I'm sure you would, Liat thought. Was I so obvious at her age?
"Mother," Nayiit said, "would you care to. .
Liat waved the offer away.
"A basin and a sponge will be enough for me. I have letters to write
before dinner. Perhaps, Ceinat-cha, if you would leave word with your
couriers that I will have things to send south?"
The girl took an acknowledging pose, then turned to Nayiit with a
flutter of a smile and gestured for him to follow her.
"Nayiit," Liat said, and her son paused in the apartment's doorway.
"Find out what you can about the situation in Machi. I'd like to know
what we're walking into."
Nayiit smiled, nodded, and vanished. The servant boy also left,
promising the basin and sponge shortly. Liat sighed and sat down,
stretching her feet out toward the burning logs. The wine tasted good,
though slightly overspiced to her taste.
Machi. She was going to Machi. She let her mind turn the fact over
again, as if it were a puzzle she had nearly solved. She was going to
present her discoveries and her fears to the man she'd once called a
lover, back when he'd been a seafront laborer and called himself Itani.
Now he was the Khai Machi. And Maati, with whom she had betrayed him.
The idea tightened her throat every time she thought of it.
Maati. Nayiit was going to see hlaati, perhaps to confront him, perhaps
to seek the sort of advice that a son can ask only of a father.
Something, perhaps, that touched on the finer points of going to foreign
bathhouses with young women in snowfox robes. Liat sighed.
Nayiit had been thinking about what it would he to walk away from his
wife, the son he'd brought to the world. He'd said as much, and more
than once. She had thought it was a question based in anger-an
accusation against Nlaati. It only now occurred to her that perhaps
there was also longing in it, and she thought to wonder how complex her
quiet, pleasant son's heart might he.
BALASAR LEANED OVER THE BALCONY AND LOOKED DOWN A'1" HE COVRTYARI)
below. A crowd had gathered, talking animatedly with the brownskinned,
almond-eyed curiosity he had spirited from across the sea. They peppered
him with questions-why was he called a poet when he didn't write poems,
what did he think of Acton, how had he learned to speak Galtic so well.
"Their eyes were bright and the conversation as lively as water dropped
on a hot skillet. For his part, Riaan Vaudathat drank it all in,
answering everything in the slushy singsong accent of the Khaiem. When
the people laughed, he joined in as if they were not laughing at him.
Perhaps he truly didn't know they were.
Riaan glanced up and saw him, raising his hands in a pose that Balasar
recognized as a form of greeting, though he couldn't have said which of
the half-thousand possible nuances it held. He only waved in return and
stepped away from the edge of the balcony.
"It's like I've taught a dog to wear clothes and talk," Balasar said,
lowering himself onto a bench beside Tustin.
"Yes, sir."
""They don't understand."