A Shadow In Summer(14)

"My name is Amat Kyaan," she said. "I'm here to inquire after your health. Marchat is a good man, but perhaps not so wise in women's matters."

The girl cocked her head, like listening to an unfamiliar song. Amat felt her smile fade a degree.

"You do know the Khaiate tongues?"

The girl giggled and said something. She spoke too quickly to follow precisely, but the words had the liquid feel of an east island language. Amat cleared her throat, and tried again, slowly in Nippu.

"My name is Amat Kyaan," she said.

"I'm Maj," the girl said, matching Amat's slow diction and exaggerating as if she were speaking to a child.

"You've come a long way to be here. I trust the travel went well?"

"It was hard at first," the girl said. "But the last three days, I've been able to keep food down."

The girl's hand strayed to her belly. Tiny, dark stretch-marks already marbled her skin. She was thin. If she went to term, she'd look like an egg on sticks. But, of course, she wouldn't go to term. Amat watched the pale fingers as they unconsciously caressed the rise and swell where the baby grew in darkness, and a sense of profound dislocation stole into her. This wasn't a noblewoman whose virginity wanted plausibility. This wasn't a child of wealth too fragile for blood teas. This didn't fit any of the hundred scenarios that had plagued Amat through the night.

She leaned against the wooden railing, taking some of the weight off her aching hip, put her cane aside, and crossed her hands.

"Marchat has told me so little of you," she said, struggling to find the vocabulary she needed. "How did you come to Saraykeht?"

The girl grinned and spun her tale. She spoke too quickly sometimes, and Amat had to make her repeat herself.

It seemed the father of her get had been a member of the utkhaiem—one of the great families of Saraykeht, near to the Khai himself. He'd been travelling in Nippu in disguise. He'd never revealed his true identity to her when he knew her, but though the affair had been brief, he had lost his heart to her. When he heard she was with child, he'd sent Oshai—the moon-faced man—to bring her here, to him. As soon as the politics of court allowed, he would return to her, marry her.

As improbability mounted on improbability, Amat nodded, encouraged, drew her out. And with each lie the girl repeated, sure of its truth, nausea grew in Amat. The girl was a fool. Beautiful, lovely, pleasant, and a fool. It was a story from the worst sort of wishing epic, but the girl, Maj, believed it.

She was being used, though for what, Amat couldn't imagine. And worse, she loved her child.

NOTHING WAS said to Maati. His belongings simply vanished from the room in which he had been living, and a servant girl led him down from the palace proper to a house nestled artfully in a stand of trees—the poet's house. An artificial pond divided it from the grounds. A wooden bridge spanned the water, arching sharply, like a cat's back. Koi—white and gold and scarlet—flowed and shifted beneath the water's skin as Maati passed over them.

Within, the house was as lavish as the palace, but on a more nearly human scale. The stairway that led up to the sleeping quarters was a rich, dark wood and inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, but no more than two people could have walked abreast up its length. The great rooms at the front, with their hinged walls that could open onto the night air or close like a shutter, were cluttered with books and scrolls and diagrams sketched on cheap paper. An ink brick had stained the arm of a great silk-embroidered chair. The place smelled of tallow candles and old laundry.

For the first time since he had left the Dai-kvo, Maati felt himself in a space the character of which he could understand. He waited for his teacher, prepared for whatever punishment awaited him. Darkness came late, and he lit the night candle as the sun set. The silence of the poet's house was his only companion as he slept.

In the morning, servants delivered a meal of sweet fruits, apple-bread still warm from the palace kitchens, and a pot of smoky, black tea. Maati ate alone, a feeling of dread stealing over him. Putting him here alone to wait might, he supposed, be another trick, another misdirection. Perhaps no one would ever come.

He turned his attention to the disorder that filled the house. After leaving the bowls, cups and knives from his own meal out on the grass for the servants to retrieve, he gathered up so many abandoned dishes from about the house that the pile of them made it seem he had eaten twice. Scrolls opened so long that dust covered the script, he cleaned, furled, and returned to the cloth sleeves that he could find. Several he suspected were mismatched—a deep blue cloth denoting legal considerations holding a scroll of philosophy. He took some consolation that the scrolls on the shelves seemed equally haphazard.