Seasons of War

she was singing her andat into the world. He clenched his fists and stayed quiet. Eiah seemed to have stopped breathing.
    The sound of Vanjit’s voice filled the air, reverberating as if the building had grown huge. The chant began to echo, and Vanjit’s actual voice receded. Words and phrases combined, voice against echo, making new sentences and meanings. The lilt of the girl’s voice fell into harmony with itself, and Maati heard a third voice, neither Vanjit nor her echo, but something deep and sonorous as a bell. It was reciting syllables borrowed from the words of the binding, creating another layer of sound and intention. The air thickened, and Vanjit’s back - her shoulders hunched, her head bowed - seemed very far away. Maati smelled hot iron, or perhaps blood. His heart began to race with a fear he couldn’t express.
    Something’s wrong. We have to stop her ; he said to Eiah, but though he could feel the words vibrate in his throat, he couldn’t hear them. Vanjit’s circling voice had made a kind of silence that Maati was powerless to break. Another layer of echoes came, the words seeming to come before Vanjit spoke them, echoing from the other direction in time. Beside him, Eiah’s face had gone white.
    Vanjit’s voice spoke a single word - the last of the binding - at the same time as all the layered echoes, a dozen voices speaking as one. The world itself chimed, pandemonium resolving into a single harmonious chord. The room was only a room again. When Maati stood, he could hear the hem of his robe whispering against the stone. Vanjit sat where she had been, her head bowed. No new form stood before her. It should have been there.
    She’s failed, Maati thought. It hasn’t worked, and she’s paid the price of it.
    The others were on their feet, but he took a pose that commanded them to remain where they were. This was his. However bad it was, it was his. His belly twisted as he walked toward her corpse. He had seen the price a failed binding exacted: always different, always fatal. And yet Vanjit’s ribs rose and fell, still breathing.
    ‘Vanjit-kya?’ he said, his voice no more than a murmur.
    The girl shifted, turned her head, and looked up at him. Her eyes were bright with joy. In her lap, something squirmed. Maati saw the round, soft flesh, the tubby, half-formed hands and feet, a toothless mouth, and black eyes full of empty rage. Except for the eyes, it could have been a human baby.
    ‘He’s come,’ Vanjit said. ‘Look, Maati-kvo. We’ve done it. He’s here.’
    As if freed from silence by the poet’s words, Clarity-of-Sight opened its tiny throat and wailed.

11
Kiyan-kya—
I look at how long I carried the world, or thought I did, and I wonder how many times we have to learn the same lessons. Until we remember them, I suppose. It isn’t that I’ve stopped worrying. The gods all know I crawl into my bed at night half-tempted to call for reports from Sinja and Danat and Ashua. Even if I had them dragged into my chambers to recount everything they’d seen and done, how would it change things? Would I need less sleep? Would I be able to remake the world through raw will like a poet? I’m only a man, however fancy the robes they put me in. I’m not more suited to lead a war fleet or root out a conspiracy or win a young girl’s love than any of them.
Why is it so hard for me to believe that someone besides myself might be competent? Or did I fear that letting go of any one part would mean everything would fall away?
No, love. Idaan was right. I have been punishing myself all this time for not saving the people I cared for most. I think some nights that I will never stop mourning you.
    Otah’s pen hung in the cool night air, the brass nib just above the paper. The night breeze smelled of the sea and the city, rich and heavy as an overripe grape whose skin has only just split. In Machi, they would already be moving down to the tunnels beneath the city. In Utani, where his central palace stood wrapped in cloth, awaiting his return, the leaves would have turned to red and yellow and gold. In Pathai, where Eiah worked with her latest pet physician and pointedly ignored all matters of politics and power, there might be frost in the mornings.
    Here in Saraykeht, the change of seasons was only a difference of scent and the surprise that the sun, which had so plagued them at summer’s height, could grow tired so early. He wrote a few more sentences, the pen sounding like bird’s