The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(92)

Danat took a pose that accepted the stakes like a man at a betting table. He would put the world and everything in it at risk for the chance that remained to save Ana's home. Otah hesitated, and then replied with a pose that stood witness to the decision. A feeling of pride warmed him.

Kiyan-kya, he thought, we have raised a good man. Please all the gods that we've also raised a wise one.

"I'll go tell the others," Danat said.

He rose and walked for the door, pausing only when Otah called after him. Danat, at the doorway, looked back.

"It's the right choice," Otah said. "No matter how poorly this happens, you made the right choice."

"There wasn't an option," Danat said.

It had been clear enough that no matter what the next step was, it wouldn't involve staying at the school. Under Idaan's direction, the armsmen were already refilling the water and coal stores for the steamcarts, packing what little equipment they had used, and preparing themselves for the road. The sky was white where it wasn't gray, the snow blurring the horizon. Ashti Beg sat alone beside the great bronze doors that had once opened only for the Dai-kvo. They were stained with verdigris and stood ajar. No one besides Otah saw the significance of it.

Midmorning saw a thinning of the clouds, a weak, pale blue forcing its way through the very top of the sky's dome. The horses were in harness, the carts showing their billows of mixed smoke and steam, and everything was at the ready except Idaan and Ana. The armsmen waited, ready to leave. Otah and Danat went back.

Otah found the pair in a large room. Ana, sitting on an ancient bench, had bent forward. Tears streaked the girl's cheeks, her hair was a wild tangle, and her hands clasped until the fingertips were red and the knuckles white. Idaan stood beside her, arms crossed and eyes as bleak as murder. Before Otah could announce himself, Idaan saw him. His sister leaned close to the Galtic girl, murmured something, listened to the soft reply, and then marched to the doorway and Otah's side.

"Is there ... is something the matter?" Otah asked.

"Of course there is. How long have you been traveling with that girl?"

"Since Saraykeht," Otah said.

"Have you noticed yet that she isn't a man?" Idaan's voice was sharp as knives. "Tell the armsmen to stand down. Then bring me a bowl of snow."

"What's the matter?" Otah demanded. And then, "Is it her time of the month? Does she need medicine?"

Idaan looked at him as if he had asked what season came after spring: pitying, incredulous, disgusted.

"Get me some snow. Or, better, some ice. Tell your men that we'll be ready in a hand and a half, and for all the gods there ever were, keep your son away from her until we can put her back together. The last thing she needs is to feel humiliated."

Otah took a pose that promised compliance, but then hesitated. Idaan's dark eyes flashed with something that wasn't anger. When she spoke, her voice was lower but no softer.

"How have you spent a lifetime in the company of women and learned nothing?" she asked, and, shaking her head, turned back to Ana.

True to her word, a hand and a half later, Ana and Idaan emerged from the school as if nothing strange had happened. Ana's outer robe was changed to a dark wool, and she leaned on Idaan's arm as she stepped up to the bed of the steamcart. Danat moved forward, but Idaan's scowl drove him back. The two women made their slow way to the shed, where Idaan closed the door behind them.

The men steering the carts called out to one another, voices carrying like crows' calls in the empty landscape. The carts stuttered and lurched, and turned to the east, tracking back along the path to the high road between ruined Nantani and Pathai, from which they'd come. Otah rode down the path he'd walked as a boy, searching his mind for some feeling of kinship with his past, but the world as it was demanded too much of him. He searched for some memory deep within him of the first time he'd walked away from the school, of leaving everything he'd known, rejected, behind him.

His mind was knotted with questions of how to find the poet, how to persuade her to do as he asked, what Idaan had meant, what was wrong with Ana, whether the steamcarts had enough fuel, and a growing ache in his spine that came from too many days riding horses he didn't know. There was no effort to spare for the past. Whatever he didn't remember now of his original flight from the school he likely never would. The past would be lost, as it always was. Always. He didn't bother trying to hold it.

They made better time than he had expected, starting as late as they had. By the time they stopped for the night, the high road was behind them. The fastest route to Utani would be overland to the Qiit, then by boat up the river. Any hope they had of overtaking Maati and Eiah would come on the roads, where the steamcarts gave Otah an advantage. They would have to sleep in the open more than if they had kept to wider roads, and the rough terrain increased the possibility of the carts breaking or getting stuck. Even of the boiler bursting and killing anyone too near it. But Idaan's voice spoke in Otah's mind of the next day, and the next, and the next, so he pushed them and himself.

Four of the armsmen rode ahead in the lowering gloom of night to scout out the next day's path. The others prepared a simple meal of pork and rice, Ashti Beg sitting with them and trading jokes. Danat's slow cir cling of their camp took the name of defense but seemed more to be avoiding the still-closed shed where Idaan and Ana rested. Otah sat alone near the steamcart's kiln, reflecting that it was very much like his son to shift between noble dedication in the morning and childish pouting as night came on. He had been much the same as a young man, or imagined that he had.