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more than that. Losing a wayhouse would have made the world harder for me and Old Mani. There are more people than I can count here in the city, and all the low towns. And you carry them. It makes it matter more.’
    ‘I sit through days of ceremony and let myself be hectored over the things I don’t do the way other people prefer,’ Otah said. ‘I’m not sure that anything I’ve done here has actually made any difference at all. If they stuffed a robe with cotton and posed the sleeves . . .’
    ‘You care about them,’ Kiyan said.
    ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I care about you and Eiah and Danat. And Maati. I know that I’m supposed to care about everyone and everything in Machi, but love, I’m only a man. They can tell me I gave up my own name when I took the chair, but really the Khai Machi is only what I do. I wouldn’t keep the work if I could find a way out.’
    Kiyan embraced him with one arm. Her hair was fragrant with lavender oil.
    ‘You’re sweet,’ she said.
    ‘Am I? I’ll try to confess my incompetence and selfishness more often.’
    ‘As long as it includes me,’ she said. ‘Now go let those poor men change your clothes and get back to beds of their own.’
    The servants had become accustomed to the Khai’s preference for brief ablutions. Otah knew that his own father had managed somehow to enjoy the ceremony of being dressed and bathed by others. But his father had been raised to take the chair, had followed the traditions and forms of etiquette, and had never, that Otah knew of, stepped outside the role he’d been born to. Otah himself had been turned out, and the years he had spent being a simple, free man, reliant upon himself had ruined him for the fawning of the court. He endured the daily frivolity of having foods brought to him, his hands cleaned for him, his hair combed on his behalf. He allowed the body servants to pull off his formal robes and swathe him in a sleeping shift, and when he returned to his bed, Kiyan’s breath was already deep, slow, and heavy. He slipped in beside her, pulling the blankets up over himself, and closed his eyes at last.
    Sleep, however, did not come. His body ached, his eyes were tired, but it seemed that the moment he laid his head back, Otah’s mind woke. He listened to the sounds of the palace in night: the almost silent wind through a distant window, the deep and subtle ticking of cooling stone, the breath of the woman at his side. Beyond the doors to the apartments, someone coughed - one of the servants set to watch over the Khai Machi in case there was anything he should desire in the night. Otah tried not to move.
    He hadn’t asked Kiyan about Danat’s health. He’d meant to. But surely if there had been anything concerning, she would have brought it up to him. And regardless, he could ask her in the morning. Perhaps he would cancel the audiences before midday and go speak with Danat’s physicians. And speak to Eiah. He hadn’t said he would do that, but Kiyan had asked, and it wasn’t as if being present in his own daughter’s life should be an imposition. He wondered what it would have been to have a dozen wives, whether he would have felt the need to attend to all of their children as he did to the two he had now, how he would have stood watching his boys grow up when he knew he would have to send them away or else watch them slaughter one another over which of them would take his own place here on this soft, sleepless bed and fear in turn for his own sons.
    The night candle ate through its marks as he listened to the internal voice nattering in his mind, gnawing at half a thousand worries both justified and inane. The trade agreements with Udun weren’t in place yet. Perhaps something really was the matter with Eiah. He didn’t know how long stone buildings stood; nothing stands forever, so it only made sense that someday the palaces would fall. And the towers. The towers reached so high it seemed that low clouds would touch them;