The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(15)

It will be a sad legacy to die with this half-finished, he thought as he let the cover close.

He needed a real school, the school needed a teacher, and he himself could manage only so much. There wasn't time to lecture all his students and write his manual and slink like a criminal through the dark corners of the Empire. If he'd been younger, perhaps-fifty, or better yet forty years old-he might have made the attempt, but not now. And with this mad scheme of Otah's, time had grown even dearer.

"Maati-cha?"

Maati blinked. Vanjit came toward him, her steps tentative. He tucked his book into its box and took a pose of welcome.

"The door wasn't bolted," she said. "I was afraid something had happened?"

"No," Maati said, rising and hoisting himself up the stairs. "I forgot it last night. An old man getting older is all."

The girl took a pose that was both an acceptance and a denial. She looked exhausted, and Maati suspected there were dark smudges under his own eyes to match hers. The scent of eggs and beef caught his attention. A small lacquer box hung at Vanjit's side.

"Ah," Maati said. "It that what I hope it is?"

She smiled at that. The girl did have a pleasant smile, when she used it. The eggs were fresh; whipped and steamed in bright orange blocks. The beef was rich and moist. Vanjit sat beside him in the echoing, empty space of the warehouse as the morning light pressed in at the high, narrow windows, blue then yellow then gold. They talked about nothing important: the wayhouse where she was staying, his annoyance with his failing eyes, the merits of their present warehouse as compared to the half-dozen other places where Maati had taken up his chalk. Vanjit asked him questions that built on what they'd discussed the night before: How did the different forms of being relate to time? How did a number exist differently than an apple or a man? Or a child?

Maati found himself holding forth on matters of the andat and the poets, his time with the Dai-kvo, and even before that at the school. Vanjit sat still, her gaze on him, and drank his words like water.

She had lost her family when she was barely six years old. Her mother, father, younger sister, and two older brothers cut down by the gale of Galtic blades. The pain of it had faded, perhaps. It had never gone. Maati felt, as they sat together, that perhaps she had begun, however imperfectly, to build a new family. Perhaps she would have sat at her true father's knee, listening to him with this same intensity. Perhaps Nayiit would have treated him with the same attention that Vanjit did now. Or perhaps their shared hunger belonged to people who had lost the first object of their love.

By the time Eiah and the others arrived in the late morning, Maati had reached the decision that he'd fought against the whole night. He took Eiah aside as soon as she came in.

"I have need of you," Maati said. "How much can you spirit away without our being noticed? We'll need food and clothing and tools. Lots of tools. And if there's a servant or slave you can trust ..."

"There isn't," Eiah said. "But things are in disarray right now. Half the court in Nantani would chew their tongues out before offering hospitality to a Galt. The other half are whipped to a froth trying to get to Saraykeht before the rest. A few wagonloads here and there would be easy to overlook."

Maati nodded, more than half to himself. Eiah took a pose of query.

"You're going to build me a school. I know where there's one to be had, and with the others helping, it shouldn't take terribly long to have it in order. And we need a teacher."

"We have a teacher, Maati-kya," Eiah said.

Maati didn't answer, and after a moment, Eiah looked down.

"Cehmai?" she asked.

"He's the only other living poet. The only one who's truly held one of the andat. He could do more, I suspect, than I can manage."

"I thought you two had fallen out?"

"I don't like his wife," Maati said sourly. "But I have to try. The two of us agreed on a way to find one another, if the need arose. I can hope he's kept to it better than I have."

"I'll come with you."

"No," Maati said, putting a hand on Eiah's shoulder. "I need you to prepare things for us. There's a place-I'll draw you a map to it. The Galts attacked it in the war, killed everyone, but even if they dropped bodies down the well, the water'll be fresh again by now. It's off the high road between Pathai and Nantani...."

"That school?" Eiah said. "The place they sent the boys to train as poets? That's where you want to go?"

"Yes," Maati said. "It's out of the way, it's built for itinerant poets, and there may be something there-some book or scroll or engravings on the walls-that the twice-damned Galts overlooked. Regardless, it's where it all began. It's where we are going to take it all back."

The voyage returning Otah to the cities of the Khaiem took weeks to prepare, and if the ships that had left Saraykeht all those months before had looked like an invading fleet, the ones returning were a city built on the water. The high-masted Galtic ships with their great billowing sails dyed red and blue and gold took to the sea by the dozens. Every great family of Galt seemed bent on sending a ship greater than the others. The ships of the utkhaiem-lacquered and delicate and low to the water-seemed small and awkward beside these, their newest seafaring cousins. Birds circled above them, screaming confusion as if a part of the coast itself had set out for foreign lands. The trees and hills of Otah's onetime enemies fell away behind them. That first night, the torches and lanterns made the sea appear as full of stars as the sky.