pride of the moment and the sense, hardly noticed at the time, that it
was an honor he didn't wholly deserve.
"Would you have done it differently, Milah-kvo?" he asked the dead man
and the empty air. "If you had known what I was going to do, would you
still have made the offer?"
The air said nothing. Maati felt himself smile without knowing precisely
why.
"Maati-kvo?"
He turned. In the dim light of his candle, Eiah seemed like a ghost.
Something conjured from his memory. He took a pose of greeting.
"You're awake," she said, falling into step beside him.
"Sometimes sleep abandons old men," he said with a chuckle. "It's the
way of things. And you? I can't think you make a practice of wandering
the halls in the middle of the night."
"I've just left Vanjit. She sits up after the lecture is done and goes
over everything we said. Everything anyone said. I agreed to sit with
her and compare my memory to hers."
"She's a good girl," Maati said.
"Her dreams are getting worse," Eiah said. "If the situation were
different, I'd be giving her a sleeping powder. I'm afraid it will dull
her, though."
"They're bad then?" Maati said.
Eiah shrugged. In the dim light, her face seemed older.
"They're no worse than anyone who watched her family die before her
eyes. She has told you, hasn't she?"
"She was a child," Maati said. "The only one to live."
"She said no more than that?"
"No," Maati said. They passed through a stone archway and into the
courtyard. Eiah looked up at the stars.
"It's as much as I know too," Eiah said. "I try to coax her. To get her
to speak about it. But she won't."
"Why try?" Maati said. "Talking won't undo it. Let her be who and where
she is now. It's better that way."
Eiah took a pose that accepted his advice, but her face didn't entirely
match it. He put a hand on her shoulder.
"It will be fine," he said.
"Will it?" Eiah said. "I tell myself the same thing, but I don't always
believe it."
Maati stopped at a stone bench, flicked a snail from the seat, and
rested. Eiah sat at his side, hunched over, her elbows on her knees.
"You think we should stop this?" he asked. "Call off the binding?"
"What reason could we give?"
"That Vanjit isn't ready."
"It isn't true, though. Her mind is as good as any of ours will ever be.
If I called this to a halt, I'd be saying I didn't trust her to be a
poet. Because of what she's been through. That the Galts had taken that
from her too. And if I say that of her, who won't it be true of? Ashti
Beg lost her husband. Irit's father burned with his farm. Large Kae only
had her womb turned sick and saw the Khai Utani slaughtered with his