An Autumn War(37)

"You would have known him, if you'd seen him in passing. You'd have known who he was."

Nayiit took a pose of affirmation. He pursed his lips and chuckled ruefully.

"I don't know what it is to be a father. I'm only working from-"

"Nayiitkya?" came a voice from the shadows behind them. A soft, feminine voice. "Is everything well?"

She stepped toward the light. A young woman, twenty summers, perhaps as many as twenty-two. She wore bedding tied around her waist, her breasts bare, her hair still wild from the pillows.

"Jaaya-cha, this is my mother. Mother, Jaaya Biavu."

The girl blanched, then flushed. She took a pose of welcome, not bothering to cover herself, but her gaze was on Nayiit. It spoke of both humiliation and contempt. Nayiit didn't look at her. The woman turned and stalked away.

"That wasn't kind," Liat said.

"Very little of what she and I do involves kindness," he said. "I don't expect I'll see her again. By which I mean, I don't suppose she'll see me."

"Is she politically connected? If her family is utkhaiem ..."

"I don't think she is," Nayiit said, his face in his hands. It was hard to be sure in the firelight, but she thought the tips of his ears were blushing. "I suppose I should have asked."

He struggled for a moment, trying to speak and failing. his brow furrowed and Liat had to resist the urge to reach over and smooth it with her thumb, the way she had when he'd been a babe.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You know that I'm sorry."

"t~ or what?" she asked, her voice low and stern. As if there were any number of things for which he might he.

"For not being a better man," he said.

The fire popped, as if in comment. Liat took her son's hand, and for a long moment, they were silent. "Then:

"I don't care what you do with your marriage, Nayiitkya. If you don't love her, end it. Or if you don't trust her. As you see fit. People come together and they part. It's what we do. But the boy. You can't leave the boy. That isn't fair."

"It's what Maati-cha did to us."

"No," Liat said, giving his hand the smallest pressure, and then releasing it. "We left him."

Nayiit turned to her slowly, his hands folding into a pose that asked confirmation. It was as if the words were too dangerous to speak.

"I left him," Liat said. "I took you when you were still a babe, and I was the one to leave him."

She saw a moment's shock in his expression, gone as fast as it had come. His face went grave, his hands as still as stones. As still as a man bending his will to keep them still.

"Why?" he asked. His voice was low and thready.

"Oh, love. It was so long ago. I was someone else, then," she said, and knew as she said it that it wasn't enough. "I did because he was only half there. And because I couldn't see to all of his needs and all of yours and have no one there to look after me."

"It was better without him?"

"I thought it would be. I thought I was cutting my losses. And then, later, when I wasn't so certain anymore, I convinced myself it had been the right thing, just so I could tell myself I hadn't been wrong."

lie was shaken, though he tried to cover it. She knew him too well to be fooled.

"tic wasn't there, Nayiit. But he never left you."

And part of me never left him, she thought. What would the world have been if I had chosen otherwise? Where would we all be now if that part of him and of me had been enough? Still in that little hut in the low town near the I)ai-kvo? Would they all have lived together in the library these past years as Nlaati had?

"Those other, ghostlike people made a pretty dream, but then there would have been no one to hear of the Galts and the missing poet, no one to travel to Nantani. And little Tai would not have been horn, and she would never have seen Amat Kyaan again. Someone else would have been with the old woman when she died-someone else or no one. And Liat would never have taken House Kyaan, would never have proven herself competent to the world and to her own satisfaction.

It was too much. The changes, the differences were too great to think of as good or as bad. The world they had now was too much itself, good and evil too tightly woven to wish for some other path. And still it would be wrong to say she found herself without regrets.

"Maati loves you," she said, softly. "You should see him. I won't interfere again. But first, VOL] should go tend to your guest. Smooth things over.

Nayiit nodded, and then a moment later, he smiled. It was the same charming smile she'd known when she was a girl and it had been on different lips. Nayiit would charm the girl, say something sweet and funny, and the pain would be forgotten for a time. He was his father's son. Son of the Khai Machi. Eldest son, and doomed to the fratricidal struggle of succession that stained every city in each generation. She wondered how far Utah would go to avoid that, to keep his boy safe from her schemes. 't'hat conversation had to come, and soon. Perhaps it would he best if she took it to the Khai herself, if she stopped waiting for him to find a right moment.