Eiah Machi, physician and daughter of the Emperor, pressed her fingers gently on the woman's belly. The swollen flesh was tight, veins marbling the skin blue within brown. The woman appeared for all the world to be in the seventh month of a pregnancy. She was not.
"It's because my mother's father was a Westlander," the woman on the table said. "I'm a quarter Westlander, so when it came, it didn't affect me like it did other girls. Even at the time, I wasn't as sick as everyone else. You can't tell because I have my father's eyes, but my mother's were paler and almost round."
Eiah nodded, running practiced fingertips across the flesh, feeling where the skin was hot and where it was cool. She took the woman's hand, bending it gently at the wrist to see how tight her tendons were. She reached inside the woman's sex, probing where only lovers had gone before. The man who stood at his wife's side looked uncomfortable, but Eiah ignored him. He was likely the least important person in the room.
"Eiah-cha," Parit, the regular physician, said, "if there is anything I can do..."
Eiah took a pose that both thanked and refused. Parit bowed slightly.
"I was very young, too," the woman said. "When it happened. Just six summers old."
"I was fourteen," Eiah said. "How many months has it been since you bled?"
"Six," the woman said as if it were a badge of honor. Eiah forced herself to smile.
"Is the baby well?" the man asked. Eiah considered how his hand wrapped his wife's. How his gaze bored into her own. Desperation was as thick a scent in the room as the vinegar and herb smoke.
"It's hard to say," Eiah said. "I haven't had the luck to see very many pregnancies. Few of us have these days. But even if things are well so far, birthing is a tricky business. Many things can go wrong."
"He'll be fine," the woman on the table asserted; the hand not being squeezed bloodless by her man caressed the slight pooch of her belly. "It's a boy," she went on. "We're going to name him Loniit."
Eiah placed a hand on the woman's arm. The woman's eyes burned with something like joy, something like fever. The smile faltered for less than a heartbeat, less than the time it took to blink. So at least some part of the woman knew the truth.
"Thank you for letting me make the examination," Eiah said. "You're very kind. And I wish the best of luck to you both."
"All three," the woman corrected.
"All three," Eiah said.
She walked from the room while Parit arranged his patient. The antechamber glowed by the light of a small lantern. Worked stone and carved wood made the room seem more spacious than it was. Two bowls, one of old wine and another of fresh water, stood waiting. Eiah washed her hands in the wine first. The chill against her fingers helped wash away the warmth of the woman's flesh. The sooner she could forget that, the better.
Voices came from the examining room like echoes. Eiah didn't listen. When she put her hands into the water, the wine turned it pink. She dried herself with a cloth laid by for the purpose, moving slowly to be sure both the husband and wife were gone before she returned.
Parit was washing down the slate table with vinegar and a stiff brush. It was something Eiah had done often when she'd first apprenticed to the physicians, all those years ago. There were fewer apprentices now, and Parit didn't complain.
"Well?" he asked.
"There's no child in her," Eiah said.
"Of course not," he said. "But the signs she does show. The pooled blood, the swelling. The loss of her monthly flow. And yet there's no slackening in her joints, no shielding in her sex. It's a strange mix."
"I've seen it before," Eiah said.
Parit stopped. His hands took a pose of query. Eiah sighed and leaned against one of the high stools.
"Desire," Eiah said. "That's all. Want something that you can't have badly enough, and the longing becomes a disease."
Her fellow physician and onetime lover paused for a moment, considering Eiah's words, then looked down and continued his cleaning.
"I suppose we should have said something," he said.
"There's nothing to say," Eiah said. "They're happy now, and they'll be sad later. What good would it do us to hurry that?"
Parit gave the half-smile she'd known on him years before, but didn't look up to meet her gaze.
"There is something to be said in favor of truth," he said.
"And there's something to be said for letting her keep her husband for another few weeks," Eiah said.
"You don't know that he'll turn her out," he said.
