FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS









EARTH-AIR-WATER-FIRE 


These elements have sustained the peaceful people of Shaftal for generations, 
with their subtle powers of healing, truth, joy, and intuition. 
But now Shaftal is dying.
The earth witch who ruled Shaftal is dead, leaving no heir. Shaftal’s ruling 
house has been scattered and destroyed by the invading Sainnites. The Shaftali 
have mobilized a guerrilla army against these marauders, but every year the cost 
of resistance grows, leaving Shaftal’s fate in the hands of three people:


Emil the Shaftali paladin: an officer and a scholar whose elemental powers make 
him an excellent judge of character; 

Zanja the diplomat: the sole survivor of a slaughtered tribe, her fire powers 
bringing the gift of prescience; 

Karis the metalsmith: a half-blood giant whose earth powers can heal and create, 
but only when she can muster the strength to hold off her addiction to a deadly 
drug that suspends her will.


Separately, all they can do is watch as Shaftal falls from prosperity into 
lawlessness and famine. If they can find a way to work together, they may just 
change the course of history.


In the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin and Elizabeth Lynn, Laurie J. Marks weaves 
a complex tale of political and personal struggle, set in a world whose concerns 
are as familiar as today’s headlines.




Praise for Fire Logic

“Laurie Marks brings skill, passion, and wisdom to her new novel. Entertaining 
and engaging—an excellent read!“ 
—Kate Elliott


“This is a treat: a strong, fast-paced tale of war and politics in a fantasy 
world where magic based on the four elements of alchemy not only works but 
powerfully affects the lives of those it touches. An unusual, exciting read.“ 
—Suzy McKee Charnas


“A glorious cast of powerful, compelling, and appealingly vulnerable characters 
struggling to do the right thing in a world gone horribly wrong. I couldn’t put 
this down until I’d read it to the end. Marks truly understands the complex 
forces of power, desire, and obligation.“ 
—Nalo Hopkinson


“Since reading Dancing Jack, I’ve been yearning for a new book by Laurie Marks, 
and the long wait has been rewarded: Fire Logic cuts deliciously through the 
mind to the heart with the delicacy, strength, beauty, and surgical precision of 
the layered Damascus steel blade that provides one of the book’s central 
images.“ 
—Candas Jane Dorsey 




FIRE LOGIC
Laurie J. Marks

TOR®
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK 
NEW YORK



This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel 
are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.


FIRE LOGIC 


Copyright © 2002 by Laurie J. Marks 


All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions 
thereof, in any form.


This book is printed on acid-free paper. 


Edited by Delia Sherman 


Design by Heidi Eriksen 


A Tor Book 
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, 
LLC 175 Fifth Avenue 
New York, NY 10010


www.tor.com 


Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 
Marks, Laurie J.
        Fire Logic / Laurie Marks.—1st ed.
            p. cm.
        “A Tom Doherty Associates book.” 
        ISBN 0-312-87887-7 (alk. paper) 
        I. Title.

 
PS3613.A369 F57 2002 
      813‘.54—dc21 2001058352

First Edition: May 2002

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1




CONTENTS

Part 1: Foolhardy

1 2 3 4 5 6 


Part 2: Fire Night

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 


Part 3: The Hinge of History

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 




For three enduring friends, who, with their elemental talents of fire,
earth, water, and air, bound into this book their insights,
truths, joys, and intelligence:
Rosemary, Delia, and Didi




Acknowledgments

I am fortunate in my friends, a sustaining community of people who read this 
manuscript again and again, and whose thoughtful responses helped this book and 
its author to transcend her limitations. I am particularly indebted to the group 
known fondly as the Genrettes: Rosemary Kirstein, Delia Sherman, and Didi 
Stewart, whose cappucino-inspired insight saw to the heart of many an incoherent 
draft, and whose energized and entertaining companionship spirited me through a 
long labor. In addition, for commentary, advice, and support in every imaginable 
form, I am profoundly grateful to Deb Manning, Susanna Sturgis, Wendy Marks, 
Gretchen Marks, Diane Silver, Gillian Spraggs, Donna Simone, Amy Hanson, Ellen 
Kushner, and my beloved Deb Mensinger.




