Shadow and Betrayal

settled and calm. ‘If you tell me “how things are” again, I will sell you within that hour. And if you bleed on my floor, you’ll clean it, you shit-licking, wattle-necked, high-town cunt. Do you understand?’
    The first bloom of emotion in her was only surprise, and then confusion, and then anger. He measured her, and she saw the hunger in him, waiting for her answer; the eagerness for her humiliation would have been pathetic - a child whipping dogs - if she hadn’t been on the end of it. She choked on her defiance and her pride. Her mouth felt thick with venom, though it was certainly only blood.
    Bend now , she thought. This is no time to be stubborn. Bend now and live through this.
    Amat Kyaan, chief overseer of House Wilsin, took a pose of gratitude and acceptance. The tears were easy to feign.

4
    ‘I can’t do this,’ Liat said over the splash of flowing water. ‘There’s too much.’
    The washing floor was outside the barracks: a stone platform with an open pipe above it and a drain below. Itani stood naked in the flow, his hair plastered flat, scrubbing his hands and arms with pumice.
    The sun, still likely three or four hands above the horizon, was nonetheless lost behind the buildings of the warehouse district. Now they were in shadow; soon it would be night. Liat on her bench leaned against the ivy-covered wall, plucking at the thick, waxy leaves.
    ‘Amat left everything half-done,’ she went on. ‘The contracts with Old Sanya. How was I to know they hadn’t been returned to him? It isn’t as if she told me to run them there. And the shipments to Obar State weren’t coordinated, so there are going to be three weeks with the third warehouse standing half-empty when it should be full. And every time something goes wrong, Wilsin-cha . . . he doesn’t say anything, but he keeps looking at me as though I might start drooling. I embarrass him.’
    Itani stepped out from the artificial waterfall. His hands and arms were a dirty blue outlined in red where he had rubbed the skin almost raw. All his cohort had spent the day hauling dye to the dye yard, and all of them were marked by the labor. She looked at him in despair. His fingernails, she knew from experience, would look as if they were dirty until the dyes wore off. It might take weeks.
    ‘Has he said anything to you?’ Itani asked, wiping the water off his arms and chest.
    ‘Of course he has. I’m doing Amat’s work and preparing for the audience with the Khai besides.’
    ‘I meant, has he told you that you were doing poorly? Or is it only your own standards that aren’t being met?’
    Liat felt herself flush, but took a pose of query. Itani frowned and pulled on fresh robes. The cloth clung to his legs.
    ‘You mean you think perhaps he wants an incompetent going before the Khai in his name?’ Liat demanded. ‘And why do you imagine he’d wish for that?’
    ‘I mean, is it possible that your expectations of yourself are higher than his? You’ve been put in this position without warning, and without the chance to prepare yourself with Amat-cha. Hold that in mind, and it seems to me you’ve been doing very well. Wilsin-cha knows all that too. If he isn’t telling you you’ve done poorly, perhaps it’s not so bad as it seems.’
    ‘So you think I have an excuse for things going badly,’ Liat said. ‘That’s thin comfort.’
    Itani sighed in resignation as he sat down beside her. His hair was still dripping wet, and Liat moved a little away to keep the water from getting on her own robes. She could see in the way he kept his expression calm that he thought she was being unreasonably hard on herself, and her suspicion that he wasn’t wholly wrong only made her more impatient with him.
    ‘If you’d like, we can go to your cell for the evening. You can work on whatever it is that needs your attention,’ he offered.
    ‘And what would you do?’
    ‘Be there,’ he said, simply. ‘The others will understand.’
    ‘Yes, lovely,’ Liat said, sarcasm in her voice. ‘Refuse your cohort’s company because I have more important things than them. Let’s see what more they can say about me. They already think I look down on them.’
    Itani sighed, leaning back into the ivy until he seemed to be sinking into the wall itself. The continual slap of water on stone muffled the sounds of the city. Any of the others could appear around the corner or from within the barracks at any moment, but still it felt as if they were alone