Traitors' Gate (71 page)

He choked, face burning. “I am not—”

“Are you not? Look how flushed you are!”

He swiped a hand over his sweating forehead. “Anyway, Mai is her own mistress. She is the administrator of their holdings and household, not him. She can't be bought or sold.”

“Of course she can be! Only the price is negotiable.”

“What are you saying, exalted one?”

“I am saying,” she said with a glance toward the wagons ambling upward behind her, “I have plans for my son that do not include an inconvenient merchant's daughter.”

H
OME. HOME. HOME
.

Mai had been gone from Olossi for only a few days, flown on eagle's wings to Horn and back again. In those few days so much had passed in Horn that to think of it dizzied her. But entering now through her courtyard gate she felt as if she had only stepped out of the compound walls to take a turn in Olossi's market streets before returning home to eat her dinner and go to her night's rest.

As Chief Tuvi escorted her in through the warehouse, voices faded to silence as people looked up. Factors hesitated, brushes were set down, vials of precious oil held forgotten in hands, people standing as still as if they had spotted a venomous snake near their feet. Tuvi shrugged with a frown of puzzlement. Priya wrapped the sleeping Atani more closely against her slender frame. When they reached the gate that led into the counting room, it opened at once, as if the folk inside had expected them. Tuvi stepped inside first, as he always did. He scanned the room, then gestured to Mai. After a glance at Priya and the baby, she followed.

O'eki stood in the center of the chamber with arms crossed, his big frame towering in the space. “Mistress!”

His gaze shifted to fix on the other person in the otherwise empty chamber, a young man with black and lovely hair curling loose as if blown in a whirlwind, his intense expression pinning her in the instant in which she recognized him.

“Keshad! You came back! You survived! What of Eliar?”

“Eliar is alive, not that I care for his well-being any longer. Mistress, where is the captain? Is he with you?”

“He's still in Horn.” She shook her head. “What news, Keshad? By your face, it is momentous!”

“I've been sent to fetch the captain,” he said, but he was a terrible liar; his gaze slid sideways, his eyelids flickered; his lips thinned as if he were squeezing back the truth.

She looked at O'eki, who shrugged. Standing, as always, in a position to block any move made against her, Chief Tuvi scratched at his straggle of a beard. Priya came in behind her and touched her elbow to reassure her. Atani smacked his lips.

“Best speak up, lad,” said Chief Tuvi in a genial tone that would have milked blood from stone, if the stone were wise.

Voices broke into argument on the other side of the door that led into the house. The heavy door groaned, then slammed back, and Sheyshi stormed into the room with high color in her dusky cheeks.

“Mistress! You are come home! I was worried for you!” She seized Mai's free arm and clung to it, her breath sweet with mint tea and her fingers like claws digging into Mai's flesh. “I heard those two talking! That one!” Mercifully, she released Mai and pointed with her finger, tremblingly, at Keshad, who flinched at the rudeness. “I heard that one tell O'eki to keep a secret until the captain comes home.”

“Keep what secret?”

Sheyshi heaved a passionate sigh. “There is trouble in the settlement for Mistress Miravia! And he won't tell you! Some important person is come, but I couldn't hear who. Now maybe your sister Miravia has trouble!”

“What important person, Keshad? Has Eliar threatened to take Miravia to Nessumara?” In her life maybe Mai had never
spoken so sharply to anyone, but the events of recent months had spun a stronger thread in her, as tough as silk, as enduring as wool.
“Tell me!”

He took a step back as if she had slapped him, then he wiped a hand over his face as if to brush away the pelting bruise of a cloudburst. The look he cast toward Sheyshi was bitter, even brutal, an ugly grimace that startled Mai. He could not control his feelings; he struggled to speak evenly as Chief Tuvi's placid gaze prodded him.

“There is much to tell, Mistress. The emperor, he who was the captain's half brother, is dead, killed in battle by his cousins.”

Mai swayed. Priya caught her under the elbow, but she found her breath. O'eki stooped by his desk and rose to offer his writing pillow for her to sit, but she shook him off as Sheyshi wailed. “No, I'm all right. What does this mean for Anji?”

“The cousin has taken the throne and been anointed as emperor. But he is a peaceable man, seeking order, not war.”