Fire Logic




Part 1
Foolhardy

      What is worth doing is worth merely beginning.


      — MACKAPEE’S Principles for Community




      Who breeches the wall breeches the trust of the people, for without walls 
      there can be no defense.

      —MABIN’S Warfare


      Without a history, we cannot distinguish heroes from fools.


      —MEDRIC’S History of My Father’s People





Chapter One
In the border regions of northern Shaftal, the peaks of the mountains loom over 
hardscrabble farmholds. The farmers there build with stone and grow in stone, 
and they might even be made of stone themselves, they are so sturdy in the face 
of the long, bitter winter that comes howling down at them from the mountains.
The stone town of Kisha would have been as insignificant as all the northern 
towns, if not for the fact that Makapee, the first G’deon, had lived and died 
there. His successor, Lilter, had discovered the manuscript of the book in which 
were laid out the principles that were to shape Shaftal. During the next two 
hundred years, the library built to house the Makapee manuscript had transformed 
the humble town into an important place, a town of scholars and librarians who 
gathered there to study and care for the largest collection of books in the 
country. The library had in turn spawned a university, and the scholars, forced 
to live in the bitter northern climate, tried to make their months of shivering 
indoors by a smoky peat fire into an intellectual virtue.
Emil Paladin considered frostbite a small price to pay for the privilege of 
being a student in the university at Kisha. He was older than some of the 
masters, and his long-time teacher, Parel Truthken, had warned him that he might 
be more learned, as well. For ten years, since his first piercing, Emil had 
accompanied Parel on the rounds of his territory, capturing fleeing wrongdoers 
and occasionally executing them when it was necessary. It was Parel who had 
finally arranged Emil’s admission and who would be paying his fees. So now Emil 
had arrived for the spring term, with a letter of introduction that was about to 
bring him into the presence of the Makapee manuscript itself.
Despite expensive carpets, rooms crammed with books, and fires that burned year 
round to prevent the damp, the library was a chilly and echoing place where men 
and women in scholar’s robes tiptoed about. Being admitted to the Makapee 
manuscript, which set forth the principles that now unified Shaftal, was like 
being admitted into a temple. As he put on the silken gloves that he was 
required to wear, it occurred to Emil that Makapee himself would have found this 
ritual tremendously peculiar. The first G’deon had been an obscure potato 
farmer, who sat by a peat fire all winter long, writing of mysteries in a 
crabbed, nearly unreadable handwriting. The paper, Emil had been told, still 
smelled of peat. He doubted that the frowning librarian would let his nose come 
close enough to the paper for him to sniff it, but still, Emil felt almost giddy 
with anticipation.
A door opened, and the sound of an urgently ringing bell intruded on the 
silence. The librarian turned her head, frowning. “What!” she breathed at the 
man who hurried towards her.
The man whispered in her ear. Paling, she turned aside and hurried away. Emil 
was left with the gloves on his hands and the door to the Makapee vault still 
bolted shut. He felt a tearing, a sense of loss so profound he could not believe 
it had anything at all to do with the manuscript. Something momentous had 
happened. Dazed, he went through the halls, following the sound of the bell out 
into the square that fronted on the library.
As the bell continued to ring, the square became crowded with scholars carrying 
pens with the ink still wet on the nibs, librarians carrying books, townsfolk 
wearing work aprons, with babies in their arms and tools in their hands, and 
