An Autumn War(33)

The nursery glowed by the light of the candles. Kiyan sat on the raised bed, talking softly to their son. Great iron statues of strange, imagined beasts had been kept in the fire grates all day and pulled out when night fell, and as he quietly walked forward, Otah could feel the heat radiating from them. The physician's assistant-a young man with a serious expression-took a respectful pose and walked quietly from the room, leaving the family alone.

Otah stepped up to the bedside. Danat's eyes, half closed in drowse, shifted toward him and a smile touched Otah's mouth.

"I got sick again, Papa-kya," he said. His voice was rough and low; the familiar sign of a hard day.

"Don't talk, sweet," Kiyan said, smoothing I)anat's forehead with the tips of her fingers. "You'll start it again."

"Yes," Otah said, sitting across from his wife, taking his son's hand. "I heard. But you've been sick before, and you've gotten better. You'll get better again. It's good for boys to be a hit ill when they're young. It gets all the hardest parts out of the way early. Then they can be strong old men.

"Tell me a story?" Danat asked.

Utah took a breath, his mind grasping for a children's story. He tried to recall being in this room himself or one like it. He had been, when he'd been I)anat's age. Someone had held him when he'd been ill, had told him stories to distract him. But everything in his life before he'd been disowned and sent to the school existed in the blur of halfmemory and dream.

"Papa-kya's tired, sweet," Kiyan said. "Let Mama tell you about . .

"No!" Danat cried, his face pulling in-mouth tight, brows thunderously low. "I want Papa-kya-"

"It's all right," Otah said. "I'm not so tired I can't tell my own boy a story."

Kiyan smiled at him, her eyes amused and apologetic both. I tried to spare you.

"Once, hack before the Empire, when the world was very new," Otah said, then paused. "There, ah. There was a goat."

The goat-whose name was coincidentally also Danat-went on to meet a variety of magical creatures and have long, circuitous conversations to no apparent point or end until Utah saw his son's eyes shut and his breath grow deep and steady. Kiyan rose and silently snuffed all but the night candle. The room filled with the scent of spent wicks. Otah let go of his son's hand and quietly pulled the netting closed. In the near-darkness, Danat's eyelids seemed darker, smudged with kohl. His skin was smooth and brown as eggshell. Kiyan touched Otah's shoulder and motioned with her gaze to the door. He laced his fingers in hers and together they walked to the hallway.

The physician's assistant sat on a low stool, a howl of rice and fish in his hands.

"I will be here for the night, Most High," the assistant said as Otah paused before him. "My teacher expects that the boy will sleep soundly, but if he wakes, I will be here."

Otah took a pose expressing gratitude. It was a humbling thing for a Khai to do before a servant, even one as skilled as this. The physician's assistant bowed deeply in response. The walk to their own rooms was a short one-down one hallway, up a wide flight of stairs worked in marble and silver, and then the gauntlet of their own servants. The evening's meal was set out for them-quail glazed with pork fat and honey, pale bread with herbed butter, fresh trout, iced apples. More food than any two people could eat.

"It isn't in his chest," Kiyan said as she lifted the trout's pale flesh from delicate, translucent bones. "His color is always good. His lips never blue at all. The physician didn't hear any water when he breathes, and he can blow up a pig's bladder as well as I could."

"And all that's good?" Otah said. "He can't run across a room without coughing until his head aches."

"All that's better than the alternative," Kiyan said. "They don't know what it is. They give him teas that make him sleep, and hope that his body's wise enough to mend itself."

""Phis has been going on too long. It's been almost a year since he was really well."

"I know it," Kiyan said, and the weariness in her voice checked Otah's frustration. "Really, love, I'm quite clear."

"I'm sorry, Kiyan-kya," he said. "It's just ..."

He shook his head.

"Hard feeling powerless?" she said gently. Otah nodded. Kiyan sighed softly, a sympathy for his pain. Then, "Agoat?"

"It was what came to mind."

After the meal, after their hands had been washed for them in silver howls, after Otah had suffered yet another change of robes, Kiyan kissed him and retreated to her rooms. Otah stepped down from his palace, instructed the retinue of servants that he wished to be left alone, and made his way west, toward the library. The sun had long since slipped behind the mountains, but the sky remained a bright gray, the clouds touched with rose and gold. Spring would soon give way to summer, the long, bright days and brief nights. Still, it was not so early in the season that lanterns didn't glow from the windows that he passed. Stars glittered in the east as the night rose. The library itself was dark, but candles burned in Maati's apartments, and Otah made his way down the path.