Shadow and Betrayal

went through the trivial issues of the day. A small fire in one of the weaver’s warehouses meant that they would be three thousand feet of thread short for the ship to Bakta. It was significant enough to warrant holding the ship, but they didn’t dare keep it too long - the season was turning. And then there was the issue of a persistent mildew in one of House Wilsin’s warehouses that had spoiled two bolts of silk, and had to be addressed before they dared to use the space again.
    Amat laid out the options, made her suggestions, answered Wilsincha’s questions, and accepted his decisions. In the main part of the bathhouse, a man broke out in song, his voice joined - a little off-key - by two more. The warm breeze coming through the cedar trellis at the windows moved the surface of the water. Painful as it was, Amat felt herself grabbing at the details - the pinkness of Marchat’s pale skin, the thin crack in the side of the lacquer tray, the just-bitter taste of overbrewed tea. Like a squirrel, she thought, gathering nuts for the winter.
    ‘Amat,’ he said, when they were through and she started to rise. The hardness in his voice caught her, and she lowered herself back into the water. ‘There’s something . . . You and I, we’ve worked together for more years than I like to remember. You’ve always been . . . always been very professional. But I’ve felt that along with that, we’ve been friends. I know that I have held you in the highest regard. Gods, that sounds wrong. Highest regard? Gods. I’m doing this badly.’
    He raised his hands from the water, fingertips wrinkled as raisins, and motioned vaguely. His face was tight and flushed. Amat frowned, confused, and then the realization washed over her like nausea. He was about to declare his love.
    She put her head down, pressing a palm to her forehead. She couldn’t look up. Laughter that had as much to do with horror as mirth shook her gently. Of all the things she’d faced, of all the evils she’d steeled herself to walk through, this one had taken her blind. Marchat Wilsin thought he loved her. It was why he’d stood up to Oshai to save her. It was why she was alive. It was ridiculous.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have . . . Forget that. I didn’t . . . I sound like a half-wit schoolboy. Here’s the thing, Amat. I didn’t mean to be involved with this. These last days, I’ve been feeling a certain distance from you. And I’m afraid that you and I might have . . . lost something between us. Something that . . .’
    It had to stop. She had to stop it.
    ‘Wilsin-cha,’ she said, and forced herself into a formal pose of respect appropriate to a superior in business. ‘I think perhaps it is too soon. The . . . the wounds are too fresh. Perhaps we might postpone this conversation.’
    He took a pose of agreement that seemed to carry a relief almost as deep as her own. She shifted to a pose of leave-taking, which he returned. She didn’t meet his gaze as she left. In the dressing room, she pulled on her robes, washed her face, and leaned against the great granite basin, her hands clenched white on its rim, until her mind had stilled. With a long, deep, slow breath, she composed herself, then took up her cane and walked out into the streets, as if the world were not a broken place, and her path through it was not twisted.
    She strode to the compound, her leg and hip hardly bothering her. She delivered the orders she had to give, made the arrangements she had discussed with Wilsin-cha. Liat, thankfully, was elsewhere. Amat’s day was difficult enough without adding the burden of Liat’s guilt and pain. And, of course, there was the decision of whether to take the girl with her when Amat left her old life behind.
    When Amat had written the last entry in the house logs, she cleaned the nib on its cloth, laid the paper over the half-used inkblock, and walked south, toward the seafront. And not toward her apartments. She passed by the stalls and the ships, the watersellers and firekeepers and carts that sold strips of pork marinated in ginger and cumin. When she reached the wide mouth of the Nantan, she paused, considering the bronze form of the last emperor gazing out over the sea. His face was calm and, she thought, sorrowful. Shian Sho had watched the Empire fall, watched the devastation of war between high counselors who could wield poets and andat. How sad, she thought, to have had so much and been powerless to save it.