private central courtyard of the house. The doors to the outer audience chamber slapped shut behind them. In the courtyard, under the shade of the inner porches, sat about twenty women, from sweet-faced girls to wrinkled crones. One quickly covered her face with a wing of pale blue silk shot through with silver cross threads. The others hid their mouths behind their hands and measured Anji through sidelong, coy gazes.
He was the only man in the chamber.
Anji's mother seated herself and indicated that Anji must sit
opposite on a couch facing both her and the courtyard. He remained standing until Mai reached him. He nodded toward the couch; when he sat, she sat beside him. Miravia slid in to kneel gracefully on the floor by Mai's legs, her back a solid comfort. She turned a little, and Atani smiled boldly at her and allowed himself to be passed into Miravia's arms.
Mai settled her now-empty hands in her lap, palms up and relaxed, in the manner of the Merciful One's bounty. She'd faced worse in Kartu Town's market, haggling over peaches. The women examined Mai more boldly than they had examined Anji. She did not flinch. Let them look! She knew her own worth.
Anji's mother clapped her hands. Slaves scurried out from whatever shadows they'd been skulking in to lay out cups and platters around a silver teapot. Out of this pot steaming hot water was drawn and poured into a ceramic blue teapot to rinse it, and the rinse water sluiced into a brass basin. Blackened leaves were sprinkled into the pot, water poured over them, and the teapot sealed with a lid. The aroma was powerful and very fine.
Two cups only, so finely wrought they seemed as thin as paper, sat on the low table.
Anji washed his hands out of the brass basin, his expression so collected Mai knew he was plotting as he wiped his hands dry. He grasped the teapot's handle, filled one cup a third of the way, the other to the full, and finished filling the first. After setting down the teapot, he picked up one cup with both hands and offered it to his mother. She took it, not hiding her smile, meant to announce her victory.
Anji picked up the second cup with both hands and offered it to Mai.
The attendants gasped, hiding faces behind veils of cloth or concealing hands.
Mai took the cup but kept on her placid market face as she met the older woman's steady gaze. So. Now they would stare in the manner of wolves waiting for one to submit to another. Mai would not look down. Neither would Anji's mother.
'Bring me a cup,' said Anji, his tone so clipped it shocked Mai into looking at him.
A cup was brought. He poured for himself. He drank first, and then of course both women must hasten to drink as the women on the courtyard whispered, like leaves stirred by the rising wind off a coming storm. Anji drained his cup and set it down. His mother
finished likewise, and Mai took a final swallow and set hers next to Anji's.
'You are being stubborn, Anjihosh,' said his mother. 'I see that has not changed.'
'I came, obediently, as soon as I heard you had arrived in the Hundred, despite pressing events elsewhere that need my immediate attention. You are of course welcome to set up your own household here, if you do not wish to return to the empire or to the Qin. With what message do you come as an emissary from cousins I have never met, do not wish to meet, and who must by the custom and law of the empire seek my death?'
She folded her hands on the glorious silk of her gown. 'I bring this message: Remain in exile, never to set foot in Sirniakan or Qin territory again, and they will not trouble you.'
'Why should I believe they are willing to allow me live unmolested when there have been several attempts already on my life?'
'If the red hounds pursued you, it was by the directive of your brother Farazadihosh. Your cousins were too busy raising an army and fighting their war to trouble themselves with you.'
'But now they do trouble themselves with me. The offer is too generous for me to believe it honestly meant. Surely you cannot believe they harbor no grievance against me, Honored Mother. Why is it you agreed to act as their emissary?'
'Because my first duty, my only obligation, is to keep you alive, Son. They know that. I know that. You know that. No other person will protect you as I have protected you and will — indeed must — protect you. Am I not correct, Anjihosh?'
He bowed his head. 'You are correct.'
'I assured myself that they meant what they said and that they were not attempting to betray you through my agency. Do you think I am a fool?'
These words were spat so sharply Mai winced, and although Anji's mother did not look at Mai, it was quite obvious by the way her mouth tightened that she had noticed Mai's reaction.
Anji held a breath longer than he ought, and expelled it as he gripped the teapot and poured a second round of tea into the cups. He did not wait for the women. He drained his cup and set it down hard on the table's polished grain.
'No more a fool than I am,' he said.
'We shall see.' She gestured, and the woman who had veiled
herself at their entrance rose like a puppet and walked with graceless stiffness — the poor thing was either terrified or haughty — to stand at the foot of the couch on which Anji's mother reclined.
'Remain in exile, never to set foot in Sirniakan or Qin territory again, and they will not trouble you,' Anji's mother repeated with a gloating satisfaction in her tone like that of a customer who feels she has gotten the better in a long tedious bargaining session. 'The bargain to be sealed by a marriage between you and their sister.'
The sister's eyes were all Mai could see; they were traced with a thick black line that emphasized their shape; her lashes were thick, her gaze exotic because it was all that existed of her. She might be beautiful; she might be plain. It was the mystery that excited.
'I have a wife,' said Anji.
'You have a concubine, Anjihosh. And very pretty she is, as I am sure you wish me to mention. The child is yours, I collect. A handsome boy.'
Her voice warmed as she deigned to examine Atani, who regarded her with the same equanimity as he regarded all people: he was sure they loved him. Hu! The woman could not be all horrid if she admired Atani.
'But a pretty girl of no rank or consequence is not the wife of a prince.'
'Mai is my wife,' said Anji.
'Furthermore,' she went on as if he had not spoken, 'you must marry in order to protect your life. My life. The life of your handsome son. Even the life of the pretty concubine is at stake.'
The sword thrust home.
His eyes flared, as though he had taken a blade to the gut, and he sat back as swiftly as if he'd been hit and flung an arm out as though to shield Mai from the blow. He did not quite touch her; he had more control than that. Yet the gesture betrayed him.
His mother smiled tightly. 'Keep your concubine if you wish. Beauty fades. Blood, however, never weakens. I will hold the baby now.'
She extended her arms; the many, gold bracelets she wore jangled along her sleeves, and they caught Atani's attention. The cursed baby went straight to her, as he went to everyone, and she seated him on her lap and let his damp bottom stain the magnificent silk and allowed him to wrap his chubby moist fingers
around the baubles as though they were humble wood toys. She knew how to hold a child, and he was an easy child to hold. Anji relaxed his arm; his shoulders eased; he smiled.
The woman, behind her veil, watched him, and then she looked at Mai, and Mai looked at her. If there was a message in the other's gaze Mai could not interpret it. After a moment, the other woman looked away, and perhaps that shuttering came from anger, or shyness, or fear, or loneliness. What manner of woman was she, raised in a women's palace apart from men and confined within walls her entire life? As remarkable as Mai's journey had been from dusty Kartu Town through the desert and the empire into the glorious Hundred, how much farther in every other way this woman must have traveled.
Would the other woman demand that her exalted rank be acknowledged, or might they become as sisters? Rich men in Kartu Town kept two wives all the time; Mai's own father had taken a pair of sisters. It wasn't impossible; women learned to live together. What choice did they have? It was better to live in harmony than to fight over scraps.
Yet what was she thinking? She need accept no scraps. She had her own household. Her own coin.
Anji's mother was watching her while pretending to dandle the baby. So Mai smiled at her, very prettily; she