Eiah took a pose that accepted correction. They both knew it was a gentle sarcasm. Parit chuckled and poured a last rinse over the slate table: the rush of the water like a fountain trailed off to small, sharp drips that reminded Eiah of wet leaves at the end of a storm. Parit pulled out a stool and sat, his hands clasped in his lap. Eiah felt a sudden awkwardness that hadn't been there before. She was always better when she could inhabit her role. If Parit had been bleeding from the neck, she would have been sure of herself. That he was only looking at her made her aware of the sharpness of her face, the gray in her hair that she'd had since her eighteenth summer, and the emptiness of the house. She took a formal pose that offered gratitude. Perhaps a degree more formal than was needed.
"Thank you for sending for me," Eiah said. "It's late, and I should be getting back."
"To the palaces," he said. There was warmth and humor in his voice. There always had been. "You could also stay here."
Eiah knew she should have been tempted at least. The glow of old love and half-recalled sex should have wafted in her nostrils like mulled wine. He was still lovely. She was still alone.
"I don't think I could, Parit-kya," she said, switching from the formal to the intimate to pull the sting from it.
"Why not?" he asked, making it sound as if he was playing.
"There are a hundred reasons," Eiah said, keeping her tone as light as his. "Don't make me list them."
He chuckled and took a pose that surrendered the game. Eiah felt herself relax a degree, and smiled. She found her bag by the door and slung its strap over her shoulder.
"You still hide behind that," Parit said.
Eiah looked down at the battered leather satchel, and then up at him, the question in her eyes.
"There's too much to fit in my sleeves," she said. "I'd clank like a toolshed every time I waved."
"That's not why you carry it," he said. "It's so that people see a physician and not your father's daughter. You've always been like that."
It was his little punishment for her return to her own rooms. There had been a time when she'd have resented the criticism. That time had passed.
"Good night, Parit-kya," she said. "It was good to see you again."
He took a pose of farewell, and then walked with her to the door. In the courtyard of his house, the autumn moon was full and bright and heavy. The air smelled of wood smoke and the ocean. Warmth so late in the season still surprised her. In the north, where she'd spent her girlhood, the chill would have been deadly by now. Here, she hardly needed a heavy robe.
Parit stopped in the shadows beneath a wide shade tree, its golden leaves lined with silver by the moonlight. Eiah had her hand on the gate before he spoke.
"Was that what you were looking for?" he asked.
She looked back, paused, and took a pose that asked for clarification. There were too many things he might have meant.
"When you wrote, you said to watch for unusual cases," Parit said. "Was she what you had in mind?"
"No," Eiah said. "That wasn't it." She passed from the garden to the street.
A decade and a half had passed since the power of the andat had left the world. For generations before that, the cities of the Khaiem had been protected by the poets-men who had dedicated their lives to binding one of the spirits, the thoughts made flesh. Stone-Made-Soft, whom Eiah had known as a child with its wide shoulders and amiable smile, was one of them. It had made the mines around the northern city of Machi the greatest in the world. Water-Moving-Down, who generations ago had commanded the rains to come or else to cease, the rivers to flow or else run dry. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues, called Seedless, who had plucked the seeds from the cotton harvests of Saraykeht and discreetly ended pregnancies.
Each of the cities had had one, and each city had shaped its trade and commerce to exploit the power of its particular andat to the advantage of its citizens. War had never come to the cities of the Khaiem. No one dared to face an enemy who might make the mountains flow like rivers, who might flood your cities or cause your crops to fail or your women to miscarry. For almost ten generations, the cities of the Khaiem had stood above the world like adults over children.
And then the Galtic general Balasar Gice had made his terrible wager and won. The andat left the world, and left it in ruins. For a blood-soaked spring, summer, and autumn, the armies of Galt had washed over the cities like a wave over sandcastles. Nantani, Udun, Yalakeht, Chaburi-Tan. The great cities fell to the foreign swords. The Khaiem died. The Dai-kvo and his poets were put to the sword and their libraries burned. Eiah still remembered being fourteen summers old and waiting for death to come. She had been only the daughter of the Khai Machi then, but that had been enough. The Galts, who had taken every other city, were advancing on them. And their only hope had been Uncle Maati, the disgraced poet, and his bid to bind one last andat.
