The Price of Spring

16

It had been raining for two full days. Occasionally the water changed to sleet or hail, and small accumulations of rotten ice had begun to form in the sheltered corners of the courtyard. Maati closed his shutters against the low clouds and sat close to the fire, the weather tapping on wood like fingers on a table. It might almost have been pleasant if it hadn't made his spine stiffen and ache.

The cold coupled with Eiah's absence had turned life quiet and slow, like a bear preparing to sleep through the winter. Maati went down to the kitchen in the morning and ate with the others. Large Kae and Irit had started rehearsing old songs together to pass the time. They sang while they cooked, and the harmonies were prettier than Maati would have imagined. When Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight were there, the andat would grow restive, its eyes shifting from one singer to the next and back again until Vanjit started to fidget and took her charge away. Small Kae had no ear for music, so instead spent her time reading the old texts that Clarity-of-Sight had been built from and asking questions about the finer points of their newly re-created grammar.

Most of the day, Maati spent alone in his rooms, or dressed in several thick robes, walking through the halls. He would not say it, but the space had begun to feel close and restricting. Likely it was only the sense of winter moving in.

With the journey to Pathai and back, along with the trading and provisioning, he couldn't expect Eiah's return for another ten days. He hadn't expected to feel that burden so heavily upon him, and so both delight and dread touched him when Small Kae interrupted his halfdoze.

"She's come back. Vanjit's been watching from the classroom, and she says Eiah's come back. She's already turned from the high road, and if the path's not too muddy, she'll be here by nightfall."

Maati rose and opened the shutters, as if by squinting at the gray he could match Vanjit's sight. A gust of cold and damp pulled at the shutter in his hand. He was half-tempted to find a cloak of oiled silk and go out to meet her. It would be folly, of course, and gain him nothing. He ran a hand through the thin remnants of his hair, wondering how many days it had been since he'd bathed and shaved himself, and then realized that Small Kae was still there, waiting for him to speak.

"Well," he said, "whatever we have that's best, let's cook it up. Eiahcha's going to have fresh supplies, so there's no point in saving it."

Small Kae grinned, took a pose that accepted his instruction, and bustled out. Maati turned back to the open window. Ice and mud and gloom. And set in it, invisible to him, Eiah and news.

There was no sunset; Eiah arrived shortly after the clouds had faded into darkness. In the light of hissing torches, the cart's wheels were beige with mud and clay. The horse trembled with exhaustion, driven too hard through the wet. Large Kae, clucking her tongue in disapproval, took the poor beast off to be rubbed down and warmed while the rest of them crowded around Eiah. She wrung the water from her hair with pale fingers, answering the first question before it was asked.

"Ashti Beg's left. She said she didn't want to come back. We were in a low town just south of here off the high road. She said we could talk about it, but when I got up in the morning, she'd already gone." She looked at Maati when she finished. "I'm sorry."

He took a pose that forgave and also diminished the scale of the thing, then waved her in. Vanjit followed, and then Irit and Small Kae. The meal was laid out and waiting. Barley soup with lemon and quail. Rice and sausage. Watered wine. Eiah sat near the brazier and ate like a woman starved, talking between mouthfuls.

"We never reached Pathai. There was a trade fair halfway to the city. Tents, carts, the wayhouse so full they were renting out space on the kitchen floor. There was a courier there gathering messages from all the low towns."

"So the letters were sent?" Irit asked. Eiah nodded and scooped up another mouthful of rice.

"Ashti Beg," Maati said. "Tell me more about her. Did she say why she left?"

Eiah frowned. Color was coming back to her cheeks, but her lips were still pale, her hair clinging to her neck like ivy.

"It was me," Vanjit said, the andat squirming in her lap. "It's my doing."

"Perhaps, but it wasn't what she said," Eiah replied. "She said she was tired, and that she felt we'd all gone past her. She didn't see that she would ever complete a binding of her own, or that her insights were particularly helping us. I tried to tell her otherwise, give her some perspective. If she'd stayed on until the morning, perhaps I could have."

Maati sipped his wine, wondering how much of what Eiah said was true, how much of it was being softened because Vanjit and Clarity-ofSight were in the room. It seemed more likely to him that Ashti Beg had taken offense at Vanjit's misstep and been unable to forgive it. He recalled the woman's dry tone, her cutting humor. She had not been an easy woman or a particularly apt pupil, but he believed he would miss her.

"Was there other news? Anything of the Galts?" Vanjit asked. There was something odd about her voice, but it might only have been that Clarity-of-Sight had started its wordless, wailing complaint. Eiah appeared to notice nothing strange in the question.

"There would have been if I'd reached Pathai, I'd expect," she said. "But since there would have been nothing to do about it and our business was done early, I wanted to come back quickly."

"Ah," Vanjit said. "Of course."

