The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(113)

In the event, they lost more than half a day. Maati identified the wrong stretches of river twice, and Eiah had no eyes to correct him. When at last they found the abandoned campsite, a soft, misting rain had started to fall and the daylight was beginning to fail them. Maati led the way into the small clearing, walking slowly. Otah and two of the armsmen were close behind. Eiah had insisted that she come as well, and Idaan was helping her, albeit more slowly.

"Well," Otah said, standing in the middle of the ruins. "I think we can fairly say that she's been here."

The camp was destroyed. The thick canvas sleeping tents lay in shreds and knots. Stones and ashes from the fire pit had been strewn about, and two leather bags lay empty in the mud. One of the armsmen crouched on his heels and pointed to a slick of black mud. A footprint no longer than Otah's thumb. Idaan's steps squelched as she paced near the ruined fire pit. Maati sat on a patch of crushed grass, his hem dragging in the mud, his face a mask of desolation.

"Back to the boat, I think," Otah said. "I can't see staying on here."

"We may still beat her to Udun," Idaan said, prying the gray wax shards that had been Eiah's binding from the muck. "She spent a fair amount of time doing this. Tents like those are hard to cut through."

One of the armsmen muttered something about the only thing worse than a mad poet being a mad poet with a knife, but Otah was already on his way back to the river.

The boatman and his second had fitted poles into thick iron rings all along the boat's edge and raised a tarp that kept the deck near to dry. As darkness fell and the rain grew heavier, the drops overhead sounded like fingertips tapping on wood. The kiln had more than enough coal. The wide-swung doors lit the boat red and orange, and the scent of pigeons roasting on spits made the night seem warmer than it was.

Maati had returned last, and spent the evening at the edge of the light. Otah saw Eiah approach him once, a few murmured phrases exchanged, and she turned back to the sound of the group eating and talking in the stern. If Idaan hadn't risen to lead her back, he would have. The boatman's second handed her a tin bowl, bird's flesh gray and steaming and glistening with fat. Otah shifted to sit at her side.

"Father," Eiah said.

"You knew it was me?"

"I'm blind, not dim," Eiah said tartly. She plucked a sliver of meat from her bowl and popped it into her mouth. She looked tired, worn thin. He could still see the girl she had been, hiding beneath the time and age. He felt the urge to stroke her hair the way he had when she was an infant, to be her father again.

"This is, I assume, when you point out how much better your plan was than my own," she said.

"I didn't intend to, no," Otah said.

Eiah turned to him, shifting her weight as if she had some angry retort that had stuck in her throat for want of opposition. When he spoke, he was quiet enough to keep the conversation as near to between only the two of them as the close quarters would allow.

"We each did our best," Otah said. "We did what we could."

He put his arm around her. She bit down on her lip and fought the sobs that shook her body like tiny earthquakes. Her fingers found his own, and squeezed as hard as a patient under a physician's blade. He made no complaint.

"How many people have I killed, Papa-kya? How many people have I killed with this?"

"Hush," Otah said. "It doesn't matter. Nothing we've done matters. Only what we do next."

"The price is too high," Eiah said. "I'm sorry. Will you tell them that I'm sorry?"

"If you'd like."

Otah rocked her gently, and she allowed him to do it. The others all knew what they were saying, if not in specific, then at least the sketch of it. Otah saw Danat's concern, and Idaan's cool evaluating glance. He saw the armsmen turn their backs to him out of respect, and at the bow, Maati turned his back for another reason. Otah felt a flicker of his rage come back, a tongue of flame rising from old coals. Maati had done this. None of it would have happened if Maati hadn't been so bent by his own guilt or so deluded by his optimism that he ignored the dangers.

Or if Otah had found him and stopped him when that first letter had come. Or if Eiah hadn't made common cause with Maati's clandestine school. Or if Vanjit hadn't been mad, or Balasar ambitious, or the world and everything in it made from the first. Otah closed his eyes, letting the darkness create a space large enough for the woman in his arms and his own complicated heart.

Eiah murmured something he couldn't make out. He made a small interrogative sound in the back of his throat, and she coughed before repeating herself.

"There was no one at the school I could talk with," she said. "I got so tired of being strong all the time."

"I know," he said. "Oh, love. That, I know."

Otah slept deeply that night, lulled by exhaustion and the soft sounds of familiar voices and of the river. He slept as if he had been ill and the fever had only just broken. As if he was weak, and gaining strength. The dreams that possessed him faded with his first awareness of light and motion, less substantial than cobwebs, less lasting than mist.

The air itself seemed cleaner. The early-morning haze burned off in sunlight the color of water. They ate boiled wheat and honey, dried apples, and black tea. The boatman's second made his call, the boatman responded, and they nosed out again into the flow. Maati, sulking, kept as nearly clear of Otah as he could but kept casting glances at Eiah. Jealous, Otah assumed, of the conversation between father and daughter and unsure of her allegiance. Eiah for her part seemed to be making a point of speaking with her brother and her aunt and Ana Dasin, sitting with them, eating with them, making conversation with the jaw-clenched determination of a horse laboring uphill.