She had been present in the warehouse when he'd attempted the binding. She'd seen it go wrong. She had felt it in her body. She and every other woman in the cities of the Khaiem. And every man of Galt. Corruptingthe-Generative, the last andat had been named.
Sterile.
Since that day, no woman of the cities of the Khaiem had borne a child. No man of Galt had fathered one. It was a dark joke. Enemy nations locked in war afflicted with complementary curses. Yourhistory will be written by half-breeds, Sterile had said, or it won't be written. Eiah knew the words because she had been in the room when the world had been broken. Her own father had taken the name Emperor when he sued for peace, and Emperor he had become. Emperor of a fallen world.
Perhaps Parit was right. Perhaps she had taken to her vocation as single-mindedly as she had because she wanted to be something else. Something besides her father's daughter. As the princess of the new empire, she would have been a marriage to some foreign ward or king or lord incapable of bearing children. The degraded currency of her body would have been her definition.
Physician and healer were better roles to play. Walking through the darkened streets of Saraykeht, her robes and her satchel afforded her a measure of respect and protection. It was poor form to assault a healer, in part because of the very real chance of requiring her services one day. The toughs and beggars who haunted the alleys near the seafront might meet her eyes as she walked past, might even hail her with an obscenity or veiled threat, but they had never followed her. And so she didn't see that she had any need of the palace guard. If her work protected her, there was no reason to call upon her blood.
She stopped at the bronze statue of Shian Sho. The last emperor gazed out wistfully over the sea, or perhaps back through the ages to a time when his name had been important. Eiah pulled her robe tight around herself and squatted at his metalwork feet, waiting for the firekeeper and his steamcart. In daytime, she would have walked the streets north and uphill to the palaces, but the seafront wasn't the worst part of Saraykeht. It was safer to wait.
To the west, the soft quarter was lit in its nightly festival. To the east, the bathhouses, the great stone warehouses, rarely more than half-filled now. Beyond that, the cohort houses of the laborers were darker, but far from unpeopled. Eiah heard a man's laugh from one direction, a woman's voice lifted in drunken song from another. The ships that filled the seafront docks stood silent, their masts like winter trees, and the ocean beyond them gray with a low mist.
There was a beauty in it, and a familiarity. Eiah had made her studies in places like this, whatever city she'd been in. She'd sewn closed the flesh of whores and thieves as often as soothed the coughs and pains of the utkhaiem in their perfumed palaces. It was a decision she'd made early in her career, not to be a court physician, not to care only for the powerful. Her father had approved, and even, she thought, been proud of the decision. For all their differences-and there were many-it was one reason she loved him.
The steamcart appeared first as a sound: the rough clatter of iron-bound wheels against the bricks of the street, the chuff of the boiler, the low rumble of the kiln. And then, as Eiah stood and shook the dirt and grime from her robe, it turned into the wide street they called the Nantan and came down toward the statue. In the light of the kiln, she saw seven or perhaps eight figures clinging to the cart's side. The firekeeper himself sat on the top, guiding the cart with a series of levers and pedals that made the most ornate loom seem simple. Eiah stepped forward as the cart trundled past, took one of the leather grips, and hoisted herself up to the cart's side runner along with the others.
"Two coppers," the firekeeper said without looking at her.
Eiah dug in her sleeve with her free hand, came out with two lengths of copper, and tossed them into the lacquer box at the firekeeper's feet. The man nodded rather than take any more-complex pose. His hands and eyes were occupied. The breeze shifted, a waft of smoke and thick steam washing her in its scent, and the cart lurched, shuddered, and turned again to the north along its constant route. Eiah sighed and made herself comfortable. It would take her almost the time for the moon to move the width of her hand before she stepped down at the pathway that led to the palaces. In the meantime, she watched the night city pass by her.
The streets nearest the seafront alternated between the high roofs of warehouses and the low of the tradesmen's shops. In the right season, the clack of looms would have filled the air, even this late at night. The streets converged on wide squares where the litter of the week's market still fouled the street: cheeses dropped to the cobbles and trod into mush, soiled cabbages and yams, even a skinned rabbit too corrupt to sell and not worth hauling away. One of the men on the far side of the steamcart stepped down, shifting the balance slightly. Eiah watched as his red-brown cloak passed into darkness.
