'And to do that, you would have me - Khai of my own city - abandon Cetani to follow your lead?'

'Yes,' Otah said.

The Khai sat in silence for a long time, then rose. The rustle of his robes as he walked to the window was the only sound. Otah waited as the man looked out over the city. Over Cetani, the city for which this man had killed his brothers, for which he had given up his name. Otah felt the tension in his own back and neck. He was asking this man to abandon everything, to walk away from the only role he had played in his life. Cetani would fall. It would be sacked. Even if everything went perfectly, there might be nothing to rebuild. And what would a Khai be if there was no city left him?

Many years before, Otah had asked another man to do the right thing, even though it would cost him his honor and prestige and the only place he had in the world. Heshai-kvo had refused, and he had died for the decision.

'Most High,' Otah began, but the Khai Cetani held up a hand to stop him without even so much as looking back. Otah could see it in the man's shoulders in the moment the decision was made; they lifted as if a burden had been taken from him.

18.

Even the winter she had pa.s.sed in Yalakeht had not prepared Liat for the fickleness of seasons in the North. Each day now was noticeably shorter than the one before, and even when the afternoons were warm, the sun pressing down benignly on her face, the nights were suddenly bitter. In the gardens, the leaves all lost their green at once, as if by conspiracy. It was unlike the near-imperceptible changes in the summer cities. In Saraykeht, autumn was a slow, lingering thing; the warmth of the world made a long good-bye. Things came faster here, and Liat found the pace disturbing. She was a woman of the South, and abrupt change uneased her.

For instance, she thought as she sipped smoky tea in her apartments, she still imagined herself a businesswoman of Saraykeht. Had anyone asked of her work, she would have spoken of the combing rooms, the warehouses. Had anyone asked of her home, she would have described the seafront of Saraykeht, the scent of the ocean, the babble of a hundred languages. She would have pictured the brick-built house she'd taken over when Amat Kyaan had died, and the little bedroom with its window half-choked with vines. She hadn't seen that city in over a year, and wouldn't go back now before the spring at best.

At best.

At worst, Saraykeht itself might be gone. Or she might not live to see summer again.

The city in which she now pa.s.sed her days was suffering from change as well. Small shrines with images of the vanished andat had begun to appear in the niches between buildings, as if a few flowers and candles could coax them back. The temples had been filled every day by men and women who might not have sat before a priest in years. The beggars singing with boxes at their feet all chose songs about redemption and the return of things lost.

She sipped her tea. It was no longer hot enough to scald her lips, but it felt good drinking it. It warmed her throat like wine, only without the easing in her muscles or the softness in her mind. The morning before her was full - coordinating the movement of food and fuel into the tunnels below Machi, the raising of stores into the high towers where they would wait out the cold of winter. There wasn't time for dark thoughts. And yet the darkness came whether she courted it or not.

She looked up at the sound of the door. Nayiit stepped in. The nights were not so long or so cold as to keep him in his rooms. Liat put down her bowl.

'Good morning, Mother,' he said as he sat on a cushion beside the fire. 'You're up early.'

'Not particularly,' Liat said.

'No?' Nayiit said, and then smiled the disarming, rueful smile that would always and forever mark him as the son of Otah Machi. 'No, I suppose not. May I?'

Liat gestured her permission, and Nayiit poured himself a bowl of the tea. He looked tired, and it was more than a night spent in teahouses and the baths. Something had changed while he'd been gone. She had thought at first that it was only exhaustion. When she'd found him asleep on Maati's floor, he had been half-dead from his time on the road and visibly thinner. But since then he'd rested and eaten, and still there was something behind his eyes. An echo of her own bleak thoughts, perhaps.

'I failed him,' Nayiit said. Liat blinked and sat back in her chair. Nayiit tilted his head. 'It's what you were wondering, ne? What's been eating the boy? Why can't he sleep anymore? I failed the Khai. I had his good opinion. There was a time that he valued my counsel and listened to me, even when I had unpleasant things to say. And then I failed him. And he sent me away.'

'You didn't fail-'

'I did. Mother, I love you, and I know that you'd move the stars for me if you could, but I failed. Your son can fail,' Nayiit said. He put down his bowl with a sharp click, and Liat wondered if perhaps he was still just a bit tipsy from his night's revelry. Drink sometimes made her maudlin too. 'I'm not a good man, Mother. I'm not. I have left my wife and my child. I have slept with half the women I've met since we left home. I lost the Khai's trust-'

'Nayiit-'

'I killed those men.'

