Shadow and Betrayal

his sympathy. He was graceful as an actor - his poses inhumanly smooth and precise.
    Biitrah would have been a terrible Khai Machi, she thought. He would never have put in enough practice to hold himself that well.
    And the tears she had suffered through the last days remembered her. Her once-father’s hand trembled as if uneased by the presence of genuine feeling. He leaned back into his black lacquer seat and motioned for a servant to bring him a bowl of tea. At the front of the temple, the priest chanted on.
    When the last word was sung, the last chime struck, bearers came and lifted her husband’s body. The slow procession began, moving through the streets to the pealing of hand bells and the wailing of flutes. In the central square, the pyre was ready - great logs of pine stinking of oil and within them a bed of hard, hot-burning coal from the mines. Biitrah was lifted onto it and a shroud of tight metal links placed over him to hide the sight when his skin peeled from his noble bones. It was her place now to step forward and begin the conflagration. She moved slowly. All eyes were on her, and she knew what they were thinking. Poor woman, to have been left alone. Shallow sympathies that would have been extended as readily to the wives of the Khai Machi’s other sons, had their men been under the metal blanket. And in those voices she heard also the excitement, dread, and anticipation that these bloody paroxysms carried. When the empty, insincere words of comfort were said, in the same breath they would move on to speculations. Both of Biitrah’s brothers had vanished. Danat, it was said, had gone to the mountains where he had a secret force at the ready, or to Lachi in the south to gather allies, or to ruined Saraykeht to hire mercenaries, or to the Dai-kvo to seek the aid of the poets and the andat. Or he was in the temple, gathering his strength, or he was cowering in the basement of a low-town comfort house, too afraid to come to the streets. And every story they told of him, they also told of Kaiin.
    It had begun. At long last, after years of waiting, one of the men who might one day be Khai Machi had made his move. The city waited for the drama to unfold. This pyre was only the opening for them, the first notes of some new song that would make this seem to be about something honorable, comprehensible, and right.
    Hiami took a pose of thanks and accepted a lit torch from the firekeeper. She stepped to the oil-soaked wood. A dove fluttered past her, landed briefly on her husband’s chest, and then flew away again. She felt herself smile to see it go. She touched the flame to the small kindling and stepped back as the fire took. She waited there as long as tradition required and then went back to the Second Palace. Let the others watch the ashes. Their song might be starting, but hers here had ended.
    Her servant girl was waiting for her at the entrance of the palace’s great hall. She held a pose of welcome that suggested there was some news waiting for her. Hiami was tempted to ignore the nuance, to walk through to her chambers and her fire and bed and the knotwork scarf that was now nearly finished. But there were tear-streaks on the girl’s cheeks, and who was Hiami, after all, to treat a suffering child unkindly? She stopped and took a pose that accepted the welcome before shifting to one of query.
    ‘Idaan Machi,’ the servant girl said. ‘She is waiting for you in the summer garden.’
    Hiami shifted to a pose of thanks, straightened her sleeves, and walked quietly down the palace halls. The sliding stone doors to the garden were open, a breeze too cold to be comfortable moving through the hall. And there, by an empty fountain surrounded by bare-limbed cherry trees, sat her once-sister. If her formal robes were not the pale of mourning, her countenance contradicted them: reddened eyes, paint and powder washed away. She was a plain enough woman without them, and Hiami felt sorry for her. It was one thing to expect the violence. It was another to see it done.
    She stepped forward, her hands in a pose of greeting. Idaan started to her feet as if she’d been caught doing something illicit, but then she took an answering pose. Hiami sat on the fountain’s stone lip, and Idaan lowered herself, sitting on the ground at her feet as a child might.
    ‘Your things are packed,’ Idaan said.
    ‘Yes. I’ll leave tomorrow. It’s weeks to Tan-Sadar. It won’t be so hard, I think. One of my daughters