Seasons of War

nuances and structures, challenging one another to understand the issues at hand more deeply. Someone - anyone - would find a phrase or a thought that struck sparks, and Vanjit would pull pages from her sleeve and mark down whatever had pushed her one step nearer the edge.
    It was happening less and less often. The binding, Maati knew, was coming near its final form. The certainty in Vanjit’s voice and the angle of her shoulders told him as much about her chances of success as looking over the details of her binding.
    As they ended the evening’s session, reluctant despite yawns and heavy-lidded eyes, Maati realized that the work they were doing was less like his own training before the Dai-kvo and more like the long, arduous hours he had spent with Cehmai. Somehow, during his absence, they had all become equals. Not in knowledge - he was still far and away the best informed - but in status. Where he had once had a body of students, he was working now with a group of novice poets. A lizard scampered along before him and then up the rough wall and into the darkness. A nightingale sang.
    He was exhausted, his body heavy, his mind beginning to spark and slip. And he was also elated. The wide night sky above him seemed rich with promise, the ground he walked upon eager to bear him up.
    His bed, however, didn’t invite sleep. Small pains in his knees and spine prodded him, and his mind failed to calm. The light of the half-moon cast shadows on the walls that seemed to move of their own accord. The restlessness of age, as opposed, he thought with weary amusement, to the restlessness of youth. As he lay there, small doubts began to arise, gnawing at him. Perhaps Vanjit wasn’t ready yet to take on the role of poet. Perhaps he and Eiah in their need and optimism were sending the girl to her death.
    There was no way to know another person’s heart. No way to judge. It might be that Vanjit herself was as afraid of this as he was, but held by her despair and anger and sense of obligation to the others to move forward as if she weren’t.
    Every poet that bound an andat came face-to-face with their own flaws, their own failures. Maati’s first master, Heshai-kvo, had made Seedless the embodiment of his own self-hatred, but that was only one extreme example. Kiai Jut three generations earlier had bound Flatness only to find the andat bent on destroying the family the poet secretly hated. Magar Inarit had famously bound Unwoven only to discover his own shameful desires made manifest in his creation. The work of binding the andat was of such depth and complexity, the poet’s true self was difficult if not impossible to hide within it. And what, he wondered, would Vanjit discover about herself if she succeeded? With all the hours they had spent on the mechanics of the binding, was it not also his responsibility to prepare the girl to face her imperfections?
    His mind worried at the questions like a dog at a bone. As the moon vanished from his window and left him with only the night candle, Maati rose. A walk might work the kinks from his muscles.
    The school was a different place at night. The ravages of war and time were less obvious, the shapes of the looming walls and hallways familiar and prone to stir the ancient memories of the boy Maati had been. Here, for instance, was the rough stone floor of the main hall. He had cleaned these very stones when his hands had been smooth and strong and free from the dark, liver-colored spots. He stood at the place where Milah-kvo had first offered him the black robes. He remembered both the pride of the moment and the sense, hardly noticed at the time, that it was an honor he didn’t wholly deserve.
    ‘Would you have done it differently, Milah-kvo?’ he asked the dead man and the empty air. ‘If you had known what I was going to do, would you still have made the offer?’
    The air said nothing. Maati felt himself smile without knowing precisely why.
    ‘Maati-kvo?’
    He turned. In the dim light of his candle, Eiah seemed like a ghost. Something conjured from his memory. He took a pose of greeting.
    ‘You’re awake,’ she said, falling into step beside him.
    ‘Sometimes sleep abandons old men,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘It’s the way of things. And you? I can’t think you make a practice of wandering the halls in the middle of the night.’
    ‘I’ve just left Vanjit. She sits up after the lecture is done and goes over everything we said. Everything anyone said. I