Seasons of War

drawn to the bed like a stone rolling downhill. She had not realized how much she loathed shipboard hammocks.
    She took a pose of thanks that the girl responded to neatly as the servant boy put the crate down gently by the fire.
    ‘I will let you rest,’ the girl said. ‘If you have need of me, any of the servants can find me for you. And I will, of course, send word when my father returns.’
    ‘You’re very kind,’ Nayiit said, smiling his disarming smile. ‘Forgive me, but is there a bathhouse near? I don’t think shipboard life has left me entirely prepared for good company.’
    ‘Of course,’ the girl said. ‘I would be pleased to show you the way.’
    I’m sure you would, Liat thought. Was I so obvious at her age?
    ‘Mother,’ Nayiit said, ‘would you care to . . .’
    Liat waved the offer away.
    ‘A basin and a sponge will be enough for me. I have letters to write before dinner. Perhaps, Ceinat-cha, if you would leave word with your couriers that I will have things to send south?’
    The girl took an acknowledging pose, then turned to Nayiit with a flutter of a smile and gestured for him to follow her.
    ‘Nayiit,’ Liat said, and her son paused in the apartment’s doorway. ‘Find out what you can about the situation in Machi. I’d like to know what we’re walking into.’
    Nayiit smiled, nodded, and vanished. The servant boy also left, promising the basin and sponge shortly. Liat sighed and sat down, stretching her feet out toward the burning logs. The wine tasted good, though slightly overspiced to her taste.
    Machi. She was going to Machi. She let her mind turn the fact over again, as if it were a puzzle she had nearly solved. She was going to present her discoveries and her fears to the man she’d once called a lover, back when he’d been a seafront laborer and called himself Itani. Now he was the Khai Machi. And Maati, with whom she had betrayed him. The idea tightened her throat every time she thought of it.
    Maati. Nayiit was going to see Maati, perhaps to confront him, perhaps to seek the sort of advice that a son can ask only of a father. Something, perhaps, that touched on the finer points of going to foreign bathhouses with young women in snowfox robes. Liat sighed.
    Nayiit had been thinking about what it would be to walk away from his wife, the son he’d brought to the world. He’d said as much, and more than once. She had thought it was a question based in anger - an accusation against Maati. It only now occurred to her that perhaps there was also longing in it, and she thought to wonder how complex her quiet, pleasant son’s heart might be.
     
    Balasar leaned over the balcony and looked down at the courtyard below. A crowd had gathered, talking animatedly with the brown-skinned, almond-eyed curiosity he had spirited from across the sea. They peppered him with questions - why was he called a poet when he didn’t write poems, what did he think of Acton, how had he learned to speak Galtic so well. Their eyes were bright and the conversation as lively as water dropped on a hot skillet. For his part, Riaan Vaudathat drank it all in, answering everything in the slushy singsong accent of the Khaiem. When the people laughed, he joined in as if they were not laughing at him. Perhaps he truly didn’t know they were.
    Riaan glanced up and saw him, raising his hands in a pose that Balasar recognized as a form of greeting, though he couldn’t have said which of the half-thousand possible nuances it held. He only waved in return and stepped away from the edge of the balcony.
    ‘It’s like I’ve taught a dog to wear clothes and talk,’ Balasar said, lowering himself onto a bench beside Eustin.
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘They don’t understand.’
    ‘You can’t expect them to, sir. They’re simple folk, most of ’em. Never been as far as Eddensea. They’ve been hearing about the Khaiem and the poets and the andat all their lives, but they’ve never seen ’em. Now they have the chance.’
    ‘Well, it’ll help my popularity at the games,’ Balasar said, his voice more bitter than he’d intended.
    ‘They don’t know the things we do, sir. You can’t expect them to think like us.’
    ‘And the High Council? Can I expect it of them? Or are they in chambers talking about the funny brown man who dresses like a girl?’
    Eustin looked down, silent for long enough that Balasar began to regret his tone.
    ‘All fairness, sir,’ Eustin said, ‘the robes do look like a