to see that the boy was weeping. Nayiit was older now than Otah had been
when he'd fathered him on Liat. Older now than Otah had been when he'd
first killed a man with his hands.
"I'm sorry, Most High," Nayiit said.
"So am I," Utah said. The scent of lamb was thick and rich. Enticing and
mildly nauseating both.
"It was my fault," Nayiit said, voice thickened by a tight throat.
""Phis, all of this, is my fault."
"No," Utah began. "You can't-"
"I saw them killing each other. I saw how many there were, and I broke,"
Nayiit said, and his hands took a pose of profound contrition. "I'm the
one who called the retreat."
"I know," Otah said.
is
Liat had been nursing her headache since she'd woken that morning; as
the day progressed, it had drawn a line from the hack of her eyes to her
temples that throbbed when she moved too quickly. She had given up
shaking her head. Instead, she pressed her fingers into the fine-grained
wood of the table and tried to will her frustration into it. Kiyan,
seated across from her, was saying something in a reasonable, measured
tone that entirely missed her point. Liat took a pose that asked
permission to speak, and then didn't wait for Kiyan to answer her.
"It isn't the men," Liat said. "He could have taken twice what he did,
and we'd be able to do what's needed. It's that he took all the horses."
Kiyan's fox-sharp face tightened. Her dark eyes flickered down toward
the maps and diagrams spread out between them. The farmlands and low
towns that surrounded Machi were listed with the weight of grain and
neat and vegetables that had come from each in the last five years.
Liat's small, neat script covered paper after paper, black ink on the
butter-yellow pages noting acres to be harvested and plowed, the number
of hands and hooves required by each.
The breeze from the unshuttered windows lifted the pages but didn't
disarray them, like invisible fingers checking the corners for some
particular mark.
"Show me again," Kiyan said, and the weariness in her voice was almost
enough to disarm Liat's annoyance. Almost, but not entirely. With a
sigh, she stood. The line behind her eyes throbbed.
"'T'his is the number of horses we'd need to plow the eastern farmsteads
here and here and here," Liat said, tapping the maps as she did so. "We
have half that number. We can get up to nearly the right level if we
take the mules from the wheat mills."
Kiyan looked over the numbers, her fingertips touching the sums and
moving on. I ler gaze was focused, a single vertical line between her brows.
"How short is the second planting now?" Kiyan asked.
"The west and south are nearly complete, but they started late. The
eastern farmsteads ... not more than a quarter."
Kiyan leaned back. Otah's wife looked nearly as worn as Liat felt. The
gray in her hair seemed more pronounced, her flesh paler and thinner.
Liat fund herself wondering if Kiyan had made a practice of painting her