The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet #4)(93)

The door opened, Ana's laughter spilling out into the night. Idaan led the girl forward, letting Ana keep a careful grip on her. Her dark eyes and Ana's unfocused gray ones were both light and merry. Ana's hair had been combed and braided in the style of children in the winter cities. In the dim moonlight, it made Ana seem hardly more than a girl.

Idaan steered the girl to the cart's front and helped her sit beside Otah. He coughed once to make sure the girl knew he was there, but she seemed unsurprised at the sound. Idaan placed a hand on the back of the girl's neck.

"I'll go get some food," Idaan said. "My brother here should be able to keep you out of trouble for that long."

Ana took a pose that offered thanks. She did a creditable job of it. Idaan snorted, patted the girl's neck, and lowered herself to the ground. Otah heard her footsteps crushing the snow as she walked away.

"Ana-cha," Otah said. His voice was more tentative than he liked. "I hope you're well?"

"Fine," she said. "Thank you. I'm sorry I delayed things today. It won't happen again."

"Hardly worth thinking about," Otah said, relieved that her infirmity had passed. Grief, he suspected, over what the poet had done to her, to her family, her nation.

"I misjudged you," Ana said. "I know it seems like everything we do is another round of apology, but I am sorry for it."

"It might be simpler to agree to forgive each other in advance," Otah said, and Ana laughed. It was a warmer sound than he'd expected. A tension he hadn't known he felt lessened and he smiled into the glowing coals of the kiln. "It is fair to ask in what manner you judged me poorly?"

"I thought you were cold. Hard. You have to understand, I grew up with monster stories about the Khaiem and the andat."

"I do," Otah said, sighing. "I look back, and I suspect that more than half of the problems between Galt and the Khaiem came from ignorance. Ignorance and power are a poor combination."

"Tell me ..." Ana said, and then stopped. Her brow furrowed, and in the dim light he thought she was blushing. Otah put his hand over hers. She shook her head, and then turned her milky eyes to him. "You've forgiven me in advance if this is too much to ask. Tell me about Danat's mother."

"Kiyan?" Otah said. "Well. What do you want to know about her?"

"Anything. Just tell me," the girl said.

Otah collected himself, and then began to pluck stories. The night they'd met. The night he'd told her that he was more than a simple courier and she'd thrown him out of her wayhouse. The ways she had helped to smooth things as he learned how to become first Khai Machi and then Emperor. He didn't tell the hard stories. The conflict over Sinja's feelings for her, and Otah's poor response to them. The long fears they suffered together when Danat was young and weak in the lungs. Her death. Still, he didn't think he kept all the sorrow from his voice.

Idaan returned halfway through one story, four bowls in her hands like a teahouse servant juggling food for a full table. Otah took one without pausing, and Idaan squatted on the boards at Ana's feet and pressed another into the girl's hands. Otah went on with other little stories- Kiyan's balancing the combined populations of Machi and Cetani with Balasar Gice's crippled army in the wake of the war. Her refusal to allow servants to bathe her. The story of when the representative of Eddensea had mistaken something she'd said and thought she'd invited him to bed with her.

Danat arrived out of the darkness, drawn by their voices. Idaan gave him the last bowl, and he sat at Otah's side, then shifted, then shifted again until his back rested against Ana's shin. He added stories of his own. His mother's sharp tongue and wayhouse keeper's vocabulary, the songs she'd sung, all the scraps and moments that built up a boy's memory of his mother. It was beautiful to listen to. It wasn't something Otah himself had ever had.

In the end, Ana let Danat lead her back to her shelter, leaving Otah and his sister alone by the black and cooling kiln. The armsmen had prepared sleeping tents for them, but Idaan seemed content to sit up drinking watered wine in the cold night air, and Otah found himself pleased enough to join her.

"I don't suppose you'd care to explain to your poor idiot brother what happened today?" he said at length.

"You haven't put it together?" Idaan said. "This Vanjit creature has destroyed the only home Ana-cha had to go to. She's had to look long and hard at what her life could be in the place she's found herself, crippled in a foreign land, and it shook her."

"She's in love with Danat?"

"Of course she is," Idaan said. "It would have happened in half the time if you and her mother hadn't insisted on it. I think that's more frightening for her than the poet killing her nation."

"I don't know what you mean," he said.

"She's spent her life watching her mother linked with her father," Idaan said. "There are only so many years you can soak in the regrets of others before you start to think that all the world's that way."

"I had the impression that Farrer-cha loved his wife deeply," Otah said.

"And I had it that there's more than a husband to make a marriage," Idaan said. "It isn't her mother she fears being, it's Farrer-cha. She's afraid of having her love merely tolerated. I spent most of the day talking about Cehmai. I told her that if she really wanted to know what spending a life with Danat would be like, she should see what sort of man you were. If she wanted to know how Danat would see her, to find how you saw your wife."