Then the sensation was gone. 'Enter,' the Weaver said, and Ukadi put his hands on her shoulders and led her away swiftly. The door closed behind them.
'Heart's blood…' she murmured to herself. 'He did not see… he did not see…'
She kept her head lowered as they turned a corner and went along a short way. Fortune was with them and they saw nobody. Ukadi held aside a curtain and ushered Muraki and Mishani through, and when he let it drop they were alone together.
The room was a small bedchamber, with only a single bed near to a window-arch that looked out past the arm of one of the great stone figures that lunged from the Keep's sloping walls. A veil had been hung across it, muting the already muted light. There was a table with a slender book on it, and two chests of drawers in a matched pair.
A difficult silence passed as mother and daughter looked upon each other for the first time in a decade. The resemblance between them was remarkable.
'You cut your hair,' Muraki whispered.
'I had to,' Mishani said. 'It matters nothing. I can grow it back.'
Muraki reached out and touched it carefully. 'It looks odd. But it suits you.'
Mishani smiled and turned her head away. 'I look like a peasant. I will be taking it down as soon as I possibly can.' Studying the veiled window-arch, she said: 'I read your books. All of them.'
'I knew you would,' her mother replied. 'I knew it.'
'The Weaver…' Mishani began, a question on her face.
'They are there to root out those who mean harm to the Imperial family. You, apparently, do not. Not even towards your father. They read no further into a person's thoughts than that. To do so would be… violation. It is dangerous. They have accidentally killed guests that way, or driven them mad, until Avun forbade it.' She glanced uneasily around the room. 'I would not have let you come if I had been able to leave myself. But I cannot leave. Your father sees to that.'
'I told you I would not take refusal,' Mishani said. 'I would have tried anyway, with or without your help. The risks are acceptable to me.'
She motioned to the bed, and they sat down on its edge next to each other.
'There are things I want to say to you,' Mishani replied. 'Things that must come from my lips, not from a coded poem. We are on two sides of a war now, Mother, and one side or the other must win eventually. Whichever of us is on the losing side will not survive, I think. We are both of us too involved.'
Muraki was silent, her hair hanging across her face. She had always hidden behind her hair: straight and centre-parted, it concealed her, leaving only a narrow gap for her eyes and nose and mouth.
'I have wanted to see you for so long,' Mishani said. 'I pictured throwing my arms around you, laughing with joy. But now that I am here, I find that it is as it always was. Why are we this way with each other?'
'It is our nature,' Muraki said quietly. 'And no amount of time can change that.'
'But I saw you in your writing, Mother,' Mishani said. 'I saw your heart in that. I know you feel as deeply as anyone, deeper than most. Deeper than Father.'
Muraki could not meet her gaze. 'My writing can express my soul better than my words or actions ever could,' she said. 'There is comfort there. I am not afraid there.'
'I know that, Mother,' Mishani said, laying a hand on Muraki's. It was clammy and cold. Startled, Muraki looked at her daughter's hand as if it were something that might bite her. Mishani did not remove it. 'I know now. There are many things I did not see before. Like the code in your poems, they took me too long to understand.'
The words came quickly from them both: there was a sense of haste in their meeting, the knowledge that the danger was far from past. They could not waste time when it was so short and precious. Neither of them had ever spoken this directly to the other before.
'I am older now than then, and much has passed in between,' Mishani said. 'When I was young, I thought you weak and distant. You were a shadow of a woman in comparison to my father. I did not even think of you when I went to Axekami to join him at the courts. It did not occur to me that you would care.' She met her mother's eyes briefly, before Muraki became uncomfortable and broke the contact. 'I was a callous child. You deserved better.'
'No,' said Muraki. 'How could you have realised that? Do we not judge everyone by how they act towards us? You cannot be blamed for my failings, daughter. If you thought me aloof, it was because I did not hold you as a child, because I did not touch you or speak with you. If you thought me weak, it was because I did not make myself heard. There is… passion in my imagination, passion in my books… but there I can shape the world as I will it. The world outside… is stultifying, and awkward, and I am shamed when I speak and afraid of people… I am embarrassed by attention…' Realising that she had trailed into a mumble, she recovered herself. 'These are my failings. They have been with me since I was a child, since I can remember. It is not what I want for myself – that is in my books – but it is how I am.'
Mishani squeezed her hand gently. 'But every book you have written has made me feel more that I have wronged you. So I came to you now to make amends. To ask you to forgive me. And to tell you that I am proud of you, Mother.'
Muraki's expression was one of incomprehension.
'Do you not see what you have done?' Mishani said. 'You dared to make yourself a spy for us, you risked yourself by sending Chien to protect me all those years ago.' Muraki put her hand to her mouth at this. 'Yes, I surmised that much before he died. Father's men got to him. But in the end, if not for him, if not for you, thousands of lives would have been lost in the Xarana Fault. Things could have turned out very differently. In your quiet way you have contributed more than we could ever ask.' She took her hand away. 'And yet still we remain in two different worlds, and soon one of them will end. That is why I am here, that is why I risk all this. There are some things that must be done, at any cost. My spirit could not rest if either of us died and… you did not know.'
'I had not realised my child could be so reckless,' Muraki whispered, but a smile touched the edge of her lips.
'It is a new experience for me too,' Mishani grinned. She felt as if a heavy stone had been lifted from her chest. Even if she was caught now, it did not matter so much. It was done, and could not be undone. 'Perhaps nature can change with time.'
'Perhaps,' said Muraki, then got up and went to the window-arch. She brushed aside the veil and looked out.
'Daughter, I love you,' she said, her back to Mishani. 'I always have. Never doubt that, though I may not show it, though we may never have the opportunity to speak again. I am glad you came so I could tell you. We should not have left these matters so late.'
Mishani felt tears start to her eyes. She knew how much it had cost her mother to say those words, and to hear them for the first time in her life was ecstasy.
'Now listen to me,' she said, turning away from the window-arch and letting the veil drop. 'I have much to tell.'
And she spoke then of Avun's plans and schemes, of hints he had given and the intentions that he had expressed. She told of his failed plot to unseat Kakre, of the imminent creation of more feya-kori; of the true numbers of the Aberrants and the dire situation that the Weavers were in, how they faced starvation unless they could take the Prefectures by the next harvest. Mishani did not interrupt, filing every word in her memory, and as her mother went on she realised that her visit could turn out to be far more valuable than even she might have guessed: for this was information only days old, reaching her without the delay of months that was necessary in the publication of a book. She was staggered how much her mother knew. Avun discussed everything with her, it seemed, and the little snippets she had managed to secrete in her stories were only those few long-term events that she thought might still be relevant by the time they reached the hands of those she meant it for. In five minutes Muraki told her more than the entire spy network and the Sisterhood put together had managed to learn in four years.