The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(30)

Maati settled himself on the tub's wide lip and took a pose that expressed curiosity and surprise. Eiah handed him a scroll, and he unfurled it. The questions were all written in a large hand, clearly, and each with a small passage to give some context. He read three of them. Two were simple enough, but the third was more interesting. It touched on the difficulties of generating new directionals, and the possibility of encasing absolute structures within relative ones. It gave the grammar an odd feeling, as if it were suggesting that fire was hot rather than asserting it.

It was interesting.

"Are they all like this?" he asked.

"The questions? Some of them, yes," Eiah said. "Vanjit's especially were beyond anything we could find a plausible answer for."

Maati pursed his lips and nodded. An absolute made relative. What would that do? He found himself smiling without knowing at first what he was smiling about.

"I think," he said, "leaving you to your own company may have been the best thing I've done."

The firelight caught Eiah's answering smile.

"I wasn't going to say so," she said. "It's been fascinating. At first, it was as if we were sneaking pies from the kitchens. Everyone wanted to do the thing, but it seemed ... wrong? I don't know if that's the word. It seemed like something we shouldn't do, and more tempting because of it. And then once we started talking with each other, it was like being on a loose cart. We couldn't stop or even slow down. Half the time I didn't know if we were going down the wrong road, but ..."

She shrugged, nodding at the scroll in his hands.

"Well, even if you were, some of this may be quite useful."

"I'd hoped so," Eiah said. "And that brings me to something else. I found some books at court. I brought them."

Maati blinked, the scroll forgotten in his hands.

"Books? They weren't all burned?" he said.

"Not that sort. These aren't ours," she said. "They're Westlands'. Books from physicians. Here."

She took back the scroll and put a small, cloth-bound book in his hand. One of the sticks in the fire grate broke, sending out embers like fireflies. Maati leaned forward.

The script was small and cramped, the ink pale. It would have been difficult in sunlight; by fire and candle, it might as well not have been written. Frustrated, Maati turned the pages and an eye stared back at him from the paper. He turned back and went more slowly. All the diagrams were of eyes, some ripped from their sockets, some pierced by careful blades. Comments accompanied each orb, laying, he assumed, its secrets open.

"Sight," Eiah said. "The author is called Arran, but it was more likely written by dozens of people who all used the same name. The wardens in the north had a period four or five generations ago when there was some brilliant work done. We ignored it, of course, because it wasn't by us. But these are very, very good. Arran was brilliant."

"Whether he existed or not," Maati said. He meant it as a joke.

"Whether he existed or not," Eiah agreed with perfect seriousness. "I've been working with these. And with Vanjit. We have a draft. You should look at it."

Maati handed her back the book and she pulled a sheaf of papers from her sleeve. Maati found himself almost hesitant to accept them. Vanjit, and her dreamed baby. Vanjit, who had lost so much in the war. He didn't want to see any of his students pay the price of a failed binding, but especially not her.

He took the papers. Eiah waited. He opened them.

The binding was an outline, but it was well-considered. The sections and relationships sketched in with commentary detailing what would go in each, often with two or three notes of possible approaches. The andat would be Clarity-of-Sight, and it would be based in the medical knowledge of Westlands physicians and the women's grammar that Maati and Eiah had been creating. Even if some Second Empire poet had managed to hold the andat before, this approach, these descriptions and sensibilities, was likely to be wholly different. Wholly new.

"Why Vanjit?" he asked. "Why not Ashti Beg or Small Kae?"

"You think she isn't ready?"

"I ... I wouldn't go so far as that," Maati said. "It's only that she's young, and she's had a harder life than some. I wonder whether ..."

"None of us are perfect, Maati-kya," Eiah said. "We have to work with the people we have. Vanjit is clever and determined."

"You think she can manage it? Bind this andat?"

"I think she has the best hope of any of us. Except possibly me."

Maati sighed, nodding as much to himself as to her. Dread thickened his throat.

"Let me look at this," he said. "Let me think about it."

Eiah took a pose that accepted his command. Maati looked down again.

"Why didn't he come?" Eiah asked.

"Because," Maati began, and then found he wasn't able to answer as easily as he'd thought. He folded the papers and began to tuck them into his sleeve, remembered how wet the cloth was, and tossed them instead onto his low, wood-framed bed. "Because he didn't want to," he said at last.

"And my aunt?"

"I don't know," Maati said. "I thought for a time that she might take my side. She didn't seem pleased with how they were living. Or, no. That's not right. She seemed to care more than he did about how they would live in the future. But he wouldn't have any of it."