Shadow and Betrayal

once someone had taken her to task, had treated her as if her actions had the same weight as other people’s, things would have ended differently.
    Or perhaps folly is folly because you can’t see where it moves from ambition into evil. Arguments that seem solid and powerful prove hollow once it’s too late to turn back. Arguments like Why should it be right for them but wrong for me?
    She haunted the Second Palace now, breathing in the emptiness that her eldest brother had left. The vaulted arches of stone and wood echoed her soft footsteps, and the sunlight that filtered though the stone shutters thickened the air to a golden twilight. Here was the bedchamber, bare even of the mattress he and his wife had slept upon. There, the workshop where he had labored on his enthusiasms, keeping engineers by his side sometimes late into the night or on into morning. The tables were empty now. Dust lay thick on them, ignored even by the servants until the time came for some new child of the Khaiem to take residence . . . to live in this opulence and keep his ear pricked for the sound of his brother’s hunting dogs.
    She heard Adrah coming long before he stepped into the room. She recognized his gait by the sound of it, and didn’t call. He was clever, she thought bitterly; if he wanted to find her, he could puzzle it out. Adrah Vaunyogi, bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, father of her children if all went well. Whatever well meant anymore.
    ‘There you are,’ Adrah said. She could see his anger in the way he held his body.
    ‘What have I done this time?’ she demanded, her tone carrying a sarcasm that dismissed his concerns even before he spoke them. ‘Did your patrons want me to wear red on a day I chose yellow?’
    The mention of his backers, even as obliquely as that, made him stiffen and peer around, looking for slaves or servants who might overhear. Idaan laughed - a cruel, short sound.
    ‘You look like a kitten with a bell on its tail,’ she said. ‘There’s no one here but us. You needn’t worry that someone will roll the rock off our little conspiracy. We’re as safe here as anywhere.’
    Adrah strode over and crouched beside her all the same. He smelled of crushed violets and sage, and it struck Idaan that it had not been so long ago that the scent would have warmed her heart and brought a flush to her cheeks. His face was long and pretty - almost too pretty to be a man’s. She had kissed those lips a thousand times, but now it seemed like the act of another woman - some entirely different Idaan Machi whose body and memory she had inherited when the first girl died. She smiled and raised her hands in a pose of formal query.
    ‘Are you mad?’ Adrah demanded. ‘Don’t speak about them. Not ever. If we’re found out . . .’
    ‘Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry,’ Idaan said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
    ‘There are rumors you spent a day with Cehmai and the andat. You were seen.’
    ‘The rumors are true, and I meant to be seen. I can’t see how my having a close relationship to the poet would hurt the cause, and in fact I think it will help, don’t you? When the time comes that half the houses of the utkhaiem are vying for my father’s chair, an upstart house like yours would do well to boast a friendship with Cehmai.’
    ‘I think being married to a daughter of the Khai will be quite enough, thank you,’ Adrah said, ‘and your brothers aren’t dead yet, in case you’d forgotten.’
    ‘No. I remember.’
    ‘I don’t want you acting strangely. Things are too delicate just now for you to start attracting attention. You are my lover, and if you are off half the time drinking rice wine with the poet, people won’t be saying that I have strong friendship with him. They’ll be saying that he’s cuckolding me, and that Vaunyogi is the wrong house to draw a new Khai from.’
    ‘So you don’t want me seeing him, or you just want more discretion when I do?’ Idaan asked.
    That stopped him. His eyes, deep brown with flecks of red and green, peered into hers. A sudden memory, powerful as illness, swept over her of a winter night when they had met in the tunnels. He had gazed at her then by firelight, had been no further from her than he was now. She wondered how these could be those same eyes. Her hand rose as if by itself and stroked his cheek. He folded his hands around hers.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ashamed of the catch in her voice. ‘I don’t want to quarrel with