through the wet. Large Kae, clucking her tongue in disapproval, took the poor beast off to be rubbed down and warmed while the rest of them crowded around Eiah. She wrung the water from her hair with pale fingers, answering the first question before it was asked.
'Ashti Beg's left. She said she didn't want to come back. We were in a low town just south of here off the high road. She said we could talk about it, but when I got up in the morning, she'd already gone.' She looked at Maati when she finished. 'I'm sorry.'
He took a pose that forgave and also diminished the scale of the thing, then waved her in. Vanjit followed, and then Irit and Small Kae. The meal was laid out and waiting. Barley soup with lemon and quail. Rice and sausage. Watered wine. Eiah sat near the brazier and ate like a woman starved, talking between mouthfuls.
'We never reached Pathai. There was a trade fair halfway to the city. Tents, carts, the wayhouse so full they were renting out space on the kitchen floor. There was a courier there gathering messages from all the low towns.'
'So the letters were sent?' Irit asked. Eiah nodded and scooped up another mouthful of rice.
'Ashti Beg,' Maati said. 'Tell me more about her. Did she say why she left?'
Eiah frowned. Color was coming back to her cheeks, but her lips were still pale, her hair clinging to her neck like ivy.
'It was me,' Vanjit said, the andat squirming in her lap. 'It's my doing.'
'Perhaps, but it wasn't what she said,' Eiah replied. 'She said she was tired, and that she felt we'd all gone past her. She didn't see that she would ever complete a binding of her own, or that her insights were particularly helping us. I tried to tell her otherwise, give her some perspective. If she'd stayed on until the morning, perhaps I could have.'
Maati sipped his wine, wondering how much of what Eiah said was true, how much of it was being softened because Vanjit and Clarity-ofSight were in the room. It seemed more likely to him that Ashti Beg had taken offense at Vanjit's misstep and been unable to forgive it. He recalled the woman's dry tone, her cutting humor. She had not been an easy woman or a particularly apt pupil, but he believed he would miss her.
'Was there other news? Anything of the Galts?' Vanjit asked. There was something odd about her voice, but it might only have been that Clarity-of-Sight had started its wordless, wailing complaint. Eiah appeared to notice nothing strange in the question.
'There would have been if I'd reached Pathai, I'd expect,' she said. 'But since there would have been nothing to do about it and our business was done early, I wanted to come back quickly.'
'Ah,' Vanjit said. 'Of course.'
Maati tugged at his fingers. There was something near disappointment in the girl's tone. As if she had expected someone that had not arrived.
'You're ready to work again?' Small Kae said. Irit flapped a cloth at her, and Small Kae took a pose that unasked the question. Eiah smiled.
'I've had a few thoughts,' she said. 'Let me look them over tonight after we unload the cart, and we can talk in the morning.'
'Oh, there's no more work for you tonight,' Irit said. 'You've been on the road all this time. We can hand a few things down from a cart.'
'Of course,' Vanjit said. 'You should rest, Eiah-kya. We'll be happy to help.'
Eiah put down her soup and took a pose that offered gratitude. Something in the cant of her wrists caught Maati's attention, but the pose was gone as quickly as it had come and Eiah was sitting back, drinking wine and leaning her still-wet hair toward the fire. Large Kae rejoined them, smelling of wet horse, and Eiah told the whole story again for her benefit and then left for her rooms. Maati felt the impulse to follow her, to speak in private, but Vanjit took him by the hand and led him out to the cart with the others.
The supplies were something less than Maati had expected. Two chests of salted pork, a few jars of lard and flour and sweet oil. Bags of rice. It wasn't inconsiderable-certainly there was enough to keep them all well-fed for weeks, but likely not months. There were few spices, and no wine. Large Kae made a few small remarks about the failures of low-town trade fairs, and the others chuckled their agreement. The rain slackened, and then, as Vanjit balanced the last bag of rice on one hip and Clarity-of-Sight on the other, snow began to fall. Maati went back to his rooms, heated a kettle over his fire, and debated whether to try to boil enough water for a bath. Immersion was the one way he was sure he could chase the cold from his joints, but the effort required seemed worse than enduring the chill. And there was an errand he preferred to complete.
Light glowed through the cracks around Eiah's door. Dim and flickering, it was still more than a single night candle would have made. Maati scratched at the door. For a moment, nothing happened. Perhaps Eiah had taken to her cot. Perhaps she was elsewhere in the school. A soft sound, no more than a whisper, drew him back to the door.
'Eiah-kya?' he said, his voice low. 'It's me.'
Her door opened. Eiah had changed into a simple robe of thick wool, her hair tied back with a length of twine. She looked powerfully like her mother. The room she brought Maati into had once been a storage pantry. Her cot and brazier and a low table were all the furnishings. There was no window, and the air was thick with the heat and smoke from the coals.
Papers and scrolls lay on the table beside a wax tablet half-whitened by fresh notes. Medical texts in the languages of the Westlands, Eiah's own earlier drafts of the binding of Wounded. And also, he saw, the completed binding they had all devised for Clarity-of-Sight. Eiah sat on the cot, the frail structure creaking under her. She didn't look up at him.
'Why did she leave?' Maati asked. 'Truth, now'
'I told her to,' Eiah said. 'She was frightened to come back. I told her that I understood. What happens if two poets come into conflict? If one poet has something like Floats-in-Air and the other has something like Sinking?'
'Or one poet can blind, and the other heal injury?'
'As an example,' Eiah said.
Maati sighed and lowered himself to sit beside her. The cot complained. He laced his fingers together, looking at the words and diagrams without seeing them.
'I don't entirely know. It hasn't happened in my lifetime. It hasn't happened in generations.'
'But it has happened,' Eiah said.
'There was the war. The one that ended the Second Empire. That was
… what, ten generations ago? The andat are flesh because we've translated them into flesh, but they are also concepts. Abstractions. It might simply be that the poets' wills are set against each other's. A kind of wrestling match mediated through the andat. Whoever has the greater strength of mind and the andat more suited to the struggle gains the upper hand. Or it could be that the concepts of the two andat don't coincide, and any struggle would have to be expressed physically. In the world we inhabit. Or…'
'Or?'
'Or something else could happen. The grammar and meaning in one binding could relate to some structure or nuance in another. Imagine two singers in competition. What if they chose songs that harmonized? What if the words of one song blended with the words of the other, and something new came from it? Songs are a poor metaphor. What are the odds that the words of any two given songs would speak to each other? If the bindings are related in concept, if the ideas are near, it's much more likely that sort of resonance could happen. By chance.'
'And what would that do?'
'I don't know,' Maati said. 'Nobody does. I can say that what was once a land of palm trees and rivers and palaces of sapphire is a killing desert. I can say that people who travel in the ruins of the Old Empire tend to die there. It might be from physical expressions of that old struggle. It might be from some interaction of bindings. There is no way to be sure.'
Eiah was silent. She turned the pages of her medical books until she reached diagrams Maati recognized. Eyes cut through the center, eyes sliced through the back. He had seen them all thousands of times when Vanjit was preparing herself, and they had seemed like the keepers of great secrets. He hadn't considered at the time that each image was the result of some actual, physical orb meeting with an investigative blade, or that all the eyes pictured there were sightless.
He felt Eiah's sigh as much as heard it.