Maati tugged at his fingers. There was something near disappointment in the girl's tone. As if she had expected someone that had not arrived.

"You're ready to work again?" Small Kae said. Irit flapped a cloth at her, and Small Kae took a pose that unasked the question. Eiah smiled.

"I've had a few thoughts," she said. "Let me look them over tonight after we unload the cart, and we can talk in the morning."

"Oh, there's no more work for you tonight," Irit said. "You've been on the road all this time. We can hand a few things down from a cart."

"Of course," Vanjit said. "You should rest, Eiah-kya. We'll be happy to help."

Eiah put down her soup and took a pose that offered gratitude. Something in the cant of her wrists caught Maati's attention, but the pose was gone as quickly as it had come and Eiah was sitting back, drinking wine and leaning her still-wet hair toward the fire. Large Kae rejoined them, smelling of wet horse, and Eiah told the whole story again for her benefit and then left for her rooms. Maati felt the impulse to follow her, to speak in private, but Vanjit took him by the hand and led him out to the cart with the others.

The supplies were something less than Maati had expected. Two chests of salted pork, a few jars of lard and flour and sweet oil. Bags of rice. It wasn't inconsiderable-certainly there was enough to keep them all well-fed for weeks, but likely not months. There were few spices, and no wine. Large Kae made a few small remarks about the failures of low-town trade fairs, and the others chuckled their agreement. The rain slackened, and then, as Vanjit balanced the last bag of rice on one hip and Clarity-of-Sight on the other, snow began to fall. Maati went back to his rooms, heated a kettle over his fire, and debated whether to try to boil enough water for a bath. Immersion was the one way he was sure he could chase the cold from his joints, but the effort required seemed worse than enduring the chill. And there was an errand he preferred to complete.

Light glowed through the cracks around Eiah's door. Dim and flickering, it was still more than a single night candle would have made. Maati scratched at the door. For a moment, nothing happened. Perhaps Eiah had taken to her cot. Perhaps she was elsewhere in the school. A soft sound, no more than a whisper, drew him back to the door.

"Eiah-kya?" he said, his voice low. "It's me."

Her door opened. Eiah had changed into a simple robe of thick wool, her hair tied back with a length of twine. She looked powerfully like her mother. The room she brought Maati into had once been a storage pantry. Her cot and brazier and a low table were all the furnishings. There was no window, and the air was thick with the heat and smoke from the coals.

Papers and scrolls lay on the table beside a wax tablet half-whitened by fresh notes. Medical texts in the languages of the Westlands, Eiah's own earlier drafts of the binding of Wounded. And also, he saw, the completed binding they had all devised for Clarity-of-Sight. Eiah sat on the cot, the frail structure creaking under her. She didn't look up at him.

"Why did she leave?" Maati asked. "Truth, now"

"I told her to," Eiah said. "She was frightened to come back. I told her that I understood. What happens if two poets come into conflict? If one poet has something like Floats-in-Air and the other has something like Sinking?"

"Or one poet can blind, and the other heal injury?"

"As an example," Eiah said.

Maati sighed and lowered himself to sit beside her. The cot complained. He laced his fingers together, looking at the words and diagrams without seeing them.

"I don't entirely know. It hasn't happened in my lifetime. It hasn't happened in generations."

"But it has happened," Eiah said.

"There was the war. The one that ended the Second Empire. That was

… what, ten generations ago? The andat are flesh because we've translated them into flesh, but they are also concepts. Abstractions. It might simply be that the poets' wills are set against each other's. A kind of wrestling match mediated through the andat. Whoever has the greater strength of mind and the andat more suited to the struggle gains the upper hand. Or it could be that the concepts of the two andat don't coincide, and any struggle would have to be expressed physically. In the world we inhabit. Or…"

"Or?"

"Or something else could happen. The grammar and meaning in one binding could relate to some structure or nuance in another. Imagine two singers in competition. What if they chose songs that harmonized? What if the words of one song blended with the words of the other, and something new came from it? Songs are a poor metaphor. What are the odds that the words of any two given songs would speak to each other? If the bindings are related in concept, if the ideas are near, it's much more likely that sort of resonance could happen. By chance."

"And what would that do?"

"I don't know," Maati said. "Nobody does. I can say that what was once a land of palm trees and rivers and palaces of sapphire is a killing desert. I can say that people who travel in the ruins of the Old Empire tend to die there. It might be from physical expressions of that old struggle. It might be from some interaction of bindings. There is no way to be sure."

Eiah was silent. She turned the pages of her medical books until she reached diagrams Maati recognized. Eyes cut through the center, eyes sliced through the back. He had seen them all thousands of times when Vanjit was preparing herself, and they had seemed like the keepers of great secrets. He hadn't considered at the time that each image was the result of some actual, physical orb meeting with an investigative blade, or that all the eyes pictured there were sightless.

