The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(53)

"The change may be permanent, but we aren't," she said.

"Well put," Maati said.

The courtyard in which they sat showed only small signs of the decade of ruin it had suffered. The weeds had all been pulled or cut, the broken stones reset. Songbirds flitted between the trees, lizards scurried through the low grass, and far above, invisible to him now, a hawk circled in the high, distant air.

Maati could imagine that it wasn't the school that he had suffered in his boyhood: it had so little in common with the half-prison he recalled. A handful of women instead of a shifting cadre of boys. A cooperative struggle to achieve the impossible instead of cruelty and judgment. Joy instead of fear. The space itself seemed remade, and perhaps the whole of the world along with it. Vanjit seemed to guess his thoughts. She smiled. The thing at her hip grumbled, fixing its black eyes on Maati, but did not cry.

"It's unlike anything I expected," Vanjit said. "I can feel him. All the time, he's in the back of my mind."

"How burdensome is it?" Maati asked, sitting forward.

Vanjit shook her head.

"No worse than any baby, I'd imagine," she said. "He tires me sometimes, but not so much I lose myself. And the others have all been kind. I don't think I've cooked a meal for myself since the binding."

"That's good," Maati said. "That's excellent."

"And you? Your eyes?"

"Perfect. I've been able to write every evening. I may actually manage to complete this before I die."

He'd meant it as a joke, but Vanjit's reply was grim, almost scolding.

"Don't say that. Don't talk about death lightly. It isn't something to laugh at."

Maati took an apologetic pose, and a moment later the darkness seemed to leave the girl's eyes. She shifted the andat again, freeing one hand to take an apologetic pose.

"No," Maati said. "You're right. You're quite right."

He steered the conversation to safer waters-meals, weather, reconstructing the finer points of Vanjit's successful binding. Contentment seemed to come from the girl like heat from a fire. He regretted leaving her there, and yet, walking down the wide stone corridors, he was also pleased.

The years he had spent scrabbling in the shadows like a rat had been so long and so thick with anger and despair, Maati had forgotten what it was to feel simple happiness. Now, with the women's grammar proved and the andat returned to the world, his flesh itself felt different. His shoulders had grown straighter, his heart lighter, his joints looser and stronger and sure. He had managed to ignore his burden so long he had mistaken it for normalcy. The lifting of it felt like youth.

Eiah sat cross-legged on the floor of one of the old lecture halls, untied codices, opened books, unfurled scrolls laid out around her like ripples on the surface of a pond. He glanced at the pages-diagrams of flayed arms, the muscles and joints laid bare as if by the most meticulous butcher in history; Westlands script with its whorls and dots like a child's angry scribble; notations in Eiah's own hand, outlining the definitions and limitations and structure of violence done upon flesh. Wounded. The andat at its origin. And all of it, he could make out from where he stood without squinting or bending close.

Eiah looked up at him with a pose equal parts welcome and despair. Maati lowered himself to the floor beside her.

"You look tired," he said.

Eiah gestured to the careful mess before her, and then sighed.

"This was simpler when I wasn't allowed to do it," she said. "Now that my own turn has come, I'm starting to think I was a fool to think it possible."

Maati touched one of the books with his outstretched fingers. The paper felt thick as skin.

"There is a danger to it," Maati said. "Even if your binding is perfectly built, there might have been another done that was too much like it. These books, they were written by men. Your training was done by men. The poets before Vanjit were all men. Your thinking could be too little like a man's."

Eiah smiled, chuckling. Maati took a pose of query.

"Physicians in the Westlands tend to be women," she said. "I don't think I have more than half-a-dozen texts that I could say for certain were written by men. The problem isn't that."

"No?"

"No, it's that no matter what's between your thighs, a cut is a cut, a burn is a burn, and a bruise is a bruise. Break a bone now, and it snaps much the way it did in the Second Empire. Vanjit's binding was based on a study of eyes and light that didn't exist back then. Nothing I'm working from is new."

There was frustration in her voice. Perhaps fear.

"There is another way," Maati said. Eiah shifted, her gaze on his. Maati scratched his arm.

"We have Clarity-of-Sight," he said. "It proves that we can do this thing, and that alone gives us a certain power. If we send word to Otahkvo, tell him what we've done and that he must turn away from his scheme with the Galts, he would do it. He would have to. We could take as much time as you care to take, consult as many scholars as we can unearth. Even Cehmai would have to come. He couldn't refuse the Emperor."

It wasn't something he'd spoken aloud before. It was hardly something he'd allowed himself to think. Before Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, the idea of returning to the courts of the Khaiem-to Otah-in triumph would have been only a sort of torture of the soul. It would have been like wishing for his son to be alive, or Liat at his side, or any of the thousand regrets of his past to be unmade.