The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(57)

"And if Radaani refuses?"

"Then I'll invite just him," Otah said. Sinja took an approving pose. Otah thought for a moment that they might be done.

"The other matter?"

"Being addressed," Otah said.

Four of the members of Idaan's list had been quietly looked into, the irregularities of their behavior clarified. One had been hiding half-a-dozen mistresses from a wife with a notoriously short temper. Two others had been conspiring to undercut the glass trades in the north, setting up workshops nearer the alum mines of Eddensea. The fourth had also appeared on Ashua Radaani's list, and had no clear connection to Maati.

Sinja had made it perfectly clear that he thought examining Eiah's actions was the wisest course. If she was Maati's backer, better to find it quickly and put a stop to the whole affair. If she wasn't, best to know that and stop losing sleep. There was a cold logic to his argument, and Otah knew what his own reluctance meant. His daughter had turned to her Uncle Maati. Turned against her father. And the pain of that loss was almost more than he could bear.

"Well," Sinja said. "I suppose I'd better go before the sailors all get too drunk to know sunrise from sunset and land us all in Eymond. If I don't come back, make sure they put up statues of me."

"You'll come back," Otah said.

"You only say that because I always have before," Sinja replied, smiling. He sobered. "See that Balasar comes quickly, though. These ships will make a grand spectacle, but it would be a short fight."

"I'll see to it," Otah said.

Sinja rose and took a pose of leave-taking. It might be the last time Otah ever saw the man. It was a fact he'd known, but something in the set of Sinja's body or the studied blankness of his face drove the point home. For the space of a breath, Otah felt the loss as if the worst had already happened.

"I would have been lost without you, these last years," Otah said. "You know that."

"I know you think it," Sinja said, matching Otah's quiet tone. "Take care, Most High. Do what needs doing."

Sitting now on his dais, watching the ships recede and vanish, Otah thought the phrase had been intended as last words. Do what needs doing. Meaning, more specifically, find Eiah. The sun rose from its morning home in the east; the seafront surged with a hundred languages, creoles, pidgins. Where the armsmen of the palace ended, merchants set up their tall, thin stalls and proclaimed their wares. When Otah took his leave, they would do the same in the space he now inhabited. Returning to the palaces would be like taking his finger out of water. It wouldn't leave a hole. He wondered, sometimes, if the whole world wasn't the same.

Back at the palaces, Otah suffered through the ritual change of robes, the closing ceremony that followed seeing off the fleet. He dearly hoped that when Balasar's reinforcements departed, he could avoid repeating the entire pointless exercise. He hoped, but doubted it. Once the last cymbal had chimed, the last priest intoned the final passage, and Otah had done his duty as Emperor, he went back to his rooms. Danat and Issandra were waiting there.

Otah greeted them both with a single pose appropriate to near family. If it was still an optimism, the Galtic woman didn't comment on it. She put down a bowl of tea she'd been drinking from, and Danat rose to his feet.

"Thank you for joining me," Otah said. "I wanted to know the ... the status of your work."

The pair exchanged glances. Issandra spoke.

"In one respect, I think you could say we're doing quite well. Ana's request that her father add himself to your naval adventure has caused something of a strain between her and Hanchat. He seems to think she's being disloyal to Galt in general and therefore him in particular."

"I can understand that," Otah said, lowering himself to a cushion. "The gods all know she surprised me with it."

"The problem is that she feels she's cleared all accounts by the gesture," Issandra said. "Any sense of obligation she might have felt toward Danat-cha from her misbehavior or his clemency toward Hanchat is done."

"I see," Otah said.

"There's something else," Danat said. "I think Shija-cha has . .

"The imitation lover has developed ambitions," Issandra said. "Apparently you've entrusted her uncle with some particularly delicate task?"

Shija Radaani. Ashua's niece.

"I have," Otah said.

"She's taken that fact and the request that she act as Danat's escort, and drawn the most remarkable conclusion," Issandra said. "She thinks that Danat-cha is in love with her, and intends to sabotage his connection to Ana on her behalf."

"It's not only that," Danat said. "This is my fault. I ... I lost my perspective. It was ..

"You bedded her," Otah said.

Danat's blush could have lit houses. It was as Otah had feared. Issandra sighed.

"This Radaani woman," she said. "Can you safely offend her family?"

"At the moment, it would be awkward," Otah said.

"Then I can't see that the girl is that far wrong," Issandra said. "Danat has sabotaged things."

"I'm very sorry," he said. "It wasn't ... gods."

Danat sat again, his head in his hands.