Seasons of War

shoulder, to offer some comfort, however powerless, moved through Maati and faded. He sat still and quiet as the chant rose, the anguish in the singer’s voice growing until the air of the teahouse hummed with it, and then it faded into despair. The man with the lacquer box came past again, but Maati didn’t put in any copper this time.
    ‘You and Mother. You’re lovers again?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ Maati said, surprised to feel a blush in his cheeks. ‘It happens sometimes.’
    ‘What happens when you’re called away to the Dai-kvo?’
    ‘Are we walking the same path a second time, you mean? We’re waiting to hear two things from the Dai-kvo - whether he thinks my speculations about avoiding the price of a failed binding are worth looking into and whether to act against Galt. Either one puts me someplace away from Liat. But we aren’t who we were then. I don’t pretend that we can be. And anyway, I have all the habits of being without her. I’ve missed her for more years than I spent in her company.’
    I have missed you, he thought but didn’t say. I have missed you, and it’s too late now for anything more than awkward conversations and late nights getting drunk together. Nothing will ever make that right.
    ‘Do you regret that?’ Nayiit asked. ‘If you could go back and do things again, would you want to love her less? Would you want to have gone to the Dai-kvo and been able to leave that . . . that longing behind you?’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    Nayiit looked up.
    ‘I would hate her, if I were you. I would think she’d taken my chance to be what I was supposed to be, to do what I could have done. There you were, a poet, and favored enough that you were expected to hold the andat, and because of her you fell into disfavor. Because of her, and because of me.’ Nayiit’s jaw clenched, his eyes only a half shade darker than the pale brown of his mother’s staring at something that wasn’t there, his attention turned inward. ‘I don’t know how you stand the sight of us.’
    ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Maati said. ‘It was never like that. If it were all mine again, I would have followed her.’
    The words struck the boy hard. His gaze lost its focus; his mouth tightened like that of a man in pain.
    ‘What is it, Nayiit-kya?’
    Nayiit seemed to snap back to the room, an embarrassed grin on his face. He took a pose of apology, but Maati shook his head.
    ‘Something’s bothering you,’ Maati said.
    ‘It’s nothing. I’ve only . . . It’s not worth talking about.’
    ‘Something’s bothering you, son.’
    He had never said the word aloud. Son . Nayiit had never heard it from his lips, not since he’d been too young for it to mean anything. Maati felt his heart leap and race like a startled deer, and he saw the shock on the boy’s face. This was the moment, then, that he’d feared and longed for. He waited to hear what Nayiit would say. Maati dreaded the polite deflection, the retreat back into the roles of a pair of strangers in a tearoom, the way a man falling from a cliff might dread the ground.
    Nayiit opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, almost too low to hear over the music and the crowd, ‘I’m trying to choose between what I am and what I want to be. I’m trying to want what I’m supposed to want. And I’m failing.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘I want to be a good man, Father. I want to love my wife and my son. I want to want them. And I don’t. I don’t know whether to walk away from them or from myself. I thought you had made that decision, but . . .’
    Maati settled back on the bench, put down his bowl still half full of wine, and took Nayiit’s hand in his own. Father. Nayiit had said Father .
    ‘Tell me,’ Maati said. ‘Tell me all of it.’
    ‘It would take all night,’ the boy said with a rueful chuckle. But he didn’t pull back his hand.
    ‘Let it,’ Maati said. ‘There’s nothing more important than this.’
     
    Balasar hadn’t slept. The night had come, a late rain shower filling the air with the scent of water and murmur of distant thunder, and he had lain in his bed, willing himself to a forgetfulness that wouldn’t come.
    The orders waited in stacks on his desk in the library, commands to be issued to each of his captains, outlining the first stage of his campaign. There were two sets, of course, just as the Khaiate mercenary captain had surmised. Those he’d sealed in green would lead the army to the North, laying waste to