Seasons of War Read Online Free PDF

mouth with the back of her hand, and Maati was amazed again by how tall she’d grown. He still thought of her as hardly standing high as his knees, and here she was - thin as a stick and awkward, but tall as her mother. She’d even taken to wearing a woman’s jewelry - necklace of gold and silver, armbands of lacework silver and gems, and rings on half her fingers. She still looked like a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s things, but even that would pass soon.
    ‘And how did he die?’ she asked.
    ‘I never said he did,’ Maati said.
    Eiah’s lips bent in a frown. Her dark eyes narrowed.
    ‘You don’t tell stories where they live, Uncle Maati. You like the dead ones.’
    Maati chuckled. It was a fair enough criticism, and her exasperation was as amusing as her interest. Since she’d been old enough to read, Eiah had haunted the library of Machi, poking here and there, reading and being frustrated. And now that she’d reached her fourteenth summer, the time had come for her to turn to matters of court. She was the only daughter of the Khai Machi, and as such, a rare chance for a marriage alliance. She would be the most valued property in the city, and worse for her and her parents, she was more than clever enough to know it. Her time in the library had taken on a tone of defiance, but it was never leveled at Maati, so it never bothered him. In fact, he found it rather delightful.
    ‘Well,’ he said, settling his paunch more comfortably in the library’s deep silk-covered chair, ‘as it happens, his binding did fail. It was tragic. He started screaming, and didn’t stop for hours. He stopped when he died, of course, and when they examined him afterwards, they found slivers of glass all through his blood.’
    ‘They cut him open?’
    ‘Of course,’ Maati said.
    ‘That’s disgusting,’ she said. Then a moment later, ‘If someone died here, could I help do it?’
    ‘No one’s likely to try a binding here, Eiah-kya. Only poets who’ve trained for years with the Dai-kvo are allowed to make the attempt, and even then they’re under strict supervision. Holding the andat is dangerous work, and not just if it fails.’
    ‘They should let girls do it too,’ she said. ‘I want to go to the school and train to be a poet.’
    ‘But then you wouldn’t be your father’s daughter anymore. If the Dai-kvo didn’t choose you, you’d be one of the branded, and they’d turn you out into the world to make whatever way you could without anyone to help you.’
    ‘That’s not true. Father was at the school, and he didn’t have to take the brand. If the Dai-kvo didn’t pick me, I wouldn’t take it either. I’d just come back here and live alone like you do.’
    ‘But then wouldn’t you and Danat have to fight?’
    ‘No,’ Eiah said, taking a pose appropriate to a tutor offering correction. ‘Girls can’t be Khai, so Danat wouldn’t have to fight me for the chair.’
    ‘But if you’re going to have women be poets, why not Khaiem too?’
    ‘Because who’d want to be Khai?’ she asked and took another piece of cake from the tray on the table between them.
    The library stretched out around them - chamber after chamber of scrolls and books and codices that were Maati’s private domain. The air was rich with the scent of old leather and dust and the pungent herbs he used to keep the mice and insects away. Baarath, the chief librarian and Maati’s best friend here in the far, cold North, had kept it before him. Often when Maati arrived in the morning or remained long after dark, puzzling over some piece of ancient text or obscure reference, he would look up, half-wondering where the annoying, fat, boisterous, petty little man had gotten to, and then he would remember.
    The fever had taken dozens of people that year. Winter always changed the city, the cold driving them deep into the tunnels and hidden chambers below Machi. For months they lived by firelight and in darkness. By midwinter, the air