Shadow and Betrayal

you.’
    ‘What are you doing, little one?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you see how dangerous this is that we’re doing? Everything rests on it.’
    ‘I know. I remember the stories. It’s strange, don’t you think, that my brothers can slaughter each other and all the people do is applaud, but if I take a hand, it’s a crime worse than anything.’
    ‘You’re a woman,’ he said, as if that explained everything.
    ‘And you,’ she said calmly, almost lovingly, ‘are a schemer and an agent of the Galts. So perhaps we deserve each other.’
    She felt him stiffen and then force the tension away. His smile was crooked. She felt something warm in her breast - painful and sad and warm as the first sip of rum on a midwinter night. She wondered if it might be hatred, and if it were, whether it was for herself or this man before her.
    ‘It’s going to be fine,’ he said.
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I knew it would be hard. It’s the ways it’s hard that surprise me. I don’t know how I should act or who I should be. I don’t know where the normal grief that anyone would feel stops or turns into something else.’ She shook her head. ‘This seemed simpler when we were only talking about it.’
    ‘I know, love. It will be simple again, I promise you. It’s only this in the middle that feels complicated.’
    ‘I don’t know how they do it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how they kill one another. I dream about him, you know. I dream that I am walking through the gardens or the palaces and I see him in among a crowd of people.’ Tears came to her eyes unbidden, flowing warm and thick down her cheeks, but her voice, when she continued, was steady and calm as a woman predicting the weather. ‘He’s always happy in the dreams. He’s always forgiven me.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know you loved him.’
    Idaan nodded, but didn’t speak.
    ‘Be strong, love. It will be over soon. It will all be finished very soon.’
    She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, her knuckles darkened where her paints were running, and pulled him close. He seemed to hold back for a moment, then folded against her, his arms around her trembling shoulders. He was warm and the smell of sage and violet was mixed now with his skin - the particular musk of his body that she had treasured once above all other scents. He murmured small comforts into her ears and stroked her hair as she wept.
    ‘Is it too late?’ she asked. ‘Can we stop it, Adrah? Can we take it all back?’
    He kissed her eyes, his lips soft as a girl’s. His voice was calm and implacable and hard as stone. When she heard it, she knew he had been thinking himself down the same pathways and had come to the same place.
    ‘No, love. It’s too late. It was too late as soon as your brother died. We have started, and there’s no ending it now except to win through or die.’
    They stayed still in each other’s embrace. If all went well, she would die an old woman in this man’s arms, or he would die in hers. While their sons killed one another. And there had been a time not half a year ago she’d thought the prize worth winning.
    ‘I should go,’ she murmured. ‘I have to attend to my father. There’s some dignitary just come to the city that I’m to smile at.’
    ‘Have you heard of the others? Kaiin and Danat?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Idaan said. ‘They’ve vanished. Gone to ground.’
    ‘And the other one? Otah?’
    Idaan pulled back, straightening the sleeves of her robes as she spoke.
    ‘Otah’s a story that the utkhaiem tell to make the song more interesting. He’s likely not even alive any longer. Or if he is, he’s wise enough to have no part of this.’
    ‘Are you certain of that?’
    ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But what else can I give you?’
    They spoke little after that. Adrah walked with her through the gardens of the Second Palace and then out to the street. Idaan made her way to her rooms and sent for the slave boy who repainted her face. The sun hadn’t moved the width of two hands together before she strode again though the high palaces, her face cool and perfect as a player’s mask. The formal poses of respect and deference greeted and steadied her. She was Idaan Machi, daughter of the Khai and wife, though none knew it yet, of the man who would take his place. She forced confidence into her spine, and the men and women around her reacted as if it were real. Which, she supposed, meant that it was. And that the