Maati-kvo. I'm always very patient."
"What happened?" Maati insisted.
"She tried to take him," Vanjit said. Her voice had changed. The
pleading tone was gone. Her words could have been shaved from ice. "She
said that she could look after him as well as anyone, and that I was
more than welcome to have him back once the kitchen had been cleaned."
Maati closed his eyes.
"She put her hands on him," Vanjit said. In her voice, it sounded like a
violation. Perhaps it was.
"And what did you do," Maati asked, though he knew the answer.
"What you told me," Vanjit said. "What you said about Wounded."
"Which was?" he said. Clarity-of-Sight gurgled and swung its thick arms
at Vanjit's ears, its dumb show of fear and distress forgotten.
"You said that Eiah-cha couldn't make an andat based on things being as
they're meant to, because the andat aren't meant to be bound. It's not
their nature. You said she had to bind Wounded and then withdraw it from
all the women who still can't bear babes. And so we withdrew from Ashti
Beg."
The andat cooed. It might have been Maati's imagination, but the thing
seemed proud. Clarity-of-Sight. And so also Blindness.
The warmth that bloomed in his breast, the tightening of his jaw, the
near-unconscious shaking of his head. They were not anger so much as a
bone-deep impatience.
"It is manipulating you," he said. "We've talked about this from the
beginning. The andat wants its freedom. Whatever else it is, it will
always struggle to be free. It has been courting Ashti Beg and the
others for days to precipitate exactly this. You have to know yourself
better than it does. You have to behave like a grown woman, not a
selfrighteous child."
"But she-"
Maati put two fingers against the girl's lips. The andat was silent now,
staring at him with silent anger.
"You have been entrusted with a power beyond any living person," Maati
said, his tone harsher than he'd intended. "You are responsible for that
power. You understand me? Responsible. I have tried to make you see
that, but now I think I've failed. Poets aren't simply men ... or women
... who have a particular profession. We aren't like sailors or
cabinetmakers or armsmen. Holding the andat is like holding small gods,
and there is a price you pay for that. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes, Maati-kvo," Vanjit whispered.
"I doubt that," he said. "After what I've seen today, I very much doubt it.
She was weeping silently. Maati opened his mouth, some cutting comment
ready to humiliate her further, and stopped. For a moment, he was a boy
again, in this same hallway. He could feel the thin robes and the winter
cold, and the tears on his own cheeks as the older boys mocked him or
Tahi-kvo-bald, cruel Tahi-kvo, who had later become the Dai- kvo-beat
him. He wondered if this fear and rage had been what drove his teachers
back then, or if it had been something colder.
"Fix it," Maati said. "Put Ashti Beg back as she was, and never, never