His face was still as stone, but a tear crept from the corner of his eye. Liat slid down from her seat to kneel on the floor beside him. She put her hand on his, but Nayiit didn't move.

'I called the retreat,' he said. 'I saw them fighting, and the Galts were everywhere. They were all around us. All I could think was that they needed to get away. I was calling signals. I knew how to call the retreat, and I did it. And they died. Every man that fell because we ran is someone I killed. And he knew it. The Khai. He knew it, and it's why he sent me back here.'

'That battle was doomed from the start,' Liat said. 'They outnumbered you; they were veterans. Your men were exhausted laborers and huntsmen. If what happened out there is anyone's fault, it's Otah's.'

'You don't understand,' he said. His voice wasn't angry, only tired. 'I want to be a good man. And I'm not. For a time, I thought I was. I thought I could be. I was wrong.'

Liat felt a thickness at the back of her throat. She forced a smile, half-rose, and kissed him on the top of his head, where the bones hadn't yet grown closed the first time she'd held him.

'Then do better,' she said. 'As long as you're alive, the next thing you do can be a good one, ne? Besides which, of course you're a good man. Only good men worry about whether they're bad.'

Nayiit chuckled. The darkness slid back to the place it had been. Not gone, but hidden.

'And what do bad men worry about?' he asked.

Liat shrugged and started to answer him, but the bells began to ring. It took half a breath for Liat to recall what the deep chiming alarm meant. She didn't remember going to the window; she couldn't say how Nayiit had come to be at her side. She squinted against the blue-yellow light of morning, trying to make out the banners hanging from the towers high above.

'Is it red or yellow?' Liat asked.

'G.o.ds,' Nayiit said. 'Look at that.'

His gaze was nearer the ground. Liat looked to the south. The low cloud of dust seemed to cover half the horizon. Otah's remaining men couldn't have done that. It wasn't him. The Galts had come to Machi. Liat stepped back from the window, her hands gripping the folds of her robe just over her heart.

'We have to get Kiyan-cha,' she said. 'We have to get Kiyan-cha and the children. And Maati. We have to get them out before-'

'Red,' Nayiit said.

Liat shook her head, uncertain for a moment what he meant. Nayiit pointed to the high dark tower and spoke over the still-ringing bells.

'The banner's red,' he said. 'It's not the Galts. It's the Khai.'

Only it wasn't. The couriers reached Kiyan just before Liat did, so when she entered Kiyan-cha's meeting rooms, she found Otah's wife with a thick letter - seams ripped, seal broken - lying abandoned in her lap and an expression equal parts disbelief and outrage on her pale face.

'He's an idiot,' Kiyan said. 'He's a self-aggrandizing, half-blind idiot who can't think two thoughts in a straight line.'

Liat took a pose that asked the question.

'My husband,' Kiyan said, color coming at last to her cheeks. 'He's sent us another whole city.'

Cetani, nearest neighbor of Machi, had emptied itself. The couriers had arrived just before the fastest carts. The dust that Liat had mistaken for an army was only the first wave of tens of thousands of men and women - their stores of grains, their chickens and ducks and goats, whatever small precious things they could not bring themselves to leave behind. Otah's letter explained that they were in need of shelter, that Machi should do its best for them. The tone of the words was apologetic, but only for someone who knew the man well. Only to women like themselves. Kiyan held Liat's arm as if for support as they walked together to the bridge outside the city where they awaited her.

The man who stood at the middle point in the bridge wore an elegant robe - black silk shot with yellow - that was only slightly disarrayed by his travels. Servants and armsmen of Machi parted for Kiyan, allowing her pa.s.sage onto the bridge's western end. Liat tried to disengage, but Kiyan's grip didn't lessen, and so they walked out together. On seeing them, the man took a pose of greeting appropriate for a man of lower rank to the wife of a more prestigious man. This was not the Khai Cetani, then, but some member of the Cetani utkhaiem.

'I have been sent to speak to the first wife of the Khai Machi,' he said.

'I am the Khai's only wife,' Kiyan said.

He took this odd information in stride, turning his attention wholly to Kiyan. Liat felt awkward and out of place, and oddly quite protective of the woman at her side.

'Kiyan-cha,' the man said. 'I am Kamath Vauamnat, voice of House Vauamnat. The Khai Cetani has sent us here at your husband's invitation. The army of Galt is still some days behind us, but it is coming. Our city . . .'