There had been a time, she knew, when the streets had been safe to walk down, even alone. There had been a time beggars with their boxes would have been on the corners, filling the night with plaintive, amateur song. She had never seen it, never heard it. It was a story she knew, Old Saraykeht from long ago. She knew it like she knew Bakta, where she had never been, and the courts of the Second Empire, gone from the world for hundreds of years. It was a story. Once upon a time there was a city by the sea, and it lived in prosperity and innocence. But it didn't anymore.
The steamcart passed into the compounds of the merchant houses, three, four, five stories tall. They were almost palaces in themselves. There were more lights here, more voices. Lanterns hung from ropes at the crossroads, spilling buttery light on the bricks. Three more of Eiah's fellows stepped down from the cart. Two stepped on, dropping their copper lengths into the firekeeper's box. They didn't speak, didn't acknowledge one another. She shifted her hands on the leather grip. The palaces of the utkhaiem would be coming soon. And her apartments, and bed, and sleep. The kiln roared when the firekeeper opened it and poured in another spade's worth of coal.
The servants met her at the gateway that separated the palaces from the city, the smooth brick streets from the crushed marble pathways. The air smelled different here, coal smoke and the rich, fetid stink of humanity displaced by incense and perfume. Eiah felt relieved to be back, and then guilty for her relief. She answered their poses of greeting and obeisance with one of acknowledgment. She was no longer her work. Among these high towers and palaces, she was and would always be her father's daughter.
"Eiah-cha," the most senior of the servants said, his hands in a pose of ritual offering, "may we escort you to your rooms?"
"No," she said. "Food first. Then rest."
Eiah suffered them to take her satchel, but refused the sable cloak they offered against the night air. It really wasn't that cold.
"Is there word from my father?" she asked as they walked along the wide, empty paths.
"No, Eiah-cha," the servant replied. "Nor from your brother. There have been no couriers today."
Eiah kept her pleasure at the news from her expression.
The palaces of Saraykeht had suffered less under their brief Galtic occupation than many others had. Nantani had been nearly ruined. Udun had been razed and never rebuilt. In Saraykeht, it was clear where statues had once been and were gone, where jewels had been set into the goldwork around the doorways and been wrenched out, but all the buildings except the Khai's palace and the library still stood. The utkhaiem of the city hadn't restored the damage or covered it over. Like a woman assaulted but with unbroken spirit, Saraykeht wore her scars without shame. Of all the cities of the Khaiem, she was the least devastated, the strongest, and the most arrogant in her will to survive. Eiah thought she might love the city just a little, even as it made her sad.
A singing slave occupied the garden outside Eiah's apartments. Eiah left the shutters open so that the songs could come through more clearly. A fire burned in the grate and candles glowed in glass towers. A Galtic clock marked the hours of the night in soft metallic counterpoint to the singer, and as she pulled off her robes and prepared for sleep, Eiah was amazed to see how early it was. The night had hardly exhausted its first third. It had seemed longer. She put out the candles, pulled herself into her bed, and drew the netting closed.
The night passed, and the day that followed it, and the day that followed that. Eiah's life in Saraykeht had long since taken on a rhythm. The mornings she spent at the palaces working with the court physicians, the afternoons down in the city or in the low towns that spread out from Saraykeht. To those who didn't know her, she gave herself out to be a visitor from Cetani in the north, driven to the summer cities by hardship. It wasn't an implausible tale. There were many for whom it was true. And while it couldn't be totally hidden, she didn't want to be widely known as her father's daughter. Not here. Not yet.
On a morning near the end of her second month in the city-two weeks after Candles Night-the object of her hunt finally appeared. She was in her rooms, working on a guide to the treatment of fevers in older patients. The fire was snapping and murmuring in the grate and a thin, cold rain tapped at the shutters like a hundred polite mice asking permission to enter. The scratch at the door startled her. She arranged her robe and opened the door just as the slave outside it was raising her hand to scratch again.
"Eiah-cha," the girl said, falling into a pose that was equal parts apology and greeting. "Forgive me, but there's a man ... he says he has to speak with you. He has a message."
