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At last he rose up and went to his bed, four of hishim They would sleep on straw outside his door He would sleep in the best bed the wayhouse offered It was the way of things A night candle burned at his bedside, the wax scented with honey The flame was hardly down to the quarter mark It was early When he&039;d been a boy of twenty, he&039;d seen candles like this burn their last before he slept, the light of dawn blocked by goose-down pillows around his head Now he couldn&039;t well i awake to the half ht high on the ceiling from the smoke hole

Sleep should have come easily to him as tired, well fed, half drunk as he was, but it didn&039;t The bed ide and soft and co on their straw outside his door But his mind would not be still

They should have killed each other when they were young and didn&039;t understand what a precious thing life is That was the mistake He and his brothers had forborne instead, and the years had drifted by Danat had married, then Kaiin He, the oldest of them, had met Hiami and followed his brothers&039; exarown and now themselves married And so here he and his brothers were None of them had seen fewer than forty summers None of them hated the other two None of them wanted ould cohter had happened when they were boys, stupid the way boys are Better that their deaths had coht of so much life behind them He was too old to become a killer

Sleep came sos s flying through the galleries of the Second Palace; Hiaold needle too soft to keep its point; the n the pump that would raise it When he woke, troubled by some need his sleepsodden mind couldn&039;t quite place, it was still dark He needed to drink water or to pass it, but no, it was neither of these He reached to unshutter the candlebox, but his hands were too aard

"There now, h," a voice said "Bat it around like that, and you&039;ll have the whole place in flahted the box and pulled open the shutters, the candlelight revealing the ray woolen traveler&039;s cloak His face, which had seeenial before, filled Biitrah with a sick dread The smile, he saw, never reached the eyes

"What&039;s happened?" he demanded, or tried to The words came out slurred and aard Still, the man Oshai seemed to catch the sense of them

"I&039;ve come to be sure you&039;ve died," he said with a pose that offered this as a service "Yourare beyond recall, but youWell,the whole exercise will have been so of a waste"

Biitrah&039;s breath suddenly hard as a runner&039;s, he threw off the blankets, but when he tried to stand, his knees were lith in the charge Oshai, if that was his naently back Biitrah fell to the floor, but he hardly felt it It was like violence being done to some other man, far away fro beside him, "to live your whole life known only as anothernever made a mark of your own on the world It seems unfair somehow"

Who, Biitrah tried to say Which of my brothers would stoop to poison?

"Still, men die all the time," Oshai went on "OneAnd how are you feeling, et up? No? That&039;s as well, then I was half-worried I ht have to pour more of this down you Undiluted, it tastes less of plums"

The assassin rose and walked to the bed There was a hitch in his step, as if his hip ached He is old as my father, but Biitrah&039;s ht Oshai sat on the bed and pulled the blankets over his lap

"No hurry, h I can wait quite coather his strength for one last movement, one last attack, closed his eyes but then found he lacked the will even to open theain The wooden floor beneath him seemed utterly comfortable; his limbs were heavy and slack There orse poisons than this He could at least thank his brothers for that

It was only Hiami he would ood to finish his design work on them He would have liked to have finished ht that held any real coherence was that he wished he&039;d gotten to live just a little while more He did not knohen his killer snuffed the candle

HIAMI HAD THE SEAT OF HONOR AT THE FUNERAL, ON THE DAIS WITH THE Khai Machi The teether on their cushions as the priest intoned the rites of the dead and struck his silver chi held the heat poorly; braziers had been set in a robes and looked at her hands It was not her first funeral She had been present for her father&039;s death, before her hest fah the years, when a member of the utkhaiem had passed on, she had sometimes sat and heard these same words spoken over some other body, listened to the roar of soless Her grief was real and profound, and this flock of gawkers and gossips had no relation to it The Khai Machi&039;s hand touched her own, and she glanced up into his eyes His hair, as left of it, had gone white years before He sently and took a pose that expressed his syraceful as an actor-his poses inhumanly smooth and precise

