A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2) (51 page)
to standing.
"You can't mean this," Idaan said, her voice hardly a whisper. "I killed
Danat. I as much as killed our father,"
"I didn't know them," her brother said. "I certainly didn't love them."
"I did."
"All the worse for you, then."
She looked into his eyes for the first time. There was a pain in them
that she couldn't fathom.
"I tried to kill you."
"You won't do it again. I've killed and lived with it. I've been given
mercy I didn't deserve. Sometimes that I didn't want. So you see, we may
not be all that different, sister." He went silent for a moment, then,
"Of course if you come back, or I find you conspiring against me-"
"I wouldn't come back here if they begged me," she said. "°I'his city is
ashes to me."
Her brother smiled and nodded as much to himself as to her.
"Sinja?" he said.
The soldier tossed the bundle to her. It was a leather traveler's cloak
lined with wool and thick silk robes and leggings wrapped around heavy
boots. She was appalled at how heavy they were, at how weak she'd
become. Her brother ducked out of the room, leaving only the two of
them. The soldier nodded to the robes in her arms.
"Best change into those quickly, Idaan-cha," he said. "I've got a sledge
and team waiting, but it's an unpleasant winter out there, and I want to
make the first low town before dark."
"This is madness," she said.
The soldier took a pose of agreement.
"He's making quite a few had decisions," he said. "He's new at this,
though. He'll get better."
Idaan stripped under the soldier's impassive gaze and pulled on the
robes and the leggings, the cloak, the boots. She stepped out of her
cell with the feeling of having shed her skin. She didn't understand how
much those walls had become everything to her until she stepped out the
last door and into the blasting cold and limitless white. For a moment,
it was too much. The world was too huge and too open, and she was too
small to survive even the sight of it. She wasn't conscious of shrinking
back from it until the soldier touched her arm.
"The sledge is this way," he said.
Idaan stumbled, her hoots new and awkward, her legs unaccustomed to the
slick ice on the snow. But she followed.
THE CHAINS WERE FROZEN To THE TOWER, THE LIFTING MECHANISM BRITtle with
cold. The only way was to walk, but Otah found he was much stronger than
he had been when they'd marched him up the tower before, and the effort
of it kept him warm. The air was bitterly cold; there weren't enough
braziers in the city to keep the towers heated in winter. The floors he
passed were filled with crates of food, bins of grains and dried fruits,
smoked fish and meats. Supplies for the months until summer came again,
and the city could forget for a while what the winter had been.
Back in the palaces, Kiyan was waiting for him. And Nlaati. They were to
meet and talk over the strategies for searching the library. And other
things, he supposed. And there was a petition from the silversmiths to
reduce the tax paid to the city on work that was sold in the nearby low
towns. And the head of the Saya wanted to discuss a proper match for his
daughter, with the strong and awkward implication that the Khai Machi
might want to consider who his second wife might be. But for now, all
the voices were gone, even the ones he loved, and the solitude was sweet.
He stopped a little under two-thirds of the way to the top, his legs
aching but his face warm. He wrestled open the inner sky doors and then
unlatched and pushed open the outer. The city was splayed out beneath
him, dark stone peeking out from under the snow, plumes of smoke rising
as always from the forges. TO the south, a hundred crows rose from the
branches of dead trees, circled briefly, and took their perches again.
And beyond that, to the east, he saw the distant forms he'd come to see:
a sledge with a small team and two figures on it, speeding out across
the snowfields. He sat, letting his feet dangle out over the rooftops,
and watched until they were only a tiny black mark in the distance. And
then as they vanished into the white.
Daniel Abraham's first published novel, A Shadow" in Summer, is the
first volume of the Long Price Quartet. He has had stories published in
the Vanishing Acts, Bones of the World, and TheDart anthologies, and has
been included in Gardner Dozois's Years Best Science Fiction anthology
as well. His story "Flat Diane" won the International Horror Guild award
for mid-length fiction.
He is currently working on the Long Price Quartet, the third volume of
which, An Autumn War, will he published in 2008. He lives in New Mexico
with his wife and daughter.
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