Daniel Abraham - Price of Spring

"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.

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."