In the end, Ana let Danat lead her back to her shelter, leaving Otah and his sister alone by the black and cooling kiln. The armsmen had prepared sleeping tents for them, but Idaan seemed content to sit up drinking watered wine in the cold night air, and Otah found himself pleased enough to join her.
"I don't suppose you'd care to explain to your poor idiot brother what happened today?" he said at length.
"You haven't put it together?" Idaan said. "This Vanjit creature has destroyed the only home Ana-cha had to go to. She's had to look long and hard at what her life could be in the place she's found herself, crippled in a foreign land, and it shook her."
"She's in love with Danat?"
"Of course she is," Idaan said. "It would have happened in half the time if you and her mother hadn't insisted on it. I think that's more frightening for her than the poet killing her nation."
"I don't know what you mean," he said.
"She's spent her life watching her mother linked with her father," Idaan said. "There are only so many years you can soak in the regrets of others before you start to think that all the world's that way."
"I had the impression that Farrercha loved his wife deeply," Otah said.
"And I had it that there's more than a husband to make a marriage," Idaan said. "It isn't her mother she fears being, it's Farrercha. She's afraid of having her love merely tolerated. I spent most of the day talking about Cehmai. I told her that if she really wanted to know what spending a life with Danat would be like, she should see what sort of man you were. If she wanted to know how Danat would see her, to find how you saw your wife."
Otah laughed, and he thought he saw the darkness around Idaan shift as if she had smiled.
"I'm sorry I didn't have the chance to know her," Idaan said. "She sounds like a good woman."
"She was," Otah said. "I miss her."
"I know you do," Idaan said. "And now Ana-cha knows it too."
"Does it matter?" Otah said. "All the hopes I had for building Galt and the Khaiem together are in rags around my knees. We're on a hunt for a girl who can ruin the world. What she's done to Galt, she could do to us. Or to all the world, if she wanted it. How do we plan for a marriage between Danat and Ana when it's just as likely that we'll all be starving and blind by Candles Night?"
"We're all born to die, Most High," Idaan said, the title sounding like an endearment in her voice. "Every love ends in parting or death. Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we'd slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don't. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever."
"You make it sound like something you've done," Otah said.
Idaan made a sound he couldn't interpret, part grunt, part whimper.
"What is it?" he asked the darkness.
The silence lasted for the length of five long breaths together. When she spoke, her voice was low and rich with embarrassment.
"Lambs," she said.
"Lambs?"
"I used to wrap up the newborn lambs and keep them in the house. I even had Cehmai build them a crib that I could rock them in. After a few years, we had to switch to goats. I couldn't slaughter the lambs after all that, could I? By the end, I think we had sixty."
Otah didn't know whether to laugh or put his arms around the woman. The thought of the hard-hearted killer of his own father, his own brothers, cuddling a baby lamb was as absurd as it was sorrowful.
"Is it like this for everyone?" he asked softly. "Does every woman suffer this? Is the need to care for something that strong?"
"Strong? When it strikes, yes. But everyone? No," Idaan said. "Of course not. As it happened, it struck me. I assume Maati's students all feel strongly enough about it to risk their lives. But not every woman needs a child, and, thank the gods, the madness sometimes passes. It did for me."
"You wouldn't be a mother now? If it were possible, you wouldn't choose to?"
"Gods, no. I'd have been terrible at it. But I miss them," Idaan said. "I miss my little lambs. And that brings us back to Ana-cha, doesn't it?"
Otah took a pose that asked clarification.
"Who am I," Idaan asked, "to say that falling in love is ridiculous just because it's doomed?"
Chapter 22
The weeks spent at the school had let Maati forget the ways in which the world broadened when he was traveling, and also the ways in which it narrowed when he was traveling with company. Living in the same walls, the same gardens, and surrounded as he had been by only a few deeply familiar faces had begun to grate on him before they left, but there had still been a way to find a moment to steal away. On the road, all of them together, the chances for private conversation were few and precious.