Daniel Abraham - THE

he was taking her until he reached the branching hall that led to the

slate-paved rooms where the teachers had once disciplined boys with the

cutting slash of a lacquered rod. He stopped in the hallway instead,

putting the reflexive impulse to violence aside. Vanjit bowed her head.

"I would like an explanation of that," he said, his voice shaking with

anger.

"It was Ashti Beg," Vanjit said. "She can't contain her jealousy any

longer, Maati-kvo. I have tried to give her the time and consideration,

but she won't understand. I am a poet now. I have an andat to care for.

I can't be expected to work and toil like a servant."

The andat twisted in her grasp, looking up at Maati with tears in its

black eyes. The tiny, toothless mouth gaped in what would have been

distress if it had been a baby.

"Tell me," Maati said. "Tell me what happened."

"Ashti Beg said that I had to clean the pots from breakfast. Irit

offered to, but Ashti wouldn't even let her finish her sentences. I

explained that I couldn't. I was very calm. I am patient with her,

Maati-kvo. I'm always very patient."

"What happened?" Maati insisted.

"She tried to take him," Vanjit said. Her voice had changed. The

pleading tone was gone. Her words could have been shaved from ice. "She

said that she could look after him as well as anyone, and that I was

more than welcome to have him back once the kitchen had been cleaned."

Maati closed his eyes.

"She put her hands on him," Vanjit said. In her voice, it sounded like a

violation. Perhaps it was.

"And what did you do," Maati asked, though he knew the answer.

"What you told me," Vanjit said. "What you said about Wounded."

"Which was?" he said. Clarity-of-Sight gurgled and swung its thick arms

at Vanjit's ears, its dumb show of fear and distress forgotten.

"You said that Eiah-cha couldn't make an andat based on things being as

they're meant to, because the andat aren't meant to be bound. It's not

their nature. You said she had to bind Wounded and then withdraw it from

all the women who still can't bear babes. And so we withdrew from Ashti

Beg."

The andat cooed. It might have been Maati's imagination, but the thing

seemed proud. Clarity-of-Sight. And so also Blindness.

The warmth that bloomed in his breast, the tightening of his jaw, the

near-unconscious shaking of his head. They were not anger so much as a

bone-deep impatience.

"It is manipulating you," he said. "We've talked about this from the

beginning. The andat wants its freedom. Whatever else it is, it will

always struggle to be free. It has been courting Ashti Beg and the

others for days to precipitate exactly this. You have to know yourself

better than it does. You have to behave like a grown woman, not a

selfrighteous child."

"But she-"

Maati put two fingers against the girl's lips. The andat was silent now,

staring at him with silent anger.

"You have been entrusted with a power beyond any living person," Maati

said, his tone harsher than he'd intended. "You are responsible for that

power. You understand me? Responsible. I have tried to make you see

that, but now I think I've failed. Poets aren't simply men ... or women

... who have a particular profession. We aren't like sailors or

cabinetmakers or armsmen. Holding the andat is like holding small gods,

and there is a price you pay for that. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Yes, Maati-kvo," Vanjit whispered.

"I doubt that," he said. "After what I've seen today, I very much doubt it.

She was weeping silently. Maati opened his mouth, some cutting comment

ready to humiliate her further, and stopped. For a moment, he was a boy

again, in this same hallway. He could feel the thin robes and the winter

cold, and the tears on his own cheeks as the older boys mocked him or

Tahi-kvo-bald, cruel Tahi-kvo, who had later become the Dai- kvo-beat

him. He wondered if this fear and rage had been what drove his teachers

back then, or if it had been something colder.

"Fix it," Maati said. "Put Ashti Beg back as she was, and never, never

use the andat for petty infighting again."

"No, Maati-kvo."

"And wash the pots when your turn comes."

Vanjit took a pose that was a promise and an expression of gratitude.

The quiet sobs as she walked away made Maati feel smaller. If they had

been in a city, he would have gone to a bathhouse or some public square,

listened to beggars singing on the corners and bought food from the

carts. He would have tried to lose himself for a while, perhaps in wine,

perhaps in music, rarely in gambling, and never in sex. At the school,

there was no escape. He walked out, leaving the stone walls and memories

behind him. Then the gardens. The low hills that haunted the land west

of the buildings.

He sat on the wind-paved hillside, marking the passage of the sun across

the afternoon sky, his mind tugged a hundred different ways. He had been

too harsh with Vanjit, or not harsh enough. The binding of Wounded was

overworked or not deeply enough considered, doomed or on the edge of

being perfected. Ashti Beg had been in the wrong or justified or both.

He closed his eyes and let the sunlight beat down on them, turning the

world to red.

In time, the turmoil in his heart calmed. A small, blue-tailed lizard

scrambled past him. He had chased lizards like it when he'd been a boy.

He hadn't recalled that in years.

It was folly to think of poets as different from other men. Other women,

now that Vanjit had proved their grammar effective. It was that mistake

which had made the school what it was, which had deformed the lives of

so many people, his own included. Of course Vanjit was still subject to

petty jealousy and pride. Of course she would need to learn wisdom, just

the same as anyone else. The andat had never changed who someone was,

only what they could do.

He should have taught them that along with all the rest. Every now and

again, he could have spent an evening talking about what power was, and

what responsibility it carried. He'd never thought to do it, he now

realized, because when he imagined a woman wielding the power of the

andat, that woman was always Eiah.

Maati made his way back as the cold afternoon breeze set the trees and

bushes rustling. He found the kitchen empty but immaculate. The broken

cutting stone had been replaced with a length of polished wood, but

otherwise everything was as it had been. His students, he found under

Eiah's command in the courtyard. They were raking the fallen leaves into

a pit for burning and resetting a half-dozen flagstones that had broken

from years of frost, tree roots, and neglect. Vanjit knelt with Large

Kae, lifting the stones from the ground. Clarity-of-Sight nestled in

Irit's lap, its eyes closed and its mouth a perfect O. Ashti Beg, her

vision clearly restored, was by Small Kae's side, a deep pile of russet

leaves before them.

"Maati-kvo," Eiah said, taking a pose of greeting, which he returned.

The others acknowledged him with a smile or simple pose. Vanjit turned

away quickly, as if afraid to see anger still in his expression.

He trundled to a rough boulder, resting against it to catch his breath.

Irit joined him and, without a word, passed the andat to him. It

stirred, groaned once, and then turned to nestle its face into his

robes. The andat had no need of breath. Maati had known that since he

had first met Seedless over half a century earlier. Clarity-of-Sight's