grace-was that Maati was not wholly at fault. Otah-kvo bore some measure
of this guilt as well. fie was the one who had come to Ntaati, all those
years ago. He was the one who had hinted to Maati that the school to
which they had both been sent had a hidden structure. If he hadn't,
Maati might never have been a poet. Never have known Seedless or Heshai,
Liat or Cehmai. Nayiit might never have been born. Even if the Galts had
come, even if the world had fallen, it wouldn't have fallen on Maati's
shoulders. Cehmai was right; the binding of Sterile had been a decision
they had all made-Otah-kvo more than any of the rest. But it was Maati
who was cast out to live in the dark and the cold. The sense of betrayal
was as comforting as a candle in the darkness, and as he walked, Maati
found himself indulging it.
The fault wasn't his alone, and the punishment was. There was nothing
fair in that. Nothing right. The terrible thing that had happened seemed
nearly inevitable now that he looked back on it. He'd been given hardly
any hooks, not half the time he'd been promised, and the threat of death
at the end of a Galtic sword unless he succeeded. It would have been
astounding it he hadn't failed.
And for the price, that wasn't something he'd chosen. That had been
Sterile. Once the binding had failed, he'd had no control over it. He
would never have hurt Eiah if he'd had the choice. It had simply
happened. And still, he felt it in the hack of his mind-the shape of the
andat, the place in the realm of ideas that it had pressed down in him,
like the flattened grass where a hunting cat has slept. Sterile came
from him, was him, and even if she had only been brief, she had still
learned her voice from him and visited her price upon the world through
his mind and fears. The clever trick of pushing the price away from
himself and onto the world had been his. The way in which the world had
broken was his shadow-not him, not even truly shaped like him. But
connected.
The tunnel before him came to a sudden end, and Nlaati had to follow his
own track back to the turn he'd missed, angling up a steep slope and
into the first breath of fresh, cold air, the first glimmer of daylight.
Nlaati stood still a moment to catch his breath, then fastened all the
tics on his cloak, pulled the furred hood up over his head, and began
the long last climb.
The bolt-hole was perhaps half a hand's walk from the entrance to the
mines in which the poets hid. The snow was dry as sand, and the icy
breeze from the North would he enough to conceal what traces of his
footsteps the sled didn't smooth over. \Iaati trudged through the world
of snow and stone, his breath pluming out before him, his face stung and
numbed. It was a hellish. His feet first burned then went numb, and
frost began to form on the fur around his hood's mouth. AIaati dragged
himself and his sled. The numbness and the pain felt a hit like penance,
and he was so caught tip in them he nearly failed to notice the horse at
the mouth of the bolt-hole.
It was a small animal, fit with heavy blankets and riding tack. Nlaati
blinked at it, stunned by its presence, then scurried quickly behind a
boulder, his heart in his mouth. Someone had come looking for them.