Shadow and Betrayal

look around you. How do you expect me to protect my house? How can I protect Old Mani? And think before you speak, because if you tell me that you’ll be strong and manly and protect me, I swear by all the gods I’ll turn you in myself.’
    ‘No one will find out,’ Otah said.
    She closed her eyes. A tear broke free, tracing a bright line down her cheek. When he leaned close, reaching out to wipe it away, she slapped his hand before it touched her.
    ‘I would almost be willing to take that chance, if it were only me. Not quite, but nearly. It isn’t, though. It’s everyone and everything I’ve worked for.’
    ‘Kiyan-kya, together we could . . .’
    ‘Do nothing. Together we could do nothing, because you are leaving now. And odd as it sounds, I do understand. Why you concealed what you did, why you told me now. And I hope ghosts haunt you and chew out your eyes at night. I hope all the gods there are damn you for making me love you and then doing this to me. Now get out. If you’re here in half a hand’s time, I will call for the guard.’
    Outside the window, a flutter of wings and then the fluting melody of a songbird. The constant distant sound of the river. The scent of pine.
    ‘Do you believe me?’ she asked. ‘That I’ll call the guard on you if you stay?’
    ‘I do,’ he said.
    ‘Then go.’
    ‘I love you.’
    ‘I know you do, ’Tani-kya. Go.’
    House Siyanti had quarters in the city for its people - small rooms hardly large enough for a cot and a brazier, but the blankets were thick and soft, and the kitchens sold meals at half the price a cart on the street would. When the rain came that night, Otah lay in the glow of the coals and listened to the patter of water against leaves mix with the voices from the covered courtyard. Someone was playing a nomad’s harp, and the music was lively and sorrowful at the same time. Sometimes voices would rise up together in song or laughter. He turned Kiyan’s words over in his mind and noticed how empty they made him feel.
    He’d been a fool to tell her, a fool to say anything. If he had only kept his secrets secret, he could have made a life for himself based on lies, and if the brothers he only knew as shadows and moments from a half-recalled childhood had ever discovered him, Kiyan and Old Mani and anyone else unfortunate enough to know him might have been killed without even knowing why.
    Kiyan had not been wrong.
    A gentle murmur of thunder came and went. Otah rose from his cot and walked out. Amiit Foss kept late hours, and Otah found him sitting at a fire grate, poking the crackling flames with a length of iron while he joked over his shoulder with the five men and four women who lounged on cushions and low chairs. He smiled when he saw Otah and called for a bowl of wine for him. The gathering looked so calm and felt so relaxed that only someone in the gentleman’s trade would have recognized it for the business meeting that it was.
    ‘Itani-cha is one of the couriers I mean to send north, if I can pry him away from his love of sloth and comfort,’ Amiit said with a smile. The others greeted him and made him welcome. Otah sat by the fire and listened. There would be nothing said here that he was not permitted to know. Amiit’s introduction had established with the subtlety of a master Otah’s rank and the level of trust to be afforded him, and no one in the room was so thick as to misunderstand him.
    The news from the north was confusing. The two surviving sons of Machi had vanished. Neither had appeared in the other cities of the Khaiem, going to courts and looking for support as tradition would have them do. Nor had the streets of Machi erupted in bloodshed as their bases of power within the city vied for advantage. The best estimates were that the old Khai wouldn’t see another winter, and even some of the houses of the utkhaiem seemed to be preparing to offer up their sons as the new Khai should the succession fail to deliver a single living heir. Something very quiet was happening, and House Siyanti - like everyone else in the world - was aching with curiosity. Otah could hear it in their voices, could see it in the way they held their wine. Even when the conversation shifted to the glassblowers of Cetani and the collapse of the planned summer fair in Amnat-Tan, all minds were drawn toward Machi. He sipped his wine.
    Going north was dangerous. He knew that, and still it didn’t escape him that the Khai Machi dying by inches was