"From whom?" Eiah demanded.
"He wouldn't say, Most High," the slave said. "He said he could speak only with you."
Eiah considered the girl. She was little more than sixteen summers. One of the youngest in the cities of the Khaiem. One of the last.
"Bring him," Eiah said. The girl made a brief pose that acknowledged the command and fled back out into the damp night. Eiah shuddered and went to add more coal to the fire. She didn't close the door.
The runner was a young man, broad across the shoulder. Twenty summers, perhaps. His hair was soaked and sticking to his forehead. His robe hung heavily from his shoulders, sodden with the rain.
"Eiah-cha," he said. "Parit-cha sent me. He's at his workroom. He said he has something and that you should come. Quickly."
She caught her breath, the first movements of excitement lighting her nerves. The other times one or another of the physicians and healers and herb women of the city had sent word, it had been with no sense of urgency. A man ill one day was very likely to be ill the next as well. This, then, was something different.
"What is it?" she asked.
The runner took an apologetic pose. Eiah waved it away and called for a servant. She needed a thick robe. And a litter; she wasn't waiting for the firekeeper. And now, she needed them now. The Emperor's daughter got what she wanted, and she got it quickly. She and the boy were on the streets in less than half a hand, the litter jouncing uncomfortably as they were carried through the drizzle. The runner tried not to seem awed at the palace servants' fear of Eiah. Eiah tried not to bite her fingernails from anxiety. The streets slid by outside their shelter as Eiah willed the litter bearers to go faster. When they reached Parit's house, she strode through the courtyard gardens like a general going to war.
Without speaking, Parit ushered her to the back. It was the same room in which she'd seen the last woman. Parit sent the runner away. There were no servants. There was no one besides the two physicians and a body on the wide slate table, covered by a thick canvas cloth soaked through with blood.
"They brought her to me this morning," Parit said. "I called for you immediately."
"Let me see," Eiah said.
Parit pulled back the cloth.
The woman was perhaps five summers older than Eiah herself, darkhaired and thickly built. She was naked, and Eiah saw the wounds that covered her body: belly, breasts, arms, legs. A hundred stab wounds. The woman's skin was unnaturally pale. She'd bled to death. Eiah felt no revulsion, no outrage. Her mind fell into the patterns she had cultivated all her life. This was only death, only violence. This was where she was most at home.
"Someone wasn't happy with her," Eiah said. "Was she a soft-quarter whore?"
Parit startled, his hands almost taking a pose of query. Eiah shrugged.
"That many knife wounds," she said, "aren't meant only to kill. Three or four would suffice. And the spacing of them isn't what I've seen when the killer had simply lost control. Someone was sending a message."
"She wasn't stabbed," Parit said. He took a cloth from his sleeve and tossed it to her. Eiah turned back to the corpse, wiping the blood away from a wound in the dead woman's side. The smear of gore thinned. The nature of the wound became clear.
It was a mouth. Tiny rosebud lips, slack as sleep. Eiah told her hand to move, but for a long moment her flesh refused her. Then, her breath shallow, she cleaned another. And then another.
The woman was covered with babies' mouths. Eiah's fingertips traced the tiny lips that had spilled the woman's lifeblood. It was a death as grotesque as any Eiah had heard in the tales of poets who had tried to bind the andat and fallen short.
Tears filled her eyes. Something like love or pity or gratitude filled her heart to bursting. She looked at the woman's face for the first time. The woman hadn't been pretty. A thick jaw, a heavy brow, acne pocks. Eiah held back from kissing her cheek. Parit was confused enough as it stood. Instead, Eiah wiped her eyes on her sleeve and took the dead woman's hand.
"What happened?" she asked.
"The watch saw a cart going west out of the soft quarter," Parit said. "The captain said there were three people, and they were acting nervous. When he hailed them, they tried to run."
"Did he catch them?"
Parit was staring at Eiah's hand clasping the dead woman's fingers.
"Parit," she said. "Did he catch them?"
