Seasons of War

slaughter, and everyone knew it. There was no point in pretending the world was something it wasn’t. Otah took a pose that accepted the advice and promised his best effort.
    In point of fact, Idaan was waiting in his rooms when he returned from his breakfast and the morning of audiences that he could not postpone. She wore a borrowed robe of blue silk as dark as a twilight sky. Her arms and shoulders were thicker than the robe allowed, the fabric straining. Her hair was pulled back in a gray tail as thick as a mane. She did not smile.
    ‘Idaan-cha,’ he said.
    ‘Brother,’ she replied.
    He sat across from her. Her long face was cool and unreadable. She touched the papers and scrolls on the low table between them. The scents of cedar and apples should have made the room more comfortable.
    ‘I’m not done,’ she said. ‘But I doubt a year and ten clerks would be enough to do a truly thorough job. With just the pair of us, and you off half the time at court, we can’t really hope for more than a weighted guess.’
    ‘Then we should get to work,’ he said. ‘I’ll have them bring us food and—’
    ‘Before that,’ Idaan said. ‘Before that, there’s something we should discuss. Alone.’
    Otah considered her eyes. They were the same black-brown as his own. Her jaw was softer, her mouth pale and lined. He could still see the girl she had been, whom he had drawn up from the deepest cells beneath Machi and given freedom where she’d expected slavery or death.
    ‘I’ll send the servants away,’ he said. She took a pose that offered thanks.
    When he returned, she was pacing before the windows, her hands clasped behind her. The soft leather soles of her boots whispered against the wood. The city spread below them, and then the sea.
    ‘I never thought about them,’ she said. ‘The andat? I never gave them half a thought when I was young. Stone-Made-Soft was something halfway between a trained hunting cat and another courtier in a world full of them. But they could destroy everything, couldn’t they? If a poet bound something like Steam or Fog, all that ocean could vanish in a moment, couldn’t it?’
    ‘I suppose,’ Otah agreed.
    ‘I would have controlled it. Stone-Made-Soft, I mean. And Cehmai. If all the things I’d planned had happened as I planned them, I would have had the command of that power.’
    ‘Your husband would have,’ he said. Otah had ordered her husband executed. Adrah Vaunyogi’s body had hung from the ruins of his family’s palace, food for the crows. Idaan smiled.
    ‘My husband,’ she said, her voice warm and amused. ‘Even worse.’
    She shook herself and turned back to the table. Her thick fingers plucked out a clerk’s writing tablet. Otah could see letters carved into the wax.
    ‘I’ve made a list of those people who seem most likely,’ she said. ‘I have a dozen, and I could give you a dozen more if you’d like it. They’ve all traveled extensively in the past four years. They’ve all had expenditures that look suspicious to one degree or another. And as far as I can see, all of them oppose your treaty with the Galts or are closely related to someone who does. And they all have the close connections to the palace that Maati boasted of.’
    Otah held out his hand. Idaan didn’t pass the tablet to him.
    ‘I think about what would have happened if I had been given that kind of power,’ she said. ‘I think of the girl I was back then. And the things I did. Can you imagine what I might have done?’
    ‘It wouldn’t have happened,’ Otah said. ‘Cehmai only answered to you so long as the Dai-kvo told him to. If you had started draining oceans or melting cities, he would have forbidden it.’
    ‘The Dai-kvo is dead, though. Years dead, and almost forgotten.’
    ‘What are you saying, Idaan-cha?’
    She smiled, but her eyes made it sorrow.
    ‘All the restraints we had to keep the poets from doing as they saw fit? They’re gone now. I’m saying you should remember that when you see this list. Remember the stakes we’re playing for.’
    The tablet was heavy in his hand, the dark wax scored with white where she had written on it. He frowned as his finger traced down the names. Then he stopped, and the blood left his face. He understood what Idaan had been saying. She was telling him to be ruthless, to be cold. She meant to steel him against the pain of what he might have to sacrifice.
    ‘My daughter’s name is on this list,’ he said, keeping his