Liat took a pose of challenge.
"Swear it," she said.
"To whom are you talking? How likely am I to be bound by an oath to you?"
Liat let her arms fall to her sides.
"I won't betray you," Seedless said, "because there's no reason to, and because it would hurt Maati."
"Maati?"
Seedless shrugged.
"I'm fond of him. He's . . . he's young and he hasn't lived in the world for very long, perhaps. But he has the talent and charm to escape this if he's wise."
"You sound like Heshai when you say that."
"Of course I do."
"Do you . . . I mean, you don't really care about Maati. Do you?"
Seedless stood. He moved with the grace and ease of a thrown stone. His robe hung from him, darker than the night. His face was the perfect white of a carnival mask, smooth as eggshell and as expressionless. The crickets increased their chirping songs until they were so loud, Liat was surprised that she could hear Seedless' voice, speaking softly over them.
"In ten years time, Liat-kya, look back at this—at what you and I said here, tonight. And when you do, ask yourself which of us was kinder to him."
Chapter 15
The days passed with an exquisite discomfort in the village of the Dai-kvo. The clear air, the cold stone of the streets, the perfection, the maleness and austerity and beauty were like a dream. Otah moved through the alleyways and loitered with other men by the firekeepers' kilns, listening to gossip and the choir of windchimes. Messengers infested the village like moths, fluttering here and there. Speakers from every city, dressed in sumptuous robes and cloaks, appeared every day and vanished again. The water tasted strange from influence, the air smelled of power.
While Otah had been lifting bales of cotton all day and pulling ticks out of his arms in the evenings, Maati had lived in these spaces. Otah went to his rooms each night, sick with waiting, and wondering who he would have been, had he taken the old Dai-kvo's offer. And then, he would remember the school—the cruelty, the malice, the cold-hearted lessons and beatings and the laughter of the strong at the weak—and he wondered instead how Maati had brought himself to accept.
In the afternoon of his fifth day, a man in the white robes of a high servant found him on the wide wooden deck of a teahouse.
"You are the courier for Maati Vaupathai?" the servant asked, taking a pose both respectful and querying. Otah responded with an affirming pose. "The most high wishes to speak with you. Please come with me."
The library was worked in marble; tall shelves filled with scrolls and bound volumes lined the walls, and sunlight shone through banks of clerestory windows with glass clear as air. Tahi-kvo—the Dai-kvo—sat at a long table of carved blackwood. An iron brazier warmed the room, smelling of white smoke and hot metal and incense. He looked up as the servant took a pose of completion and readiness so abjectly humble as to approach the ludicrous. Otah took no pose.
"Go," the Dai-kvo said, and the white-robed servant left, pulling the wide doors closed behind him. Otah stood as Tahi-kvo considered him from under frowning brows then pushed a sewn letter across the table. Otah stepped forward and took it, tucking it into his sleeve. They stood for a moment in silence.
"You were stupid to come," Tahi-kvo said, his tone matter-of-fact. "If your brothers find you're alive they'll stop eyeing each other and work in concert to kill you."
"I suppose they might. Will you tell them?"
"No." Tahi-kvo rose and stalked to a bookshelf, speaking over his shoulder as he went. "My master died, you know. The season after you left."
"I'm sorry," Otah said.
"Why did you come? Why you?"
"Maati is a friend. And there was no one else who could be trusted." The other reasons weren't ones he would share with Tahi-kvo. They were his own.
Tahi-kvo ran his fingers across the spines of the books. Even turned almost away, Otah could see the bitterness in his smile.
"And he trusts you? He trusts Otah Machi? Well, he's young. Perhaps he doesn't know you so well as I do. Do you want to know what's in this letter I'm sending with you?"
"If he cares to tell me," Otah said.
The volume Tahi-kvo pulled down was ancient—bound in wood with clasps of metal and thick as a hand spread wide. He hefted it back and laid it on the table before he answered.
"It says he mustn't let Heshai lose control of his andat. It says there isn't a replacement for it, and that there isn't the prospect of one. If Seedless escapes, I have nothing to send, and Saraykeht becomes an oversized low town. That's what it says."
Tahi-kvo's eyebrows rose, challenging. Otah took a pose that accepted the lesson from a teacher—a pose he'd taken before, when he'd been a boy.