was only flesh. The news of Nayiit's death had been a more profound
wound than anything the andat could do. Her boy had followed her on this
last desperate adventure. He had left his own wife and child. And she
had brought him here to die for a boy he hadn't even known to be his
brother.
Or perhaps he had known. Perhaps that was what had given him the courage
to attack the Galtic soldiers and be cut down. She would have asked him;
she still intended to ask him, when she saw him next. Even knowing that
she never could, even trying consciously to force the im pulse away, she
found she could not stop intending it. It-hen / see him again still felt
like the future. A time would come when it would feel like the past.
When he was here, when I could touch him, when he would smile at me and
make me laugh, when I worried for him. When my boy lived. Back then.
Before I lost him.
Before the world changed.
She sighed in the darkness, and didn't bother to wipe away the tears.
They were meaningless-her body responding without her. 't'hey couldn't
undo what had been done, and so they didn't matter. Voices echoed in the
hall outside her apartments here in the tunnels, and she ignored them.
If they had been shouting warnings of fire, she would have ignored those
too.
Sometimes she would think of all the people who had died. The amateur
soldiers that Otah had led into battle outside the village of the
l)ai-kvo, the Galts dead on the road from Cetani. The sad rogue poet
Riaan, slaughtered by the men he thought his friends. The innocent,
naive men and women and children in Nantani and Utani and Chaburi- 'lan
and all the other sacked cities. The children at the poets' school.
Every one of them had a mother. Every mother who had not had the luck to
die was trapped in the quiet desperation that imprisoned her now. Liat
thought of all these other grieving women, held them up in her mind as
proof that she was being stupid and weak. Mothers lost their sons all
the time, all across the world. In every nation, in every city, in every
age. Her suffering wasn't so much compared with all of them.
And then she would hear someone cough in Nayiit's voice, or she'd
mistake the shape of a man's back, and her idiot, traitor heart would
sing for a moment. Even as her mind told her no it wasn't, her heart
would soar before it fell.
The scratch at her door was so faint and tentative, Liat thought a first
it was only a rat tricked by the darkness into believing the room empty.
But the sound came again, the intentional rhythm of a hand against wood.
Likely it was Otah, coming again to hold her hand and sit quietly. I le
had done so several times, when he could free himself from the rigors of
peace and war and Empire. They spoke little because there was too much
to say, and no words adequate. Or perhaps one of his physicians, come to
look in on her health. Or a servant sent to declaim poems or sing.
Someone to distract her in the name of comfort. She wished they wouldn't
come.
The scratch repeated itself, more loudly.
"Who?" Liat managed to ask. For answer, the door slid open, and Kiyan