tips of her fingers. "You'll start it again."
"Yes," Otah said, sitting across from his wife, taking his son's hand.
"I heard. But you've been sick before, and you've gotten better. You'll
get better again. It's good for boys to be a hit ill when they're young.
It gets all the hardest parts out of the way early. Then they can be
strong old men.
"Tell me a story?" Danat asked.
Utah took a breath, his mind grasping for a children's story. He tried
to recall being in this room himself or one like it. He had been, when
he'd been I)anat's age. Someone had held him when he'd been ill, had
told him stories to distract him. But everything in his life before he'd
been disowned and sent to the school existed in the blur of halfmemory
and dream.
"Papa-kya's tired, sweet," Kiyan said. "Let Mama tell you about . .
"No!" Danat cried, his face pulling in-mouth tight, brows thunderously
low. "I want Papa-kya-"
"It's all right," Otah said. "I'm not so tired I can't tell my own boy a
story."
Kiyan smiled at him, her eyes amused and apologetic both. I tried to
spare you.
"Once, hack before the Empire, when the world was very new," Otah said,
then paused. "There, ah. There was a goat."
The goat-whose name was coincidentally also Danat-went on to meet a
variety of magical creatures and have long, circuitous conversations to
no apparent point or end until Utah saw his son's eyes shut and his
breath grow deep and steady. Kiyan rose and silently snuffed all but the
night candle. The room filled with the scent of spent wicks. Otah let go
of his son's hand and quietly pulled the netting closed. In the
near-darkness, Danat's eyelids seemed darker, smudged with kohl. His
skin was smooth and brown as eggshell. Kiyan touched Otah's shoulder and
motioned with her gaze to the door. He laced his fingers in hers and
together they walked to the hallway.
The physician's assistant sat on a low stool, a howl of rice and fish in
his hands.
"I will be here for the night, Most High," the assistant said as Otah
paused before him. "My teacher expects that the boy will sleep soundly,
but if he wakes, I will be here."
Otah took a pose expressing gratitude. It was a humbling thing for a
Khai to do before a servant, even one as skilled as this. The
physician's assistant bowed deeply in response. The walk to their own
rooms was a short one-down one hallway, up a wide flight of stairs
worked in marble and silver, and then the gauntlet of their own
servants. The evening's meal was set out for them-quail glazed with pork
fat and honey, pale bread with herbed butter, fresh trout, iced apples.
More food than any two people could eat.
"It isn't in his chest," Kiyan said as she lifted the trout's pale flesh
from delicate, translucent bones. "His color is always good. His lips
never blue at all. The physician didn't hear any water when he breathes,
and he can blow up a pig's bladder as well as I could."