Long Price Quartet #01 - A Shadow In Summer by Daniel Abraham

Author:Daniel Abraham [Abraham, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2006-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Amat woke in the darkness, her breath fast, her heart pounding. In her dream, Ovi Niit had been kicking in her door, and even when she'd pulled herself up from sleep's dark waters, it took some time for her to feel certain that the booming reports from the dream hadn't been real. Slowly, the panic waned, and she lay back. Above her, the netting glowed like new copper in the light from the night candle and then slowly became brighter and paler as the cool blue light of dawn crept in through the opened windows. The shutters shifted in the sea-scented breeze.

Her desk was piled with papers. Ink bricks hollowed from use stacked one on another at the head of the stairs, waiting to be carried away. The affairs of the house had fallen into near chaos while she was away. She had spent long nights looking over lists and ledgers and telling herself that she cared for them all the way she once had. That House Wilsin and her work for it had not been poisoned.

Amat sighed, sat up, and pushed the netting aside. Her world since her resurrection had been much the same—nightmares until dawn, gray and empty work and messages and meetings until sunset. At one point, seeing the strain on her face at the end of the day, Marchat had offered to send her away for a week to Chaburitan once the season was over. The house could cover the expenses, he said. And she let herself imagine that time—away from Saraykeht and the seafront and her desk and the soft quarter—though the fantasy was washed by melancholy. It could never actually happen, but it would have been nice.

Instead, Amat Kyaan rose from her bed, pulled on clean robes, and walked out, leaning on her cane, to the corner stall where a girl from the low towns sold fresh berries wrapped in sweet frybread. It was good enough as a meal to see her through to midday. She ate it as she walked back to her apartments, trying to order her day in her mind, but finding it hard to concentrate on shifting meetings and duties back and forth. Simply leaving her mind blank and empty was so much easier.

Her time since the sad trade and her banishment had felt like being ill. She'd moved through her days without feeling them, unable to concentrate, uninterested in her work. Something had broken in her, and pretending it back to fixed wasn't working. She'd half known it wouldn't, and her mind had made plans for her almost without her knowing it.

The man waiting at her door was wearing robes of yellow and silver—the colors of House Tiyan. He was young—sixteen, perhaps seventeen summers. Liat's age. An apprentice, then, but the apprentice of someone high in House Tiyan. There was only one errand that could mean. Amat shifted her schedule in her mind and popped the last of the berry-soaked frybread into her mouth. The young man, seeing her, fell into a pose of greeting appropriate for an honored elder.

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