Idaan looked at him as if he had asked what season came after spring:
pitying, incredulous, disgusted.
"Get me some snow. Or, better, some ice. Tell your men that we'll be
ready in a hand and a half, and for all the gods there ever were, keep
your son away from her until we can put her back together. The last
thing she needs is to feel humiliated."
Otah took a pose that promised compliance, but then hesitated. Idaan's
dark eyes flashed with something that wasn't anger. When she spoke, her
voice was lower but no softer.
"How have you spent a lifetime in the company of women and learned
nothing?" she asked, and, shaking her head, turned back to Ana.
True to her word, a hand and a half later, Ana and Idaan emerged from
the school as if nothing strange had happened. Ana's outer robe was
changed to a dark wool, and she leaned on Idaan's arm as she stepped up
to the bed of the steamcart. Danat moved forward, but Idaan's scowl
drove him back. The two women made their slow way to the shed, where
Idaan closed the door behind them.
The men steering the carts called out to one another, voices carrying
like crows' calls in the empty landscape. The carts stuttered and
lurched, and turned to the east, tracking back along the path to the
high road between ruined Nantani and Pathai, from which they'd come.
Otah rode down the path he'd walked as a boy, searching his mind for
some feeling of kinship with his past, but the world as it was demanded
too much of him. He searched for some memory deep within him of the
first time he'd walked away from the school, of leaving everything he'd
known, rejected, behind him.
His mind was knotted with questions of how to find the poet, how to
persuade her to do as he asked, what Idaan had meant, what was wrong
with Ana, whether the steamcarts had enough fuel, and a growing ache in
his spine that came from too many days riding horses he didn't know.
There was no effort to spare for the past. Whatever he didn't remember
now of his original flight from the school he likely never would. The
past would be lost, as it always was. Always. He didn't bother trying to
hold it.
They made better time than he had expected, starting as late as they
had. By the time they stopped for the night, the high road was behind
them. The fastest route to Utani would be overland to the Qiit, then by
boat up the river. Any hope they had of overtaking Maati and Eiah would
come on the roads, where the steamcarts gave Otah an advantage. They
would have to sleep in the open more than if they had kept to wider
roads, and the rough terrain increased the possibility of the carts
breaking or getting stuck. Even of the boiler bursting and killing
anyone too near it. But Idaan's voice spoke in Otah's mind of the next
day, and the next, and the next, so he pushed them and himself.
Four of the armsmen rode ahead in the lowering gloom of night to scout
out the next day's path. The others prepared a simple meal of pork and
rice, Ashti Beg sitting with them and trading jokes. Danat's slow cir
cling of their camp took the name of defense but seemed more to be
avoiding the still-closed shed where Idaan and Ana rested. Otah sat