The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(52)

"I suppose," Otah agreed.

"I would have controlled it. Stone-Made-Soft, I mean. And Cehmai. If all the things I'd planned had happened as I planned them, I would have had the command of that power."

"Your husband would have," he said. Otah had ordered her husband executed. Adrah Vaunyogi's body had hung from the ruins of his family's palace, food for the crows. Idaan smiled.

"My husband," she said, her voice warm and amused. "Even worse."

She shook herself and turned back to the table. Her thick fingers plucked out a clerk's writing tablet. Otah could see letters carved into the wax.

"I've made a list of those people who seem most likely," she said. "I have a dozen, and I could give you a dozen more if you'd like it. They've all traveled extensively in the past four years. They've all had expenditures that look suspicious to one degree or another. And as far as I can see, all of them oppose your treaty with the Galts or are closely related to someone who does. And they all have the close connections to the palace that Maati boasted of."

Otah held out his hand. Idaan didn't pass the tablet to him.

"I think about what would have happened if I had been given that kind of power," she said. "I think of the girl I was back then. And the things I did. Can you imagine what I might have done?"

"It wouldn't have happened," Otah said. "Cehmai only answered to you so long as the Dai-kvo told him to. If you had started draining oceans or melting cities, he would have forbidden it."

"The Dai-kvo is dead, though. Years dead, and almost forgotten."

"What are you saying, Idaan-cha?"

She smiled, but her eyes made it sorrow.

"All the restraints we had to keep the poets from doing as they saw fit? They're gone now. I'm saying you should remember that when you see this list. Remember the stakes we're playing for."

The tablet was heavy in his hand, the dark wax scored with white where she had written on it. He frowned as his finger traced down the names. Then he stopped, and the blood left his face. He understood what Idaan had been saying. She was telling him to be ruthless, to be cold. She meant to steel him against the pain of what he might have to sacrifice.

"My daughter's name is on this list," he said, keeping his voice low and matter-of-fact.

His sister replied with silence.

"There," Vanjit said, her finger pointing up into a featureless blue sky. "Right there."

On her hip, the andat squirmed and waved its tiny hands. She shifted her weight, drawing the small body closer to her own, her outstretched finger still indicating nothing.

"I don't see it," Maati said.

Vanjit smiled, her attention focusing on the babe. Clarity-of-Sight mewled, shook its head weakly, and then stilled. Vanjit's lips pressed thin, and the sky above Maati seemed to sharpen. Even where there was nothing to see, the blue itself seemed legible. And then he caught sight of it. Little more than a dot at first, and then a moment later, he made out the shape of the outstretched wings. A hawk, soaring high above the ground. Its beak was hooked and sharp as a knife. Its feathers, brown and gold, trembled in the high air. A smear of old blood darkened its talons. There were mites in its feathers.

Maati closed his eyes and looked away, shaken by vertigo.

"Gods!" he said. He heard Vanjit's delighted chuckle.

The spirit of elation filled the stone halls, the ruined gardens, the spare meadows. All the days since the binding, it had felt to Maati as if the world itself had taken a deep breath and then laughed aloud. Whenever the chores and classes had allowed it, the girls had crowded around Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, and himself along with them.

The andat itself was beautiful and fascinating. Its form was identical to a true human child, but small things in its behavior showed Vanjit's inexperience. She had not held a babe or seen one since she herself had been no more than a child. The strength of its neck and the sureness of its gaze were subtly wrong. Its cry, while wordless, expressed a richness and variety of emotion that in Maati's experience children rarely developed before they could walk. Small errors of imagination that affected only the form that the andat took. Its function, as Vanjit delighting in showing, was perfect and precise.

"I've seen other things too," Vanjit said. "The greater the change, the more difficult it is at first."

Maati nodded. He could see the individual hairs on her head. The crags where tiny flakes of dead skin peeled from the living tissue beneath. An insect the shape of a tick but a thousand times smaller clung to the root of her eyelash. He closed his eyes.

"Forgive me," he said. "Could I put upon you to undo some part of that? It's distracting...."

He heard her robe rustle and go silent. When he opened his eyes again, his vision was clear but no longer inhumanly so. He smiled.

"Once I've made the change, I forget that it doesn't fall back on its own," she said.

"Stone-Made-Soft was much the same," Maati said. "Once it had changed the nature of a rock, it remained weakened until Cehmai-kvo put an effort into changing it back. Then there was Water-Moving-Down, who might stop a river only so long as its poet gave the matter strict attention. The question rests on the innate capacity for change within the object affected. Stone by nature resists change, water embraces it. I suspect that whatever eyes you improve will still suffer the normal effects of age."