Shadow and Betrayal

windows. The shutters shifted in the sea-scented breeze.
    Her desk was piled with papers. Ink bricks hollowed from use stacked one on another at the head of the stairs, waiting to be carried away. The affairs of the house had fallen into near chaos while she was away. She had spent long nights looking over lists and ledgers and telling herself that she cared for them all the way she once had. That House Wilsin and her work for it had not been poisoned.
    Amat sighed, sat up, and pushed the netting aside. Her world since her resurrection had been much the same - nightmares until dawn, gray and empty work and messages and meetings until sunset. At one point, seeing the strain on her face at the end of the day, Marchat had offered to send her away for a week to Chaburi-tan once the season was over. The house could cover the expenses, he said. And she let herself imagine that time - away from Saraykeht and the seafront and her desk and the soft quarter - though the fantasy was washed by melancholy. It could never actually happen, but it would have been nice.
    Instead, Amat Kyaan rose from her bed, pulled on clean robes, and walked out, leaning on her cane, to the corner stall where a girl from the low towns sold fresh berries wrapped in sweet frybread. It was good enough as a meal to see her through to midday. She ate it as she walked back to her apartments, trying to order her day in her mind, but finding it hard to concentrate on shifting meetings and duties back and forth. Simply leaving her mind blank and empty was so much easier.
    Her time since the sad trade and her banishment had felt like being ill. She’d moved through her days without feeling them, unable to concentrate, uninterested in her work. Something had broken in her, and pretending it back to fixed wasn’t working. She’d half known it wouldn’t, and her mind had made plans for her almost without her knowing it.
    The man waiting at her door was wearing robes of yellow and silver - the colors of House Tiyan. He was young - sixteen, perhaps seventeen summers. Liat’s age. An apprentice, then, but the apprentice of someone high in House Tiyan. There was only one errand that could mean. Amat shifted her schedule in her mind and popped the last of the berry-soaked frybread into her mouth. The young man, seeing her, fell into a pose of greeting appropriate for an honored elder. Amat responded.
    ‘Kyaan-cha,’ the boy said, ‘I come on behalf of Annan Tiyan . . .’
    ‘Of course you do,’ she said, opening her door. ‘Come inside. You have the listings?’
    He hesitated behind her for only a moment. Amat went slowly up the stairs. Her hip was much better since she’d returned to her apartments with her stinging ointment and her own bed. She paused at her basin, washing the red stains from her food off her fingertips before she began handling papers. When she reached her desk, she turned and sat. The boy stood before her. He’d taken the paper from his sleeve - the one she’d sent to his master. She held out her hand, and he gave it to her.
    The receipt was signed. Amat smiled and tucked the paper into her own sleeve. It would go with her papers later. The papers she was going to take with her, not the ones for House Wilsin. The box was on the desk under a pile of contracts. Amat shifted it out, into her lap. Dark wood banded by iron, and heavy with jewels and lengths of silver. She handed it to the boy.
    ‘My master . . .’ the boy began. ‘That is, Amat Kyaan-cha, I was wondering if . . .’
    ‘Annan wants to know why I’m having him hold the package,’ she said, ‘and he wanted you to find out without making it obvious you were asking.’
    The boy blushed furiously. Amat took a pose that dismissed the issue.
    ‘It’s rude of him, but I’d have done the same in his place. You may tell him that I have always followed imperial form by caching such things with trusted friends. One of the people who had been doing me this favor is leaving the city, though, so it was time to find a new holder. And, of course, if he should ever care to, I would be pleased to return the favor. It’s got nothing to do with that poor island girl.’
    It wasn’t true, of course, but it was convenient. This was the fourth such box she’d sent out to men and women in the city to whom she felt she might be able to appeal if circumstances turned against her again. The receipt was only as good as the honor of the people she stowed the boxes with. And there would be