The Price of Spring

by Daniel Abraham

  "Such as?" Large Kae asked.

  "Punishment," Eiah suggested. "Or isolation. Or. .."

  "Or a sense of family," Ashti Beg said, her voice oddly contemplative.

  "If we think of the babe as having more than one agenda, this could be its way of making a world that was only mother and child. Alienating all the rest of us."

  "But it also wants its freedom," Maati said. Small Kae shifted on her bench at the sound of his voice, making room for him. He moved forward and sat. "Whatever else it wants, it must want that."

  A puff of smoke escaped from the fire grate. Maati sipped the drink Idaan had given him-rum with honey and apple. It warmed his throat and made his chest glow.

  "Is this really what we should care about?" the Galtic girl-Anaasked. "I don't mean that as an attack, but it seems that we've estab lished that the girl's less than sane. Is there something we gain by trying to guess at the shape of her madness?"

  "We might have a better idea of where she's gone," Small Kae offered. "What she might do next?"

  "Ana's right," Danat said. "We could roll dice about it, but there are some things we know for certain. She set out half a day's boat ride north of here a night ago. If she goes upriver, she'll need to hire a boat. If she goes down, she could hire one or build a raft and rely on the current. Or she can go east over land. What about the low towns? Could she have found shelter in a low town?"

  The group was silent, then Danat said, "I'll get the keeper. She may know something of the local geography."

  It was, Maati thought, a strangely familiar feeling. A handful of people sitting together, thinking aloud about an insoluble problem. The weeks at the school, sitting in the classrooms with chalk marks on the walls. All of them offering suggestion, interpretation, questions opened for anyone to answer if they could. He took an unexpected comfort from it.

  The only one who didn't speak was Otah.

  The conversation went on long into the night. The longer they took to find Vanjit, the greater her chance of escape. The greater her chance of dying alone in the wild. The Galtic girl and Small Kae had a long discussion of whether they were going to rescue Vanjit or if the aim was to kill her; Small Kae advocated a fast death, Ana wanted the chance to ask Vanjit to undo the damage to Galt. Danat counted the days to Utani, the days back, guessed at the size of the search party that could be raised.

  "There is another option," Eiah said, her pearl-gray eyes focused on nothing. "I had a binding prepared. Wounded. If I can manage it, we would have another way to heal the damage done to Galt."

  Ana turned toward Eiah's voice, raw hope on her face. Maati almost felt sorry to dash it.

  "No," he said. "It can't be done. Even if you knew it well enough to perform it blind, we hadn't looked over the most recent version. And Vanjit ruined the notes."

  "But if Galt could be given its eyes again . . ." Danat said.

  "Vanjit could take them away again," Maati said. "Clarity-of-Sight and Wounded could go back and forth until eventually Eiah tried to heal someone just as Vanjit tried to blind them, and then the gods alone know what would happen. And that matters less than the fact that Eiah would die if she tried the thing."

  "You don't know that," Idaan said.

  "I'm not willing to take the risk," Maati said.

  Otah listened, his brow furrowed, his gaze shifting now and again to the fire. It wasn't until morning that Maati and the others learned what the Emperor was thinking.

  The morning light transformed the wayhouse. With the shutters all opened, the benches and tables and soot-stained walls seemed less oppressive. The fire still smoked, but the breeze moving through the rooms kept the air fresh and clear, if cold. The wayhouse keeper had prepared duck eggs and peppered pork for their morning meal, and tea brewed until it was rich with taste and not yet bitter.

  They were not all there. Ashti Beg and the two Kaes had stayed up after many of the others had faded into their restless sleep. Maati had slipped into dream with the sound of their voices in his ears, and none of them had yet risen. Danat and Otah were sitting at the same table, looking like a painter's metaphor of youth and age. Eiah and Idaan shared his own table, and he did not know where the Galtic girl had gone.

  "She didn't blind Maati. Why?" Otah asked, gesturing at Maati as if he were an exhibit at an audience rather than a person. "Why spare him and not the others?"

  "Well, for Eiah it's clear enough," Danat said around a mouthful of pork. "She didn't want another poet binding the andat. As long as Vanjit's the only one, she's ... well, the only one."

  "And the two Kaes," Eiah said, "so that they couldn't follow her."

  "Yes," Idaan said, "but that's not the question. 117hy notMaati?"

  "Because . . ." Maati began, and then fell short. Because she cared for him more? Because she didn't fear him? Nothing he could think of rang true.

  "I think she wants to be found," Otah said. "I think she wants to be found, in specific, by Maati."

  Idaan grunted appreciatively. Eiah frowned and then nodded slowly.

  "Why would she want that?" Maati asked.

  "Because your attention is the mark of status," Eiah answered. "You are the teacher. The Dai-kvo. Which of us you choose to give your time to determines who is in favor and who isn't. And she wants to show herself that she can take you from me."

