"I'm fine. A little bruised on the arm and shoulder, but… but fine."
In the dim, Otah saw that Nayiit held something before him. A greasy scent of roast lamb came to him.
"I can't eat," Otah said as the boy came closer. "Thank you, but
… give it to the men. Give it to the injured men."
"Your attendant said you didn't eat in the morning either," Nayiit said. "It won't help them if you collapse. It won't bring them back."
Otah felt a surge of cold anger at the words, but hit back his retort. He nodded to the edge of the cot.
"Leave it there," he said.
Nayiit hesitated, but then moved forward and placed the bowl on the cot. Ile stepped back, but he did not walk away. As Otah's eyes adjusted to the darkness, Nayiit's face took on dim features. Otah wasn't surprised to see that the boy was weeping. Nayiit was older now than Otah had been when he'd fathered him on Liat. Older now than Otah had been when he'd first killed a man with his hands.
"I'm sorry, Most High," Nayiit said.
"So am I," Utah said. The scent of lamb was thick and rich. Enticing and mildly nauseating both.
"It was my fault," Nayiit said, voice thickened by a tight throat. "Phis, all of this, is my fault."
"No," Utah began. "You can't-"
"I saw them killing each other. I saw how many there were, and I broke," Nayiit said, and his hands took a pose of profound contrition. "I'm the one who called the retreat."
"I know," Otah said. is
Liat had been nursing her headache since she'd woken that morning; as the day progressed, it had drawn a line from the hack of her eyes to her temples that throbbed when she moved too quickly. She had given up shaking her head. Instead, she pressed her fingers into the fine-grained wood of the table and tried to will her frustration into it. Kiyan, seated across from her, was saying something in a reasonable, measured tone that entirely missed her point. Liat took a pose that asked permission to speak, and then didn't wait for Kiyan to answer her.
"It isn't the men," Liat said. "He could have taken twice what he did, and we'd be able to do what's needed. It's that he took all the horses."
Kiyan's fox-sharp face tightened. Her dark eyes flickered down toward the maps and diagrams spread out between them. The farmlands and low towns that surrounded Machi were listed with the weight of grain and neat and vegetables that had come from each in the last five years. Liat's small, neat script covered paper after paper, black ink on the butter-yellow pages noting acres to be harvested and plowed, the number of hands and hooves required by each.
The breeze from the unshuttered windows lifted the pages but didn't disarray them, like invisible fingers checking the corners for some particular mark.
"Show me again," Kiyan said, and the weariness in her voice was almost enough to disarm Liat's annoyance. Almost, but not entirely. With a sigh, she stood. The line behind her eyes throbbed.
"'T'his is the number of horses we'd need to plow the eastern farmsteads here and here and here," Liat said, tapping the maps as she did so. "We have half that number. We can get up to nearly the right level if we take the mules from the wheat mills."
Kiyan looked over the numbers, her fingertips touching the sums and moving on. I ler gaze was focused, a single vertical line between her brows.
"How short is the second planting now?" Kiyan asked.
"The west and south are nearly complete, but they started late. The eastern farmsteads… not more than a quarter."
Kiyan leaned back. Otah's wife looked nearly as worn as Liat felt. The gray in her hair seemed more pronounced, her flesh paler and thinner. Liat fund herself wondering if Kiyan had made a practice of painting her face and dyeing her hair that, in the crisis, she had let fall away, or if the task they had set themselves was simply sucking the life out of them both.
"It's too late," Kiyan said. "With the time it would take to get the mules, put them to yoke, and plow the fields, we'd be harvesting snowdrifts."
"Is there something else we could plant?" Liat asked. "Something we have time to grow before winter? Potatoes? Turnips?"
"I don't know," Kiyan said. "How long does it take to grow turnips this far North?"
Liar closed her eyes. Two educated, serious, competent women should be able to run a city. Should be able to shoulder the burden of the world and forget that one stood to lose a husband, the other a son. Should be able to ignore the constant fear that soldiers of a Galtic army might appear any day on the horizon prepared to destroy the city. It should he within their power, and yet they were blocked by idiot questions like whether turnips take longer to grow than potatoes. She took a deep breath and slowly let it out, willing the tension in her jaw to lessen, the pain behind her eyes to recede.
"I'll find out," Ifiat said. "But will you give the order to the mills? They won't he happy to stop their work."
"I'll give them the option of loaning the Khai their animals or pulling the plows themselves," Kiyan said. "If we have to spend the winter grinding wheat for our bread, it's a small price for not starving."
"It's going to he a thin spring regardless," Liat said.
Kiyan took the papers that Liat had drawn up. She didn't speak, but the set of her mouth agreed.
"We'll do our best," Kiyan said.
The banquet had gone splendidly. The women of the utkhaiem- wives and mothers, daughters and aunts-had heard Kiyan's words and taken to them as if she were a priest before the faithful. Liat had seen the light in their eyes, the sense of hope. For all their fine robes and lives of court scandal and gossip, each of these women was as grateful as Liat had been for the chance of something to do.
The food and fuel, Kiyan had kept for herself. Other people had been tasked with seeing to the wool, to arranging the movement of the summer belongings into the storage of the high towers, the preparation of the lower city-the tunnels below Machi. Liat had volunteered to act as Kiyan's messenger and go-between in the management of the farms and crops, gathering the food that would see them through the winter. Being the lover of a poet-even a poet who had never bound one of the andat-apparently lent her enough status in court to make her interesting. And as the rumors began to spread that Cehmai and Maati were keeping long hours together in the library and the poet's house, that they were preparing a fresh binding, Liat found herself more and more in demand. In recent days it had even begun to interfere with her work.
She had let herself spend time in lush gardens and high-domed dining halls, telling what stories she knew of Nlaati's work and intentionswhat parts of it he'd said would be safe to tell. The women were so hungry for good news, for hope, that Liat couldn't refuse them. After telling the stories often enough, even she began to take hope from them herself. But tea and sweet bread and gossip took time, and they took attention, and she had let it go too far. The second wheat crop would be short, and no amount of pleasant high-city chatter now would fill bellies in the spring. Assuming they lived. If the Galts appeared tomorrow, it would hardly matter what she'd done or failed to do.
"There's going to be enough food," Kiyan said softly. "We may wind up killing more of the livestock and eating the grain ourselves, but even if half the crop failed, we'd have enough to see us through to the early harvest."
"Still," Liat said. "It would have been good to have more."
Kiyan took a pose that both agreed with Liat and dismissed the matter. Liat responded with one appropriate for taking leave of a superior. It was a nuance that seemed to trouble Kiyan, because she leaned forward, her fingertips touching Liat's arm.
"Are you well?" Kiyan asked.
"Fine," Liat said. "It's just my head has been tender. It's often like that when the Khai Saraykeht changes the tax laws again or the cotton crops fail. It fades when the troubles pass."