Seasons of War

cities by hardship. It wasn’t an implausible tale. There were many for whom it was true. And while it couldn’t be totally hidden, she didn’t want to be widely known as her father’s daughter. Not here. Not yet.
    On a morning near the end of her second month in the city - two weeks after Candles Night - the object of her hunt finally appeared. She was in her rooms, working on a guide to the treatment of fevers in older patients. The fire was snapping and murmuring in the grate and a thin, cold rain tapped at the shutters like a hundred polite mice asking permission to enter. The scratch at the door startled her. She arranged her robe and opened the door just as the slave outside it was raising her hand to scratch again.
    ‘Eiah-cha,’ the girl said, falling into a pose that was equal parts apology and greeting. ‘Forgive me, but there’s a man . . . he says he has to speak with you. He has a message.’
    ‘From whom?’ Eiah demanded.
    ‘He wouldn’t say, Most High,’ the slave said. ‘He said he could speak only with you.’
    Eiah considered the girl. She was little more than sixteen summers. One of the youngest in the cities of the Khaiem. One of the last.
    ‘Bring him,’ Eiah said. The girl made a brief pose that acknowledged the command and fled back out into the damp night. Eiah shuddered and went to add more coal to the fire. She didn’t close the door.
    The runner was a young man, broad across the shoulder. Twenty summers, perhaps. His hair was soaked and sticking to his forehead. His robe hung heavily from his shoulders, sodden with the rain.
    ‘Eiah-cha,’ he said. ‘Parit-cha sent me. He’s at his workroom. He said he has something and that you should come. Quickly.’
    She caught her breath, the first movements of excitement lighting her nerves. The other times one or another of the physicians and healers and herb women of the city had sent word, it had been with no sense of urgency. A man ill one day was very likely to be ill the next as well. This, then, was something different.
    ‘What is it?’ she asked.
    The runner took an apologetic pose. Eiah waved it away and called for a servant. She needed a thick robe. And a litter; she wasn’t waiting for the firekeeper. And now, she needed them now. The Emperor’s daughter got what she wanted, and she got it quickly. She and the boy were on the streets in less than half a hand, the litter jouncing uncomfortably as they were carried through the drizzle. The runner tried not to seem awed at the palace servants’ fear of Eiah. Eiah tried not to bite her fingernails from anxiety. The streets slid by outside their shelter as Eiah willed the litter bearers to go faster. When they reached Parit’s house, she strode through the courtyard gardens like a general going to war.
    Without speaking, Parit ushered her to the back. It was the same room in which she’d seen the last woman. Parit sent the runner away. There were no servants. There was no one besides the two physicians and a body on the wide slate table, covered by a thick canvas cloth soaked through with blood.
    ‘They brought her to me this morning,’ Parit said. ‘I called for you immediately.’
    ‘Let me see,’ Eiah said.
    Parit pulled back the cloth.
    The woman was perhaps five summers older than Eiah herself, dark-haired and thickly built. She was naked, and Eiah saw the wounds that covered her body: belly, breasts, arms, legs. A hundred stab wounds. The woman’s skin was unnaturally pale. She’d bled to death. Eiah felt no revulsion, no outrage. Her mind fell into the patterns she had cultivated all her life. This was only death, only violence. This was where she was most at home.
    ‘Someone wasn’t happy with her,’ Eiah said. ‘Was she a soft-quarter whore?’
    Parit startled, his hands almost taking a pose of query. Eiah shrugged.
    ‘That many knife wounds,’ she said, ‘aren’t meant only to kill. Three or four would suffice. And the spacing of them isn’t what I’ve seen when the killer had simply lost control. Someone was sending a message.’
    ‘She wasn’t stabbed,’ Parit said. He took a cloth from his sleeve and tossed it to her. Eiah turned back to the corpse, wiping the blood away from a wound in the dead woman’s side. The smear of gore thinned. The nature of the wound became clear.
    It was a mouth. Tiny rosebud lips, slack as sleep. Eiah told her hand to move, but for a long moment her flesh refused her. Then, her breath shallow, she cleaned