stroking her skin. "How did it start?"
"I don't know," she said. And then, a moment later, "When I was young, I
think."
Quietly, she told him everything, even the things she had never told
Adrah. Seeing her brothers sent to the school and being told that she
could not go herself because of her sex. Watching her mother brood and
suffer and know that one day she would be sent away or else die there,
in the women's quarters and be remembered only as something that had
borne a Khai's babies.
She told him about listening to songs about the sons of the Khaiem
battling for the succession and how, as a girl, she'd pretend to be one
of them and force her playmates to take on the roles of her rivals. And
the sense of injustice that her older brothers would pick their own
wives and command their own fates, while she would be sold at convenience.
At some point, Cchmai stopped stroking her, and only listened, but that
open, receptive silence was all she needed of him. She poured out
everything. The wild, impossible plans she'd woven with Adrah. The
intimation, one night when a Galtic dignitary had come to Nlaehi, that
the schemes might not be impossible after all. The bargain they had
struck-access to a library's depth of old books and scrolls traded for
power and freedom. And from there, the progression, inevitable as water
flowing toward the sea, that led Adrah to her father's sleeping chambers
and her to the still moment by the lake, the terrible sound of the arrow
striking home.
With every phrase, she felt the horror of it case. It lost none of the
sorrow, none of the regret, but the bleak, soul-eating despair began to
fade from black to merely the darkest gray. By the time she came to the
end of one sentence and found nothing following it, the birds outside
had begun to trill and sing. It would be light soon. Dawn would come
after all. She sighed.
"That was a longer answer than you hoped for, maybe," she said.
"It was enough," he said.
Idaan shifted and sat up, pulling her hair back from her face. Cehmai
didn't move.
"Hiami told me once," she said, "just before she left, that to become
Khai you had to forget how to love. I see why she believed that. But it
isn't what's happened. Not to me. "Thank You, Cchmai-kya."
"For what?"
"For loving me. For protecting me," she said. "I didn't guess how much I
needed to tell you all that. It was ... it was too much. You see that."
"I do," Cehmai said.
"Are you angry with me now?"
"Of course not," he said.
"Are you horrified by me?"
She heard him shift his weight. The pause stretched, her heart sickening
with every beat.
"I love you, Idaan," he said at last, and she felt the tears come again,
but this time with a very different pressure behind them. It wasn't joy,
but it was perhaps relief.
She shifted forward in the darkness, found his body there waiting, and
held him for a time. She was the one who kissed him this time. She was
the one who moved their conversation from the intimacy of confession to
the intimacy of sex. Cehmai seemed almost reluctant, as if afraid that
taking her body now would betray some deeper moment that they had
shared. But Idaan led him to his bed in the darkness, opened her own
robes and his, and coaxed his flesh until whatever objection he'd
fostered was forgotten. She found herself at ease, lighter, almost as if
she was half in dream.
Afterwards, she lay nestled in his arms, warm, safe, and calm as she had
never been in years. Sunlight pressed at the closed shutters as she
drifted down to sleep.
The tunnels beneath Machi were a city unto themselves. Otah found
himself drawn out into them more and more often as the days crept
forward. Sinja and Amiit had tried to keep him from leaving the
storehouse beneath the underground palaces of the Sava, but Otah had
overruled them. The risk of a few quiet hours walking abandoned
corridors was less, he judged, than the risk of going quietly mad
waiting in the same sunless room day after day. Sinja had convinced him
to take an armsman as guard when he went.
Otah had expected the darkness and the quiet-wide halls empty, water
troughs dry-hut the beauty he stumbled on took him by stirprise. Here a
wide square of stone smooth as beach sand, delicate pillars spiraling
tip from it like bolts of twisting silk made from stone. And down
another corridor, a bathhouse left dry for the winter but rich with the
scent of cedar and pine resin.
Even when lie returned to the storehouse and the voices and faces he
knew, lie found his mind lingering in the dark corridors and galleries,
unsure whether the images of the spaces lit with the white shadowless
light of a thousand candles were imagination or memory.
A sharp rapping brought him back to himself, and the door of his private
office swung open. Amiit and Sinja walked in, already half into a
conversation. Sinja's expression was mildly annoyed. Amiit, Otah
thought, seemed worried.
"It would only make things worse," Amiit said.
"We'd earn more time. And it isn't as if they'd accuse Otah-cha here of
it. They think he's dead."
"'T'hen they'll accuse him of it once they find he's alive," Amiit said
and turned to Otah. "Sinja wants to assassinate the head of a high
family in order to slow the work of the council."
"We won't do that," Otah said. "My hands aren't particularly bloodied
yet, and I'd like to keep it that way-"
"It isn't as though people are going to believe it," Sinja said. "If
you're going to carry the blame you may as well get the advantages from
doing the thing."
"It'll be easier to convince them of my innocence later if I'm actually
innocent of something," Otah said, "hut there may be other roads that
come to the same place. Is there something else that would slow the
council and doesn't involve putting holes in someone?"
Sinja frowned, his eyes shifting as if he were reading text written in
the air. He half-smiled.
"Perhaps. Let me look into that."
With a pose that ended his conversation, Sinja left. Amiit sighed and
lowered himself into one of the chairs.
"What news?" Amiit asked.
"Kamau and Vaunani are talking about merging their forces," Otah said.
"Most of the talks seem to involve someone hitting someone or throwing a
knife. The Loiya, Bentani, and (:oirah have all been quietly, and so far