Shadow and Betrayal

is married there, and my brother is a decent man. They’ll treat me well while I make arrangements for my own apartments.’
    ‘It isn’t fair,’ Idaan said. ‘They shouldn’t force you out like this. You belong here.’
    ‘It’s tradition,’ Hiami said with a pose of surrender. ‘Fairness has nothing to do with it. My husband is dead. I will return to my father’s house, whoever’s actually sitting in his chair these days.’
    ‘If you were a merchant, no one would require anything like that of you. You could go where you pleased, and do what you wanted.’
    ‘True, but I’m not, am I? I was born to the utkhaiem. You were born to a Khai.’
    ‘And women,’ Idaan said. Hiami was surprised by the venom in the word. ‘We were born women, so we’ll never even have the freedoms our brothers do.’
    Hiami laughed. She couldn’t help herself, it was all so ridiculous. She took her once-sister’s hand and leaned forward until their foreheads almost touched. Idaan’s tear-red eyes shifted to meet her gaze.
    ‘I don’t think the men in our families consider themselves unconstrained by history,’ she said, and Idaan’s expression twisted with chagrin.
    ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that . . . Gods . . . I’m sorry, Hiami-kya. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry . . .’
    Hiami opened her arms, and the girl fell into them, weeping. Hiami rocked her slowly, cooing into her ear and stroking her hair as if she were comforting a babe. And as she did, she looked around the gardens. This would be the last time she saw them. Thin tendrils of green were rising from the soil. The trees were bare, but their bark had an undertone of green. Soon it would be warm enough to turn on the fountains.
    She felt her sorrow settle deep, an almost physical sensation. She understood the tears of the young that were even now soaking her robes at the shoulder. She would come to understand the tears of age in time. They would be keeping her company. There was no need to hurry.
    At length, Idaan’s sobs grew shallower and less frequent. The girl pulled back, smiling sheepishly and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
    ‘I hadn’t thought it would be this bad,’ Idaan said softly. ‘I knew it would be hard, but this is . . . How did they do it?’
    ‘Who, dear?’
    ‘All of them. All through the generations. How did they bring themselves to kill each other?’
    ‘I think,’ Hiami said, her words seeming to come from the new sorrow within her and not from the self she had known, ‘that in order to become one of the Khaiem, you have to stop being able to love. So perhaps Biitrah’s tragedy isn’t the worst that could have happened.’
    Idaan hadn’t followed the thought. She took a pose of query.
    ‘Winning this game may be worse than losing it, at least for the sort of man he was. He loved the world too much. Seeing that love taken from him would have been bad. Seeing him carry the deaths of his brothers with him . . . and he wouldn’t have been able to go slogging through the mines. He would have hated that. He would have been a very poor Khai Machi.’
    ‘I don’t think I love the world that way,’ Idaan said.
    ‘You don’t, Idaan-kya,’ Hiami said. ‘And just now I don’t either. But I will try to. I will try to love things the way he did.’
    They sat a while longer, speaking of things less treacherous. In the end, they parted as if it were just another absence before them, as if there would be another meeting on another day. A more appropriate farewell would have ended with them both in tears again.
    The leave-taking ceremony before the Khai was more formal, but the emptiness of it kept it from unbalancing her composure. He sent her back to her family with gifts and letters of gratitude, and assured her that she would always have a place in his heart so long as it beat. Only when he enjoined her not to think ill of her fallen husband for his weakness did her sorrow threaten to shift to rage, but she held it down. They were only words, spoken at all such events. They were no more about Biitrah than the protestations of loyalty she now recited were about this hollow-hearted man in his black lacquer seat.
    After the ceremony, she went around the palaces, conducting more personal farewells with the people whom she’d come to know and care for in Machi, and just as dark fell, she even slipped out into the streets of the city to press a few lengths of silver or small jewelry into