Daniel Abraham - Price of Spring

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.

Maati tramped through the overgrown streets, Idaan walking silently at his side. The hunter's bow slung over her shoulder was meant more as protection from feral dogs than to assassinate Vanjit, though Maati knew Idaan could use it for either. To their left, an unused canal stank of stale water and rotting vine. To the right, walls stood or leaned, roofs sagged or had fallen in. Every twenty steps seemed to offer up a new display of how war and time could erase the best that humanity achieved. And above the ruins, rising like a mountain over the city, the ruined palaces of the Khai Udun were grayed by the moisture in the air. The towers and terraces of enameled brick as soft as visions.

He had lost Eiah too.

Squatting on the boat as they made their way upriver, he had watched her turn to Otah, watched her become his daughter again where before she had chosen the role of outcast. She had lost faith in Maati's dream, and he understood why. She had delighted in the Galtic girl's condition as if it weren't the very thing that they had feared and fought against.