Seasons of War

boil enough water for a bath. Immersion was the one way he was sure he could chase the cold from his joints, but the effort required seemed worse than enduring the chill. And there was an errand he preferred to complete.
    Light glowed through the cracks around Eiah’s door. Dim and flickering, it was still more than a single night candle would have made. Maati scratched at the door. For a moment, nothing happened. Perhaps Eiah had taken to her cot. Perhaps she was elsewhere in the school. A soft sound, no more than a whisper, drew him back to the door.
    ‘Eiah-kya?’ he said, his voice low. ‘It’s me.’
    Her door opened. Eiah had changed into a simple robe of thick wool, her hair tied back with a length of twine. She looked powerfully like her mother. The room she brought Maati into had once been a storage pantry. Her cot and brazier and a low table were all the furnishings. There was no window, and the air was thick with the heat and smoke from the coals.
    Papers and scrolls lay on the table beside a wax tablet half-whitened by fresh notes. Medical texts in the languages of the Westlands, Eiah’s own earlier drafts of the binding of Wounded. And also, he saw, the completed binding they had all devised for Clarity-of-Sight. Eiah sat on the cot, the frail structure creaking under her. She didn’t look up at him.
    ‘Why did she leave?’ Maati asked. ‘Truth, now.’
    ‘I told her to,’ Eiah said. ‘She was frightened to come back. I told her that I understood. What happens if two poets come into conflict? If one poet has something like Floats-in-Air and the other has something like Sinking?’
    ‘Or one poet can blind, and the other heal injury?’
    ‘As an example,’ Eiah said.
    Maati sighed and lowered himself to sit beside her. The cot complained. He laced his fingers together, looking at the words and diagrams without seeing them.
    ‘I don’t entirely know. It hasn’t happened in my lifetime. It hasn’t happened in generations.’
    ‘But it has happened,’ Eiah said.
    ‘There was the war. The one that ended the Second Empire. That was . . . what, ten generations ago? The andat are flesh because we’ve translated them into flesh, but they are also concepts. Abstractions. It might simply be that the poets’ wills are set against each other’s. A kind of wrestling match mediated through the andat. Whoever has the greater strength of mind and the andat more suited to the struggle gains the upper hand. Or it could be that the concepts of the two andat don’t coincide, and any struggle would have to be expressed physically. In the world we inhabit. Or . . .’
    ‘Or?’
    ‘Or something else could happen. The grammar and meaning in one binding could relate to some structure or nuance in another. Imagine two singers in competition. What if they chose songs that harmonized? What if the words of one song blended with the words of the other, and something new came from it? Songs are a poor metaphor. What are the odds that the words of any two given songs would speak to each other? If the bindings are related in concept, if the ideas are near, it’s much more likely that sort of resonance could happen. By chance.’
    ‘And what would that do?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Maati said. ‘Nobody does. I can say that what was once a land of palm trees and rivers and palaces of sapphire is a killing desert. I can say that people who travel in the ruins of the Old Empire tend to die there. It might be from physical expressions of that old struggle. It might be from some interaction of bindings. There is no way to be sure.’
    Eiah was silent. She turned the pages of her medical books until she reached diagrams Maati recognized. Eyes cut through the center, eyes sliced through the back. He had seen them all thousands of times when Vanjit was preparing herself, and they had seemed like the keepers of great secrets. He hadn’t considered at the time that each image was the result of some actual, physical orb meeting with an investigative blade, or that all the eyes pictured there were sightless.
    He felt Eiah’s sigh as much as heard it.
    ‘What happened out there?’ he asked. ‘The truth, not what you said in front of the others.’
    Eiah leaned forward. For a moment, Maati thought she was weeping, but she straightened again. Her eyes were dry, her jaw set. She had pulled a small box of carved oak from under the cot, and she handed it to him now. He opened it, the leather hinge loose and soft. Six