Shadow and Betrayal

always worked fairly well for me. You could be Sian Noygu. Your mother and father were merchants in . . . well, call it Udun. You don’t want people thinking about Machi if you can help it. They died in a plague. Or a fire. Or bandits killed them. It isn’t as if you don’t know how to lie. Invent something.’
    Idaan stood, something like hope in her heart. To leave this hole. To leave this city and this life. To become someone else. She hadn’t understood how weary and exhausted she had become until this moment. She had thought the cell was her prison.
    The soldier looked at her with perfectly empty eyes. She might have been a cow or a large stone he’d been set to move. Otah levered himself back to standing.
    ‘You can’t mean this,’ Idaan said, her voice hardly a whisper. ‘I killed Danat. I as much as killed our father,’
    ‘I didn’t know them,’ her brother said. ‘I certainly didn’t love them.’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘All the worse for you, then.’
    She looked into his eyes for the first time. There was a pain in them that she couldn’t fathom.
    ‘I tried to kill you.’
    ‘You won’t do it again. I’ve killed and lived with it. I’ve been given mercy I didn’t deserve. Sometimes that I didn’t want. So you see, we may not be all that different, sister.’ He went silent for a moment, then, ‘Of course if you come back, or I find you conspiring against me—’
    ‘I wouldn’t come back here if they begged me,’ she said. ‘This city is ashes to me.’
    Her brother smiled and nodded as much to himself as to her.
    ‘Sinja?’ he said.
    The soldier tossed the bundle to her. It was a leather traveler’s cloak lined with wool and thick silk robes and leggings wrapped around heavy boots. She was appalled at how heavy they were, at how weak she’d become. Her brother ducked out of the room, leaving only the two of them. The soldier nodded to the robes in her arms.
    ‘Best change into those quickly, Idaan-cha,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a sledge and team waiting, but it’s an unpleasant winter out there, and I want to make the first low town before dark.’
    ‘This is madness,’ she said.
    The soldier took a pose of agreement.
    ‘He’s making quite a few bad decisions,’ he said. ‘He’s new at this, though. He’ll get better.’
    Idaan stripped under the soldier’s impassive gaze and pulled on the robes and the leggings, the cloak, the boots. She stepped out of her cell with the feeling of having shed her skin. She didn’t understand how much those walls had become everything to her until she stepped out the last door and into the blasting cold and limitless white. For a moment, it was too much. The world was too huge and too open, and she was too small to survive even the sight of it. She wasn’t conscious of shrinking back from it until the soldier touched her arm.
    ‘The sledge is this way,’ he said.
    Idaan stumbled, her boots new and awkward, her legs unaccustomed to the slick ice on the snow. But she followed.

    The chains were frozen to the tower, the lifting mechanism brittle with cold. The only way was to walk, but Otah found he was much stronger than he had been when they’d marched him up the tower before, and the effort of it kept him warm. The air was bitterly cold; there weren’t enough braziers in the city to keep the towers heated in winter. The floors he passed were filled with crates of food, bins of grains and dried fruits, smoked fish and meats. Supplies for the months until summer came again, and the city could forget for a while what the winter had been.
    Back in the palaces, Kiyan was waiting for him. And Maati. They were to meet and talk over the strategies for searching the library. And other things, he supposed. And there was a petition from the silversmiths to reduce the tax paid to the city on work that was sold in the nearby low towns. And the head of the Saya wanted to discuss a proper match for his daughter, with the strong and awkward implication that the Khai Machi might want to consider who his second wife might be. But for now, all the voices were gone, even the ones he loved, and the solitude was sweet.
    He stopped a little under two-thirds of the way to the top, his legs aching but his face warm. He wrestled open the inner sky doors and then unlatched and pushed open the outer. The city was splayed out beneath him, dark stone peeking out from under the snow, plumes of smoke rising as always from the forges. To the south, a hundred