farmers from the countryside in heavy, muddy boots, with satchels on their 
shoulders. The farmers must have spotted the messenger on the road, and followed 
him into town to hear the news. The messenger’s dirty, ragged banner hung limp 
from the bell tower, and Emil could scarcely make out the single glyph imprinted 
on it. It was Death-and-Life, he realized finally, which was commonly depicted 
on glyph cards as a pyre into which a man stepped and became a skeleton, or, 
alternately, from which a skeleton stepped and became a man. It was the G’deon’s 
glyph, carried through Shaftal only once in each G’deon’s lifetime: when the 
previous G’deon died and the new one was vested with the power of Shaftal. It 
called the people to simultaneously mourn and rejoice. Soon, the messenger would 
announce the death of Harald G’deon, who had given the land protection and 
health for thirty-five years, and would name his successor.
Emil did not envy the young elemental selected to inherit that burden of power 
and decision. The government of Shaftal had been in discord for some years, and 
the coastal regions were occupied by foreigners who lacked the Paladin 
compunctions over the use of violence. This was a time that demanded wisdom, and 
the new G’deon would not have much leisure to learn it.
A townswoman with a child clinging to her leg turned to Emil and said anxiously, 
“Well, it’s a pity about Harald. But what I most want to hear is the name of his 
successor. It would relieve my heart to know that the rumors we’ve heard are 
wrong.”
“Rumors?” said Emil. “I’m sorry, I was isolated all winter, and have only just 
come into town.”
“Well, they say that even though Harald has known since autumn that he was 
dying, he refused to name a successor. Surely he did it at the end, though. He’d 
change his mind when he felt the breath of death at his heels. And now all this 
Sainnite nonsense will come to an end, at last, for a young G’deon won’t fear to 
act against them.”
The bell stopped ringing. The messenger, whose road-grimy clothing had once been 
white, stood up on the bell platform to speak, but he could utter only a cracked 
whisper that those closest to him could scarcely hear. The people pushed a big 
man forward to stand beside him and listen to his broken voice, then shout his 
words in a voice that carried across half the town.
“Harald G’deon is dead!”
The gathered people nodded somberly.
“He vested no successor!” the big man boomed.
Some listeners groaned, and others cried out in dismay, but Emil stood silent in 
horror. It was unimaginable that a G’deon would allow the accumulated power of 
ten generations of earth witches to die with him.
“The House of Lilterwess has fallen in a Sainnite attack!” the big man shouted. 
His words were heard in stunned silence, followed by an outcry of shock and 
grief that swelled to fill the square. The big man’s final words could scarcely 
be heard. “No one survived.”
From every quarter, the townspeople shouted frightened, frenzied questions. The 
messenger sank down onto the bell platform and replied in his broken whisper, “I 
don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Emil had already stripped off his silk gloves, and now handed them to a nearby 
librarian—the same one who had been about to admit him to the vault. “What will 
become of us?” she cried.
“Shaftal is at war,” he said.
He pushed his way through the weeping crowd and headed for the nearest Paladin 
charterhouse, where he knew the members of his order would gather. He noticed 
that he himself was weeping, though, except for that first tearing sensation in 
the library, he felt nothing. It was a small thing, insignificant beyond notice, 
that the fall of the House of Lilterwess had severed Emil’s soul, separating the 
scholar from the soldier, leaving his heart on the steps of the library while 
his duty called him away to war.



