Shadow and Betrayal

who he was, by doing what he’d done. He thought of the boy he had been, marching away from the school across the western snows. He remembered his fear and the warmth of his rage at the poets and his parents and all in the world that treated boys so unfairly. What a pompous little ass he’d been, young and certain and alone. He should have taken the Daikvo’s offer and become a poet. He might have tried to bind an andat, and maybe failed and paid the price, dying in the attempt. And then Kiyan would never have met him. She would be safe.
    There’s still a price, he thought, as clear as a voice speaking in his head. You could still pay it.
    Machi was ten days’ walk, perhaps as little as four and a half days’ ride. If he could turn all eyes back to Machi, Kiyan might have at least the chance to escape his idiocy. And what would she matter, if no one need search for him? He could take a horse from the stables now. After all, if he was an upstart and a poisoner and a man turned evil by love, it hardly mattered being a horse thief as well. He closed his eyes, an angry bark of a laugh forcing its way from his throat.
    Everything you have won, you’ve won by leaving, he thought, remembering a woman whom he had known almost well enough to join his life with though he had never loved her, nor she him. Well, Maj, perhaps this time I’ll lose.
     
    The night candle was past its middle mark; the air was filled with the songs of crickets. Somewhere in the course of things, the pale mist of netting had been pulled from the bed, and the room looked exposed without it. Cehmai could feel Stone-Made-Soft in the back of his mind, but the effort of being truly aware of the andat was too much; his body was thick and heavy and content. Focus and rigor would have their place another time.
    Idaan traced her fingertips across his chest, raising gooseflesh. He shivered, took her hand and folded it in his own. She sighed and lay against him. Her hair smelled of roses.
    ‘Why do they call you poets?’ she asked.
    ‘It’s an old Empire term,’ Cehmai said. ‘It’s from the binding.’
    ‘The andat are poems?’ she said. She had the darkest eyes. Like an animal’s. He looked at her mouth. The lips were too full to be fashionable. With the paint worn off, he could see how she narrowed them. He raised his head and kissed them again, gently this time. His own mouth felt bruised from their coupling. And then his head grew too heavy, and he let it rest again.
    ‘They’re . . . like that. Binding one is like describing something perfectly. Understanding it, and expanding it . . . I’m not saying this well. Have you ever translated a letter? Taken something in the Khaiate tongues and tried to say the same thing in Westland or an east island tongue?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I had to take something from the Empire and rewrite it for a tutor once.’
    Cehmai closed his eyes. He could feel sleep pulling at him, but he fought against it a bit. He wasn’t ready to let the moment pass.
    ‘That’s near enough. You had to make choices when you did that. Tilfa could mean take or it could mean give or it could mean exchange - it’s yours to choose, depending on how it’s used in the original document. And so a letter or a poem doesn’t have a set translation. You could have any number of ways that you say the same thing. Binding the andat means describing them - what the thought of them is - so well that you can translate it perfectly into a form that includes will and volition. Like translating a Galtic contract so that all the nuances of the trade are preserved perfectly.’
    ‘But there’s any number of ways to do that,’ she said.
    ‘There are very few ways to do it perfectly. And if a binding goes wrong . . . Existing isn’t normal for them. If you leave an imprecision or an inaccuracy, they escape through it, and the poet pays a price for that. Usually it comes as some particularly gruesome death. And knowing what an andat is can be subtle. Stone-Made-Soft. What do you mean by stone? Iron comes from stone, so is it stone? Sand is made of tiny stones. Is it stone? Bones are like stone. But are they like enough to be called the same name? All those nuances have to be balanced or the binding fails. Happily, the Empire produced some formal grammars that were very precise.’
    ‘And you describe this thing . . .’
    ‘And then you hold that in your mind until you die. Only it’s the kind of thought that can think back, so