An Autumn War(65)

hlaati looked away. Otah bowed his head and pretended not to have seen the tears on his old friend's cheeks.

"I've only just found him again," Maati said, barely audible over the splashing water. "I've only just found him again, and I don't want him taken away."

"I'll keep him safe," Otah said.

Maati reached out his hand, and Otah let him lace his fingers with his own. It wasn't an intimacy that they had often shared, and against his will, Otah found something near to sorrow tightening his chest. He put his free hand to Maati's shoulder. When Maati spoke, his voice was thick and Otah no longer ignored his tears.

"We're his fathers, you and I," Maati said. "So we'll take care of him. Won't we?"

"Of course we will," Otah said.

"You'll see him home safe."

"Of course."

Maati nodded. It was an empty promise, and they both knew it. Otah smoothed a palm over llaati's thinning hair, squeezed his palm one last time, and stood. He was moved to speak, but he couldn't find any words that would say what he meant. Instead he turned and softly walked away. His servants and attendants waited just outside the garden, attentive as puppies whose mother has left them. Otah waved them away, as he always had. And as he might not do again. The Master of Tides brought the ledger that outlined the rest of his day, and the day after, and was suddenly perfectly blank after that. In two days, he would he traveling with what militia he could, and there was no point planning past that. As the man spoke, Otah gently took the book from him, closed it, and handed it hack. The Master of rides went silent, and no one followed Otah when he walked away.

He strode through the palaces, ignoring the poses of obeisance and respect that bloomed wherever he went. He didn't have time for the forms and rituals. He didn't have time to respect the traditions he was about to put his life in danger to protect. He wasn't entirely sure what that said about him. He took the wide, marble stairs two at a time, rising up from the lower palace toward his personal apartments. When he arrived, Kivan wasn't there. Ile paced the rooms, plucking at the papers on the wide table he'd had brought for him. Maps and histories and lists of names. Numbers of men and of wagons and routes. It looked like a nest for rats: the piled hooks, the scattered notes. It was vaguely ridiculous, he thought as he read over the names of the houses and families who had sworn him support. He was no more a general than he was a tinsmith, and still, here he was, the man stuck with the job.

He didn't recall picking up the map. And yet there it was, in his hands. His eyes traced the paths he and his men might take. He and the men Maati had called disposable. It wasn't the first time he'd wished Sinja-cha were still in the city, if only to have the dispassionate eye of a man who had actually fought in the field. Otah was an amateur at war. He had the impression that it was a poor field for amateurs. He traded the map for the lists of men and studied it again as if there were a cipher hidden in it. He didn't notice when Kiyan and Eiah arrived. When he looked up from his papers, they were simply there.

His wife was calm and collected, though he could see the strain in the thinness of her lips and the tightness of her jaw. Her hair was grayer now than the image of her in his mind. Her face seemed older. For a moment, he was hack in the wayhouse she'd taken over from her father, years ago in ildun. He was in her common room, listening to a flute player fumble through old tunes that everyone knew, and wondering if the lovely fox-faced woman serving the wine had meant to touch his hand when she poured. From such small things are lives constructed. Something of his thought must have shown in his face, because her fea tures softened and something near a blush touched her cheeks as Eiah lowered herself to a couch and collapsed. He noticed that her usual array of rings and jewels were gone; but for the quality of her robe, she could have been a merchant's daughter.

"You look spent, Eiah-kya," Utah said. "Then, to Kiyan, "What's she been doing? Carrying stones tip the towers? And what's happened to jewelry?"

"Physicians don't wear metalwork," she said, as if he'd asked something profoundly stupid. "Blood gets caught in the settings."

"She's been with them all day," Kiyan said.

" We had a boy come in with a crushed arm," Eiah said, her eyes closed. "It was all bloody and the skin scraped off. It looked like something from a butcher's stall. I could see his knuckle hones. l)orin-cha cleaned it up and wrapped it. We'll know in a couple days whether he'll have to have it off."

"We'll know?" Utah asked. "They're having you decide the fate of men's elbows?"

He saw a dark glitter where his daughter's eyes cracked just slightly open. "Dorin-cha will tell me, and then we'll both know."