girl's cheeks, her hair was a wild tangle, and her hands clasped until the fingertips were red and the knuckles white. Idaan stood beside her, arms crossed and eyes as bleak as murder. Before Otah could announce himself, Idaan saw him. His sister leaned close to the Galtic girl, murmured something, listened to the soft reply, and then marched to the doorway and Otah's side.
'Is there… is something the matter?' Otah asked.
'Of course there is. How long have you been traveling with that girl?'
'Since Saraykeht,' Otah said.
'Have you noticed yet that she isn't a man?' Idaan's voice was sharp as knives. 'Tell the armsmen to stand down. Then bring me a bowl of snow.'
'What's the matter?' Otah demanded. And then, 'Is it her time of the month? Does she need medicine?'
Idaan looked at him as if he had asked what season came after spring: pitying, incredulous, disgusted.
'Get me some snow. Or, better, some ice. Tell your men that we'll be ready in a hand and a half, and for all the gods there ever were, keep your son away from her until we can put her back together. The last thing she needs is to feel humiliated.'
Otah took a pose that promised compliance, but then hesitated. Idaan's dark eyes flashed with something that wasn't anger. When she spoke, her voice was lower but no softer.
'How have you spent a lifetime in the company of women and learned nothing?' she asked, and, shaking her head, turned back to Ana.
True to her word, a hand and a half later, Ana and Idaan emerged from the school as if nothing strange had happened. Ana's outer robe was changed to a dark wool, and she leaned on Idaan's arm as she stepped up to the bed of the steamcart. Danat moved forward, but Idaan's scowl drove him back. The two women made their slow way to the shed, where Idaan closed the door behind them.
The men steering the carts called out to one another, voices carrying like crows' calls in the empty landscape. The carts stuttered and lurched, and turned to the east, tracking back along the path to the high road between ruined Nantani and Pathai, from which they'd come. Otah rode down the path he'd walked as a boy, searching his mind for some feeling of kinship with his past, but the world as it was demanded too much of him. He searched for some memory deep within him of the first time he'd walked away from the school, of leaving everything he'd known, rejected, behind him.
His mind was knotted with questions of how to find the poet, how to persuade her to do as he asked, what Idaan had meant, what was wrong with Ana, whether the steamcarts had enough fuel, and a growing ache in his spine that came from too many days riding horses he didn't know. There was no effort to spare for the past. Whatever he didn't remember now of his original flight from the school he likely never would. The past would be lost, as it always was. Always. He didn't bother trying to hold it.
They made better time than he had expected, starting as late as they had. By the time they stopped for the night, the high road was behind them. The fastest route to Utani would be overland to the Qiit, then by boat up the river. Any hope they had of overtaking Maati and Eiah would come on the roads, where the steamcarts gave Otah an advantage. They would have to sleep in the open more than if they had kept to wider roads, and the rough terrain increased the possibility of the carts breaking or getting stuck. Even of the boiler bursting and killing anyone too near it. But Idaan's voice spoke in Otah's mind of the next day, and the next, and the next, so he pushed them and himself.
Four of the armsmen rode ahead in the lowering gloom of night to scout out the next day's path. The others prepared a simple meal of pork and rice, Ashti Beg sitting with them and trading jokes. Danat's slow cir cling of their camp took the name of defense but seemed more to be avoiding the still-closed shed where Idaan and Ana rested. Otah sat alone near the steamcart's kiln, reflecting that it was very much like his son to shift between noble dedication in the morning and childish pouting as night came on. He had been much the same as a young man, or imagined that he had.
The door opened, Ana's laughter spilling out into the night. Idaan led the girl forward, letting Ana keep a careful grip on her. Her dark eyes and Ana's unfocused gray ones were both light and merry. Ana's hair had been combed and braided in the style of children in the winter cities. In the dim moonlight, it made Ana seem hardly more than a girl.
Idaan steered the girl to the cart's front and helped her sit beside Otah. He coughed once to make sure the girl knew he was there, but she seemed unsurprised at the sound. Idaan placed a hand on the back of the girl's neck.
'I'll go get some food,' Idaan said. 'My brother here should be able to keep you out of trouble for that long.'
Ana took a pose that offered thanks. She did a creditable job of it. Idaan snorted, patted the girl's neck, and lowered herself to the ground. Otah heard her footsteps crushing the snow as she walked away.
'Ana-cha,' Otah said. His voice was more tentative than he liked. 'I hope you're well?'
'Fine,' she said. 'Thank you. I'm sorry I delayed things today. It won't happen again.'
'Hardly worth thinking about,' Otah said, relieved that her infirmity had passed. Grief, he suspected, over what the poet had done to her, to her family, her nation.
'I misjudged you,' Ana said. 'I know it seems like everything we do is another round of apology, but I am sorry for it.'
'It might be simpler to agree to forgive each other in advance,' Otah said, and Ana laughed. It was a warmer sound than he'd expected. A tension he hadn't known he felt lessened and he smiled into the glowing coals of the kiln. 'It is fair to ask in what manner you judged me poorly?'
'I thought you were cold. Hard. You have to understand, I grew up with monster stories about the Khaiem and the andat.'
'I do,' Otah said, sighing. 'I look back, and I suspect that more than half of the problems between Galt and the Khaiem came from ignorance. Ignorance and power are a poor combination.'
'Tell me…' Ana said, and then stopped. Her brow furrowed, and in the dim light he thought she was blushing. Otah put his hand over hers. She shook her head, and then turned her milky eyes to him. 'You've forgiven me in advance if this is too much to ask. Tell me about Danat's mother.'
'Kiyan?' Otah said. 'Well. What do you want to know about her?'
'Anything. Just tell me,' the girl said.
Otah collected himself, and then began to pluck stories. The night they'd met. The night he'd told her that he was more than a simple courier and she'd thrown him out of her wayhouse. The ways she had helped to smooth things as he learned how to become first Khai Machi and then Emperor. He didn't tell the hard stories. The conflict over Sinja's feelings for her, and Otah's poor response to them. The long fears they suffered together when Danat was young and weak in the lungs. Her death. Still, he didn't think he kept all the sorrow from his voice.
Idaan returned halfway through one story, four bowls in her hands like a teahouse servant juggling food for a full table. Otah took one without pausing, and Idaan squatted on the boards at Ana's feet and pressed another into the girl's hands. Otah went on with other little stories- Kiyan's balancing the combined populations of Machi and Cetani with Balasar Gice's crippled army in the wake of the war. Her refusal to allow servants to bathe her. The story of when the representative of Eddensea had mistaken something she'd said and thought she'd invited him to bed with her.
Danat arrived out of the darkness, drawn by their voices. Idaan gave him the last bowl, and he sat at Otah's side, then shifted, then shifted again until his back rested against Ana's shin. He added stories of his own. His mother's sharp tongue and wayhouse keeper's vocabulary, the songs she'd sung, all the scraps and moments that built up a boy's memory of his mother. It was beautiful to listen to. It wasn't something Otah himself had ever had.
In the end, Ana let Danat lead her back to her shelter, leaving Otah and his sister alone by the black and cooling kiln. The armsmen had prepared sleeping tents for them, but Idaan seemed content to sit up drinking watered wine in the cold night air, and Otah found himself pleased enough to join her.
'I don't suppose you'd care to explain to your poor idiot brother what happened today?' he said at length.
'You haven't put it together?' Idaan said. 'This Vanjit creature has destroyed the only home Ana-cha had to go to. She's had to look long and hard at what her life could be in the place she's found herself, crippled in a foreign land, and it shook her.'
