'If you would take me where?'
'Take you as my wife. She has plans, verea, for her son, and they don't include you.'
Tuvi's gaze was distant as he continued smiling absently at the cooing boy. These words did not surprise him, however much they confounded her. 'Like I said, it's best if you do nothing until the captain returns, Mistress.'
Mai stared at Keshad. 'As your wife?'
Sheyshi sobbed and collapsed tin the floor like a rag doll cast away by its indifferent owner. Merciful One! Could poor Sheyshi have been harboring an infatuation for Keshad all this time? And no one the wiser?
'Of course that's not what I want, not that I don't admire you, verea. But you must know-' His emotions galloped away and dragged him after. 'You must know, verea, that I intend to marry Miravia. If she'll have me.'
Sheyshi bawled.
'But you can't!' cried Mai. 'I mean Miravia to marry Chief Tuvi! He's the only one who's worthy of her. And then she'll always stay with me. You can't have her, Keshad!'
'Who are you to order her life? Eliar repudiated her. In the market. In front of everyone. Will you do that, also, if she turns down Chief Tuvi in favor of me? No disrespect, Chief.'
The chief studied the baby with brows furrowed.
'What makes you think she'll have you?' demanded Mai. 'You, who traded in slaves for years!'
'I only did it to earn coin to buy my sister free.'
'Miravia despises and rejects slavery.'
'You keep slaves! She doesn't despise and reject you!'
Anji's mother] Blown in like a storm to overset everything. How could a woman who had never met her be speaking of handing Mai over to another man as if she were a slave purchased at the market? And yet hadn't Anji bought her from her father? That he treated her as a wife, not as a slave concubine, was only because he had chosen to do so. He could have used and then discarded her at any slave market during their long journey here. Why should Anji's mother — a woman of exalted birth, sister to the var who ruled over the Qin Empire and wife to the Sirniakan emperor himself — consider Mai to be any different from a slave? Any more than she was herself, a woman of far superior rank and blood, who had been discarded by the emperor when it was no longer politically useful for him to favor her?
'I will not be handed off to some other man!' cried Mai. 'Meaning no disrespect to you, Master Keshad!' But the words were bitter, their bile a sour taste on her tongue.
Miravia was going to marry Tuvi. Mai had it all arranged and was just allowing time for Miravia's situation to settle. It was not acceptable for Miravia to marry this unpleasant young man with his handsome eyes and beautiful hair, exactly the kind of passionate features worn by the heroes in songs who snared so many luckless maidens. What if Miravia, so innocent, so unworldly, fell in love with his intense looks and rejected a steady, solid, intelligent, calm, and wise man like Tuvi just because he was old enough to be her father!
Yet how was Mai different from the rest if she managed Miravia's life, or Priya's life, or anyone's life but her own and her child's, merely to satisfy her own selfish desires? If she did not want to be so treated, then she must begin by refusing to inflict on
those she had authority over what others had previously inflicted on them. What her father had dealt to her.
She turned to the big man. 'O'eki, write up a manumission for all three of you. You, and Priya. And Sheyshi.'
'Do you mean to turn me out?' Sheyshi sobbed. 'Where will I go?'
'Of course I won't turn you out. If you want to stay, you can stay. It's just you won't be a slave. You'll be a hireling. You'll be paid coin, and if you want to work elsewhere, you can go elsewhere.'
'I don't want to go elsewhere!' Sheyshi wailed, swaying back and forth like a tree whipped in a strong wind.
'You don't have to go anywhere,' said Mai, expending her last store of even temper, she who had prided herself on her fathomless calm. Not for her Ti's storms or her twin Mei's sulks; she had held herself above Uncle Girish's tantrums and thoroughgoing nastiness, her father's controlling angers, her mother's jealousy and competitiveness, her aunt's scheming, and her grandmother's favoritism. And yet here they all surfaced in a swell of furious emotion that made her hands quiver and her shoulders shake.
Keshad will not get the better of me!
'Go on, O'eki!' she said harshly. 'Do as I told you!'
With a shaking hand, O'eki moved paper on the desk and weighted its corners with stones. His brushstrokes were uneven, the calligraphy uncharacteristically sloppy, but he wrote the same text three times, a formulation familiar to him from his years as a slave in Kartu Town.
Tuvi dandled the baby with a thoughtful look on his face that might have meant anything. Surely he had guessed she meant him for Miravia, someone special only, but what he thought of her blurted confidence, the revelation of her most lovingly hoarded plans, she could not tell. Sheyshi's tears squeezed out through eyes pressed shut.
Priya said nothing, moved not. Keshad fumed. She'd stolen a march on him, hadn't she? Eiya! And now she was crying, but she let the tears flow. Tears were no reason to feel shame. Only dishonor shamed you.
O'eki lifted his brush as if to add another word but set it down on the brush stand instead.
'Mistress,' he said in a trembling voice. 'I am finished.'
Sheyshi turned her face toward the wall, hiding herself.
Mai sank down beside O'eki. She plucked the brush from the stand, forefingers on the outside and small fingers on the back with the thumb to steady them. She touched the hairs to the ink-stone and, ruthlessly, hearing only their breathing as her accompaniment, signed them with her formal name, Mai'ili daughter of Clan Mei, as Priya had taught her.
She signed Sheyshi's manumission. She signed O'eki's manumission. She signed Priya's manumission and pressed the seal over each one, to make them legal and binding before witnesses, work that the clerks of Sapanasu usually did but which those who could write could manage themselves without requiring the intervention of the temple.
The var's sister and the emperor's former favored queen, so grand and noble a woman, might consider Mai of Clan Mei so insignificant as to warrant no more consideration than a disposable slave, but Mai was no longer such an insignificant creature even if she had been so at one time. She had no need to ask anyone's permission to seal such an act. Hers to act and hers to seal because this was her household as much as Anji's and no woman like Grandmother Mei was going to totter in and think she could sell off Mai as though she were a helpless, propertyless daughter worth only as much coin as her beauty could be sold for. And she certainly wasn't going to let some handsome untested young man steal Miravia just because of his pretty eyes and reckless heart! She had a right to appeal to Miravia's affections, too.
'It's done.'
Perhaps her tone had an angry edge. Perhaps she was shaking more than she realized, even if only one drop of ink stained the paper above her imperfectly brushed name. She wanted its lines to reflect the grace of proper calligraphy, to mirror the gravity of the occasion, but she was still learning, so it would have to do.
She set the brush on its stand. O'eki put a hand to his forehead.
Priya's fingers brushed her chest as if pain stabbed in her heart. 'Free,' she murmured as she leaned to the right as if trying to read the freshly inked letters. Without warning, she collapsed.
In her haste, Mai knocked the writing table askew, and before O'eki had even gotten to his feet she knelt beside Priya's limp form. 'Priya? Priya!'
As faintly as the whisper of mice in the desert Priya spoke again one word. 'Free.'
Mai held her shoulders, keeping her head up. How slender she was! Not much weight to hold, and yet how generous in heart Priya had been all those years. She had served Mai faithfully, affectionately, warmly, loyally. Mai had never given her service a thought.
How blind she had been!
'Yes, you're free now, Priya. You and O'eki both. If I had understood…'
But she had not understood. Only now was the veil ripped from her eyes.
