'I know,' the girl said. 'Loya-cha's very smart, and he said I could keep coming here until Mama-kya or the Khai said different. Can I see your tongue, please?'
Liat let the examination be repeated, then when it was finished said, 'You must be pleased to have found something you enjoy doing.'
'It's all right,' Eiah said. 'I'd still rather be married, but this is almost as good. And maybe Papa-kya can find someone to marry me who'll let me take part in the physician's house. I'll probably be married to one of the Khaiem, after all, and Mama-kya's running the whole city now. Everyone says so.
'It may be different later, though,' Liat said, trying to imagine a Khai allowing his wife to take a tradesman's work as a hobby.
'There may not be any Khaiem, you mean,' Eiah said. 'The Galts may kill them all.'
'Of course they won't,' Liat said, but the girl's eyes met hers and Liat faltered. There was so much of Otah's cool distance in a face that seemed too young to look on the world so dispassionately. She was like her father, prepared to pass judgment on the gods themselves if the situation called her to do it. Comfortable lies had no place with her. Liat looked down. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Perhaps there won't be.'
'Here, now,' the physician said. 'Take this with you, Liat-cha. Pour it into a bowl of water and once it's dissolved, drink the whole thing. It will he bitter, so drink it fast. You'll likely want to lie down for a hand or two afterward, to let it work. But it should do what needs doing.'
Liat took the paper packet and slipped it into her sleeve before taking a pose of gratitude.
'We should have a lunch in the gardens again,' Eiah said. 'You and Uncle Nlaati and me. Loya-cha would come too, except he's a servant.'
Liat felt herself blush, but the physician's wry smile told her it was not the first such pronouncement he'd been subjected to.
'Perhaps you should wait for another day,' he said. 'Liat-cha had a headache, remember.'
'I know that,' Eiah said impatiently. 'I meant tomorrow.'
''T'hat would be lovely,' Liat said. 'I'll talk with Nlaati about it.'
'Would you be so good as to get the stiff brushes from the back and wash them for me, Eiah-cha?' the physician said. 'Famiya's anxious to be done with us, I'm sure.'
Eiah dropped into a pose of confirmation for less than a breath before darting off to her task. Liat watched the physician, the amusement and fondness in his expression. He shook his head.
'She is a force,' he said. 'But the powder. I wanted to say, it can be habit-forming. You shouldn't have it more than once in a week. So if the pain returns, we may have to find another approach.'
'I'm sure this will be fine,' Liat said as she rose. 'And… thank you. For what you've done with Eiah, I mean.'
'She needs it,' the man said with a shrug. 'Her father's ridden off to die, her mother and her friend the poet are too busy trying to keep us all alive to take time to comfort her. She buries herself in this, and so even if she slows us down, how can I do anything but welcome her?'
Liat felt her heart turn to lead. The physician's smile slipped, and for a moment the dread showed from behind the mask. When he spoke again, it was softly and the words were as gray as stones.
'And, after all, we may need our children to know how to care for the dying before all that's coming is done.'
Maati ribbed his eyes wlth the palms of his hands, squinted, blinked. The world was blurry: the long, rich green of the grass on which they lay was like a single sheet of dyed rice paper; the towers of Machi were reduced to dark blurs that the blue of the sky shone through. It was like fog without the grayness. He blinked again, and the world moved nearer to focus.
'How long was I sleeping?' he asked.
'Long enough, sweet,' Liat said. 'I could have managed longer, I think. The gods all know we've been restless enough at night.'
The sun was near the top of its arc, the remains of breakfast in lacquered boxes with their lids shut, the day half gone. Liat was right, of course. He hadn't been sleeping near enough-late to bed, waking early, and with troubled rest between. He could feel it in his neck and hack and see it in the slowness with which his vision cleared.
'Where's F, iah got to?' he asked.
'Back to her place with the physicians, I'd guess. I offered to wake you so that she could say her good-byes, but she thought it would be better if you slept.' Liat smiled. 'She said it would be restorative. Can you imagine her using that kind of language a season ago? She already sounds like a physician's apprentice.'
Maati grinned. He'd resisted the idea of this little outing at first, but Cehmai had joined F, iah's cause. A half-day's effort by a rested man might do better for them than the whole day by someone drunk with exhaustion and despair. And even now the library seemed to call to him-the scrolls he had already read, the codices laid out and put away and pulled out to look over again, the wax tablets with their notes cut into them and smoothed clear again. And in the end, he had never been able to refuse Eiah. Her good opinion was too precious and too fickle.
Liat slid her hand around his arm and leaned against him. She smelled of grass and cherry paste on apples and musk. He turned without thinking and kissed the crown of her head as if it were something he had always done. As if there had not been a lifetime between the days when they had first been lovers and now.
'How badly is it going?' she asked.
'Not well. We have a start, but Cehmai's notes are only beginnings. And they were done by a student. I'm sure they all seemed terribly deep and insightful when he was still fresh from the school. But there's less there than I'd hoped. And…'
'And?'
Maati sighed. The towers were visible now. The blades of grass stood out one from another.
'He's not a great inventor,' Maati said. 'He never was. It's part of why he was chosen to take over an andat that had already been captured instead of binding something new. And I'm no better.'
'You were chosen for the same thing.'
'Cehmai's clever. I'm clever too, if it comes to that, but we're the second pressing. There's no one we can talk with who's seen a binding through from first principles to a completion. We need someone whose mind's sharper than ours.'
There were birds wheeling about the towers-tiny specks of black and gray and white wheeling though the air as if a single mind drove them. Maati pretended he could hear their calls.
'Perhaps you could train someone. 'There's a whole city to choose from.'
'There isn't time,' Maati said. He wanted to say that even if there were, he wouldn't. The andat were too powerful, too dangerous to be given to anyone whose heart wasn't strong or whose conscience couldn't be trusted. That was the lesson, after all, that had driven his own life and Cehmai's and the Dai-kvo himself. It was what elevated each of the poets from boy children cast out by their parents to the most honored men in the world. And yet, if there were someone bright enough to hand the power to, he suspected he would. If it brought the army back from the field and put the world back the way it had been, the risk would be worth it.
'Maybe one of the other poets will come,' Liat said, but her voice had gone thin and weary.
'You don't have hope for the Dai-kvo?'
Liat smiled.
'Hope? Yes, I have hope. Just not faith. The Galts know what's in play. If we don't recapture the andat, the cities will all fall. If we do, we'll destroy Galt and everyone in her. 'They'll be as ruthless as we will.'
'And Otah-kvo? Nayiit?'
Liat's gaze met his, and he nodded. The knot in her chest, he was certain, was much like his own.
'They'll be fine,' Liat said, her tone asking for her own belief in the words as much as his. 'It's always the footmen who die in battles, isn't it? The generals all live. And he'll keep Nayiit safe. He said he would.'
'They might not even see battle. If they arrive before the Galts and come back quickly enough, we might not lose a single man.'
'And the moon may come down and get itself trapped in a teabowl,' Liat said. 'But it would be nice, wouldn't it? For us, I mean. Not so much for the Galts.'
'You care what happens to them?'