  "That's idiotic," Maati said.

  "No," Idaan said, her voice oddly soft. "It's only childish."

  "It fits together if you've raised a daughter," Otah agreed. "It's just what Eiah would have done when at twelve summers. But if I'm right, it changes things. I didn't want to say it in front of Ana-cha, but if your poet's truly gone to ground, I can't believe we'd find her before spring. She can find new allies if she needs them, or use the andat to threaten people and get what she wants from them. At best, we might have her by Candles Night."

  "But if she's waiting to be found," Danat said.

  "Then it's a matter of guessing where she'd wait," Otah said. "Where she'd expect Maati to go looking for her."

  "I don't know the answer to that," Maati said. "The school, maybe. She might make her way back there."

  "Or at the camp where we lost her," Eiah suggested.

  Silence fell over the room for a moment. A decision had just been made, and Maati could tell that each of them knew it. Utani would wait. They were hunting Vanjit.

  "The camp's nearest," Danat said.

  "You can send one of the armsmen north with a letter," Eiah said. "Even if we fail, it doesn't mean a larger search can't be organized while we try."

  "I'll round up the others," Idaan said, rising from the table. "No point wasting daylight. Danat-cha, if you could tell our well-armed escorts that we're leaving?"

  Danat swilled down the last of his tea, took a pose that accepted his aunt's instructions, and rose. In moments, only Otah, Eiah, and Maati himself were left in the room. Otah took a bite of egg and stared out into nothing.

  "Otah-kvo," Maati said.

  The Emperor looked over, his eyebrow raised in something equally query and challenge. Maati felt his chest tighten as if it were bound by wire. He sat silent for the rest of the meal.

  To Maati's dismay, Ashti Beg, Large Kae, and Small Kae all preferred to stay behind. There was a logic to it, and the keeper was more than happy to take Otah's silver in return for a promise to look after them. Still, Maati found himself wishing that they had come.

  The Emperor's boat was, if anything, smaller than the one Maati had hired. One of the armsmen had been sent north with letters that Otah had hastily drafted, another to the south. Half of the rest were set to finding a second boat and following with the supplies, and yet the little craft felt crowded as they nosed out into the river.

  Otah stood at the bow, Danat at his side. Idaan had appointed herself shepherd of Eiah and Ana, the blinded women. Maati sat alone near the stern. The sky was pale with haze, the river air rich with the scent of decaying leaves and autumn. The kiln roared to itself, and the wheel
slapped the water. Far above, two vees of geese headed south, their brash unlovely voices made beautiful by distance.

  His rage was gone, and he missed it. All his fantasies of Otah Machi apologizing, of Otah Machi debased before him, melted like sugar in water when faced with the man himself. Maati felt small and alone, and perhaps that was merely accurate. He had lost everything now except perhaps Eiah. Irit was gone, and the wisest of them all for fleeing. He couldn't imagine Large Kae and Small Kae would return to him. Ashti Beg had left once already. And then Vanjit. All of his little family was gone now.

  His family. Ashti Beg's voice returned to him. Vanjit and Clarity-ofSight and the need for family.

  "Oh," he said, almost before he knew what he meant. And then, "Oh."

  Maati made his unsteady way to the bow, touching crates with his fingertips to keep from stumbling. Otah and Danat turned at the sound of his approach, but said nothing. Maati reached them short of breath and oddly elated. His smile seemed to surprise them.

  "I know where she's gone," he said.

  27

  Udun had been a river city. A city of birds.

  Otah remembered the first time he'd come to it, a letter of introduction from a man he had known briefly years before limp in his sleeve. After years of life in the eastern islands, it was like walking into a dream. Canals laced the city, great stone quays as busy as the streets. Great humped bridges with stairs cut in each side rose up to let even the tallest boats pass. On the shores, tree branches bent under the brightly colored burden of wings and beaks and a thousand kinds of song. The street carts sold food and drink as they did everywhere, but with each paper basket of lemon fish, every bowl of rice and sausage, there would be a twist of colored cloth.

  Open the cloth, and seeds would spill out, and then within a heartbeat would come the birds. Fortunes were told by which birds reached you. Finches for love, sparrows for pain, and so on, and so on. Wealth, birth, death, love, sex, and mystery all spelled out in feathers and hunger for those wise enough to see or credulous enough to believe.

  The palaces of the Khai Udun had spanned the wide river itself, barges disappearing into the seemingly endless black tunnel and then emerging again into the light. Beggars sang from rafts, their boxes floating at the side. The firekeepers' kilns had all been enameled the green of the river water and a deep red Otah had never seen elsewhere. And at a wayhouse with a little garden, there had been a keeper with a foxsharp face and threads of white in her black hair.

