sorrowful and joyous. This, he understood, was a gift. Galtic voices
raised in a song of an empire that was not their own. He let himself be
carried by it, and when the voices fell again, the last throbbing notes
fading to silence, he was among the first to applaud. Otah was surprised
to find tears in his eyes.
Ana Dasin, at his side, was also weeping. When he met her eyes, she
looked down, said something he couldn't hear, and walked briskly away.
He watched her descend the stairs below decks as the singers began
another, more boisterous song. Otah's gaze flickered to Issandra. In the
dim light, the subtle signs of age were softened. He saw for a moment
who she had been as a younger woman. She met his eyes with a profound
weariness. Fatter had his hand on her arm, holding her gently to him,
though the man's face remained turned away. Otah wondered, not for the
first time, what brokering this agreement had cost Issandra Dasin.
He glanced at the stairs down which her daughter had vanished, and then
back, his hands shifting into a pose that made an implicit offer.
Issandra raised an eyebrow, a half-smile making a dimple in one cheek.
Otah tugged at his robes, straightening the lines, and stepped carefully
down from the dais. The girl Ana would be his daughter too, soon enough.
If her true mother and father weren't placed to speak with her in her
distress, perhaps it was time that Otah did.
Below decks, the Galtic ship was as cramped and close and ripe with the
scent of tightly quartered humanity as any ship Otah had sailed with.
Under normal circumstances, the deck now peopled with the guests of the
Dasin family would have given room to a full watch of sailors. Instead,
most were lurking in the tiny rooms, waiting for the songs to end and
their own turn with fresh air to come. Still, Otah, Emperor of the
Khaiem, found a way cleared for him, conversations stopping when he came
in view. He made his way forward, squinting into the darkness for a
glimpse of the rabbit-faced girl.
Galtic design divided the cargo hold in sections, and it was in one of
these dark chambers that he heard the girl's voice. Crates and boxes
loomed above him to either side, the binding ropes creaking gently with
the rolling ship. Rats chattered and complained. And there, hunched over
as if she were protecting something pressed to her belly, sat Ana Dasin.
"Excuse me," Otah said. "I don't mean to intrude, but ... may I sit?"
Ana looked up at him. Her dark eyes shone in the dim light. Her nod was
so faint it might almost have been the movement of the ship. Otah
stepped carefully over the rough board, hitched his robes up to his
shins, and sat at the girl's side. They were silent. Above them, the
singers struck a complex rhythm, like jugglers tossing pins between
them. Otah sighed.
"I know this isn't easy for you," he said.
"What isn't, Most High?"
"Otah. Please, my name is Otah. You can call me that. I mean all of
this. Being uprooted, married off to a man you've never met in a city
you've never been to."
"It's what's expected of me," she said.
"Yes, I know, but ... it isn't really fair."