At the edge of the crowded square, an old man and a young woman observed the 
aftermath of the messenger’s terrible news. Though they did not look like anyone 
else in the square, they were distinctly similar to each other: small-framed 
where the Shaftali were sturdily built, dark-skinned where the Shaftali were 
fair, with eyes and hair black as obsidian, where the townsfolk were generally 
tinted the color of earth. In dress also, they stood apart as strangers, wearing 
long tunics of finely woven goat’s wool and jerkins and leggings of deerskin, 
while the working people wore breeches and longshirts. Both had long hair 
plaited and knotted at. the backs of their heads. Let loose from its bindings, 
the young woman’s hair would have brushed her thighs, and the man’s hair would 
have reached his knees. Even their faces were shaped differently from those of 
the townsfolk: narrow and pointed, with hollows under the cheekbones and eyes 
deep set in shadow.
With their pack animals tethered nearby, the two strangers stood beside a pile 
of beautifully woven blankets and rugs. When the messenger first arrived, they 
had been negotiating a large sale to a trader of woolens. The old man turned 
from his consideration of the weeping crowd to speak quietly to his companion, 
in a subtle, singing language. “So we cross the boundary into a new world.”
She said, “But I feel the world is dissolving away before us, like a crumbling 
ledge above a crashing cataract.”
“Every boundary crossing feels like this,” the old man said. “When we cross a 
boundary, it is a loss, a death, an ending. It always seems unendurable. It 
always seems like plunging over a cliff.” He added kindly, “Zanja na’Tarwein, 
what has happened here portends a future that is more yours than mine. It is not 
too late to change your mind and refuse the gods.”
Though she was young, her face did not seem much given to laughter. She smiled 
though, ironically. “How shall I do that? Shall I unlearn all I have learned, 
these last two years? Shall I tell Salos’a that now I have seen the world beyond 
the mountains I want nothing to do with it?”
“You could,” he suggested. “The mountains protect our people like a fortress. 
You might retreat behind those walls and never come out again.”
“No, Speaker,” she said, seriously and respectfully, “I could not.”
They stood silently for a long time, watching the crowd divide into arm-waving, 
wildly talking clusters. The youths sent from the farms left to bear their news 
to the waiting elders. Zanja imagined the people of the entire country standing 
about like this, bereft and bewildered. She said, “Now the Sainnites will 
overpower them like wolves overpower sheep.” Her people got their wool from 
goats, who were brave and clever and sure-footed. She had no admiration for 
sheep.
The Speaker said, “No, I think not. Perhaps the Shaftali people are not wolves, 
but neither are they sheep.”
The trader finally remembered his visitors and their pile of woolens, and came 
over wringing his hands. “I don’t know what to say to you. Ashawala’i woolens 
are a luxury, and I don’t know if I can sell luxuries to a country at war.”
The Speaker said dryly, “Good sir, this land has been occupied by Sainnites for 
fifteen years, yet you never had any difficulty selling your wares before.”
“But now the House of Lilterwess has fallen.” The man could not continue. “Come 
back tomorrow,” he finally said in a choked voice. “I need to consider my 
future.”
“I am considering whether the Ashawala’i people would be better served if we 
sold their woolens to a more decisive trader. One who will not make us spend an 
entire afternoon unpacking and repacking with nothing to show for it.” He 
gestured, and Zanja, who understood the value of drama, began painstakingly and 
with evident weariness to roll up the large, beautiful rug over which they had 
been dickering. The trader thought better of his caution, and money changed 
hands.
As they led their string of sturdy horses away, the old man commented, “We will 
travel more lightly now.”
The Speaker had said he would bring her to the House of Lilterwess, to introduce 
her to its most important residents: Mabin, the council head, the other eleven 
councilors representing the Orders of Lilterwess and each of the regions of 
Shaftal, and Harald G’deon himself. Now, the House of Lilterwess was rubble, the 
twelve councilors were dead, and so was Harald G’deon. Now, Zanja asked, “But 
where will we travel to?” The Speaker did not answer.
They walked down one of the town’s main streets until they reached a place where 
an inn stood on one side of the road, and on the other side stood a Lilterwess 
charterhouse. The yard was busy with horses being saddled and armament and 
supplies being distributed to a company of Paladins. Most of them seemed very 
young, not yet pierced with the first gold earring that would mark the day they 
took their vows to spend their life in service to Shaftal. Their senior officer, 
a woman whose two earrings glittered in the bright spring sun, came over to the 
fence. “That’s a fine string of animals you’ve got there. The Paladins have need 
of them.”
“I am the Speaker for the Ashawala’i before the Council of Lilterwess, and these 
are the only horses and donkeys owned by my people. Without them, the trade 
between my people and yours would come to an end.”
“That seems a small matter when the world is coming to an end.”
“It is not a small matter.” The Speaker leaned his elbows unconcernedly on the 
fence. “And you will not take my people’s stock, for we are protected under the 
law.”
“What do we know anymore?” the commander muttered. “Isn’t it against the law for 
children to ride to war? Isn’t it against the law for the House of Lilterwess to 
be turned to rubble?” She turned rather agitatedly to shout something at 
someone.
“You may borrow our donkeys,” said the Speaker, “If we accompany them.”
“We ride out on Paladin business.”
“It is the Speaker’s duty to advise and protect our people. For that, we must 
know all we can about events in Shaftal. And we are katrim, warriors like 
yourself, with vows to fulfill. We will observe, and not interfere, and perhaps 
we might even be of some help.“
The commander looked at them then. She saw two schooled faces and disciplined 
stances. The Speaker’s hands had many small scars, of a kind a blade fighter 
might get in practice bouts. His young companion’s hands were scarred also, 
though not so heavily. Both of them had a rather unnerving quality to their 
gazes, an intentness and seriousness that seemed almost unnaturally alert and 
intelligent. Perhaps these two had elemental talents. In any case, they almost 
certainly would be valuable companions.
The commander said, for she was desperate for beasts to carry the gear of war, 
“We ride to a gathering of Paladins, and after that we ride against the 
Sainnites. Come with us if you like, but I can’t promise your safety, or the 
safety of your animals.”
Seeming amused, the Speaker accepted her terms.



