Daniel Abraham - Price of Spring

"Dreams," Small Kae said. "Or when you mistake things for other things."

"My brother had a fever once," Ashti Beg said. "Saw rats coming through the walls for three days."

"I don't think that applies," Eiah said. "The definitions we've based the draft on are all physicians' texts. They have to do with the actual function of the eye."

"But if you see a thing without your eyes," Small Kae began.

"Then you're imagining them," Vanjit said, her voice calm and certain. "And the passages on clarity would prevent the contradiction."

"What contradiction?" Large Kae asked.

"Who can answer that?" Maati said, leaping into the fray. "It's a good question, but any of you should be able to think it through. Ashti-cha? Would you care to?"

The older woman sucked her teeth for a moment. A sparrow flew in through one window, its wings fluttering like a pennant in the wind, and then out again.

"Clarity," Ashti Beg said slowly. "The sense of clarity implies that it's reflecting the world as it is, ne? And if you see something that's not there to be seen, it's not the world as it is. Even if imagining something is like sight, it isn't like clarity."

"Very good," Maati said, and the woman smiled. Maati smiled back.

The binding had progressed more quickly than Maati had thought possible. For the greatest part, the advances had been made in moments like these. Seven minds prodding at the same thought, debating the nuances and structures, challenging one another to understand the issues at hand more deeply. Someone-anyone-would find a phrase or a thought that struck sparks, and Vanjit would pull pages from her sleeve and mark down whatever had pushed her one step nearer the edge.

It was happening less and less often. The binding, Maati knew, was coming near its final form. The certainty in Vanjit's voice and the angle of her shoulders told him as much about her chances of success as looking over the details of her binding.

As they ended the evening's session, reluctant despite yawns and heavy-lidded eyes, Maati realized that the work they were doing was less like his own training before the Dai-kvo and more like the long, arduous hours he had spent with Cehmai. Somehow, during his absence, they had all become equals. Not in knowledge-he was still far and away the best informed-but in status. Where he had once had a body of students, he was working now with a group of novice poets. A lizard scampered along before him and then up the rough wall and into the darkness. A nightingale sang.

He was exhausted, his body heavy, his mind beginning to spark and slip. And he was also elated. The wide night sky above him seemed rich with promise, the ground he walked upon eager to bear him up.

His bed, however, didn't invite sleep. Small pains in his knees and spine prodded him, and his mind failed to calm. The light of the halfmoon cast shadows on the walls that seemed to move of their own accord. The restlessness of age, as opposed, he thought with weary amusement, to the restlessness of youth. As he lay there, small doubts began to arise, gnawing at him. Perhaps Vanjit wasn't ready yet to take on the role of poet. Perhaps he and Eiah in their need and optimism were sending the girl to her death.

There was no way to know another person's heart. No way to judge. It might be that Vanjit herself was as afraid of this as he was, but held by her despair and anger and sense of obligation to the others to move forward as if she weren't.

Every poet that bound an andat came face-to-face with their own flaws, their own failures. Maati's first master, Heshai-kvo, had made Seedless the embodiment of his own self-hatred, but that was only one extreme example. Kiai Jut three generations earlier had bound Flatness only to find the andat bent on destroying the family the poet secretly hated. Magar Inarit had famously bound Unwoven only to discover his own shameful desires made manifest in his creation. The work of binding the andat was of such depth and complexity, the poet's true self was difficult if not impossible to hide within it. And what, he wondered, would Vanjit discover about herself if she succeeded? With all the hours they had spent on the mechanics of the binding, was it not also his responsibility to prepare the girl to face her imperfections?

His mind worried at the questions like a dog at a bone. As the moon vanished from his window and left him with only the night candle, Maati rose. A walk might work the kinks from his muscles.

The school was a different place at night. The ravages of war and time were less obvious, the shapes of the looming walls and hallways familiar and prone to stir the ancient memories of the boy Maati had been. Here, for instance, was the rough stone floor of the main hall. He had cleaned these very stones when his hands had been smooth and strong and free from the dark, liver-colored spots. He stood at the place where Milah-kvo had first offered him the black robes. He remembered both the pride of the moment and the sense, hardly noticed at the time, that it was an honor he didn't wholly deserve.

"Would you have done it differently, Milah-kvo?" he asked the dead man and the empty air. "If you had known what I was going to do, would you still have made the offer?"

The air said nothing. Maati felt himself smile without knowing precisely why.

"Maati-kvo?"

He turned. In the dim light of his candle, Eiah seemed like a ghost. Something conjured from his memory. He took a pose of greeting.

"You're awake," she said, falling into step beside him.

"Sometimes sleep abandons old men," he said with a chuckle. "It's the way of things. And you? I can't think you make a practice of wandering the halls in the middle of the night."

"I've just left Vanjit. She sits up after the lecture is done and goes over everything we said. Everything anyone said. I agreed to sit with her and compare my memory to hers."

"She's a good girl," Maati said.

"Her dreams are getting worse," Eiah said. "If the situation were different, I'd be giving her a sleeping powder. I'm afraid it will dull her, though."

"They're bad then?" Maati said.

Eiah shrugged. In the dim light, her face seemed older.

"They're no worse than anyone who watched her family die before her eyes. She has told you, hasn't she?"

"She was a child," Maati said. "The only one to live."

"She said no more than that?"

"No," Maati said. They passed through a stone archway and into the courtyard. Eiah looked up at the stars.

"It's as much as I know too," Eiah said. "I try to coax her. To get her to speak about it. But she won't."

"Why try?" Maati said. "Talking won't undo it. Let her be who and where she is now. It's better that way."

Eiah took a pose that accepted his advice, but her face didn't entirely match it. He put a hand on her shoulder.

"It will be fine," he said.

"Will it?" Eiah said. "I tell myself the same thing, but I don't always believe it."

Maati stopped at a stone bench, flicked a snail from the seat, and rested. Eiah sat at his side, hunched over, her elbows on her knees.

"You think we should stop this?" he asked. "Call off the binding?"

"What reason could we give?"

"That Vanjit isn't ready."

"It isn't true, though. Her mind is as good as any of ours will ever be. If I called this to a halt, I'd be saying I didn't trust her to be a poet. Because of what she's been through. That the Galts had taken that from her too. And if I say that of her, who won't it be true of? Ashti Beg lost her husband. Irit's father burned with his farm. Large Kae only had her womb turned sick and saw the Khai Utani slaughtered with his family. If we're looking for a woman who's never known pain, we may as well pack up our things now, because there isn't one."

Maati let the silence stretch, in part to leave Eiah room to think. In part because he didn't know what wisdom he could offer.