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Authors: Abraham Daniel

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A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2) (51 page)

BOOK: A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2)
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to standing.

 

"You can't mean this," Idaan said, her voice hardly a whisper. "I killed

Danat. I as much as killed our father,"

 

"I didn't know them," her brother said. "I certainly didn't love them."

 

"I did."

 

"All the worse for you, then."

 

She looked into his eyes for the first time. There was a pain in them

that she couldn't fathom.

 

"I tried to kill you."

 

"You won't do it again. I've killed and lived with it. I've been given

mercy I didn't deserve. Sometimes that I didn't want. So you see, we may

not be all that different, sister." He went silent for a moment, then,

"Of course if you come back, or I find you conspiring against me-"

 

"I wouldn't come back here if they begged me," she said. "°I'his city is

ashes to me."

 

Her brother smiled and nodded as much to himself as to her.

 

"Sinja?" he said.

 

The soldier tossed the bundle to her. It was a leather traveler's cloak

lined with wool and thick silk robes and leggings wrapped around heavy

boots. She was appalled at how heavy they were, at how weak she'd

become. Her brother ducked out of the room, leaving only the two of

them. The soldier nodded to the robes in her arms.

 

"Best change into those quickly, Idaan-cha," he said. "I've got a sledge

and team waiting, but it's an unpleasant winter out there, and I want to

make the first low town before dark."

 

"This is madness," she said.

 

The soldier took a pose of agreement.

 

"He's making quite a few had decisions," he said. "He's new at this,

though. He'll get better."

 

Idaan stripped under the soldier's impassive gaze and pulled on the

robes and the leggings, the cloak, the boots. She stepped out of her

cell with the feeling of having shed her skin. She didn't understand how

much those walls had become everything to her until she stepped out the

last door and into the blasting cold and limitless white. For a moment,

it was too much. The world was too huge and too open, and she was too

small to survive even the sight of it. She wasn't conscious of shrinking

back from it until the soldier touched her arm.

 

"The sledge is this way," he said.

 

Idaan stumbled, her hoots new and awkward, her legs unaccustomed to the

slick ice on the snow. But she followed.

 

THE CHAINS WERE FROZEN To THE TOWER, THE LIFTING MECHANISM BRITtle with

cold. The only way was to walk, but Otah found he was much stronger than

he had been when they'd marched him up the tower before, and the effort

of it kept him warm. The air was bitterly cold; there weren't enough

braziers in the city to keep the towers heated in winter. The floors he

passed were filled with crates of food, bins of grains and dried fruits,

smoked fish and meats. Supplies for the months until summer came again,

and the city could forget for a while what the winter had been.

 

Back in the palaces, Kiyan was waiting for him. And Nlaati. They were to

meet and talk over the strategies for searching the library. And other

things, he supposed. And there was a petition from the silversmiths to

reduce the tax paid to the city on work that was sold in the nearby low

towns. And the head of the Saya wanted to discuss a proper match for his

daughter, with the strong and awkward implication that the Khai Machi

might want to consider who his second wife might be. But for now, all

the voices were gone, even the ones he loved, and the solitude was sweet.

 

He stopped a little under two-thirds of the way to the top, his legs

aching but his face warm. He wrestled open the inner sky doors and then

unlatched and pushed open the outer. The city was splayed out beneath

him, dark stone peeking out from under the snow, plumes of smoke rising

as always from the forges. TO the south, a hundred crows rose from the

branches of dead trees, circled briefly, and took their perches again.

 

And beyond that, to the east, he saw the distant forms he'd come to see:

a sledge with a small team and two figures on it, speeding out across

the snowfields. He sat, letting his feet dangle out over the rooftops,

and watched until they were only a tiny black mark in the distance. And

then as they vanished into the white.

 

Daniel Abraham's first published novel, A Shadow" in Summer, is the

first volume of the Long Price Quartet. He has had stories published in

the Vanishing Acts, Bones of the World, and TheDart anthologies, and has

been included in Gardner Dozois's Years Best Science Fiction anthology

as well. His story "Flat Diane" won the International Horror Guild award

for mid-length fiction.

 

He is currently working on the Long Price Quartet, the third volume of

which, An Autumn War, will he published in 2008. He lives in New Mexico

with his wife and daughter.

 

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