“Hu! Certainly it seems practical to him to want no more fighting now he has gained the imperial throne,” said Tuvi with one those inscrutable smiles common to the Qin when they were amused by the ironies of life.

“Maybe so. I only met his gelded brother, who seemed—” The phrase spoken with a shudder. “—determined to achieve his ends. They have an offer for the captain.”

Mai shook her head impatiently. “An offer? Of what kind?”

“Gelded?”
said Tuvi. “Ah. He was cut. A eunuch cannot sit as emperor. Or var.”

“They don't expect—!” Mai broke off as heat rose in her face.

Atani essayed a few gurgling sounds and reached for Mai from the wrap. Priya lifted him out of the cloth, and as Mai took his comforting weight in her arms she remembered that calmness served her better than anger and fright. “What is the offer, Keshad?”

“I don't know, verea. They sent an emissary. They sent the captain's mother. It's she who knows what they mean to offer him.”

“The captain's
mother
?” said Tuvi under his breath, words she would not have heard if he had not been standing close enough that his shoulder brushed hers. “The var's sister? Is here in the Hundred? In Astafero? Hu!”

Sheyshi was staring at Kesh as if his words had hammered her, yet her gaze seemed fixed not on him but past him, as if she were seeing something else. Then her eyes flickered and she glanced at Mai and began to snivel. “I'm scared, Mistress. What if the red hounds come?”

“Hush, Sheyshi. Tuvi, if Anji's mother has come, I must greet her. Show her honor and respect. Can she not come here to Olossi?”

The Qin were not outwardly affectionate; they did not push and prod, except when soldiers wrestled and sparred in training exercises. In Kartu Town, folk kept a physical distance appropriate to their station and degree of relationship, and even within the Mei clan Mai had witnessed few displays of physical warmth and intimacy. One of the most startling aspects of the Hundred was the degree to which people casually touched other people, of either sex, in public spaces.

So when Tuvi now touched her hand, she was shocked enough that Atani startled, his little head tilting back to look first at her and then at the chief.

“Best she stay there and you stay here until the captain returns, Mistress,” Tuvi said, but his sober expression cleared immediately and a smile softened his face as the baby squirmed and reached for him. Mai handed him over.

“She asked me if I would take you!” Keshad blurted.

“If you would take me where?”

“Take you as my wife. She has plans, verea, for her son, and they don't include you.”

Tuvi's gaze was distant as he continued smiling absently at the cooing boy. These words did not surprise him, however much they confounded her. “Like I said, it's best if you do nothing until the captain returns, Mistress.”

Mai stared at Keshad. “As
your
wife
?”

Sheyshi sobbed and collapsed on the floor like a rag doll cast away by its indifferent owner. Merciful One! Could poor
Sheyshi have been harboring an infatuation for Keshad all this time? And no one the wiser?

“Of course that's not what I want, not that I don't admire you, verea. But you must know—” His emotions galloped away and dragged him after. “You must know, verea, that I intend to marry Miravia. If she'll have me.”

Sheyshi bawled.

“But you can't!” cried Mai. “I mean Miravia to marry Chief Tuvi! He's the only one who's worthy of her. And then she'll always stay with me. You can't have her, Keshad!”

“Who are
you
to order her life? Eliar repudiated her. In the market. In front of everyone. Will you do that, also, if she turns down Chief Tuvi in favor of me? No disrespect, Chief.”

The chief studied the baby with brows furrowed.

“What makes you think she'll have you?” demanded Mai. “You, who traded in slaves for years!”

“I only did it to earn coin to buy my sister free.”

“Miravia despises and rejects slavery.”

“You keep slaves! She doesn't despise and reject you!”

Anji's
mother
! Blown in like a storm to overset everything. How could a woman who had never met her be speaking of handing Mai over to another man as if she were a slave purchased at the market? And yet hadn't Anji bought her from her father? That he treated her as a wife, not as a slave concubine, was only because he had chosen to do so. He could have used and then discarded her at any slave market during their long journey here. Why should Anji's mother—a woman of exalted birth, sister to the var who ruled over the Qin Empire and wife to the Sirniakan emperor himself—consider Mai to be any different from a slave? Any more than she was herself, a woman of far superior rank and blood, who had been discarded by the emperor when it was no longer politically useful for him to favor her?

