"It seems to me you've done well enough," Nayiit said as he waved at the
serving boy for more wine. "You've made yourself a place in the court
here, you've been able to study in the libraries here, and from what
Mother says, you've found something no one else ever has. That alone is
more than most men manage in a lifetime."
"I suppose," Maati said. He wanted to go on, wanted to say that most men
had children, raised them up, watched them become women and men. He
wanted to tell this charming boy who stood now where Maati himself once
had that he regretted that he had not been able to enjoy those simple
pleasures. Instead, he took another handful of pea pods. He could tell
that Nayiit sensed his reservations, heard the longing in the brevity of
his reply. When the boy spoke, his tone was light.
"I've spent all my life-well, since I've been old enough to think of it
as really mine and not something Mother's let me borrow-with House
Kyaan. Running errands, delivering contracts. That's how I started, at
least. Mother always told me I had to do better than the other boys who
worked for the house because I was her son, and if people thought I was
getting favors because of it, they wouldn't respect her or me. She was
right. I can see that. At the time it all seemed monstrously unfair,
though."
"Do you like the work?" Maati asked.
The girl with the drum began tapping a low tattoo, her voice droning in
a lament. Maati shifted to look at Nayiit. The boy's gaze was fixed on
the singer, his expression melancholy. The urge to put his hand to
Nayiit's shoulder, to offer some comfort, however powerless, moved
through Maati and faded. He sat still and quiet as the chant rose, the
anguish in the singer's voice growing until the air of the teahouse
hummed with it, and then it faded into despair. The man with the lacquer
box came past again, but Maati didn't put in any copper this time.
"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, Nayiit-kya?"
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