Shadow and Betrayal

come to tell me how to save my child?’
    ‘No.’
    Maj shrugged, asking with motion what else could be worth hearing.
    ‘Wilsin-cha is going to arrange your travel back to Nippu,’ Amat said. ‘I think it will happen within the week.’
    Maj nodded. Her eyes softened, and Amat knew she was seeing herself at home, imagining the things that had happened somehow undone. It seemed almost cruel to go on.
    ‘I don’t want you to go,’ Amat said. ‘I want you to stay here. In Saraykeht.’
    The pale eyes narrowed, and Maj lifted herself on one elbow, shifting to face Amat directly. Amat could see the distrust in her face and felt she understood it.
    ‘What happened to you goes deeper than it appears,’ Amat said. ‘It was an attack on my city and its trade, and not only by the andat and Oshai. It won’t be easy to show this for what it was, and if you leave . . . if you leave, I don’t think I can.’
    ‘What can’t you do?’
    ‘Prove to the Khai that there were more people involved than he knows of now.’
    ‘Are you being paid to do this?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then why?’
    Amat drew in a breath, steadied herself, and met the girl’s eyes.
    ‘Because it’s the right thing,’ Amat said. It was the first time she’d said the words aloud, and something in her released with them. Since the day she’d left Ovi Niit, she had been two women - the overseer of House Wilsin and also the woman who knew that she would have to have this conversation. Have this conversation and then follow it with all the actions it implied. She laced her fingers around one knee and smiled, a little sadly, at the relief she felt in being only one woman again. ‘What happened was wrong. They struck at my city. Mine. And my house was part of it. Because of that, I was part of it. Doing this will gain me nothing, Maj. I will lose a great deal that I hold dear. And I will do it with you or without you.’
    ‘It won’t bring me back my child.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Will it avenge him?’
    ‘Yes. If I succeed.’
    ‘What would he do, your Khai? If you won.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Amat said. ‘Whatever he deems right. He might fine House Wilsin. Or he might burn it. He might exile Wilsin-cha.’
    ‘Or kill him?’
    ‘Or kill him. He might turn Seedless against House Wilsin, or the Galtic Council. Or all of Galt. I don’t know. But that’s not for me to choose. All I can do is ask for his justice, and trust that the Khai will follow the right road afterward.’
    Maj turned back to the window, away from Amat. The pale fingers touched the latticework, traced the lines of it as if they were the curves of a beloved face. Amat swallowed to loosen the knot in her throat. Outside, a songbird called twice, then paused, and sang again.
    ‘I should go,’ Amat said.
    Maj didn’t turn. Amat rose, the chair creaking and groaning. She took her cane.
    ‘When I call for you, will you come?’
    The silence was thick. Amat’s impulse was to speak again, to make her case. To beg if she needed to, but her training from years of negotiations was to wait. The silence demanded an answer more eloquently than words could. When Maj spoke, her voice was hard.
    ‘I’ll come.’
     
    Saraykeht receded. The wide mouth of the seafront thinned; wharves wide enough to hold ten men standing abreast narrowed to twigs. Otah sat at the back rail of the ship, aware of the swell and drop of the water, the rich scent of the spray, but concentrating upon the city falling away behind him. He could take it all in at once: the palaces of the Khai on the top of the northern slope grayed by distance; the tall, white warehouses with their heavy red and gray tiles near the seafront; the calm, respectable morning face of the soft quarter. Coast fishermen resting atop poles outside the city, lines cast into the surf. They passed east. The rivermouth, wide and muddy, and the cane fields. And then over the course of half a hand, the wind pressing the wide, low ship’s sails took them around a bend in the land, and Saraykeht was gone. Otah rested his chin on the oily wood of the railing.
    They were all back there - Liat and Maati and Kirath and Tuui and Epani who everyone called the cicada behind his back. The streets he’d carted bales of cotton and cloth and barrels of dye through and the teahouses he’d sung and drunk in. The garden where he’d first kissed Liat and been surprised and pleased to find her kissing him back. The firekeeper, least of the utkhaiem, who’d