"You and Mother. You're lovers again?"
"I suppose so," Maati said, surprised to feel a blush in his cheeks. "It happens sometimes."
"What happens when you're called away to the Dai-kvo?"
"Are we walking the same path a second time, you mean? We're waiting to hear two things from the Dal-kvo-whether he thinks my speculations about avoiding the price of a failed binding are worth looking into and whether to act against Galt. Either one puts me someplace away from Liat. But we aren't who we were then. I don't pretend that we can be. And anyway, I have all the habits of being without her. I've missed her for more years than I spent in her company."
I have missed you, he thought but didn't say. I have missed you, and it's too late now for anything more than awkward conversations and late nights getting drunk together. Nothing will ever make that right.
"Do you regret that?" Nayiit asked. "If you could go hack and do things again, would you want to love her less? Would you want to have gone to the Dai-kvo and been able to leave that ... that longing behind you?"
"I don't know what you mean."
Nayiit looked up.
"I would hate her, if I were you. I would think she'd taken my chance to be what I was supposed to be, to do what I could have done. "There you were, a poet, and favored enough that you were expected to hold the andat, and because of her you fell into disfavor. Because of her, and because of me." Nayiit's jaw clenched, his eyes only a half shade darker than the pale brown of his mother's staring at something that wasn't there, his attention turned inward. "I don't know how you stand the sight of us."
"It wasn't like that," Maati said. "It was never like that. If it were all mine again, I would have followed her."
The words struck the boy hard. His gaze lost its focus; his mouth tightened like that of a man in pain.
"What is it, Nayiitkya?"
Nayiit seemed to snap back to the room, an embarrassed grin on his face. He took a pose of apology, but Maati shook his head.
"Something's bothering you," Maati said.
"It's nothing. I've only ... It's not worth talking about."
"Something's bothering you, son."
He had never said the word aloud. Son. Nayiit had never heard it from his lips, not since he'd been too young for it to mean anything. Maati felt his heart leap and race like a startled deer, and he saw the shock on the boy's face. This was the moment, then, that he'd feared and longed for. Fie waited to hear what Nayiit would say. Maati dreaded the polite deflection, the retreat back into the roles of a pair of strangers in a tearoom, the way a man falling from a cliff might dread the ground.
Nayiit opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, almost too low to hear over the music and the crowd, "I'm trying to choose between what I am and what I want to be. I'm trying to want what I'm supposed to want. And I'm failing."
"I see."
"I want to be a good man, Father. I want to love my wife and my son. I want to want them. And I don't. I don't know whether to walk away from them or from myself. I thought you had made that decision, but. . ."
Maati settled hack on the bench, put down his howl still half full of wine, and took Naviit's hand in his own. Father. Nayiit had said Father.
"Tell me," Maati said. "Tell me all of it."
"It would take all night," the boy said with a rueful chuckle. But he didn't pull hack his hand.
"Let it," Maati said. "There's nothing more important than this."
BALASAR HADN'T SLEPT. THE NIGHT HAD COME, A LATE RAIN SHOWER FILLing the air with the scent of water and murmur of distant thunder, and he had lain in his bed, willing himself to a forgetfulness that wouldn't come.
The orders waited in stacks on his desk in the library, commands to he issued to each of his captains, outlining the first stage of his campaign. There were two sets, of course, just as the Khaiate mercenary captain had surmised. 'T'hose he'd sealed in green would lead the army to the North, laying waste to the Westlands and sending the thin stream of gold and silver that could be wrung from them back to the coffers of the High Council. Those he'd sealed in red would wheel the army-twenty thousand armsmcn, three hundred steam wagons, six thousand horses, and God only knew how many servants and camp followers-to the east and the most glorious act of conquest the world had ever known.
If he succeeded, he would he remembered as the greatest general in history, at least in his audacity. The battles themselves he expected to he simple enough. The Khaiem had no experience in tactics and no armies to protect them. Balasar would he remembered for two things only: the unimaginable wealth he was about to pour into Galt and the ceremony that would come with the dawn. The plot that stripped the andat from the world.