Shadow and Betrayal

sit more comfortably in my chair, and schemes begin. Your task isn’t only to find Otah. Your task is to protect my city.’
    ‘I understand, most high.’
    ‘You do not, Maati-cha. The spring roses are starting to bloom, and I will not see high summer. Neither of us has the luxury of time.’
     
    The gathering was all that Cehmai had hoped for, and less. Spring breezes washed the pavilion with the scent of fresh flowers. Kilns set along the edges roared behind the music of reed organ, flute, and drum. Overhead, the stars shone like gems strewn on dark velvet. The long months of winter had given musicians time to compose and practice new songs, and the youth of the high families week after weary week to tire of the cold and dark and the terrible constriction that deep winter brought to those with no business to conduct on the snow.
    Cehmai laughed and clapped time with the music and danced. Women and girls caught his eye, and he, theirs. The heat of youth did where heavier robes would otherwise have been called for, and the draw of body to body filled the air with something stronger than the perfume of flowers. Even the impending death of the Khai lent an air of license. Momentous things were happening, the world’s order was changing, and they were young enough to find the thought romantic.
    And yet he could not enjoy it.
    A young man in an eagle’s mask pressed a bowl of hot wine into his hand, and spun away into the dance. Cehmai grinned, sipped at it, and faded back to the edge of the pavilion. In the shadows behind the kilns, Stone-Made-Soft stood motionless. Cehmai sat beside it, put the bowl on the grass, and watched the revelry. Two young men had doffed their robes entirely and were sprinting around the wide grounds in nothing but their masks and long scarves trailing from their necks. The andat shifted like the first shudder of a landslide, then was still again. When it spoke, its voice was so soft that they would not be heard by the others.
    ‘It wouldn’t be the first time the Dai-kvo had lied.’
    ‘Or the first time I’d wondered why,’ Cehmai said. ‘It’s his to decide what to say and to whom.’
    ‘And yours?’
    ‘And mine to satisfy my curiosity. You heard what he said to the overseer in the mines. If he truly didn’t want me to know, he would have lied better. Maati-kvo is looking into more than the library, and that’s certain.’
    The andat sighed. Stone-Made-Soft had no more need of breath than did a mountainside. The exhalation could only be a comment. Cehmai felt the subject of their conversation changing even before the andat spoke.
    ‘She’s come.’
    And there, dressed black as rooks and pale as mourning, Idaan Machi moved among the dancers. Her mask hid only part of her face and not her identity. Wrapped as he was by the darkness, she did not see him. Cehmai felt a lightening in his breast as he watched her move through the crowd, greeting friends and looking, he thought, for something or perhaps someone among them. She was not beautiful - well painted, but any number of the girls and women were more nearly perfect. She was not the most graceful, or the best spoken, or any of the hundred things that Cehmai thought of when he tried to explain to himself why this girl should fascinate him. The closest he could come was that she was interesting, and none of the others were.
    ‘It won’t end well,’ the andat murmured.
    ‘It hasn’t begun,’ Cehmai said. ‘How can something end when it hasn’t even started?’
    Stone-Made-Soft sighed again, and Cehmai rose, tugging at his robes to smooth their lines. The music had paused and someone in the crowd laughed long and high.
    ‘Come back when you’ve finished and we’ll carry on our conversation, ’ the andat said.
    Cehmai ignored the patience in its voice and strode forward, back into the light. The reed organ struck a chord just as he reached Idaan’s side. He brushed her arm, and she turned - first annoyed and then surprised and then, he thought, pleased.
    ‘Idaan-cha,’ he said, the exaggerated formality acting as its opposite without taking him quite into the intimacy that the kya suffix would have suggested. ‘I’d almost thought you wouldn’t be joining us.’
    ‘I almost wasn’t,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought you’d be here.’
    The organ set a beat, and the drums picked it up; the dance was beginning again. Cehmai held out a hand and, after a pause that took a thousand years and lasted perhaps a