Shadow and Betrayal

belong there now.’
    ‘It’s hard,’ his companion said, taking a pose of agreement. ‘I think it’s why I keep travelling even though I’m not really suited to it. Whenever I’m in one place, I remember another. So I’ll be in Udun and thinking about a black crab stew they serve in Chaburi-Tan. Or in Saraykeht, thinking of the way the rain falls in Utani. If I could take them all - all the best parts of all the cities - and bring them to a single place, I think that would be paradise. But I can’t, so I’m doomed. When the time comes I’m too old to do this, I’ll have to settle for one place and I truly believe the thought of never seeing the others again will break me.’
    For a moment, they were silent. Then the courier’s distant expression changed, and he turned to look at Otah carefully.
    ‘You’re an interesting one, Itani Noyga. I thought I’d come make light with a young man on what looks like his first journey, and I find myself thinking about my final one. Do you always carry that cloud with you?’
    Otah grinned and took a pose of light apology, but hands and smile both wilted under the cool gaze. The canvas chuffed and a man in the back of the low, barge-built ship shouted.
    ‘Yes,’ he surprised himself by saying. ‘But very few people seem to notice it.’
     
    ‘So the island girl’s left,’ Amat said. ‘What does it matter? You were about to send her away.’
    Marchat Wilsin fidgeted, sending little waves across the bath to rebound against the tiles. Amat sipped her tea and feigned disinterest.
    ‘We were sending her home. It was arranged. Why would she go?’ he asked, as much to the water or himself as to her. Amat put her bowl of tea down in the floating tray and took a pose of query that was by its context a sarcasm.
    ‘Let me see, Wilsin-cha. A young girl who has been deceived, used, humiliated. A girl who believed the stories she’d been told about perfect love and a powerful lover and was taken instead to a slaughterhouse for her own blood. Now why wouldn’t she want to go back to the people she’d left? I’m sure they wouldn’t think her a credulous idiot. No more than the Khai and the utkhaiem do now. There are jokes about her, you know. At the seafront. Laborers and teahouse servants make them up to tell each other. Did you want to hear some?’
    ‘No,’ Marchat said and slapped the water. ‘No, I don’t. I don’t want it to happen, and if it’s going to, I don’t want to know about it.’
    ‘Shame, Marchat. She left from shame.’
    ‘I don’t see why she should feel ashamed,’ he said, a defensiveness in his voice. A defense of himself and, heartbreakingly, of Maj. ‘She didn’t do anything wrong.’
    Amat released her pose and let her hands slip back under the water. Wilsin-cha’s lips worked silently, as if he were in conversation with himself and halfway moved to speaking. Amat waited.
    The night before, she had taken Maj out to one of the low towns - a fishing village west of the city. A safe house outside the city would do, Amat thought, until a more suitable arrangement could be made. A week, she hoped, but perhaps more. In the last days, her plans had begun to fall away from House Wilsin’s. It wouldn’t be long before she and her employer, her old friend, parted company. It was worse, sitting there with him in the bathhouse he’d used for years, because he didn’t know. House Wilsin had taken her from a life on a knife-edge, and he - Marchat-cha - had chosen her from among the clerks and functionaries. He had promoted her through the ranks. And now they sat as they had for years, but it was nearing the last time.
    Despite herself, Amat leaned forward and put her palm on his shoulder. He looked up and forced a smile.
    ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘At least it’s over.’
    It was something he’d said often in the last days, repeating it as if saying the words again would make them true. So perhaps some part of him did know that it was far from finished. He took her hand and, to her surprise, kissed it. His whiskers scratched her water-softened skin. Gently and despite him, she pulled away. He was blushing. Gods, the poor man was blushing. It made her want to weep, want to leave, want to shout at him until her echoing fury cracked the tiles. After all you’ve done, how dare you make me feel sympathy for you?
    ‘Wilsin-cha,’ she said. ‘The shipping schedule.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. The schedule.’
    Together, they