Kiyan smiled. It was a hard expression. Determined. She did not let go
of Liat's hand, but neither did she hold it captive.
"I want you with me because we can't have other enemies now," she said.
"And because you and I aren't so different. And because I think perhaps
the distraction is something you need as badly as I do. There's war
enough coming. I want there to be peace between us."
"I have a price," Liat said.
Kiyan nodded that she continue.
"When Nayiit comes back, spend time with him. Talk with him. Find out
who he is. Know him."
"Because?"
"Because if you're going to have me fall in love with your boy, you owe
it to fall a little in love with mine."
Kiyan grinned, tears glistening in her eyes. Her hand squeezed Liat's.
Liat closed her grip, fierce as a drowning man holding to a rope. She
hadn't understood until this moment how deep her fear ran or the
loneliness that even Maati couldn't assuage. She couldn't say whether
she had pulled Kiyan to her or if she herself had been pulled, but she
found herself sobbing into the other woman's shoulder. Otah's wife
wrapped fierce arms around her, embracing her as if she would protect
Liat from the world.
"They would never understand this," Liat managed when her breath was her
own again.
""They're men," Kiyan said. ""They're simpler."
13
For years, Otah had been a traveler by profession. He had worked the
gentleman's trade, traveling as a courier for a merchant house with
business in half the cities of the Khaiem. He had spent days on
horseback or hunkered down in the backs of wagons or walking. He
remembered with fondness the feeling of resting at the end of a day, his
limbs warm and weary, sinking into the woolen blanket that only half
protected him from the ticks. He remembered looking up at the wide sky
with something like contentment. It seemed fourteen years sleeping in
the best bed in Machi had made a difference.
"Is there something I can bring you, Most I Iigh?" the servant boy asked
from the doorway of the tent. Utah pulled open the netting and turned
over in his cot, twisting his head to look at him. The boy was perhaps
eighteen summers old, long hair pulled back and bound by a length of
leather.
"Do I seem like I need something?"
The boy looked down, abashed.
"You were moaning again, Most High."
Otah let himself lie back on the cot. The stretched canvas creaked under
him like a ship in a storm. He closed his eyes and cataloged quietly all
his reasons for moaning. His hack ached like someone had kicked him. His
thighs were chafed half raw. They were hardly ten days out from Machi,
and it was becoming profoundly clear that he didn't know how to march a
military column across the rolling, forested hills that stretched from
Machi almost to the mountains North of the Daikvo. The great Galtic army