Seasons of War

darling chipmunk. Seriously, Papa. “Darling chipmunk.”’
    ‘It might be a Galtic endearment,’ he said, trying to match his son’s light tone.
    Danat waved the thought away. It would be no more dignified, Otah admitted to himself, because a whole culture said it. Danat went on.
    ‘I said that my business wasn’t with him, but with Ana-cha. He began declaiming something in rhymed verse about him and his love being one flesh. Ana-cha told him to stop, but he only started bellowing it.’
    ‘How did Ana-cha react?’
    Danat’s grin widened. Blood had pinked his teeth.
    ‘She seemed a bit embarrassed. I began speaking to her as if he weren’t there. And . . .’
    Danat shrugged.
    ‘He hit you?’
    ‘I may have goaded him,’ Danat said. ‘A little.’
    Otah sat back, stunned. Danat raised his hands to a pose appropriate to the announcement of victory in a game. Otah let himself smile too, but there was a touch of melancholy behind it. His son was no longer the ill, fragile child he’d known. That boy was gone. In his place was a young man with the same instinct to rough-and-tumble as any number of young men. The same as Otah had suffered once himself. It was so easy to forget.
    ‘I had the palace armsmen throw him in a cell,’ Danat said. ‘I’ve set a guard on him in case anyone decides to defend my abused dignity by killing him.’
    ‘Yes, that would complicate things,’ Otah agreed.
    ‘Ana followed the whole way shrieking, but she was as angry at Hanchat-cha as at me. Once I get to looking a bit less like an apprentice showfighter’s first night, I’m sending an invitation to Ana-cha for a formal dinner at which we can further discuss her poor treatment of our hospitality. And then I’m going to meet my new lover.’
    ‘Your new lover?’
    ‘Shija Radaani has offered to play the role. I think she was flattered to be asked. Issandra-cha is adamant that nothing makes a man worth having like another woman smiling at him.’
    ‘Issandra-cha is a dangerous woman,’ Otah said.
    ‘She is,’ Danat agreed.
    They laughed together for a moment. Otah was the first to sober.
    ‘Will it work, do you think?’ he asked. ‘Can it be done?’
    ‘Can I win Ana’s heart and make her want what she’s professed before everyone of power in two empires that she hates?’ Danat said. Saying it that way, he sounded like his mother. ‘I don’t know. And I can’t say what I feel about the way it’s happening. I’m plotting against her. Her own mother is plotting against her. I feel that I ought to disapprove. That it isn’t honest. And yet . . .’
    Danat shook his head. Otah took a querying pose.
    ‘I’m enjoying myself,’ Danat said. ‘Whatever it says of me, I’ve been struck bloody by a Galt boy, and I feel I’ve scored a point in some game.’
    ‘It’s an important game.’
    Danat rose. He took a pose that promised his best effort, appropriate to a junior competitor to his teacher, and left.
    There had to be some way that he could aid in Danat’s task, but for the moment, he couldn’t think what it might be. Perhaps if there was a way to arrange some sort of isolation for the two. A journey, perhaps, to Yalakeht. Or, no, there was the conspiracy with Obar State there that still hadn’t been rooted out. Well, Cetani, then. Something long and arduous and cold by the time they got there. And without the bastard who’d struck his son . . .
    Otah finished his fish and rice, lingering over a last bowl of wine and looking out at the small garden. It was, he thought, the size of the walled yard at the wayhouse Kiyan had owned before she became his first and only wife and he became the Khai Machi. That little space of green and white, of finches in the branches and voles scuttling in the low grass, might have been the size of his life.
    Until the Galts came and slaughtered them all with the rest of Udun.
    And instead, he had the world, or most of it. And a son. And, however little she liked it, a daughter. And Kiyan’s ashes and his memory of her. But it had been a pretty little garden.
    Otah returned to the waiting supplicants with his mind moving in ten different directions at once. He did his best to focus on the work before him, but everything seemed trivial. No matter that men’s fortunes lay in his decision. No matter that he was the final appeal for justice, or if not that, at least peace. Or mercy. Justice and peace and mercy all seemed insignificant when held next to duty. His duty