urge to stroke her hair the way he had when she was an infant, to be her father again.
'This is, I assume, when you point out how much better your plan was than my own,' she said.
'I didn't intend to, no,' Otah said.
Eiah turned to him, shifting her weight as if she had some angry retort that had stuck in her throat for want of opposition. When he spoke, he was quiet enough to keep the conversation as near to between only the two of them as the close quarters would allow.
'We each did our best,' Otah said. 'We did what we could.'
He put his arm around her. She bit down on her lip and fought the sobs that shook her body like tiny earthquakes. Her fingers found his own, and squeezed as hard as a patient under a physician's blade. He made no complaint.
'How many people have I killed, Papa-kya? How many people have I killed with this?'
'Hush,' Otah said. 'It doesn't matter. Nothing we've done matters. Only what we do next.'
'The price is too high,' Eiah said. 'I'm sorry. Will you tell them that I'm sorry?'
'If you'd like.'
Otah rocked her gently, and she allowed him to do it. The others all knew what they were saying, if not in specific, then at least the sketch of it. Otah saw Danat's concern, and Idaan's cool evaluating glance. He saw the armsmen turn their backs to him out of respect, and at the bow, Maati turned his back for another reason. Otah felt a flicker of his rage come back, a tongue of flame rising from old coals. Maati had done this. None of it would have happened if Maati hadn't been so bent by his own guilt or so deluded by his optimism that he ignored the dangers.
Or if Otah had found him and stopped him when that first letter had come. Or if Eiah hadn't made common cause with Maati's clandestine school. Or if Vanjit hadn't been mad, or Balasar ambitious, or the world and everything in it made from the first. Otah closed his eyes, letting the darkness create a space large enough for the woman in his arms and his own complicated heart.
Eiah murmured something he couldn't make out. He made a small interrogative sound in the back of his throat, and she coughed before repeating herself.
'There was no one at the school I could talk with,' she said. 'I got so tired of being strong all the time.'
'I know,' he said. 'Oh, love. That, I know.'
Otah slept deeply that night, lulled by exhaustion and the soft sounds of familiar voices and of the river. He slept as if he had been ill and the fever had only just broken. As if he was weak, and gaining strength. The dreams that possessed him faded with his first awareness of light and motion, less substantial than cobwebs, less lasting than mist.
The air itself seemed cleaner. The early-morning haze burned off in sunlight the color of water. They ate boiled wheat and honey, dried apples, and black tea. The boatman's second made his call, the boatman responded, and they nosed out again into the flow. Maati, sulking, kept as nearly clear of Otah as he could but kept casting glances at Eiah. Jealous, Otah assumed, of the conversation between father and daughter and unsure of her allegiance. Eiah for her part seemed to be making a point of speaking with her brother and her aunt and Ana Dasin, sitting with them, eating with them, making conversation with the jaw-clenched determination of a horse laboring uphill.
The character of the river itself changed as they went farther north. Where the south was wide and slow and gentle, the stretch just south of Udun was narrower-sometimes no more than a hundred yards acrossand faster. The boatman kept his kiln roaring, the boiler bumping and complaining. The paddle wheel spat up river water, slicking the deck nearest the stern. Otah would have been concerned if the boatman and his second hadn't appeared so pleased with themselves. Still, whenever the boiler chimed after some particularly loud knock, Otah eyed it with suspicion. He had seen boilers burst their seams.
The miles passed slowly, though still faster than the poet girl could have walked. Every now and then, a flicker of movement on the shore would catch Otah's attention. Bird or deer or trick of the light. He found himself wondering what they would do if she appeared, andat in her arms, and struck them all blind. His fears always took the form of getting Danat and Eiah and Ana to safety, though he knew that his own danger would be as great as theirs and their competence likely greater.
The spitting waterwheel slowly drove them toward the bow. Near midday, the captain of the guard brought them tin bowls of raisins and bread and cheese. They all sat in a clump, and even Maati haunted the edges of the conversation. Ana and Eiah sat hand in hand on a long, low bench; Danat, cross-legged on the deck. Otah and Idaan kept to leather and canvas stools that creaked when sat upon and resisted any attempt to rise. The cheese was rich and fragrant, the bread only mildly stale, and the topic a council of war.
'If we do find her,' Idaan said, answering Otah's voiced concerns, 'I'm not sure what we do with her. Can she be made to see reason?'
'A month ago, I'd have said it was possible,' Eiah said. 'Not simple, but possible. I'm half-sorry we didn't kill her in her sleep when we were still at the school.'
'Only half?' Danat asked.
'There's Galt,' Eiah said. 'As it stands now, she's the only one who can put it back. It's harder for her to do that dead.'
Danat looked chagrined, and, as if sensing it, Idaan put a hand on his shoulder. Eiah squeezed Ana's hand, then gently bent it at the wrist, as if testing something.
'She's alone. She's hurt and she's sad. I'm not saying that's all certain to work in our favor,' Maati said, 'but it's something.' Otah thought he sounded petulant, but none of the others appeared to hear it that way.
Eiah's voice cut the conversation like a blade. Even before he took the sense of the words, Otah was halfway to his feet.
'How long?' Eiah asked.
Her hands were around Ana's wrists, her fingers curled as if measuring the girl's pulses. Eiah's face was pale.
'Ah,' Idaan said. 'Well. Sitting those two together was a mistake.'
'Tell me,' Eiah said. 'How far along?'
'A third, perhaps,' Ana said softly.
'We hadn't mentioned it to the men,' Idaan said. 'I understand the first ones don't always take.'
It took him less than a breath to understand.
'Ah,' Otah said, a hundred tiny signs falling into place. Ana's weeping at the school, her avoidance of Danat, the way she'd kept to herself in the mornings and eaten with Idaan.
'What?' Danat asked, baffled.
'I'm pregnant,' Ana said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact, her cheeks as bright as apples with her blush. The whole boat seemed to breathe in at once.
'And how long has this been going on?' Otah demanded, shifting his gaze to the dumbstruck Danat at his feet. His son blinked up, uncomprehending. It was as if Otah had asked in an unknown language.
'You're joking,' Idaan said. 'You have a boy who's just ended his twentieth summer and a girl not two years younger, an escort of professional armsmen as chaperone, and a steamcart with private quarters built on its back. What did you expect would happen?'
'But,' Otah began, then found he wasn't sure what he intended to say. She's blinded, or They aren't wed, or Farrer Dasin will say it's my fault for not keeping better watch over them. Each impulse seemed more ridiculous than the last.
'I'm going to be a father,' Danat said as if testing out the words. He turned to look up at Otah and started to grin. 'You're going to be a grandfather.'
Eiah was weeping openly, her arms around Ana. A clamor of voices and a whoop from the stern said that whatever hope there might have been that the thing would be kept quiet once they returned to court was gone. Otah sat back, his stool creaking under his weight. Idaan took a pose of query that carried nuances of both pity at his idiocy and congratulations. Otah started laughing and found it hard to stop.
It had been so long since he'd felt joy, he'd almost forgotten what it was like.
The rest of the day was spent in half-drunken conversation. Otah was made to retell the details of Danat's birth, and of Eiah's. Danat grew slowly more pleased with himself and the world as the initial shock wore thin. Ana Dasin smiled, her grayed eyes taking in nothing and giving out a pleasure and satisfaction that seemed more