Something changed in the courtier's face. It was unlike anything Liat had seen before, except perhaps an actor who in the midst of declaiming some epic has forgotten the words. The mask and distance of etiquette failed, and the words he spoke became genuine.

'Our city's gone. We have what we're carrying. We need your help.'

Only Liat was near enough to Kiyan to hear the tiny sigh that escaped before she spoke.

'How could I refuse you?' she said. 'I am utterly unprepared, but if you will bring your people across the bridge and make them ready, I will find them places here.'

The man took a pose of grat.i.tude, and Kiyan turned back, Liat still at her side, and walked back to the bank where her people waited.

'We'll need something like shelter for these people,' Kiyan said, under her breath. 'Someplace we can keep them out of the rain until we can find . . . someplace.'

'They won't all fit,' Liat said. 'We can put them in the tunnels, but then there's no place for all of us to go when winter comes. There's too many of them, and they can't have carried enough food to see them through until spring. And we're stretched thin as it is.'

'We'll stretch thinner,' Kiyan said.

The rest of the day was a single long emergency, events and needs and decisions coming in waves and overlapping each other like the scales of a snake. Liat found herself at the large and growing camp that was forming as the refugees of Cetani reached the bridge. Thankfully, the bridge was only the width of eight men walking abreast, and it kept the flow of humanity and cattle and carts to a speed that was almost manageable. Liat only had to school herself not to look across the water to the larger, shapeless ma.s.s of people still waiting to cross. Liat motioned them to different places, the ones too frail or ill to survive another night in the open, the ones robust enough that they might be put to work. There were old men, children, babes hanging in their mothers' exhausted arms.

Liat felt as if she were being asked to engineer a new city of tents and cook fires. They came in the hundreds. In the thousands. Night had fallen before the last man crossed, and Liat could see fires on the far side, camps made by those who'd given up hope of crossing today. Liat sat on the smooth stone rail at the bridge's end and let the aches in her feet and back and legs complain to her. It had been an excruciating day, and the work was far from ended. But at least the refugees were in tents sent out from Machi, safe from the cold. The food carts of Machi had also come out from the city, making their way through the crowds with garlic sausages and honeyed almonds and bowls of noodles and beef. There were even songs. Over the constant frigid rushing of the water, there was the sound of flutes and drums and voices. The temptation to close her eyes was unbearable, and yet. And yet.

I want to be a good man, he'd said. And I'm not.

With a sigh she began the long trek back to the city, to the palaces, to Kiyan and Maati and the bathhouses and her bed. The city, as she pa.s.sed through its streets, was alive. The refugees of Cetani had not all waited in the camp. Or perhaps Kiyan had meant to start bringing them into the city. Whatever the intention had been, they had come, and Machi had poured itself out to make them welcome, to offer them food and wine and comfort, to pull news and gossip from them. The sun was gone, and the darkness was cold, and yet the city was full as a street fair. And as chaotic.

She found Kiyan in the palaces looking as exhausted as she herself felt. Otah's wife waved her near to the long, broad table. Wives of the utkhaiem were consulting one another, writing figures on paper, issuing orders to wide-eyed servants. It was like the middle of a trading company at the height of the cotton harvest, and Liat found it strangely comforting.

'It can be done,' Kiyan said. 'It won't be pleasant, but it can be done. I've had word from the Poinyat that we can use their mines, and I'm expecting the Daikani any time now.'

'The mines?' Liat said. The exhaustion made her slow to understand.

'We'll have to put people in them. They're deep enough to stay warm. It's like living in the tunnels under the city, only rougher. The ones in the plain will even have their own water. There's food and sewage to worry about, but I've sent Jaini Radaani to speak with the engineers, and if she can't convince them to find a solution, I'll be quite surprised.'

'That's good,' Liat said. 'Things at the bridge are under control. We've set up a tent for the physicians down there, and there's food enough. There will be more tomorrow, but I think they've all been seen to.'

'G.o.ds, Liat-cha. You look like death and you're cold. Let me have someone see you to the baths, get you warm. Have you eaten?'

She hadn't, but she pushed the thought aside.

'I need something from you, Kiyan-cha.'

'Ask.'

'Nayiit. He needs . . . something. He needs something to do. Something that he can be proud of. He came back from the battle . . .'

'I know,' Kiyan said. 'I know what happened there. It was in Otah's letter.'

'He needs to help,' Liat said, surprised at the pleading tone of her own voice. She hadn't known she felt so desperate for him. 'He needs to matter.'

