The Price of Spring

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.

Eiah turned to him, shifting her weight as if she had some angry retort that had stuck in her throat for want of opposition. When he spoke, he was quiet enough to keep the conversation as near to between only the two of them as the close quarters would allow.

"We each did our best," Otah said. "We did what we could."

He put his arm around her. She bit down on her lip and fought the sobs that shook her body like tiny earthquakes. Her fingers found his own, and squeezed as hard as a patient under a physician's blade. He made no complaint.

"How many people have I killed, Papa-kya? How many people have I killed with this?"

"Hush," Otah said. "It doesn't matter. Nothing we've done matters. Only what we do next."

"The price is too high," Eiah said. "I'm sorry. Will you tell them that I'm sorry?"

"If you'd like."

Otah rocked her gently, and she allowed him to do it. The others all knew what they were saying, if not in specific, then at least the sketch of it. Otah saw Danat's concern, and Idaan's cool evaluating glance. He saw the armsmen turn their backs to him out of respect, and at the bow, Maati turned his back for another reason. Otah felt a flicker of his rage come back, a tongue of flame rising from old coals. Maati had done this. None of it would have happened if Maati hadn't been so bent by his own guilt or so deluded by his optimism that he ignored the dangers.

Or if Otah had found him and stopped him when that first letter had come. Or if Eiah hadn't made common cause with Maati's clandestine school. Or if Vanjit hadn't been mad, or Balasar ambitious, or the world and everything in it made from the first. Otah closed his eyes, letting the darkness create a space large enough for the woman in his arms and his own complicated heart.

Eiah murmured something he couldn't make out. He made a small interrogative sound in the back of his throat, and she coughed before repeating herself.

"There was no one at the school I could talk with," she said. "I got so tired of being strong all the time."

"I know," he said. "Oh, love. That, I know."

Otah slept deeply that night, lulled by exhaustion and the soft sounds of familiar voices and of the river. He slept as if he had been ill and the fever had only just broken. As if he was weak, and gaining strength. The dreams that possessed him faded with his first awareness of light and motion, less substantial than cobwebs, less lasting than mist.

The air itself seemed cleaner. The early-morning haze burned off in sunlight the color of water. They ate boiled wheat and honey, dried apples, and black tea. The boatman's second made his call, the boatman responded, and they nosed out again into the flow. Maati, sulking, kept as nearly clear of Otah as he could but kept casting glances at Eiah. Jealous, Otah assumed, of the conversation between father and daughter and unsure of her allegiance. Eiah for her part seemed to be making a point of speaking with her brother and her aunt and Ana Dasin, sitting with them, eating with them, making conversation with the jaw-clenched determination of a horse laboring uphill.

The character of the river itself changed as they went farther north. Where the south was wide and slow and gentle, the stretch just south of Udun was narrower-sometimes no more than a hundred yards acrossand faster. The boatman kept his kiln roaring, the boiler bumping and complaining. The paddle wheel spat up river water, slicking the deck nearest the stern. Otah would have been concerned if the boatman and his second hadn't appeared so pleased with themselves. Still, whenever the boiler chimed after some particularly loud knock, Otah eyed it with suspicion. He had seen boilers burst their seams.

The miles passed slowly, though still faster than the poet girl could have walked. Every now and then, a flicker of movement on the shore would catch Otah's attention. Bird or deer or trick of the light. He found himself wondering what they would do if she appeared, andat in her arms, and struck them all blind. His fears always took the form of getting Danat and Eiah and Ana to safety, though he knew that his own danger would be as great as theirs and their competence likely greater.

The spitting waterwheel slowly drove them toward the bow. Near midday, the captain of the guard brought them tin bowls of raisins and bread and cheese. They all sat in a clump, and even Maati haunted the edges of the conversation. Ana and Eiah sat hand in hand on a long, low bench; Danat, cross-legged on the deck. Otah and Idaan kept to leather and canvas stools that creaked when sat upon and resisted any attempt to rise. The cheese was rich and fragrant, the bread only mildly stale, and the topic a council of war.

"If we do find her," Idaan said, answering Otah's voiced concerns, "I'm not sure what we do with her. Can she be made to see reason?"

"A month ago, I'd have said it was possible," Eiah said. "Not simple, but possible. I'm half-sorry we didn't kill her in her sleep when we were still at the school."

"Only half?" Danat asked.

"There's Galt," Eiah said. "As it stands now, she's the only one who can put it back. It's harder for her to do that dead."

Danat looked chagrined, and, as if sensing it, Idaan put a hand on his shoulder. Eiah squeezed Ana's hand, then gently bent it at the wrist, as if testing something.

