The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(38)

"And Clarity-of-Sight isn't the right one?" he asked.

"It won't give any of these women babies. It won't put them back in the arms of the men who used to be their husbands or stop men like my father from trading in women's flesh like we were sheep. None of it. All the binding will do is prove that it can be done. That a solution exists. It doesn't even mean I'll be strong enough when my turn comes."

Maati took her hand. He had known her for so many years. Her hand had been so small that first time he had seen her. He remembered her deep brown eyes, and the way she had gurgled and burrowed into her mother's cradling arms. He could still see the shape of that young face in the shape of her cheeks and the set of her jaw. He leaned over and kissed her hair. She looked up at him, amused to see him so easily moved.

"I was only thinking," he said, "how many of us there are carrying this whole burden alone."

"I know I'm not alone, Maati-kya. It only feels like it some nights."

"It does. It certainly does," he said. Then, "Do you think she'll manage it?"

Eiah rose silently, took a pose that marked parting with nuances as intimate as family, and walked back into the buildings of the school. Maati sighed and lay back on the stone, looking up into the night sky. A shooting star blazed from the eastern sky toward the north and vanished like an ember gone cold.

He wondered if Otah-kvo still looked at the sky, or if he had grown too busy being the Emperor. The days and nights of power and feasting and admiration might rob him of simple beauties like a night sky or a fear grown less by being shared. Might, in fact, cut Otah-kvo off from all the things that gave meaning to people lower than himself. He was, after all, planning his new empire by denying all the women injured by the last war any hope of those simple, human pleasures. A babe. A family. Tens of thousands of women, cut free from the lives they were entitled to, now to be forgotten.

He wondered if a man who could do that still had enough humanity left to enjoy a falling star or the song of a nightingale.

He hoped not.

Eiah left the next morning. The high road was still in good repair, and travel along it was an order of magnitude faster than the tracking Maati had done between the low towns. When Maati and the others saw her off, she was wearing simple robes and the leather satchel hung at her side. She could have been mistaken for any traveling physician. Maati might have imagined it, but he thought that Vanjit held her parting stance longer than the others, that her eyes followed Eiah more hungrily.

When the horse and cart had gone far enough that even the dust from the hooves and wheels was invisible, they turned back to the business at hand. Until midday, they scraped soot and a decade's fallen leaves out from the shell of one of the gutted buildings. Irit found the bones of some forgotten boy who had been caught in that long-cooled fire, and they held a brief ceremony in remembrance of the slaughtered poets and student boys in whose path they all traveled. Vanjit especially was sober and pale as Maati finished his words and committed the bones to a fresh-made, hotter blaze that would, he hoped, return the old bones to their proper ash.

As they made their way back from the pyre, he made a point to walk at her side. Her olive skin and well-deep eyes reminded him of his first lover, Liat. The mother of the child who should have been his own. Even before she spoke, his breast ached like a once-broken arm presaging a shift of weather.

"I was thinking of my brother," Vanjit said. "He was near that boy's age. Not highborn, of course. They didn't take normal people here then, did they?"

"No," Maati said. "Nor women, for that."

"It's a strange thought. It already seems like home to me. Like I've always been here," the girl said, then shifted her weight, her shoulders turning a degree toward Maati even as they walked side by side. "You've always known Eiah-cha, haven't you?"

"As long as she's known anything," Maati said with a chuckle. "Possibly a bit longer. I was living in Machi for years and years before the war."

"She must be very important to you."

"She's been my salvation, in her way. Without her, none of us would be here."

"You would have found a way," Vanjit said. Her voice was odd, a degree harder than Maati had expected. Or perhaps he had imagined it, because when she went on, there was no particular bite to the words. "You're clever and wise enough, and I'm sure there are more people in places of influence that would have given you aid, if you'd asked."

"Perhaps," Maati said. "But I knew from the first I could trust Eiah. That carries quite a bit of weight. Without trust, I don't know if I would have hit on the idea of coming here. Before, I always kept to places I could leave easily."

"She said that you wouldn't let her bind the first andat," Vanjit said. "One of us has to succeed before you'll let her make the attempt."

"That's so," Maati agreed, a moment's discomfort passing through him. He didn't want to explain the thinking behind that decision. When Vanjit went on, it was happily not in that direction.

"She's shown me some of the work she's done. She's working from the same books that I am, you know."

"Yes," Maati said. "That was a good thought, using sources from the Westlands. The more things we can use that weren't part of how the old poets thought, the better off we are."