single-mindedly as she had because she wanted to be something else.
Something besides her father's daughter. As the princess of the new
empire, she would have been a marriage to some foreign ward or king or
lord incapable of bearing children. The degraded currency of her body
would have been her definition.
Physician and healer were better roles to play. Walking through the
darkened streets of Saraykeht, her robes and her satchel afforded her a
measure of respect and protection. It was poor form to assault a healer,
in part because of the very real chance of requiring her services one
day. The toughs and beggars who haunted the alleys near the seafront
might meet her eyes as she walked past, might even hail her with an
obscenity or veiled threat, but they had never followed her. And so she
didn't see that she had any need of the palace guard. If her work
protected her, there was no reason to call upon her blood.
She stopped at the bronze statue of Shian Sho. The last emperor gazed
out wistfully over the sea, or perhaps back through the ages to a time
when his name had been important. Eiah pulled her robe tight around
herself and squatted at his metalwork feet, waiting for the firekeeper
and his steamcart. In daytime, she would have walked the streets north
and uphill to the palaces, but the seafront wasn't the worst part of
Saraykeht. It was safer to wait.
To the west, the soft quarter was lit in its nightly festival. To the
east, the bathhouses, the great stone warehouses, rarely more than
half-filled now. Beyond that, the cohort houses of the laborers were
darker, but far from unpeopled. Eiah heard a man's laugh from one
direction, a woman's voice lifted in drunken song from another. The
ships that filled the seafront docks stood silent, their masts like
winter trees, and the ocean beyond them gray with a low mist.
There was a beauty in it, and a familiarity. Eiah had made her studies
in places like this, whatever city she'd been in. She'd sewn closed the
flesh of whores and thieves as often as soothed the coughs and pains of
the utkhaiem in their perfumed palaces. It was a decision she'd made
early in her career, not to be a court physician, not to care only for
the powerful. Her father had approved, and even, she thought, been proud
of the decision. For all their differences-and there were many-it was
one reason she loved him.
The steamcart appeared first as a sound: the rough clatter of iron-bound
wheels against the bricks of the street, the chuff of the boiler, the
low rumble of the kiln. And then, as Eiah stood and shook the dirt and
grime from her robe, it turned into the wide street they called the
Nantan and came down toward the statue. In the light of the kiln, she
saw seven or perhaps eight figures clinging to the cart's side. The
firekeeper himself sat on the top, guiding the cart with a series of
levers and pedals that made the most ornate loom seem simple. Eiah
stepped forward as the cart trundled past, took one of the leather
grips, and hoisted herself up to the cart's side runner along with the
others.
"Two coppers," the firekeeper said without looking at her.
Eiah dug in her sleeve with her free hand, came out with two lengths of