Biitrah would have been a terrible Khai Machi, she thought He would never have put in enough practice to hold hih the last days remembered her Her once-father&039;s hand tre He leaned hack into his black lacquer seat andhim a bowl of tea At the front of the te, the last chime struck, bearers caan,of hand bells and the wailing of flutes In the central square, the pyre was ready-great logs of pine stinking of oil and within the coal froht ht when his skin peeled from his noble bones It was her place now to step forward and begin the conflagration She moved slowly All eyes were on her, and she knehat they were thinking Poor woman, to have been left alone Shallow sympathies that would have been extended as readily to the wives of the Khai Machi&039;s other sons, had their men been under the metal blanket And in those voices she heard also the excitement, dread, and anticipation that these bloody paroxysms carried When the empty, insincere words of comfort were said, in the same breath they would move on to speculations Both of Biitrah&039;s brothers had vanished Danat, it was said, had gone to the mountains where he had a secret force at the ready, or to Lachi in the south to gather allies, or to ruined Saraykeht to hire mercenaries, or to the Dai-kvo to seek the aid of the poets and the andat Or he was in the te in the basement of a lon comfort house, too afraid to come to the streets And every story they told of hi last, after years of waiting, one of the ht one day be Khai Machi had made his move The city waited for the dra for the that wouldhonorable, coht

Hiami took a pose of thanks and accepted a lit torch from the firekeeper She stepped to the oil-soaked wood A dove fluttered past her, landed briefly on her husband&039;s chest, and then fleay again She felt herself s and stepped back as the fire took She waited there as long as tradition required and then went back to the Second Palace Let the others watch the ashes "Their song irl aiting for her at the entrance of the palace&039;s great hall She held a pose of welco for her Hiah to her chambers and her fire and bed and the knotwork scarf that was now nearly finished But there were tear-streaks on the girl&039;s cheeks, and as Hia child unkindly? She stopped and took a pose that accepted the welco to one of query

"Idaan Machi," the servant girl said "She is waiting for you in the suhtened her sleeves, and walked quietly down the palace halls The sliding stone doors to the garden were open, a breeze too cold to be coh the hall And there, by an empty fountain surrounded by bare-limbed cherry trees, sat her once-sister If her for, her countenance contradicted them: reddened eyes, paint and poashed away She was a plain enough woman without the to expect the violence It was another to see it done

She stepped forward, her hands in a pose of greeting Idaan started to her feet as if she&039;d been caught doing so pose Hiami sat on the fountain&039;s stone lip, and Idaan lowered herself, sitting on the ground at her feet as a child s are packed," Idaan said

"Yes I&039;ll leave tomorrow It&039;s weeks to "Ian-Sadar It won&039;t be so hard, I think One of hters is married there, and my brother is a decent ements for my own apartments"

"It isn&039;t fair," Idaan said "They shouldn&039;t force you out like this You belong here"

"It&039;s tradition," Hia to do with it My husband is dead I will return toin his chair these days"

"If you were alike that of you You could go where you pleased, and do what you wanted"

"True, but I&039;m not, am I? I was born to the utkhaiem You were horn to a Khai"

"And women," Idaan said Hiami was surprised by the venom in the word "We were born women, so we&039;ll never even have the freedohed She couldn&039;t help herself, it was all so ridiculous She took her once-sister&039;s hand and leaned forward until their foreheads alaze

"I don&039;t think the men in our families consider themselves unconstrained by history," she said, and Idaan&039;s expression twisted with chagrin

"I wasn&039;t thinking," she said "I didn&039;t mean thatGodsI&039;m sorry, Hiami-kya I&039;m so sorry I&039;irl fell into the into her ear and stroking her hair as if she were coardens This would be the last ti from the soil The trees were bare, but their bark had an undertone of green Soon it would be warh to turn on the fountains

She felt her sorrow settle deep, an al that were even now soaking her robes at the shoulder She would coe in ti her coth, Idaan&039;s sobs grew shallower and less frequent The girl pulled back, s her eyes with the back of her hand

"I hadn&039;t thought it would be this had," Idaan said softly "I kneould be hard, but this isHow did they do it?"

"Who, dear?"

"All of the themselves to kill each other?"

"I think," Hia to come from the new sorroithin her and not from the self she had known, "that in order to beco able to love So perhaps Biitrah&039;s tragedy isn&039;t the worst that could have happened"

Idaan hadn&039;t followed the thought She took a pose of query

"Winning this ga it, at least for the sort ofthat love taken fro him carry the deaths of his brothers with hi through the mines He would have hated that He would have been a very poor Khai Maehi"

"I don&039;t think I love the world that way," Idaan said

"You don&039;t, Idaan-kya," Hiami said "And just now I don&039;t either But I will try to I will try to love things the way he did"