He felt Eiah's sigh as much as heard it.

"What happened out there?" he asked. "The truth, not what you said in front of the others."

Eiah leaned forward. For a moment, Maati thought she was weeping, but she straightened again. Her eyes were dry, her jaw set. She had pulled a small box of carved oak from under the cot, and she handed it to him now. He opened it, the leather hinge loose and soft. Six folded pages lay inside, sewn at the edges and sealed with Eiah's personal sigil.

"You didn't send them?"

"It was true about the trade fair. We did find one. It wasn't very good, but it was there, so we stopped. There are Galts everywhere now. They came to Saraykeht at the start, and apparently the councillors and the court are all still there. There are others who have fanned out. The ones who believe that my father's plan is going to work."

"The ones who see a profit in it. Slavers?"

"Marriage brokers," Eiah said as if the terms were the same. "They've been traveling the low towns making lists of men in want of Galtic peasant girls to act as brood mares for their farms. Apparently eight lengths of copper will put a man's name on the list to travel to Galt. Two of silver for the list to haul a girl here."

Maati felt his belly twist. It had gone further than he had dared think.

"Most of them are lying, of course," Eiah said. "Taking money from the desperate and moving on. I don't know how many of them there are out there. Hundreds, I would guess. But, Maati-cha, the night I left? All of the Galts lost their sight. All of them, and at once. No one cares any longer what's happened with my brother and the girl he was supposed to marry. No one talks about the Emperor. All anyone cares about is the andat. They know that some poet somewhere has bound Blindness or something like it and loosed it against the Galts."

It was as if the air had gone from the room, as if Maati were suddenly on a mountaintop. His breath was fast, his heart pounding. It might have been joy or fear or something of each.

"I see," Maati said.

"Uncle, they hate us. All those farmers and traders and shepherds? All those men who thought that they would have wives and children? All those women who thought that even if it hadn't come from their body, at least there would be a baby nearby to care for? They think we've taken it from them. And I have never seen so much rage."

Maati felt as if he'd been struck, caught in the moment between the blow and the bloom of pain. He said something, words stringing together without sense and trailing to silence. He put his face in his hands.

"You didn't know," Eiah said. "She didn't tell you."

"Vanjit's done this," Maati said. "She can undo it. I can…" He stopped, catching his breath. He felt as if he'd been running. His hands trembled. When Eiah spoke, her voice was as level and calm as a physician's announcing a death.

"Twice."

Maati turned to her, his hands taking a pose of query. Eiah put her hand on the table, papers shifting under her fingers with a sound like sand against glass.

"This is twice, Maati-cha. First with Ashti Beg, and now… Gods. Now with all of Galt."

"Is this why Ashti Beg left?" Maati asked. "The true reason?"

"The true reason is that she was afraid of Vanjit," Eiah said. "And I couldn't reassure her."

"Children," Maati said. The pain in his chest was easing, the shock of the news fading away. "I'll speak with Vanjit. She did this all. She can undo it as well. And… and it does speak to the purpose. We wanted to announce that the andat had returned to the world. She's done that in no small voice."

"Maati-cha," Eiah began, but he kept talking, fast and loud.

"This is why they did it, you know All those tests and lies and opportunities to prove ourselves. Or fail to prove ourselves. They broke us to the lead first, and gave us power when they knew we could be controlled."

"It looked like a wiser strategy, if this is the alternative," Eiah said. "Do you think she'll listen to you?"

"Listen, yes. Do as I command? I don't know. And I don't know that I'd want her to. She's learning responsibility. She's learning her own limits. Even if I could tell her what they are, she couldn't learn by having it said. She's… exploring."

"She's killed thousands of people, at the least."

"Galts," Maati said. "She's killed Galts. We were never here to save them. Yes, Eiah-kya. Vanjit went too far, and because she's holding an andat, there are consequences. When you slaughter a city? When you send your army to kill a little girl's family in front of her? There are consequences to that too. Or by all the gods there should be."

"You're saying this is justice?" Eiah asked.

"We made peace with Galt," Maati said. "None of Vanjit's family were avenged. There was no justice for them because it was simpler for Otah to ignore their deaths. Just as it's simpler for him to ignore all the women of the cities. Vanjit has an andat, and so her will is now more important than your father's. I don't see that makes it any more or less just."

Eiah took a pose that respectfully disagreed, then dropped her hands to her sides.

"I don't argue that she's gone too far," Maati said. "She's killing a horsefly with a hammer. Only that it's not as bad as it first seems. She's still young. She's still new to her powers."

"And that forgives everything?" Eiah said.

"Don't," Maati said more sharply than he'd intended. "Don't be so quick to judge her. You'll be in her position soon enough. If all goes well."

