the rooms during the day. He and Old Mani would take care of the
evenings, though. They wanted to sell as much wine as they could, but
they didn't want a girl my age around drunken travelers. I thought they
were being so unfair."
Kiyan pursed her lips.
"But maybe I've told that story already," she said.
"Once or twice," Otah agreed.
"There was a time I didn't worry about the whole world and everything in
it, you know. I remember that there was. It doesn't make sense to me.
One had season, an illness, a fire-anything, really, and I could have
lost the wayhouse. But now here I am, highest of the Khaiem, a whole
city that will bend itself in half to hand me whatever it thinks I want,
and the world seems more fragile."
"We got old," Otah said. "It's always the ones who've seen the most who
think the world's on the edge of collapse, isn't it? And we've seen more
than most."
Kiyan shook her head.
"It's more than that. Losing a wayhouse would have made the world harder
for me and Old Mani. There are more people than I can count here in the
city, and all the low towns. And you carry them. It makes it matter more."
"I sit through days of ceremony and let myself be hectored over the
things I don't do the way other people prefer," Otah said. "I'm not sure
that anything I've done here has actually made any difference at all. If
they stuffed a robe with cotton and posed the sleeves ..."
"You care about them," Kiyan said.
"I don't," he said. "I care about you and Eiah and I)anat. And Maati. I
know that I'm supposed to care about everyone and everything in Machi,
but love, I'm only a man. "l'hey can tell me I gave tip my own name when
I took the chair, but really the Khai Machi is only what I do. I
wouldn't keep the work if I could find a way out."
Kiyan embraced him with one arm. Her hair was fragrant with lavender oil.
"You're sweet," she said.
"Am I? I'll try to confess my incompetence and selfishness more often."
"As long as it includes me," she said. "Now go let those poor men change
your clothes and get hack to beds of their own."
The servants had become accustomed to the Khai's preference for brief
ablutions. Otah knew that his own father had managed somehow to enjoy
the ceremony of being dressed and bathed by others. But his father had
been raised to take the chair, had followed the traditions and forms of
etiquette, and had never that Otah knew stepped outside the role he'd
been horn to. Otah himself had been turned out, and the years he had
spent being a simple, free man, reliant upon himself had ruined him for
the fawning of the court. He endured the daily frivolity of having foods
brought to him, his hands cleaned for him, his hair combed on his
behalf. He allowed the body servants to pull off his formal robes and
swathe him in a sleeping shift, and when he returned to his bed, Kiyan's
breath was already deep, slow, and heavy. He slipped in beside her,
pulling the blankets up over himself, and closed his eyes at last.
Sleep, however, did not come. His body ached, his eyes were tired, but