him, conversations stopping when he came in view. He made his way forward, squinting into the darkness for a glimpse of the rabbit-faced girl.
Galtic design divided the cargo hold in sections, and it was in one of these dark chambers that he heard the girl's voice. Crates and boxes loomed above him to either side, the binding ropes creaking gently with the rolling ship. Rats chattered and complained. And there, hunched over as if she were protecting something pressed to her belly, sat Ana Dasin.
'Excuse me,' Otah said. 'I don't mean to intrude, but… may I sit?'
Ana looked up at him. Her dark eyes shone in the dim light. Her nod was so faint it might almost have been the movement of the ship. Otah stepped carefully over the rough board, hitched his robes up to his shins, and sat at the girl's side. They were silent. Above them, the singers struck a complex rhythm, like jugglers tossing pins between them. Otah sighed.
'I know this isn't easy for you,' he said.
'What isn't, Most High?'
'Otah. Please, my name is Otah. You can call me that. I mean all of this. Being uprooted, married off to a man you've never met in a city you've never been to.'
'It's what's expected of me,' she said.
'Yes, I know, but… it isn't really fair.'
'No,' she said, her voice suddenly hard. 'It isn't.'
Otah clasped his hands, fingers laced together.
'He isn't a bad man, my son,' Otah said. 'He's clever and he's strong, and he cares about people. He feels deeply. He's probably a better man than I was at his age.'
'Forgive me, Most High,' Ana Dasin said. 'I don't know what you want me to say.'
'Nothing. Nothing in particular. Only know that this life that we've forced on you… it might have some redeeming qualities. The gods all know the life I've had wasn't the one I expected, either. We do what we have to do. In my ways, I'm as constrained by it as you are.'
She looked at him as if he were speaking a language she hadn't heard before. Otah shook his head.
'It's nothing, Ana-cha,' he said. 'Only know that I know how hard this time is, and it will get better. If you allow room for it, this new life might even surprise you.'
The girl was quiet for a moment, her brow furrowed. She shook her head.
'Thank you?' she said.
Otah chuckled ruefully.
'I'm not doing a particularly good job of this, am I?' he said.
'I don't know,' Ana Dasin said after a pause. Her tone carried the shielded contempt of an adolescent for her elders. 'I don't know what you're doing.'
Making his way back through the crowded belly of the ship, Otah wondered what he had thought he would say to a Galtic girl who had seen forty-five fewer summers than himself. He had expected to offer some kind of wisdom, some variety of comfort, and instead it had been like trying to hold a conversation with a cat. Who would have thought a man could be as old as he was, wield the power of empire, and still be so naive as to think his heart would be explicable to an eighteen-year-old girl?
And, of course, as he reached the plank stairway that led up, he found what he wished he had said. He should have said that he knew what courage it took to face sacrifice. He should have said that he knew her suffering was real, and that it was in a noble cause. It made them alike, the Emperor and the Empress-to-be, that they compromised in order to make the lives of uncountable strangers better.
More than that, he should have encouraged her to speak, and he should have listened.
An approving roar came from the deck above him. A reed organ hummed and sang, flute and drum following a heartbeat later. Otah hesitated and turned back. He would try again. At worst, the girl would think he was ridiculous, and she likely already did that.
As he drew near the hold, he heard her weeping again, her voice straining at words he couldn't make out. A man's voice answered, not her father's. Otah hesitated, then quietly stepped forward.
In the gloom, Ana Dasin knelt, her arms around a young man. The boy, whoever he was, wore the work clothes of a sailor, but his arms were thin and his skin was as pale as the girl's. He returned her embrace, his arms finding their way around her as if through long acquaintance; his tear-streaked face nuzzled her hair. Ana Dasin stroked the boy's head, murmuring reassurances.
Ah, Otah thought as he stepped back, unnoticed. That's how it is.
Above deck, he smiled and nodded at Issandra and pretended to turn his attention back to the music. He wondered how many other sacrifices he had demanded in order to remake the world according to his vision, how many other lovers would be parted to further his little scheme to save two empires. He would likely never know the full price of it. As if in answer, the candles guttered in the breeze, the reed organ took a mournful turn, and the sea through which they sailed grew darker.
4
The midday sun beat down on the lush green; gnats and flies filled the air. The river-not the Qiit proper but one of its tributariesthreaded its way south like a snake. Maati tied his mule under the wide leaves of a catalpa and squatted down on a likely-looking boulder. Pulling a pouch of raisins and seeds from his sleeve, he looked out over the summer. The wild trees, the rough wagon track he'd followed from the farmers' low town to the northwest, the cultivated fields to the south.
A cluster of small farms made a loose community here, raising goats and millet and, near the water, rice. The land between the cities was dotted with low communities like this one: the rural roots that fed the great, blossoming cities of the Khaiem. The accents were rougher here, the effete taint of a high court as foreign as another language. Men might be born, grow, love, marry, and die without ever traveling more than a day's walk, birthing bed and grave marker no more distant than a thrown pebble.
And one of those fields with its ripe green grasses had been plowed by the only other man in all the world who knew how to bind the andat. Maati took a mouthful of raisins and chewed slowly, thinking.
Leaving the warehouse outside Utani had proven harder than he had expected. For over a decade, he had been rootless, moving from one city or town to another, living in the shadows. One more journey-and this one heading south into the summer cities-hadn't seemed to signify anything more than a few weeks' time and, of course, the errand itself. But somewhere in the years since the Galtic invasion, Maati had grown accustomed to traveling with companions, and as he and his swaybacked pack mule had made their slow way down the tracks and low-town roads, he had felt their absence.
The world had changed in the years he had been walking through it. Having no one there to talk with forced his mind back in on itself, and the nature of the changes he saw were more disturbing than he'd thought they would be.
Many were things he had expected. The cities and towns had grown quieter, undisturbed by the laughter and games of children. The people were older, grayer. The streets felt too big, like the robes of a once-hale man who had grown thin with illness or age. And the scars of the war itself-the burned towns already half-reclaimed by foxes and saplings, the bright green swath from Utani all the way down to ruined Nantani on the southern coast where once an army had passed-had faded, but they had not disappeared.
The distrust of the foreign was driven deep into the flesh here. He had heard stories of Westlands women coming to marry among the low towns, thinking their wombs would make them of greater value here than in their own lands. Instead, they were recognized as a slower kind of invasion. Driven out with threats or stones. The men who had had the temerity to marry outside their own kind punished in ways to rival the prices paid by failed poets. Joints broken, drowned in night pots, necks snapped, and bodies thrown into creeks to drown in half a hand's depth of water.
And yet, the stories might only be stories. The more Maati traveled, the less certain he was.
Twice, great belching steam wagons had passed him on the trail. The men at the controls had been locals, but the machines themselves were Galtic, remnants of the war. Once he had seen plumes of smoke and steam