“I will not be handed off to some other man!” cried Mai. “Meaning no disrespect to
you
, Master Keshad!” But the words were bitter, their bile a sour taste on her tongue.

Miravia was going to marry Tuvi. Mai had it all arranged and
was just allowing time for Miravia's situation to settle. It was not acceptable for Miravia to marry this unpleasant young man with his handsome eyes and beautiful hair, exactly the kind of passionate features worn by the heroes in songs who snared so many luckless maidens. What if Miravia, so innocent, so unworldly, fell in love with his intense looks and rejected a steady, solid, intelligent, calm, and wise man like Tuvi just because he was old enough to be her father!

Yet how was Mai different from the rest if she managed Miravia's life, or Priya's life, or anyone's life but her own and her child's, merely to satisfy her own selfish desires? If she did not want to be so treated, then she must begin by refusing to inflict on those she had authority over what others had previously inflicted on them. What her father had dealt to her.

She turned to the big man. “O'eki, write up a manumission for all three of you. You, and Priya. And Sheyshi.”

“Do you mean to turn me out?” Sheyshi sobbed. “Where will I go?”

“Of course I won't turn you out. If you want to stay, you can stay. It's just you won't be a slave. You'll be a hireling. You'll be paid coin, and if you want to work elsewhere, you can go elsewhere.”

“I don't want to go elsewhere!” Sheyshi wailed, swaying back and forth like a tree whipped in a strong wind.

“You don't have to go anywhere,” said Mai, expending her last store of even temper, she who had prided herself on her fathomless calm. Not for her Ti's storms or her twin Mei's sulks; she had held herself above Uncle Girish's tantrums and thoroughgoing nastiness, her father's controlling angers, her mother's jealousy and competitiveness, her aunt's scheming, and her grandmother's favoritism. And yet here they all surfaced in a swell of furious emotion that made her hands quiver and her shoulders shake.

Keshad will not get the better of
me
!

“Go on, O'eki!” she said harshly. “Do as I told you!”

With a shaking hand, O'eki moved paper on the desk and weighted its corners with stones. His brushstrokes were uneven,
the calligraphy uncharacteristically sloppy, but he wrote the same text three times, a formulation familiar to him from his years as a slave in Kartu Town.

Tuvi dandled the baby with a thoughtful look on his face that might have meant anything. Surely he had guessed she meant him for Miravia, someone special only, but what he thought of her blurted confidence, the revelation of her most lovingly hoarded plans, she could not tell. Sheyshi's tears squeezed out through eyes pressed shut.

Priya said nothing, moved not. Keshad fumed. She'd stolen a march on him, hadn't she? Eiya! And now she was crying, but she let the tears flow. Tears were no reason to feel shame. Only dishonor shamed you.

O'eki lifted his brush as if to add another word but set it down on the brush stand instead.

“Mistress,” he said in a trembling voice. “I am finished.”

Sheyshi turned her face toward the wall, hiding herself.

Mai sank down beside O'eki. She plucked the brush from the stand, forefingers on the outside and small fingers on the back with the thumb to steady them. She touched the hairs to the inkstone and, ruthlessly, hearing only their breathing as her accompaniment, signed them with her formal name, Mai'ili daughter of Clan Mei, as Priya had taught her.

She signed Sheyshi's manumission. She signed O'eki's manumission. She signed Priya's manumission and pressed the seal over each one, to make them legal and binding before witnesses, work that the clerks of Sapanasu usually did but which those who could write could manage themselves without requiring the intervention of the temple.

The var's sister and the emperor's former favored queen, so grand and noble a woman, might consider Mai of Clan Mei so insignificant as to warrant no more consideration than a disposable slave, but Mai was no longer such an insignificant creature even if she had been so at one time. She had no need to ask anyone's permission to seal such an act. Hers to act and hers to seal because this was her household as much as Anji's and no woman like Grandmother Mei was going to totter in and think she could sell off Mai as though she were a helpless, propertyless
daughter worth only as much coin as her beauty could be sold for. And she certainly wasn't going to let some handsome untested young man steal Miravia just because of his pretty eyes and reckless heart! She had a right to appeal to Miravia's affections, too.