At some point, Cchmai stopped stroking her, and only listened, but that
open, receptive silence was all she needed of him. She poured out
everything. The wild, impossible plans she'd woven with Adrah. The
intimation, one night when a Galtic dignitary had come to Nlaehi, that
the schemes might not be impossible after all. The bargain they had
struck-access to a library's depth of old books and scrolls traded for
power and freedom. And from there, the progression, inevitable as water
flowing toward the sea, that led Adrah to her father's sleeping chambers
and her to the still moment by the lake, the terrible sound of the arrow
striking home.
With every phrase, she felt the horror of it case. It lost none of the
sorrow, none of the regret, but the bleak, soul-eating despair began to
fade from black to merely the darkest gray. By the time she came to the
end of one sentence and found nothing following it, the birds outside
had begun to trill and sing. It would be light soon. Dawn would come
after all. She sighed.
"That was a longer answer than you hoped for, maybe," she said.
"It was enough," he said.
Idaan shifted and sat up, pulling her hair back from her face. Cehmai
didn't move.
"Hiami told me once," she said, "just before she left, that to become
Khai you had to forget how to love. I see why she believed that. But it
isn't what's happened. Not to me. "Thank You, Cchmai-kya."
"For what?"
"For loving me. For protecting me," she said. "I didn't guess how much I
needed to tell you all that. It was ... it was too much. You see that."
"I do," Cehmai said.
"Are you angry with me now?"
"Of course not," he said.
"Are you horrified by me?"
She heard him shift his weight. The pause stretched, her heart sickening
with every beat.
"I love you, Idaan," he said at last, and she felt the tears come again,
but this time with a very different pressure behind them. It wasn't joy,
but it was perhaps relief.
She shifted forward in the darkness, found his body there waiting, and
held him for a time. She was the one who kissed him this time. She was
the one who moved their conversation from the intimacy of confession to
the intimacy of sex. Cehmai seemed almost reluctant, as if afraid that
taking her body now would betray some deeper moment that they had
shared. But Idaan led him to his bed in the darkness, opened her own
robes and his, and coaxed his flesh until whatever objection he'd
fostered was forgotten. She found herself at ease, lighter, almost as if
she was half in dream.
Afterwards, she lay nestled in his arms, warm, safe, and calm as she had
never been in years. Sunlight pressed at the closed shutters as she
drifted down to sleep.
The tunnels beneath Machi were a city unto themselves. Otah found
himself drawn out into them more and more often as the days crept