Seasons of War

wasn’t. He never was. I offered to have him take the brand.’
    ‘I know,’ Kiyan said. ‘Otah told me.’
    But she might as well not have spoken. Liat could no more stop the words now than will the blood to stop flowing from a wound.
    ‘I offered to take him away. I didn’t want him fighting to be the Khai any more than you did. I wouldn’t have put him in danger, and he would never have hurt Danat. He would never have hurt your boy. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone. It’s your mewling half-dead son that’s caused this. If he’d been able to fight off a cough, Otah would never have kept Nayiit from the brand. Nayiit would never have fought, never have hurt anybody’s children. He was . . . he was . . .’
    The tears came again. She couldn’t say what would have come. She couldn’t say that Danat and Nayiit would never have come to face one another as custom demanded. Perhaps in the years ahead the gods would have pitted them against each other. If the world was what it had been. If things hadn’t changed. Sobs as violent as sickness racked her, and she found Kiyan’s arms around her, her own fists full of the soft wool of the woman’s robe, her screams echoing as if by will alone she could pull the stones down and bury them all.
    Time changed its nature. The sorrow and rage and the physical ache of her heart went on forever and only a moment. The only measure was that the candles had burned a quarter of their length before the fit passed, and exhaustion reclaimed her again. She was embarrassed to see the damp spot she had left on Kiyan’s shoulder, but when she tried to smooth it away, Kiyan only took her hand, lacing their fingers together like half-grown girls trading gossip at a dance. Liat allowed it.
    ‘You know you can stay here,’ Kiyan said.
    ‘You know I can’t.’
    ‘I only meant you’d be welcome,’ Kiyan said. Then a moment later, ‘What will you do when the thaw comes?’
    ‘Go south,’ Liat said. ‘Go to Saraykeht. See what’s left. I may still have a grandson. I can hope it. And better that he not lose a father and grandmother both.’
    ‘Nayiit was a good man,’ Kiyan said.
    ‘He was nothing of the sort. He was a charming bastard who fled his own family and slept with half the women between here and Saraykeht. But I loved him.’
    ‘He died saving my son,’ Kiyan said. ‘He’s a hero.’
    ‘That doesn’t help me.’
    ‘I know it,’ Kiyan said, and with a distant surprise, Liat found herself smiling.
    ‘Aren’t you going to tell me it will pass?’ Liat asked.
    ‘Will it?’
    The tunnels below Machi had their own weather - a system of warm winds and cold; dry and damp. Sometimes, if no one was speaking, if there were no words to say, Liat could hear it like a breath. Like a long, low, endless exhalation.
    ‘I will never stop missing him,’ Liat said. ‘I want him back.’
    Kiyan nodded, and sat there with her, keeping the vigil for another night as outside autumn fell into winter and winter crawled toward spring. The world slowly changing.
     
    ‘I understand your son has fallen ill?’
    Otah’s first impulse, unthinking as a reflex, was to deny it. Balasar Gice was a small-framed man, unimposing until he spoke, and then charming and warm enough to fill a room with his ironic half-smile. He was the man who had brought down everything. Thousands of people who were alive in the spring were now dead or enslaved through this man’s ambition. Otah’s first impulse was to keep anything about Danat away from the man, because he was a Galt and the enemy.
    His second impulse, as unreasoned as the first, was to tell Balasar the truth, because in the few days since the surrender, he’d begun to like the man.
    ‘It’s a cough,’ Otah said. ‘He’s always had it, but it had been less recently. We’d hoped it was gone, but . . .’
    He took a pose expressing regret and powerlessness before the gods. Balasar seemed to take the sense of it.
    ‘I have medics with me,’ the Galt said, gesturing over his back at the wide, dark stone arch that led from the great vaulted chamber in which they now met toward the south and the tunnels given over to the Galtic army. ‘They have more experience with sewing men’s fingers back on, but they might be of use. If you’d accept them.’
    Otah hesitated, his unease washing back over him, then forced himself to smile.
    ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said, neither agreeing to anything nor refusing. The Galt