Shadow and Betrayal

nearer again, not touching, not speaking. There was no chill to the air now. There was no darkness. Cehmai’s senses were as fresh and bright and clear as midday, his mind as focused as the first day he’d controlled the andat. Idaan took his hand and slowly, deliberately, drew it through the folds of her robes until it cupped her breast.
    ‘You . . . you have a lover, Idaan-kya. Adrah . . .’
    ‘Do you want me to sleep here tonight?’
    ‘Yes, Idaan. I do.’
    ‘And I want that too.’
    He struggled to think, but his skin felt as though he was basking in some hidden sun. There seemed to be some sound in his ears that he couldn’t place that drove away everything but his fingertips and the cold-stippled flesh beneath them.
    ‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this,’ he said.
    Her lips parted, and she moved half an inch back. His hand pressed against her skin, his eyes were locked on hers. Fear sang through him that she would take another step back, that his fingers would only remember this moment, that this chance would pass. She saw it in his face, she must have, because she smiled, calm and knowing and sure of herself, like something from a dream.
    ‘Do you care?’ she asked.
    ‘No,’ he said, half-surprised at the answer. ‘No, I truly don’t.’
     
    The caravan left the low town before dawn, cartwheels rattling on the old stone paving, oxen snorting white in the cold, and the voices of carters and merchants light with the anticipation of journey’s end. The weeks of travel were past. By midday, they would cross the bridge over the Tidat and enter Machi. The companionship of the road - already somewhat strained by differences in political opinions and some unfortunate words spoken by one of the carters early in the journey - would break apart, and each of them would be about his own business again. Otah walked with his hands in his sleeves and his heart divided between dread and anticipation. Itani Noygu was going to Machi on the business of his house - the satchel of letters at his side proved that. There was nothing he carried with him that would suggest anything else. He had come away from this city as a child so long ago he had only shreds of memory left of it. A scent of musk, a stone corridor, bathing in a copper tub when he was small enough to be lifted with a single hand, a view from the top of one of the towers. Other things as fragmentary, as fleeting. He could not say which memories were real and which only parts of dreams.
    It was enough, he supposed, to be here now, walking in the darkness. He would go and see it with a man’s eyes. He would see this place that had sent him forth and, despite all his struggles, still had the power to poison the life he’d built for himself. Itani Noygu had made his way as an indentured laborer at the seafronts of Saraykeht, as a translator and fisherman and midwife’s assistant in the east islands, as a sailor on a merchant ship, and as a courier in House Siyanti and all through the cities. He could write and speak in three tongues, play the flute badly, tell jokes well, cook his own meals over a half-dead fire, and comport himself well in any company from the ranks of the utkhaiem to the denizens of the crudest dockhouse. This from a twelve-year-old boy who had named himself, been his own father and mother, formed a life out of little more than the will to do so. Itani Noygu was by any sane standard a success.
    It was Otah Machi who had lost Kiyan’s love.
    The sky in the east lightened to indigo and then royal blue, and Otah could see the road out farther ahead. Between one breath and the next, the oxen came clearer. And the plains before them opened like a vast scroll. Far to the north, mountains towered, looking flat as a painting and blued by the distance. Smoke rose from low towns and mines on the plain, the greener pathway of trees marked the river, and on the horizon, small as fingers, rose the dark towers of Machi, unnatural in the landscape.
    Otah stopped as sunlight lit the distant peaks like a fire. The brilliance crept down and then the distant towers blazed suddenly, and a moment later, the plain flooded with light. Otah caught his breath.
    This is where I started, he thought. I come from here.
    He had to trot to catch back up with the caravan, but the questioning looks were all answered with a grin and a gesture. The enthusiastic courier still naïve enough to be amazed by a sunrise. There was nothing more to it than