"She's alone. She's hurt and she's sad. I'm not saying that's all certain to work in our favor," Maati said, "but it's something." Otah thought he sounded petulant, but none of the others appeared to hear it that way.

Eiah's voice cut the conversation like a blade. Even before he took the sense of the words, Otah was halfway to his feet.

"How long?" Eiah asked.

Her hands were around Ana's wrists, her fingers curled as if measuring the girl's pulses. Eiah's face was pale.

"Ah," Idaan said. "Well. Sitting those two together was a mistake."

"Tell me," Eiah said. "How far along?"

"A third, perhaps," Ana said softly.

"We hadn't mentioned it to the men," Idaan said. "I understand the first ones don't always take."

It took him less than a breath to understand.

"Ah," Otah said, a hundred tiny signs falling into place. Ana's weeping at the school, her avoidance of Danat, the way she'd kept to herself in the mornings and eaten with Idaan.

"What?" Danat asked, baffled.

"I'm pregnant," Ana said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact, her cheeks as bright as apples with her blush. The whole boat seemed to breathe in at once.

"And how long has this been going on?" Otah demanded, shifting his gaze to the dumbstruck Danat at his feet. His son blinked up, uncomprehending. It was as if Otah had asked in an unknown language.

"You're joking," Idaan said. "You have a boy who's just ended his twentieth summer and a girl not two years younger, an escort of professional armsmen as chaperone, and a steamcart with private quarters built on its back. What did you expect would happen?"

"But," Otah began, then found he wasn't sure what he intended to say. She's blinded, or They aren't wed, or Farrer Dasin will say it's my fault for not keeping better watch over them. Each impulse seemed more ridiculous than the last.

"I'm going to be a father," Danat said as if testing out the words. He turned to look up at Otah and started to grin. "You're going to be a grandfather."

Eiah was weeping openly, her arms around Ana. A clamor of voices and a whoop from the stern said that whatever hope there might have been that the thing would be kept quiet once they returned to court was gone. Otah sat back, his stool creaking under his weight. Idaan took a pose of query that carried nuances of both pity at his idiocy and congratulations. Otah started laughing and found it hard to stop.

It had been so long since he'd felt joy, he'd almost forgotten what it was like.

The rest of the day was spent in half-drunken conversation. Otah was made to retell the details of Danat's birth, and of Eiah's. Danat grew slowly more pleased with himself and the world as the initial shock wore thin. Ana Dasin smiled, her grayed eyes taking in nothing and giving out a pleasure and satisfaction that seemed more intimate in that she couldn't see its reflection in the faces around her.

Stories came pouring out as if they had only been waiting for the chance to be told. Idaan's spectacularly failed attempts to care for a younger half-sister when she'd been little more than fourteen summers old. Otah's work in the eastern islands as an assistant midwife, and the awkward incident of the baby born to an island mother and island father and with a complexion that sang to the stars of Obar State. Eiah spilled out every piece of secondhand wisdom she'd ever heard about keeping a new babe safe in the womb until it was ready to be born. At one point the armsmen broke into giddy song and, against Danat's protests, lifted him onto their shoulders, the deck shifting slightly under them. The sun itself seemed to shine for them, the river to laugh.

Maati alone seemed not to recover entirely from the first surprise. He smiled and chuckled and nodded when it fit the moment, but his eyes were reading letters in the air. He looked neither pleased nor displeased, but lost. Otah saw his lips moving as Maati spoke to himself, as if trying to explain something to his body that only his mind knew. When the poet hefted himself up and came to take Ana's hand, it was with a formality that might have been mixed feelings on his part or only a fear that his kind thoughts would be unwelcome. Ana accepted the formal, somewhat stilted blessing, and afterward Eiah took Maati's hand, pulling him down to sit at her side.

Even braided together, Otah's anger and distrust and sorrow couldn't overcome the moment. The blood and horror of the world lifted, and a future worth having peeked through the crack.

It was only much later, when the sun fell carelessly into the treetops of the western bank and shadows darkened the water, that the celebration faltered. The boat passed a brickwork tower standing on the riverbank, ivy almost obscuring the scars where fire had burned through timber and stripped the shutters from the empty windows. Otah watched the structure with the eerie feeling that it was watching back. The river bent, and a great stone bridge came into sight, gaps in its rail like missing teeth. Birds as bright as fire sang and fluttered, even in the autumn cold. Their songs filled the air, the familiar trills greeting Otah like the wail of a ghost.

The ruins of the river city. The corpse of a city of birds.

They had come to dead Udun.