The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(102)

News of the Emperor's party came close to overwhelming stories of the mysterious baby at the wayhouse. No couriers came to trouble Otah with word of fire or death. Twice, Otah dreamed that Sinja was riding at his side, robes soaked with seawater and black as a bat's wing, and he woke each time with an obscure feeling of peace. And with every stop, they found the poets had passed before them more and more recently.

Three days ago. Then two.

When they reached the river Qiit, tea-dark with newly fallen leaves, just the day before.

The cold caught up with them in the middle of the day, a wind from the west that rattled the trees and sent tiny whitecaps across the river's back. They had covered a great stretch of river in their day's travel, but night meant landing. The boatman was adamant. The river, he said, was a living thing; it changed from one journey to the next. Sandbars shifted, rocks lurked where none had been before. The boat was shallow enough to pass over many dangers, but a log invisible in the darkness could break a hole in the deck. Better to run in the daylight than swim in the dark. The way the boatman said it left no room for disagreement.

They camped at the riverside, and awakened with tents and robes soaked heavy by dew. Morning light saw them on the water again, the boiler at the stern muttering angrily to itself, the paddle wheel punishing the water.

Maati sat away from the noise, huddled in two wool robes, and watched the trees march from the north to the south like an army bent on sacking Saraykeht. Large Kae and Small Kae sat in the stern, making conversation with the boatman and his second when the men would deign to speak. Vanjit and Eiah turned around each other, one in the bow, the other in the center of the craft, both maintaining a space between them, the andat watching with rage and hunger in its black eyes. It was like watching an alley-mouth knife fight drawn out over hours and days.

It was hard now to remember the days before they had been splintered. The years he had spent in hiding had seemed like a punishment at the time. Living in warehouses, giving the lectures he half-recalled from his own youth and half-invented anew, trying to understand the ways in which a woman's mind was not a man's and how that power could be channeled into grammar. He had resented it. He recalled crawling onto a cot, exhausted from the day's work. He could still picture the expressions of hunger and determination on their faces. He had not seen it then, but it had all of it been driven by hope. Even the sorrow and mourning that came after a binding failed and they lost someone to the andat's grim price had held a sense of community.

Now they had won, and the world seemed all cold wind and dark water. Even the two Kaes seemed to have set themselves apart from Vanjit, from Eiah, from himself. The nights of conversation and food and laughter were gone like a pleasant dream. They had created a women's grammar and the price was higher than he could have imagined.

Murder. He was planning to murder one of his own.

As he had expected, the boat was too small for any more private conversations. He had managed no more than a few moments with Eiah when none of the others were paying them attention. Something in Vanjit's wine, perhaps, to slow her mind and deepen her sleep. She mustn't know that the blow was coming.

He could see that it weighed on Eiah as much as it did upon him. She sat carving soft wood with a knife wherever Vanjit was not, her mouth in a vicious scowl. The wax tablets that had been her whole work before he'd come to her lay stacked in a crate. The latest version of Wounded, waiting for his analysis and approval. He imagined the two of them would sit nearer each other if it weren't for the fear that Vanjit would suspect them of plotting. And he would not fear that except that it was truth.

For their own part, Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight held to themselves. Poet and andat in apparent harmony, watching the night sky or penetrating the secrets of wood and water that only she could see. Vanjit hadn't offered to share the wonders the andat revealed since before they had left the school, and Maati couldn't bring himself to ask the favor. Not knowing what he knew. Not intending what he intended.

When evening came, the boatman sang out, his second joining the high whooping call. There was no reason for it that Maati could see, only the habit of years. The boat angled its way to a low, muddy bank. When the water was still enough, the second dropped over the side and slogged to the line of trees, a rope thick as his arm trailing behind him. Once the rope had been made fast to the trees, he called out again, and the boatman shifted the mechanism of the boiler from paddle wheel to winch, and the great rope went taut. It creaked with the straining, and river water flowed from the strands as if giant hands were wringing it. By the time the boatman stopped, the craft was almost jumping distance from the shore and felt as solid as a building. It made Maati uncomfortable, afraid that they had grounded it so well that they wouldn't be able to free it in the morning. The boatman and his second showed no unease.

A wide plank made a bridge between boat and shore. The boatman wrestled it into place with a stream of perfunctory vulgarity. The second, his robes soaked and muddied, trotted back onto the deck.

"We're doing well, eh?" Maati said to the boatman. "The distance we went today must have been four days' ride."

"We'll do well enough," the boatman agreed. "Have you in Utani before the last leaf drops, that's certain."

Large Kae went across to the shore, two tents on her wide back. Eiah was just behind her with a crate of food to make the evening meal. The twilight sky was gray streaked with gold, and the calls of birds gave some hint to where the boatman's songs had found their start. On another night, it would have been beautiful.