Daniel Abraham - THE

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