"What? No. No, all three slipped away. But they had to abandon the cart. She was in it," Parit said, nodding at the corpse. "I'd asked anything unusual to be brought to me. I offered a length of silver."
"They earned it," Eiah said. "Thank you, Parit-kya. I can't tell you how much this means."
"What should we do?" Parit asked, sitting on his stool like a fresh apprentice before his master. He'd always done that when he felt himself at sea. Eiah found there was warmth in her heart for him even now
"Burn her," Eiah said. "Burn her with honors and treat her ashes with respect."
"Shouldn't we ... shouldn't we tell someone? The utkhaiem? The Emperor?"
"You already have," Eiah said. "You've told me."
There was a moment's pause. Parit took a pose that asked clarification. It wasn't quite the appropriate one, but he was flustered.
"This is it, then," he said. "This is what you were looking for."
"Yes," Eiah said.
"You know what happened to her."
"Yes."
"Would you..." Parit coughed, looked down. His brow was knotted. Eiah was half-tempted to go to him, to smooth his forehead with her palm. "Could you explain this to me?"
"No," she said.
AFTER THAT, IT WAS SIMPLE. THEY WOULDN'T REMAIN IN SARAYKEHT, NOT WHEN they'd so nearly been discovered. The Emperor's daughter asked favors of the port master, of the customs men on the roads, of the armsmen paid by the city to patrol and keep the violence in the low towns to an acceptable level. Her quarry weren't smugglers or thieves. They weren't expert in covering their tracks. In two days, she knew where they were. Eiah quietly packed what things she needed from her apartments in the palace, took a horse from the stables, and rode out of the city as if she were only going to visit an herb woman in one of the low towns.
As if she were coming back.
She found them at a wayhouse on the road to Shosheyn-Tan. The winter sun had set, but the gates to the wayhouse courtyard were still open. The carriage Eiah had heard described was at the side of the house, its horses unhitched. The two women, she knew, were presenting themselves as travelers. The man-old, fat, unpleasant to speak withwas posing as their slave. Eiah let the servant take her horse to be cared for, but instead of going up the steps to the main house, she followed him back to the stables. A small shack stood away at an angle. Quarters for servants and slaves. Eiah felt her lips press thin at the thought. Rough straw ticking, thin blankets, whatever was left to eat after the paying guests were done.
"How many servants are here now?" Eiah asked of the young maneighteen summers, so four years old when it had happened-brushing down her horse. He looked at her as if she'd asked what color ducks laid the eggs they served at table. She smiled.
"Three," the servant said.
"Tell me about them," she said.
He shrugged.
"There's an old woman came in two days ago. Her master's laid up sick. Then a boy from the Westlands works for a merchant staying on the ground floor. And an old bastard just came in with two women from Chaburi-Tan."
"Chaburi-Tan?"
"What they said," the servant replied.
Eiah took two lengths of silver from her sleeve and held them out in her palm. The servant promptly forgot about her horse.
"When you're done," she said, "take the woman and the Westlander to the back of the house. Buy them some wine. Don't mention me. Leave the old man."
The servant took a pose of acceptance so total it was just short of an open pledge. Eiah smiled, dropped the silver in his palm, and pulled up a shoeing stool to sit on while she waited. The night was cool, but still not near as cold as her home in the north. An owl hooted deep and low. Eiah pulled her arms up into her sleeves to keep her fingers warm. The scent of roasting pork wafted from the wayhouse, and the sounds of a flute and a voice lifted together.
The servant finished his work and with a deferential nod to Eiah, made his way to the servants' house. It was less than half a hand before he emerged with a thin woman and a sandy-haired Westlands boy trailing him. Eiah pushed her hands back through her sleeves and made her way to the small, rough shack.
He was sitting beside the fire, frowning into the flames and eating a mush of rice and raisins from a small wooden bowl. The years hadn't been kind to him. He was thicker than he'd been when she knew him, an unhealthy fatness that had little to do with indulgence. His color was poor; what remained of his hair was white stained yellow by neglect. He looked angry. He looked lonesome.
"Uncle Maati," she said.
He startled. His eyes flashed. Eiah couldn't tell if it was anger or fear. But whatever it was had a trace of pleasure to it.