Zanja na’Tarwein closely watched these negotiations. Like her, the Speaker once 
had accompanied his predecessor when he was a young katrim. Like her, he 
belonged to a fire clan, and had been born with an elemental talent for 
languages and insight. And, like her, when he went on his vision journey he had 
dreamed of the god Salos’a. Now, by watching him she continued to learn what it 
meant to be chosen by the one who crosses between worlds, who sees in all 
directions. Though the hawk, the raven, and owl were all associated with death, 
Salos’a was not a killer like the hawk, or a trickster like the raven. The owl 
conducted souls to the Land of the Sun, and was a restless wanderer who 
acknowledged no boundaries.
Zanja had already learned that she who crosses between worlds is a stranger 
everywhere, even in the land of her birth. Having lived for six seasons with a 
Shaftali farm family, she had developed two minds and two ways of seeing, to go 
with her two languages. After that, her own family found her peculiar, and said 
that she stumbled between contradictory cultures and languages like a drunken 
fool. The Speaker had explained, “That is what it means to be a Speaker. Did you 
think it would be easy or graceful?” He had added, no more reassuringly, “What 
you see and know depends on which eyes you see with.”
Today, she had come to understand more clearly why a crosser of boundaries must 
learn to see through the eyes of strangers. Twice today, the Speaker had settled 
a difference in his favor by constructing an argument from the materials of his 
opponent’s self-interest and values. As they began the journey southward in the 
company of Paladins, she considered in silence the Speaker’s methods, and what 
he had needed to know about the person he spoke to in order to properly advocate 
for his people’s interests. Now, when he spoke to her about the towns they 
passed, and described the peculiar ways and customs of the people there, she 
listened attentively, thinking all the while about the potential usefulness of 
the information.
The Paladins with whom they journeyed seemed a random collection: some were 
well-equipped and travel-hardened, others had the pale skin and soft hands of 
scholars and their riding gear was creased from having been folded away in 
trunks. More than half of them seemed to have only recently left their family 
farmholds. Except for the fact that they all traveled armed, and they shared a 
propensity for lengthy, arcane discussions of philosophy, it might have been 
difficult to tell that they all were members of the same order.
One of the Paladins had been riding somewhat separate from the others. A man 
neither young nor old, he did not eat or drink or join in conversations, and 
walked away alone when they stopped to rest the horses. “What about him 
interests you?” the Speaker asked Zanja, when he noticed her watching the man.
“He is so solitary,” she said.
“Is that all? You must listen more carefully to your intuition, or you will not 
survive for long.”
She considered the lone man, who now stood a good distance away, gazing at 
something beyond the far horizon. “He is not merely sad,” she said. “He is 
complex. He knows so much that it weighs him down. And yet I think he could be 
merry. The same knowledge that he finds so heavy might also give him joy.”
The Speaker grunted approvingly. “You’re guessing, of course. But you’re 
learning to let your guesswork reveal the truth. Now tell me what kind of man 
you have described.”
Zanja considered some more, and abruptly felt quite stupid. “Of course, he is a 
fire blood, like us.”
“Next time,” the Speaker said, “It will not take so long for you to realize it.”

