An Autumn War

himself and his sled. The numbness and the pain felt a hit like penance,

and he was so caught tip in them he nearly failed to notice the horse at

the mouth of the bolt-hole.

It was a small animal, fit with heavy blankets and riding tack. Nlaati

blinked at it, stu

boulder, his heart in his mouth. Someone had come looking for them.

Someone had found them. He turned to look back at the path he'd walked,

certain that the footsteps in the snow were visible as blood on a

wedding dress.

lie waited for what seemed half a day but couldn't have been more than

half a hand's width in the arc of the fast winter sun. A figure emerged

from the tu

torn between poking his head out to watch it and pulling back to hide

behind his boulder. In the end caution won out, and he waited blind

while the sound of horse's hooves on snow began and then grew faint. tie

chanced a look, and the rider had its back to him, heading back south to

Machi, a twig of black on the wide field of mourning white. laati

waited until he judged the risk of being seen no greater than the risk

of frostbite if he stayed still, then forced himself-all his limbs

aching with the cold-to scramble the last stretch into the tu

The bolt-hole was empty. He was surprised to find that he'd halfexpected

it to be filled with men bearing swords, ready to take their vengeance

out against him. He pulled off his gloves and lit a small fire to warm

himself, and when his hands could move again without pain, he made an

inventory of the place. Nothing seemed to be missing, nothing disturbed.

Except this: a small wicker basket with two low stone wax-sealed jars

where none had been before. Maati squatted over them, lifting them

carefully. They were heavy-packed with something. And a length of

scroll, curled like a leaf, had been nestled between them. Maati blew on

his fingers and unfurled the scrap of parchment.

Maati-rha-

I thought you might be out in the hiding

place where we were supposed to go when

the Galts came, but you aren't here, so

I'm not sure anymore. I'm leaving this

for you just in case. It's peaches from

the gardens. They were going to give

them to the Galts, so I stole them.

Loya-cha says I'm not supposed to ride

yet, so I don't know when I'll be able

to get out again. If you find this, take

it so I'll know you were there.

It's going to be all right.

It was signed with Eiah's wide, uncontrolled hand. Maati felt himself

weeping. He broke the seal of one jar and with numb fingers drew out a

slice of the deep orange fruit, sweet and rich and thick with the

sunshine of the autumn days that had passed.

THE WORLD CHANGES. SOMETIMES SLOWLY, SOMETIMES ALL OF AN INSTANT. But

the world changes, and it doesn't change back. A rockslide shifts the

face of a mountain, and the stones never go back up to take their old

places. War scatters the people of a city, and not all will return. If any.

A child cherished as a babe, clung to as a man, dies; a mother's one

last journey with her son at her side proves to be truly the last. The

world has changed. And no matter how painful this new world is, it

doesn't change back.

Liat lay in the darkened room, as she had for days. Her belly didn't

bother her any longer. Even when it had, the pain hadn't been deep. It

was only flesh. The news of Nayiit's death had been a more profound

wound than anything the andat could do. Her boy had followed her on this

last desperate adventure. He had left his own wife and child. And she

had brought him here to die for a boy he hadn't even known to be his

brother.

Or perhaps he had known. Perhaps that was what had given him the courage

to attack the Galtic soldiers and be cut down. She would have asked him;

she still intended to ask him, when she saw him next. Even knowing that

she never could, even trying consciously to force the im pulse away, she

found she could not stop intending it. It-hen / see him again still felt

like the future. A time would come when it would feel like the past.

When he was here, when I could touch him, when he would smile at me and

make me laugh, when I worried for him. When my boy lived. Back then.

Before I lost him.

Before the world changed.

She sighed in the darkness, and didn't bother to wipe away the tears.

They were meaningless-her body responding without her. 't'hey couldn't

undo what had been done, and so they didn't matter. Voices echoed in the

hall outside her apartments here in the tu

If they had been shouting warnings of fire, she would have ignored those

too.

Sometimes she would think of all the people who had died. The amateur

soldiers that Otah had led into battle outside the village of the

l)ai-kvo, the Galts dead on the road from Cetani. The sad rogue poet

Riaan, slaughtered by the men he thought his friends. The i

naive men and women and children in Nantani and Utani and Chaburi- 'lan

and all the other sacked cities. The children at the poets' school.

Every one of them had a mother. Every mother who had not had the luck to

die was trapped in the quiet desperation that imprisoned her now. Liat

thought of all these other grieving women, held them up in her mind as

proof that she was being stupid and weak. Mothers lost their sons all

the time, all across the world. In every nation, in every city, in every

age. Her suffering wasn't so much compared with all of them.

And then she would hear someone cough in Nayiit's voice, or she'd

mistake the shape of a man's back, and her idiot, traitor heart would

sing for a moment. Even as her mind told her no it wasn't, her heart

would soar before it fell.

The scratch at her door was so faint and tentative, Liat thought a first

it was only a rat tricked by the darkness into believing the room empty.

But the sound came again, the intentional rhythm of a hand against wood.

Likely it was Otah, coming again to hold her hand and sit quietly. I le

had done so several times, when he could free himself from the rigors of

peace and war and Empire. They spoke little because there was too much

to say, and no words adequate. Or perhaps one of his physicians, come to

look in on her health. Or a servant sent to declaim poems or sing.

Someone to distract her in the name of comfort. She wished they wouldn't

come.

The scratch repeated itself, more loudly.

"Who?" Liat managed to ask. For answer, the door slid open, and Kiyan

stood framed in the doorway, a lantern in her hand. The expression on

the woman's fox-thin face seemed equally pity and unease.

"Liat-kya," she said. "May I cone in?"