The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(9)

The night wore on, the moon rising through the clouds, the fire in its grate flickering, dying down to embers before being fed fresh coal and coming to life again. They talked and they laughed, traded jokes and memories. Otah was aware, as he always was, of a distant twinge of guilt at enjoying the company of a man who had killed so many innocents in his war against the Khaiem and the andat. And as always, he tried to set the guilt aside. It was better to forget the ruins of Nantani and the bodies of the Dai-kvo and his poets, the corpses of Otah's own men scattered like scythed wheat and the smell of book paste catching fire. It was better, but it was difficult. He knew he would never wholly succeed.

He was more than half drunk when the conversation turned to his unfinished letter, still on his desk.

"It's pathetic, I suppose," Otah said, "but it's the habit I've made."

"I don't think it's pathetic," Balasar said. "You're keeping faith with her. With what she was to you, and what she still is. That's admirable."

"Tends toward the maudlin, actually," Otah said. "But I think she'd forgive me that. I only wish she could write back. There were things she'd understand in an instant that I doubt I'd ever have come to. If she were here, she'd have found a way to win the vote."

"I can't see that," Balasar said ruefully.

Otah took a pose of correction that spilled a bit of the wine from his bowl.

"She had a different perspective," Otah said. "She was ... she ..."

Otah's mind shifted under him, struggling against the fog. There was something. He'd just thought it, and now it was almost gone again. Kiyan-kya, his beloved wife, with her fox-sharp face and her way of smiling. Something about the ways that the world she'd seen were different from his own experience. The way talking with her had been like living twice...

"Otah?" Balasar said, and Otah realized it wasn't the first time.

"Forgive me," Otah said, suddenly short of breath. "Balasar-cha, I think ... will you excuse me? There's something I need to ..."

Otah put his wine bowl on the desk and walked to the door of his rooms. The corridors of the suite were dark, only the lowest of servants still awake, cleaning the carpets and polishing the latches. Eyes widened and hands fluttered as Otah passed, but he ignored them. The scribes and translators were housed in a separate building across a flagstone square. Otah passed the dry fountain in its center before the thought that had possessed him truly took form. He had to restrain himself from laughing.

The chief scribe was so dead asleep that Otah had to shake the woman twice. When consciousness did come into her eyes, her face went pale. She took a pose of apology that Otah waved away.

"How many of your best calligraphers can work in Galtic?"

"All of them, Most High," the chief scribe said. "It's why I brought them."

"How many? How many can we put to work now, tonight?"

"Ten?" she said as if it were a question.

"Wake them. Get them to their desks. Then I'll need a translator in my apartments. Or two. Best get two. An etiquette master and a trade specialist. Now. Go, now! This won't wait for morning."

On the way back to his rooms, his heart was tripping over, but his mind was clearing, the alcohol burning off in the heat of his plan. Balasar was seated where Otah had left him, an expression of bleary concern on his face.

"Is all well?"

"All's excellent," Otah said. "No, don't go. Stay here, Balasar-cha. I have a letter to write, and I need you."

"What's happened?"

"I can't convince the men on the council. You've said as much. And if I can't talk to the men who wield the power, I'll talk to the women who wield the men. Tell me there's a councilman's wife out there who doesn't want grandchildren. I defy you to."

"I don't understand," Balasar said.

"I need a list of the names of all the councilmen's wives. And the men of the convocation. Theirs too. Perhaps their daughters if ... Well, those can wait. I'm going to draft an appeal to the women of Galt. If anyone can sway the vote, it's them."

"And you think that would work?" Balasar asked, incredulity in his expression.

In the event, Otah's letter seemed for two full days to have no effect. The letters went out, each sewn with silk thread and stamped with Otah's imperial seal, and no word came back. He attended the ceremonies and meals, the entertainments and committee meetings, his eyes straining for some hint of change like a snow fox waiting for the thaw. It was only on the morning of the third day, just as he was preparing to send a fresh wave of appeals to the daughters of the families of power, that his visitor was announced.

She was perhaps ten years younger than Otah, with hair the gray of dry slate pulled back from an intimidating, well-painted face. The reddening at her eyelids seemed more likely to be a constant feature than a sign of recent weeping. Otah rose from the garden bench and took a pose of welcome simple enough for anyone with even rudimentary training to recognize. His guest replied appropriately and waited for him to invite her to sit in the chair across from him.

"We haven't met," the woman said in her native language. "Not formally."

"But I know your husband," Otah said. He had met with all the members of the High Council many times. Farrer Dasin was among the longest-standing, though not by any means the most powerful. His wife Issandra had been no more than a polite smile and another face among hundreds until now. Otah considered her raised brows and downcast eyes, the set of her mouth and her shoulders. There had been a time when he'd lived by knowing how to interpret such small indications. Perhaps he still did.