Shadow and Betrayal

the one who arranged her family’s death.’
    ‘That’s so,’ Cehmai agreed.
    ‘I see. And you were the one who brought that to light?’
    ‘That’s so.’
    Radaani paused, his lips pursed, his fingers knotted around each other.
    ‘Does the Dai-kvo back the upstart, then?’
    ‘No,’ Maati said before Cehmai could speak. ‘We take no side in this. We support the council’s decision, but that doesn’t mean we withhold the truth from the utkhaiem.’
    ‘As Maati-kvo says,’ Cehmai agreed. ‘We are servants here.’
    ‘Servants with the world by its balls,’ Radaani said. ‘It’s easy, Cehmai-cha, to support a position in a side room with no one much around to hear you. It’s a harder thing to say the same words in front of the gods and the court and the world in general. If I take this to the council and you decide that perhaps it wasn’t all quite what you’ve said it was, it will go badly for me.’
    ‘I’ll tell what I know,’ Cehmai said. ‘Whoever asks.’
    ‘Well,’ Radaani said, then more than half to himself, ‘Well well well.’
    In the pause that followed, another roll of thunder rattled the shutters. But Porsha Radaani’s smile had faded into something less amused, more serious. We have him, Maati thought. Radaani clapped his hands on his thighs and stood.
    ‘I have some conversations I’ll have to conduct, Maati-cha,’ he said. ‘You understand that I’m taking a great personal risk doing this? Me and my family both.’
    ‘And I know that Otah-kvo will appreciate that,’ Maati said. ‘In my experience, he has always been good to his friends.’
    ‘That’s best,’ Radaani said. ‘After this, I expect he’ll have about two of them. Just so long as he remembers what he owes me.’
    ‘He will. And so will the Kamau and the Vaunani. And I imagine a fair number of your rival families will be getting less favorable terms from the Galts in the future.’
    ‘Yes. That had occurred to me too.’
    Radaani smiled broadly and took a formal pose of leave-taking that included the room and all three of them in it - the two poets, the one spirit. When he was gone, Maati went to the window again. Radaani was walking fast down the street, his servants half-skipping to keep the canopy over him. His limp was almost gone.
    Maati closed the shutters.
    ‘He’s agreed?’ Cehmai asked.
    ‘As near as we can expect. He smells profit in it for himself and disappointment for his rivals. That’s the best we can offer, but I think he’s pleased enough to do the thing.’
    ‘That’s good.’
    Maati sat in the chair Radaani had used, sighing. Cehmai leaned against the table, his arms folded. His mouth was thin, his eyes dark. He looked more than half ill. The andat pulled out the chair beside him and sat with a mild, companionable expression.
    ‘What did the Dai-kvo say?’ Cehmai asked. ‘In the letter?’
    ‘He said I was under no circumstances to take sides in the succession. He repeated that I was to return to his village as soon as possible. He seems to think that by involving myself in all this court intrigue, I may be upsetting the utkhaiem. And then he went into a long commentary about the andat being used in political struggle as the reason that the Empire ate itself.’
    ‘He’s not wrong,’ Cehmai said.
    ‘Well, perhaps not. But it’s late to undo it.’
    ‘You can blame me if you’d like,’ Cehmai said.
    ‘I think not. I chose what I’d do, and I don’t think I chose poorly. If the Dai-kvo disagrees, we can have a conversation about it.’
    ‘He’ll throw you out,’ Cehmai said.
    Maati thought for a moment of his little cell at the village, of the years spent in minor tasks at the will of the Dai-kvo and the poets senior to himself. Liat had asked him to leave it all a hundred times, and he’d refused. The prospect of failure and disgrace faced him now, and he heard her words, saw her face, and wondered why it had all seemed so wrong when she’d said it and so clear now. Age perhaps. Experience. Some tiny sliver of wisdom that told him that in the balance between the world and a woman, either answer could be right.
    ‘I’m sorry for all this, Cehmai. About Idaan. I know how hard this is for you.’
    ‘She picked it. No one made her plot against her family.’
    ‘But you love her.’
    The young poet frowned now, then shrugged.
    ‘Less now than I did two days ago,’ he said. ‘Ask again in a month. I’m a poet, after all. There’s only so much room