Seasons of War

someone might put together again what had been torn apart, and it was a chance the Galt had refused to accept. Their tenuous peace required sacrifices, and sacrifice without loss didn’t deserve the name.
    ‘Forgive this,’ Otah said, to no one. He walked forward, coming to the first pile. The book was leather-bound and worn from years of loving care. Otah let it fall open and looked on Heshai’s careful handwriting for the last time. With a sense of sorrow, Otah cast the book into the flames, then raised his hands again, and the servants began to throw the pages into the fire. Parchment darkened and curled in the suddenly white flame. Tiny embers flew out into the air, glowing and going dark, fireflies at sunset. The horror of it all closed his throat, and with it came a strange elation.
    A hand touched his arm, and Otah looked at the Galtic general. There were tears in his eyes too.
    ‘It was necessary,’ he said.
    The night candles were burned down past their first quarter before Otah found his way back to his rooms. Kiyan was already asleep, her face smooth and peaceful. He resisted the urge to touch her, to pull her awake and hope that some of that calm might come with her. It wouldn’t. He knew that. Instead he watched the subtle rise and fall of her breath, listened to the small sounds the tunnels made in the darkness, the soft flow of air. He thought of crawling in beside her, still in his robes, pressing his eyes closed until forgetfulness took him as well. But he needed to perform one last errand. He rose quietly and left by the back passage, down deeper into the earth.
    The physician rose when he caught sight of Otah, taking a welcoming pose so quietly that the rustle of cloth in his robes seemed loud. Otah replied with one that asked a question.
    ‘He’s well,’ the physician said. ‘The poppy milk makes him sleepy, but it stops the cough.’
    ‘May I?’ Otah asked.
    ‘I think he’ll never rest unless you do. But it would be best if he didn’t speak overmuch.’
    Danat’s room was warm and close. The night candle fluttered and glowed in its glass case. Great iron statues of hunting cats and a bear risen on his back feet radiated heat from the fires in which they’d been kept all through the day. His boy sat up unsteadily, smiling. Otah went to his side.
    ‘You should be asleep,’ Otah said, smoothing the hair from Danat’s brow.
    ‘You were supposed to read to me,’ the boy said. His voice was scratchy and thick, but not as bad as it had been. Otah felt tears in his eyes again. He could not bring himself to say that the books were all gone, the stories all made ash. ‘Lie back,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
    Grinning, Danat dropped to his pillows. Otah took a long, unsteady breath and closed his eyes.
    ‘In the sixteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Adani Beh,’ Otah murmured, ‘there came to court a boy whose blood was half Bakta, his skin the color of soot, and his mind as clever as any man who has ever lived . . .’ Danat made a small sound of pleasure and closed his eyes, his hand seeking out Otah’s fingers.
    Otah went on as long as he could before his memory failed him, and then he began to invent.

BOOK FOUR: THE PRICE OF SPRING

PROLOGUE
    E iah Machi, physician and daughter of the Emperor, pressed her fingers gently on the woman’s belly. The swollen flesh was tight, veins marbling the skin blue within brown. The woman appeared for all the world to be in the seventh month of a pregnancy. She was not.
    ‘It’s because my mother’s father was a Westlander,’ the woman on the table said. ‘I’m a quarter Westlander, so when it came, it didn’t affect me like it did other girls. Even at the time, I wasn’t as sick as everyone else. You can’t tell because I have my father’s eyes, but my mother’s were paler and almost round.’
    Eiah nodded, running practiced fingertips across the flesh, feeling where the skin was hot and where it was cool. She took the woman’s hand, bending it gently at the wrist to see how tight her tendons were. She reached inside the woman’s sex, probing where only lovers had gone before. The man who stood at his wife’s side looked uncomfortable, but Eiah ignored him. He was likely the least important person in the room.
    ‘Eiah-cha,’ Parit, the regular physician, said, ‘if there is anything I can do . . .’
    Eiah took a pose that both thanked and refused. Parit bowed slightly.
    ‘I was very young, too,’ the