Kiyan nodded slowly, then leaned close and kissed Liat's cheek. The woman's lips felt almost hot against Liat's chilled skin.

'I understand, Liat-kya,' she said. 'Go and rest. I'll see to it. I promise you.'

Weeping with fatigue, Liat found her way to her apartments, to her bedchamber, to her bed. Her belly ached with hunger, but she only drank the full carafe of water the servants had left at her bedside. By the time her body learned that it had been tricked, she would already be asleep. She closed her eyes for a moment before pulling off her robes and woke, still dressed, in the morning. The light sifted through the shutters, pressing in at the seams. The night candle was a lump of spent wax, and the air didn't smell of the dying wick. There was something, though. Pork. Bread. Liat sat up, her head light.

She stripped off yesterday's robes, sticky with sleep sweat, and pulled on a simple sitting robe of thick gray wool. When she stepped out to the main rooms, Kiyan was still arranging the meal on its table.

Thick slices of pink-white meat, bread so fresh it still steamed, trout baked with lemon and salt, poached pears on a silver plate. And a teapot that smelled of white tea and honey. Liat's stomach woke with a sharp pang.

'They told me you hadn't eaten last night,' she said. 'Either of you. I thought I might bring along something to keep you breathing.'

'Kiyan-cha . . .' Liat began, then broke off and simply took a pose of grat.i.tude. Kiyan smiled. She was a beautiful woman, and age was treating her gently. The intelligence in her eyes was matched by the humor. Otah was lucky, Liat thought, to have her.

'It's a trick, really,' Kiyan said. 'I've come pretending to be a servant girl, when I actually want to speak with Nayiit. If he's awake.'

'I am.'

His voice came from the shadows of his bedchambers. Nayiit stepped out. His hair pointed in a hundred directions. His eyes were red and puffy. A thin sprinkling of stubble cast a shadow on his jaw. Kiyan took a pose of greeting. He returned it.

'How can I be of service, Kiyan-cha?' he asked. Liat could tell from the too-precise diction that he'd spent his night drinking. He closed his bedroom doors behind him as he stepped in, and Liat more than half thought it was to protect the privacy of whatever woman was sleeping in his bed. Something pa.s.sed across Kiyan's sharp features; it might have been compa.s.sion or sorrow, understanding or recognition. Liat couldn't say, and it was gone almost as soon as it came.

'That's the question, Nayiit-cha. I have something to ask of you. It may come to nothing, and if you should have to act upon my request, I'm afraid I won't be in a position to repay you.'

Nayiit came forward slowly and sat at the table. Kiyan filled a plate for him as she spoke, casual as if she were a wayhouse keeper, and he a simple guest.

'You've heard the gossip from Cetani, I a.s.sume,' she said.

'They've fled before the Galts. The Khai - both of them - are in the rear. To protect the people if the Galts come from behind.'

'Yes,' Kiyan said. 'It's actually more complex than that. Otah has invented a scheme. If it works, he may win us a few months. Perhaps through the winter. If not, I think we can a.s.sume the Galts will be here shortly after the last of our cousins from Cetani have arrived.'

It was a casual way to express the raw fear that every one of them might die violently before the first frost came. Our lives are measured in days now, Liat thought. But Kiyan had not paused to let the thought grow.

'There is an old mine a day's ride to the north of Machi. It was dug when the first Khai Machi set up residence here. It's been tapped out for generations, but the tunnels are still there. I've been quietly moving supplies to it. A bit of food. Blankets. Coal. A few boxes of gold and jewels. Enough for a few people to survive a winter and still have enough to slip across the pa.s.ses and into the Westlands when spring came.'

Nayiit took a pose that accepted all she said. Kiyan smiled and leaned forward to touch Nayiit's hands with her own. She seemed at ease except for the tears that had gathered in her eyes.

'If the Galts come,' she said, 'will you take Eiah and Danat there? Will you . . .'

Kiyan stopped, her smile crumbling. She visibly gathered herself. A long, slow breath. And even still, when she spoke, it was hardly more than a whisper.

'If they come, will you protect my children?'

You brilliant, vicious snake, Liat thought. You glorious b.i.t.c.h. You'd ask him to love your son. You'd make caring for Danat the proof that my boy's a decent man. And you're doing it because I asked you to.

It's perfect.

'I would be honored,' Nayiit said. The sound of his voice and the awestruck expression in his eyes were all that Liat needed to see how well Kiyan had chosen.