can't hide it from me, Itani. You might as well come out with it."
Otah held the thought in his mind. I'm not who I've told you I am. Itani Noygu is the name I picked for myself when I was a child. My father is dying, and brothers I can hardly recall have started killing each other, and I find it makes me sad. He wondered what Kiyan would say to that. She prided herself on knowing him-on knowing people and how their minds worked. And yet he didn't think this was something she'd already have guessed.
Naked, she lay beside him, pulling thick blankets up over them both.
"Did you find another woman in Chaburi-Tan?" she asked, halfteasing. But only half. "Some young dancing girl who stole your heart, or some other hit of your flesh, and now you're stewing over how to tell me you're leaving me?"
"I'm a courier," Otah said. "I have a woman in every city I visit. You know that."
"You don't," she said. "Some couriers do, but you don't."
"No?"
"No. It took me half a year of doing everything short of stripping bare for you to notice me. You don't stay in other cities long enough for a woman to chip through your reserve. And you don't have to push away the blankets. You may want to be cold, but I don't."
"Well. Maybe I'm just feeling old."
"A ripe thirty-three? Well, when you decide to stop running across the world, I'd always be pleased to hire you on. We could stand another pair of hands around the place. You could throw out the drunks and track down the cheats that try to slip away without paying."
"You don't pay enough," Otah said. "I talk to Old Mani. I know what your wages are.
"Perhaps you'd get extra for keeping me warm at nights."
"Shouldn't you offer that to Old Mani first? He's been here longer than I have."
Kiyan slapped his chest smartly, and then nestled into him. He found himself curling toward her, the warmth of her body drawing him like a familiar scent. Her fingers traced the tattoo on his breast-the ink had faded over time, blurring lines that had once been sharp and clear.
"Jokes aside," she said, and he could hear a weariness in her voice, "I would take you on, if you wanted to stay. You could live here, with me. Help me manage the house."
He caressed her hair, feeling the individual strands as they flowed across his fingertips. There was a scattering of white among the black that made her look older than she was. Otah knew that they had been there since she was a girl, as if she'd been born old.
"That sounds like you're suggesting marriage," he said.
"Perhaps. You wouldn't have to, but ... it would be one way to arrange things. That isn't a threat, you know. I don't need a husband. Only if it would make you feel better, we could ..."
He kissed her gently. It had been weeks, and he was surprised to find how much he'd missed the touch of her lips. Weeks of travel weariness slipped away, the deep unease loosened its hold on his chest, and he took comfort in her. He fell asleep with her arm over his body, her breath already soft and deep with sleep.
In the morning, he woke before she did, slipped out of the bed, and dressed quietly. The sun was not up, but the eastern sky had lightened and the morning birds were singing madly as he took himself across an ancient stone bridge into Udun.
A river city, Udun was laced with as many canals as roadways. Bridges humped up high enough for barges to pass beneath them, and the green water of the Qiit lapped at old stone steps that descended into the river mud. Otah stopped at a stall on the broad central plaza and traded two lengths of copper for a thick wedge of honey bread and a bowl of black, smoky tea. Around him, the city slowly came awakethe streets and canals filling with traders and merchants, beggars singing at the corners or in small rafts tied at the water's edge, laborers hauling wagons along the wide flagstoned streets, and birds bright as shafts of sunlight-blue and red and yellow, green as grass, and pink as dawn. Udun was a city of birds, and their chatter and shriek and song filled the air as he ate.
The compound of House Siyanti was in the better part of the city, just downstream