A Betrayal in Winter (lpq-2) by Daniel Abraham Read Free Book Online

a
    bench by the fire. There were a good number of travelers-merchants from
    the great cities, farmers from the low towns, travelers each with a
    story and a past and a tale to tell, if only they were asked the right
    questions in the right ways.
     
    It was later, the warm air busy with conversation, that Otah caught
    sight of Kiyan across the wide hall. She had on a working woman's robes,
    her hair tied back, but the expression on her face and the angle of her
    body spoke of a deep contentment and satisfaction. She knew her place
    was here, and she was proud of it.
     
    Otah found himself suddenly stilled by a longing for her unlike the
    simple lust that he was accustomed to. He imagined himself feeling the
    same satisfaction that he saw in her. The same sense of having a place
    in the world. She turned to him as if he had spoken and tilted her
    head-not an actual formal pose, but nonetheless a question.
     
    He smiled in reply. This that she offered was, he suspected, a life
    worth living.
     
    CEHMAI TYAN'S DREAMS, WHENEVER THE TIME. CAME TO RENEW HIS LIFE'S
    struggle, took the same form. A normal dream-meaningless, strange, and
    trivial-would shift. Something small would happen that carried a weight
    of fear and dread out of all proportion. This time, he dreamt he was
    walking in a street fair, trying to find a stall with food he liked,
    when a young girl appeared at his side. As he saw her, his sleeping mind
    had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted
    the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.
     
    Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown
    robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked
    stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air
    fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs
    felt softer than grass against Cehmai's bare feet. And the andat was
    waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it-black
    basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone
    disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent's
    pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a
    windstorm sounded.
     
    "Again?" the poet asked.
     
    Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board,
    recalled the binding-the translation that had brought the thing across
    from him out of formlessness-and pushed a black stone into the empty
    field of the hoard. The game began again.
     
    The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai's work. It had been
    done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had
    figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding-the fluid lines of play
    and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit
    seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his
    fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru's had once
    touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted
    his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held
    when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across
    from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat
    held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part
    because the binding had also made StoneMade-Soft a terrible player.
     
    The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. StoneMade-Soft
    glowered down on its failing line.
     
    "You're going to lose," Cehmai said.
     
    "I know," the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant
    rockslide-another evocation of flowing stone. "Being doomed doesn't take
    away from the dignity of the effort, though."
     
    "Well said."
     
    The andat shrugged and smiled. "One can afford to be philosophical when
    losing means outliving one's opponent. This particular game? You picked
    it. But there are others we play that I'm not quite so crippled at."
     
    "I didn't