The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(112)

Otah stood at the bow, Danat at his side. Idaan had appointed herself shepherd of Eiah and Ana, the blinded women. Maati sat alone near the stern. The sky was pale with haze, the river air rich with the scent of decaying leaves and autumn. The kiln roared to itself, and the wheel slapped the water. Far above, two vees of geese headed south, their brash unlovely voices made beautiful by distance.

His rage was gone, and he missed it. All his fantasies of Otah Machi apologizing, of Otah Machi debased before him, melted like sugar in water when faced with the man himself. Maati felt small and alone, and perhaps that was merely accurate. He had lost everything now except perhaps Eiah. Irit was gone, and the wisest of them all for fleeing. He couldn't imagine Large Kae and Small Kae would return to him. Ashti Beg had left once already. And then Vanjit. All of his little family was gone now.

His family. Ashti Beg's voice returned to him. Vanjit and Clarity-ofSight and the need for family.

"Oh," he said, almost before he knew what he meant. And then, "Oh."

Maati made his unsteady way to the bow, touching crates with his fingertips to keep from stumbling. Otah and Danat turned at the sound of his approach, but said nothing. Maati reached them short of breath and oddly elated. His smile seemed to surprise them.

"I know where she's gone," he said.

Udun had been a river city. A city of birds.

Otah remembered the first time he'd come to it, a letter of introduction from a man he had known briefly years before limp in his sleeve. After years of life in the eastern islands, it was like walking into a dream. Canals laced the city, great stone quays as busy as the streets. Great humped bridges with stairs cut in each side rose up to let even the tallest boats pass. On the shores, tree branches bent under the brightly colored burden of wings and beaks and a thousand kinds of song. The street carts sold food and drink as they did everywhere, but with each paper basket of lemon fish, every bowl of rice and sausage, there would be a twist of colored cloth.

Open the cloth, and seeds would spill out, and then within a heartbeat would come the birds. Fortunes were told by which birds reached you. Finches for love, sparrows for pain, and so on, and so on. Wealth, birth, death, love, sex, and mystery all spelled out in feathers and hunger for those wise enough to see or credulous enough to believe.

The palaces of the Khai Udun had spanned the wide river itself, barges disappearing into the seemingly endless black tunnel and then emerging again into the light. Beggars sang from rafts, their boxes floating at the side. The firekeepers' kilns had all been enameled the green of the river water and a deep red Otah had never seen elsewhere. And at a wayhouse with a little garden, there had been a keeper with a foxsharp face and threads of white in her black hair.

He had entered the gentleman's trade there, become a courier and traveled through the world, bringing his messages back to House Siyanti and sleeping at Kiyan's wayhouse. He knew all the cities and many of the low towns as they had been back then, but Udun had been something precious.

And then the Galts had come. There were tales afterward that the river downstream from the ruins stank of corpses for a year. Thousands of men and women and children had died in the bloodiest slaughter of the war. Rich and poor, utkhaiem and laborer, none had been spared. What survivors there were had abandoned their city's grave, leaving it to the birds. Udun had died, and with it-among unnumbered others-the poet Vanjit's parents and siblings and some part of her soul.

And so, Maati argued, it was where she would return now.

"It's plausible," Eiah said. "Vanjit's always thought of herself as a victim. This would help her to play the role."

"How far would it be from here?" Danat asked.

Otah, his mind already more than half in the past, calculated. They were six days south of Utani on this steamcart for water. Udun had been a week's ride or ten days walking south from Utani....

"She could reach it in three days," Otah said, "if she knew where she was headed. There are more than enough streams and creeks feeding the river here. Water wouldn't be a problem."

"If we go there now, we might reach it before she does," Idaan said, looking out over the river.

"The camp's still the better wager," Danat said. "It's where she parted ways with them. They left their sleeping tents, so there's shelter of a sort. And it doesn't require walking anywhere."

Maati started to object, but Otah raised his hand.

"It's along the way," Otah said. "We'll stop there and look. If she's been to the camp, we should be able to tell. If not, we won't have lost more than half a day."

Maati straightened as if the decision were a personal insult, turned and walked back to the stern of the boat. Time had not been gentle to the man. Hard fat had thickened his chest and belly. His skin was gray where it wasn't flushed. Maati's long, age-paled hair had an unhealthy yellow, and his movements were labored as if he woke every morning tired. And his mind ...

Otah turned back to the water, the trees, the soft wind. The white haze of sky was darkening as the day wore on, the scent of rain on the air. The others-Idaan, Danat, Eiah, Ana-moved away quietly, as if afraid their conversation might move him to violence. Otah breathed in and out, slow and deep, until both his disgust and his pity had faded.

Maati had lost the right to feel anger when his pupil had killed Galt, and any sentimental connection between Otah and his once-friend had drowned outside Chaburi-Tan. If Maati thought that stopping at the camp was a poor decision, he could make his case or he could choke on it. It was the same to Otah.