"Don't know who you mean," he said. "Name's Daavit."
Eiah chuckled and stepped into the small room. It smelled of bodies and smoke and the raisins in Maati's food. Eiah found a small chair and pulled it to the fire beside the old poet, her chosen uncle, the man who had destroyed the world. They sat silently for a while.
"It was the way they died," Eiah said. "All the stories you told me when I was young about the prices that the andat exacted when a poet's binding failed. The one whose blood turned dry. The one whose belly swelled up like he was pregnant, and when they cut him open it was all ice and seaweed. All of them. I started to hear stories. What was that, four years ago?"
At first she thought he wouldn't answer. He cupped two thick fingers into the rice and ate what they lifted out. He swallowed. He sucked his teeth.
"Six," he said.
"Six years," she said. "Women started appearing here and there, dead in strange ways."
He didn't answer. Eiah waited for the space of five slow breaths together before she went on.
"You told me stories about the andat when I was young," she said. "I remember most of it, I think. I know that a binding only works once. In order to bind the same andat again, the poet has to invent a whole new way to describe the thought. You used to tell me about how the poets of the Old Empire would bind three or four andat in a lifetime. I thought at the time you envied them, but I saw later that you were only sick at the waste of it."
Maati sighed and looked down.
"And I remember when you tried to explain to me why only men could be poets," she said. "As I recall, the arguments weren't all that convincing to me."
"You were a stubborn girl," Maati said.
"You've changed your mind," Eiah said. "You've lost all your books. All the grammars and histories and records of the andat that have come before. They're gone. All the poets gone but you and perhaps Cehmai. And in the history of the Empire, the Second Empire, the Khaiem, the one thing you know is that a woman has never been a poet. So perhaps, if women think differently enough from men, the bindings they create will succeed, even with nothing but your own memory to draw from."
"Who told you? Otah?"
"I know my father had letters from you," Eiah said. "I don't know what was in them. He didn't tell me."
"A women's grammar," Maati said. "We're building a women's gram? mar.
Eiah took the bowl from his hands and put it on the floor with a clatter. Outside, a gust of wind shrilled past the shack. Smoke bellied out from the fire, rising into the air, thinning as it went. When he looked at her, the pleasure was gone from his eyes.
"It's the best hope," Maati said. "It's the only way to ... undo what's been done."
"You can't do this, Maati-kya," Eiah said, her voice gentle.
Maati started to his feet. The stool he'd sat on clattered to the floor. Eiah pulled back from his accusing finger.
"Don't you tell that to me, Eiah," Maati said, biting at the words. "I know he doesn't approve. I asked his help. Eight years ago, I risked my life by sending to him, asking the Emperor of this pisspot empire for help. And what did he say? No. Let the world be the world, he said. He doesn't see what it is out here. He doesn't see the pain and the ache and the suffering. So don't you tell we what to do. Every girl I've lost, it's his fault. Every time we try and fall short, it's because we're sneaking around in warehouses and low towns. Meeting in secret like criminals-"
"Maati-kya-"
"I can do this," the old poet continued, a fleck of white foam at the corner of his mouth. "I have to. I have to retrieve my error. I have to fix what I broke. I know I'm hated. I know what the world's become because of me. But these girls are dedicated and smart and willing to die if that's what's called for. Willing to die. How can you and your great and glorious father tell me that I'm wrong to try?"
"I didn't say you shouldn't try," Eiah said. "I said you can't do it. Not alone."
Maati's mouth worked for a moment. His fingertip traced an arc down to the fire grate as the anger left him. Confusion washed through his expression, his shoulders sagging and his chest sinking in. He reminded Eiah of a puppet with its strings fouled. She rose and took his hand as she had the dead woman's.
"I haven't come here on my father's business," Eiah said. "I've come to help."
"Oh," Maati said. A tentative smile found its way to his lips. "Well. I ... that is ..."
He frowned viciously and wiped at his eyes with one hand. Eiah stepped forward and put her arms around him. His clothes smelled rank and unwashed; his flesh was soft, his skin papery. When he returned her embrace, she would not have traded the moment for anything.