The search went on, moving from room to room with an efficiency that spoke of experience. Amat followed slowly, considering the worn mattresses, the storage chambers in casual disarray. The house was kept no better than its books. That would change. Everything would change. Nothing would be spared.
Sorrow, as powerful as it was unexpected, stung her eyes. She brushed the tears away. This wasn't the time for it. There would never be a time for it. Not in her lifetime.
The search complete, the watch gone, Amat gathered her people—her vipers—in the common room at the back. The speech she'd prepared, rehearsed a thousand times in her mind, seemed suddenly limp; words that had seemed commanding were petty and weak. Standing at the head of one long table, she drew breath and slowly let it out.
"Well . . ." she said.
In the pause, the voice came from the crowd.
"Grandmother? Is it really you?"
It was a boy of five or six summers. He had been sleeping on a bench one morning, she remembered, when she'd come out of her hellish little cell for a plate of barley gruel and pork. He'd snored.
"Yes," she said. "I've come back."
IN THE days that followed, Heshai didn't improve, but neither did he seem to grow worse. His patchy beard grew fuller, his weight fell for a time and then slowly returned. He would rouse himself now to wander the house, though he didn't leave it, except to lumber down to the pond at night and stare into the black depths. Maati knew—because who else would take the time to care—that Heshai ate less at night than in the mornings, that he changed to clean robes if they were given him, that he might bathe if a bath was drawn, or he might not.
Thankfully the cotton harvest was complete, and there was nothing official the poet had been called on to perform. Physicians came from the Khai, but Heshai refused to see them. Servants who tried to approach the poet soon learned to ask their questions of Maati. Sometimes Maati acted as go between, sometimes, he just made the decisions himself.
For his own life, Maati found himself floating. Unless he was engaged in the daily maintenance of his invalid master, there was no direction for him that he didn't choose, and so he found that his days had grown to follow his emotions. If he felt frightened or overwhelmed, he studied Heshai's brown book, searching for insights that might serve him later if he were called on to hold Seedless. If he felt guilty, he sat by Heshai and tried to coax him into conversation. If he felt lonesome—and he often felt lonesome—he sought out Liat Chokavi. Sometimes he dreamed of her, and of that one brief kiss.
If his feelings for her were complex, it was only because she was beautiful and his friend and Otahkvo's lover. There was no harm in it, because nothing could come from it. And so, she was his friend, his only friend in the city.
It was because he had become so familiar with her habits and the places where she spent her days that, when the news came—carried by a palace slave with his morning meal—Maati found her so easily. The clearing was west of the seafront and faced a thin stretch of beach she'd shown him one night. Half-leaved trees and the curve of the shore hid the city. Liat sat on a natural bench of stone, leaning against a slab of granite half her height, and looking at the waves without seeing them. Maati moved forward, his feet crackling in the fallen leaves. Liat turned once, and seeing it was him, turned back to the water without speaking. He smoothed a clear spot beside her on the bench and sat.
"It's true then?" he asked. "Amat Kyaan quit the house?"
Liat nodded.
"Wilsincha must be furious."
She shrugged. Maati sat forward, his elbows on his knees. The waves gathered and washed the sand, each receding into the rush of the next. Gulls wheeled and screamed to the east and a huge Galtic ship floated at anchor on the horizon. They were the only signs of the city. He stirred the pile of dry leaves below them with his heel, exposing the dark soil beneath them.
"Did you know?"
"She didn't tell me," Liat said, and her voice was calm and blasted and empty. "She just went. Her apartments were empty except for a box of house papers and a letter to Wilsincha."
"So it wasn't only you, at least. She hadn't told anyone. Do you know why she left?"
"No," Liat said. "I blame myself for it. If I had done better, if I hadn't embarrassed the house . . ."
"You did what Wilsincha asked you to do. If the trade had been what it seemed, they'd be calling your praises for it."
"Perhaps," Liat said. "It hardly matters. She's gone. Wilsincha doesn't have any faith in me. I'm an apprentice without a master."
"Well. We're both that, at least."
She coughed out a single laugh.