  He had entered the gentleman's trade there, become a courier and traveled through the world, bringing his messages back to House Siyanti and sleeping at Kiyan's wayhouse. He knew all the cities and many of the low towns as they had been back then, but Udun had been something precious.

  And then the Galts had come. There were tales afterward that the river downstream from the ruins stank of corpses for a year. Thousands of men and women and children had died in the bloodiest slaughter of the war. Rich and poor, utkhaiem and laborer, none had been spared. What survivors there were had abandoned their city's grave, leaving it to the birds. Udun had died, and with it-among unnumbered others-the poet Vanjit's parents and siblings and some part of her soul.

  And so, Maati argued, it was where she would return now.

  "It's plausible," Eiah said. "Vanjit's always thought of herself as a victim. This would help her to play the role."

  "How far would it be from here?" Danat asked.

  Otah, his mind already more than half in the past, calculated. They were six days south of Utani on this steamcart for water. Udun had been a week's ride or ten days walking south from Utani....

  "She could reach it in three days," Otah said, "if she knew where she was headed. There are more than enough streams and creeks feeding the river here. Water wouldn't be a problem."

  "If we go there now, we might reach it before she does," Idaan said, looking out over the river.

  "The camp's still the better wager," Danat said. "It's where she parted ways with them. They left their sleeping tents, so there's shelter of a sort. And it doesn't require walking anywhere."

  Maati started to object, but Otah raised his hand.

  "It's along the way," Otah said. "We'll stop there and look. If she's been to the camp, we should be able to tell. If not, we won't have lost more than half a day."

  Maati straightened as if the decision were a personal insult, turned and walked back to the stern of the boat. Time had not been gentle to the man. Hard fat had thickened his chest and belly. His skin was gray where it wasn't flushed. Maati's long, age-paled hair had an unhealthy yellow, and his movements were labored as if he woke every morning tired. And his mind ...

  Otah turned back to the water, the trees, the soft wind. The white haze of sky was darkening as the day wore on, the scent of rain on the air. The others-Idaan, Danat, Eiah, Ana-moved away quietly, as if afraid their conversation might move him to violence. Otah breathed in and out, slow and deep, until both his disgust and his pity had faded.

  Maati had lost the right to feel anger when his pupil had killed Galt, and any sentimental connection between Otah and his once-friend had drowned outside Chaburi-Tan. If Maati thought that stopping at the camp was a poor decision, he could make his case or he could choke on it. It was the same to Otah.

  In the event, they lost more than half a day. Maati identified the wrong stretches of river twice, and Eiah had no eyes to correct him. When at last they found the abandoned campsite, a soft, misting rain had started to fall and the daylight was beginning to fail them. Maati led the way into the small clearing, walking slowly. Otah and two of the armsmen were close behind. Eiah had insisted that she come as well, and Idaan was helping her, albeit more slowly.

  "Well," Otah said, standing in the middle of the ruins. "I think we can fairly say that she's been here."

  The camp was destroyed. The thick canvas sleeping tents lay in shreds and knots. Stones and ashes from the fire pit had been strewn about, and two leather bags lay empty in the mud. One of the armsmen crouched on his heels and pointed to a slick of black mud. A footprint no longer than Otah's thumb. Idaan's steps squelched as she paced near the ruined fire pit. Maati sat on a patch of crushed grass, his hem dragging in the mud, his face a mask of desolation.

  "Back to the boat, I think," Otah said. "I can't see staying on here."

  "We may still beat her to Udun," Idaan said, prying the gray wax shards that had been Eiah's binding from the muck. "She spent a fair amount of time doing this. Tents like those are hard to cut through."

  One of the armsmen muttered something about the only thing worse than a mad poet being a mad poet with a knife, but Otah was already on his way back to the river.

  The boatman and his second had fitted poles into thick iron rings all along the boat's edge and raised a tarp that kept the deck near to dry. As darkness fell and the rain grew heavier, the drops overhead sounded like fingertips tapping on wood. The kiln had more than enough coal. The wide-swung doors lit the boat red and orange, and the scent of pigeons roasting on spits made the night seem warmer than it was.

  Maati had returned last, and spent the evening at the edge of the light. Otah saw Eiah approach him once, a few murmured phrases exchanged, and she turned back to the sound of the group eating and talking in the stern. If Idaan hadn't risen to lead her back, he would have. The boatman's second handed her a tin bowl, bird's flesh gray and steaming and glistening with fat. Otah shifted to sit at her side.

  "Father," Eiah said.

  "You knew it was me?"

  "I'm blind, not dim," Eiah said tartly. She plucked a sliver of meat from her bowl and popped it into her mouth. She looked tired, worn thin. He could still see the girl she had been, hiding beneath the time and age. He felt the 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.

  Eia
h 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."