The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(21)

Age had thickened her. Her hair, tied back in a ferocious knot, was more gray than black. Her long, northern face showed curiosity, then surprise, then for less than a heartbeat something like contempt.

"You'll want to see him, then," said Otah's exiled sister: the woman who had once set an assassin to kill Maati. Who had blamed Otah for the murders she and her ambitious lover had committed.

She sank the gory knife into the dead animal's side, setting the corpse swinging, and walked forward.

"Follow me," she said.

"Tell me where to find him," Maati said. "I can just as well. . ."

"The dogs don't know you," Idaan said. "Follow me."

Once Maati saw the dogs-five wide-jawed beasts as big as ponies, lazing in the rich dirt at the back of the house-he was glad she was there to guide him. She walked with a strong gait, leading him past the house, past a low barn where chickens scattered and complained, to a wide, low field of grass, its black soil under half an inch of water. At the far side of the field, a thin figure stood. He wore the canvas trousers of a workman and a rag the color of old blood around his head. By the time the man's face had ceased to be a leather-colored blur, they were almost upon him. There were the bright, boyish eyes, the serious mouth. The sun had coarsened his skin and complicated the corners of his eyes. He smiled and took a pose of greeting appropriate for one master of their arcane trade to another. Idaan snorted, turned, and walked back toward the slaughterhouse, leaving them alone.

"It's a dry year," Cehmai said. "You wouldn't know it, but it's a dry year. The last two crops, I was afraid that they'd mold in the field. This one, I'm out here every other week, opening the ditch gates."

"I need your help, Cehmai-cha," Maati said.

The man nodded, squinted out over the field as if judging something Maati couldn't see, and sighed.

"Of course you do," Cehmai said. "Come on, then. Walk with me."

The fields were not the largest Maati had seen, and reminded him of the gardens he'd worked as a child in the school. The dark soil of the riverfed lowlands was unlike the dry, pale soil of the high plains outside Pathai, but the scent of wet earth, the buzzing of small insects, the warmth of the high sun, and the subtle cool rising from the water all echoed moments of his childhood. Not all those memories were harsh. For a moment, he imagined slipping off his sandals and sinking his toes into the mud.

As they walked, he told Cehmai all he'd been doing in the years since they'd met. The idea of a women's grammar was one they had discussed before, so it required little more than to remind him of it. He outlined the progress he had made, the insights that had taken the project far enough to begin the experimental bindings. They paused under the broad shade of a catalpa and Cehmai shared a light meal of dried cherries and dense honey bread while Maati recounted his losses.

He did not mention Eiah or the school. Not yet. Not until he knew better which way his old colleague's opinions fell.

Cehmai listened, nodding on occasion. He asked few questions, but those he did were to the point and well-considered. Maati felt himself falling into familiar habits of conversation. When, three hands later, Cehmai rose and led the way back to the river gate, it was almost as if the years had not passed. They were the only two people in the world who shared the knowledge of the andat and the Dai-kvo. They had suffered through the long, painful nights of the war, working to fashion a binding that might save them. They had lived through the long, bitter winter of their failure in the caves north of Machi. If it had not made them friends, they were at least intimates. Maati found himself outlining the binding of Returning-to-Natural-Equilibrium as Cehmai turned the rough iron mechanism that would slow the water.

"That won't work," Cehmai said with a grunt. "Logic's wrong."

"I don't know about that," Maati said. "The girl's trained as a physician. She says that healing flesh is mostly a matter of letting it go back into the shape it tends toward anyway. The body actually helps the process that way, and-"

"But the logic, Maati-kvo," Cehmai said, using the honorific for a teacher as if by reflex. "It's a paradox. The natural balance of the andat is not to exist, and she wants to bind something whose essence is the return to its natural state? It's the same problem as Freedom-FromBondage. She should reverse it."

"How do you mean?"

The river gates creaked as they closed. The flow thinned and then stopped. Cehmai squatted, elbows resting on his knees, and pointed toward the water with his chin.

"Water-Moving-Down didn't only make water move down. She also stopped it. She withdrew her influence, ne? So she could make rain fall or she could keep it in the sky. She could stop a river from flowing as easily as making it run fast. Your physician can't bind Returning-to-Balance or however she planned to phrase it. But if she bound something like Wounded or Scarred-by-Illness, she could withdraw that from someone. She negates the opposite, achieves the same effect, and has something that isn't so slippery to hold."

Maati considered, then nodded.

"That's good," he said. "That's very good. And it's why I need you."

Cehmai smiled out at the waving green field, then glanced at the house and looked down.

"You'll stay the night?" Cehmai said.

Maati took a pose that accepted the invitation. He kept his trepidation at the thought of sleeping under Idaan's roof out of his stance and expression. It would have been too much to hope for that Cehmai would drop everything in his life and take to the road at once. And still, Maati had hoped for it....