They sat a while longer, speaking of things less treacherous In the end, they parted as if it were just another absence before the on another day A more appropriate fareould have ended with the ceremony before the Khai washer coifts and letters of gratitude, and assured her that she would always have a place in his heart so long as it beat Only when he enjoined her not to think ill of her fallen husband for his weakness did her sorrow threaten to shift to rage, but she held it down They were only words, spoken at all such events They were no more about Biitrah than the protestations of loyalty she now recited were about this hollow-hearted man in his black lacquer seat

After the cere more personal farewells with the people whom she&039;d come to know and care for in Nlachi, and just as dark fell, she even slipped out into the streets of the city to press a few lengths of silver or small jewelry into the hands of a select few friends ere not of the utkhaiem There were tears and insincere pro her hack Hiarace Little sorroere, after all, only little

She lay sleepless that last night in the bed that had seen all her nights since she had first coht of her and her husband, witnessed the birth of their children and her present , and she tried to think kindly of the bed, the palace, the city and its people She set her teeth against her tears and tried to love the world In the , she would take a flatboat down the &039;Fidat, slaves and servants to carry her things, and leave behind forever the bed of the Second Palace where people did everything but die gently and old in their sleep

Maati took a pose that requested clarification In another context, it would have risked annoying the er, but this ti a certain level of disbelief Without hesitation, he repeated his words

"The Dai-kvo requests Maati Vaupathai come immediately to his private chae of the Dai-kvo that Maati Vaupathai was, if not a failure, certainly an e roo the broad, clean streets, and huddled with others around the kilns of the firekeepers, Maati had grown used to the fact that he would never be entirely accepted by those who surrounded hined to speak to him directly Maati closed the brown leather book he had been studying and slipped it into his sleeve He took a pose that accepted the er turned se that was home to the [)a]-kvo and the poets was always beautiful Now in the , flowers and ivies scented the air and threatened to overflow the well-tended gardens and planters, but no stray grass rose between the paving stones The gentle choir of wind chih, thin waterfall that fell beside the palaces shone silver, and the towers and garrets-carved from the mountain face itself-were unstained even by the birds that roosted in the eaves Men spent lifetie ie and palaces seereat bowl of sky above thee-only men, no women were permitted-had never entirely robbed Nlaati of his awe at the place He struggled now to hold himself tall, to appear as calularly As he passed through the archways that led to the palace, he saw several ers and more than a few of the brown-robed poets pause to look at him

He was not the only one who found his presence there strange

The servant led hiardens to the modest apartments of the most powerful man in the world Maati recalled the last time he had been there-the insults and recri sarcas around hiar castles left out in the rain Maati shook himself There was no reason for the I)ai-kvo to have called hinities of the past

There are always the indignities of the future, the soft voice that had become Maati&039;s muse said from a corner of his mind Never assume you can survive the future because you&039;ve survived the past Everyone thinks that, and they&039;ve all been wrong eventually

The servant stopped before the el chamber He scratched it twice to announce them, then opened the door andto dive from a cliff into shalloater and entered

The Dai-kvo was sitting at his table He had not had hair since Maati had met him twenty-three summers before when the Dai-kvo had only been Tahi-kvo, the crueler of the two teachers set to sift through the discarded sons of the Khaiee His brows had gone pure white since he&039;d become the Dai-kvo, and the lines around his mouth had deepened His black eyes were just as alive

The other two ers to Maati The thinner one sat at the table across froold, his hair pulled back to show graying temples and a thin whiteflecked heard The thicker-with both fat and ht-stood at , one foot up on the thick ledge, looking into the gardens, and Maati could see where his clean-shaven jaw sagged at the jowl His robes were the light brown color of sand, his boots hard leather and travel worn He turned to look at Maati as the door closed, and there was so familiar about him-about both these new men-that he could not describe He fell into the old pose, the first one he had learned at the school

"I ah Dai-kvo"

The Dai-kvo grunted and gestured to hiers

"This is the one," the Dai-kvo said The raceful and sure of theined what they saw hi hack his hairline, the smallest of pot bellies A soft man in a poet&039;s robes, ill-considered and little spoken of He felt himself start to blush, clenched his teeth, and forced hier nor his shaive me," he said "I don&039;t believe we have ize that I don&039;t recall it"

"We haven&039;t met," the thicker one said

"He isn&039;tto the Dai-kvo The thicker scowled and sketched the briefest of apologetic poses It was a thread thrown to a drowningeven the empty foresturing to a chair "Have a bowl of tea There&039;s so we have to discuss Tell me what you&039;ve heard of events in the winter cities"

Maati sat and spoke while the Dai-kvo poured the tea