"I wonder what I'll forget. How I'll go too far," Eiah said, and sighed. "How did we ever think we could do good with these as our tools?"

Maati was silent for a moment. His memory turned on Heshai and Seedless, Cehmai and Stone-Made-Soft. The sickening twist that was Sterile, moving through his own mind like an eel through muddy water.

"Is there another way to fix it?" Maati asked. "After Sterile, is there a way other than this to make the world whole? All those women who will never bear a child. All those men whose money is going to charming Galtic liars. Is there a way to make the world well again besides what we're doing?"

"We could wait," Eiah said, her voice gray and toneless. "Given enough time, we'll all die and be forgotten."

Maati was silent. Eiah closed her eyes. The flame of the night candle fluttered in a draft that smelled of fresh snow and wet cloth. Eiah's gaze focused inward, on some landscape of her own mind. He didn't think she liked what she saw there. She opened her mouth as if to speak, closed it again, and looked away.

"You're right, though," Maati said. "This is twice."

They found Vanjit in her room, the andat wailing disconsolately as she rocked it in her arms. Maati entered the room first to Vanjit's gentle smile, but her expression went blank when Eiah came in after him and slid the door shut behind her. The andat's black eyes went from Vanjit to Eiah and back, then it squealed in delight and held its thick, short arms up to Eiah as if it was asking to be held.

"You know, then," Vanjit said. "It was inevitable."

"You should have told me what you intended," Maati said. "It was a dangerous, rash thing to do. And it's going to have consequences."

Vanjit put Clarity-of-Sight on the floor at her feet. The thing shrieked complaint, and she bent toward it, her jaw clenched. Maati recognized the push and pull of wills between andat and poet. Even before the andat whimpered and went silent, he had no doubt of the outcome.

"You were going to tell the world of what we'd done anyway," Vanjit said. "But you couldn't be sure they would have stopped the Emperor, could you? This way they can't go forward."

"Why didn't you tell Maati-kvo what you were doing?" Eiah asked.

"Because he would have told me not to," Vanjit said, anger in her voice.

"I would have," Maati said. "Yes."

"It isn't fair, Maati-kya," Vanjit said. "It isn't right that they should come here, take our places. They were the killers, not us. They were the ones who brought blades to our cities. Any of the poets could have destroyed Galt at any time, and we never, ever did."

"And that makes it right to crush them now?" Eiah demanded.

"Yes," Vanjit said. There were tears in her eyes.

Eiah tilted her head. Long familiarity told Maati the thoughts that occupied Eiah's mind. This girl, sitting before them both, had been granted the power of a small god by their work. Maati's and Eiah's. The others had helped, but the three of them together in that room carried the decision. And so the weight of its consequences.

"It was ill advised," Maati said. "The low towns should have been our allies and support. Now they've been angered."

"Why?" Vanjit asked.

"They don't know what our plan is," Maati said. "They don't know about Eiah and Wounded. All they see is that there was a glimmer of hope. Yes, I know it was a thin, false hope, but it was all that they had."

"That's stupid," Vanjit said.

"It only seems that way because we know more than they," Eiah said.

"We can tell them," Vanjit said.

"If we can calm them long enough to listen," Maati said. "But that isn't what I've come here for. I am your teacher, Vanjit-cha. I need two things of you. Do you understand?"

The girl looked at the ground, her hands rising in a pose of acceptance appropriate for a student to her master.

"First, you must never take this kind of action with the andat without telling me. We have too many plans and they are too delicate for any of us to act without the others knowing it."

"Eiah sent Ashti Beg away," Vanjit said.

"And we discussed that possibility before they left," Maati said. "The second thing… What you've done to the Galts, only you can undo."

The girl looked up now. Anger flashed in her eyes. The andat gurgled and clapped its tiny hands. Maati held up a finger, insisting that she wait until he had finished.

"If you hold to this," he said, "thousands of people will die. Women and children who are innocent of any crime."

"It's what they did to us," she said. "It's that they did to me. Maati reached forward and took her hand.

"I understand," he said. "I won't tell you to undo this thing. But for me, think carefully about how the burden of those deaths will weigh on you. You're angry now, and anger gives you strength. But when it's faded, you will still be responsible for what you've done."

"I will, Maati-kvo," Vanjit said.

Eiah made a sound in the back of her throat, its meaning unguessable. Maati smiled and put a hand on Vanjit's shoulder.

"Well. That's settled. Now, I suppose it's time to get back to work. Give these people in the low towns something to celebrate."

"You've done it, then, Eiah-kya?" Vanjit asked. "You've found the insight you needed? You understand Wounded?"

Eiah was quiet for a moment, looking down at Vanjit and Clarity-ofSight. Her lips twitched into a thin, joyless smile.

"Closer," Eiah said. "I've come closer."