* * *

They had neared their journey’s end when the solitary man, with apparent effort, 
began making himself more convivial. Eventually, he dropped back and walked his 
horse beside the Speaker’s and soon had convinced Zanja’s teacher to give a 
lengthy, detailed exposition of the differences between the Ashawala’i and the 
Shaftali people.
The solitary man’s name was Emil. He told them that after fifteen years as a 
Paladin, he recently had been pierced with the earring of Regard. He 
self-consciously fingered the two gold earrings in his right earlobe. “I suppose 
they’ll make me a commander now,” he said, without enthusiasm. “And what will 
become of you, now that we have no G’deon or Lilterwess Council for you to speak 
to? How will you advocate for your people?”
The Speaker said, “In just a few years, these problems will be Zanja’s, so 
perhaps she should answer your question.”
Zanja was unprepared, but she could not defer to her elders when the Speaker 
made it so clear she must think for herself. “As Shaftal changes, my duties must 
change as well,” she said. “But how could I say how Shaftal is going to change? 
Perhaps Shaftal will form a new government, to which I might be an ambassador. 
Or perhaps the Sainnites will.” Emil looked rather startled by this grim 
possibility, but refrained from objecting. “Perhaps Shaftal will become a land 
of violence and confusion,” she continued, “And I will keep that turmoil from 
affecting my people.”
The Speaker grunted with approval, which encouraged her to add, “Perhaps my 
duties will become impossible to fulfill.”
“Perhaps they will,” the Speaker said.
But Emil, who seemed much impressed by her answer, said, “Impossible? For a 
woman of less talent, perhaps.”
The Ashawala’i did not compliment each other so directly. Zanja glanced 
confusedly at the Speaker, who said on her behalf, “You are too kind.”
“We have arrived,” said Emil, standing up in his stirrups to see better. For 
some time they had been traveling among wagons laden with food being transported 
from the farmholds of the region. Now, the woods had opened up into a vast 
clearing filled with Paladin encampments, wagons, animals, equipment, and food 
tents. A harried woman directed the wagons in one direction and the Paladins in 
another. At the top of the hill before them stood a complex of buildings, a 
Paladin charterhouse. “The generals will be there,” said Emil, “and that’s where 
I must go, to learn my future.”
He took each of their hands in turn, as he bid them farewell. “Perhaps we’ll 
meet again,” he said, and rode up the hill.
Along with the hundreds of fretful Paladins, seething with rumors and tales of 
fresh disaster, the Speaker and his student camped upon the hillside. Before 
nightfall, a wagonload of travelers, accompanied by a handful of Paladin 
outriders, made its way up the dusty track from the highway. Word swept through 
the gathered Paladins like the turning of a tide: the new arrivals were refugees 
from the House of Lilterwess, and Councilor Mabin traveled among them, unharmed. 
“I believe this rumor,” said the Speaker thoughtfully. “The House of Lilterwess 
was like a city within a building, with hundreds of residents and plenty of 
defenders. I found it difficult to believe that no one at all escaped the 
attack. And Councilor Mabin has always struck me as someone who would survive, 
whenever survival is possible.”
Though the gathered Paladins crowded expectantly around the charterhouse, the 
hour grew late without any fresh news, and finally the companies began making 
ready for bed. Zanja and the Speaker also slept, but he awoke her before dawn, 
and they quietly made their way among sleeping Paladins and smoldering 
campfires. The blacksmith slept beside his anvil, the horses dozed in their 
field, the guard at the hostel door seemed asleep on his feet and blinked at 
them blearily when the Speaker addressed him. “Tell Councilor Mabin that the 
Speaker of the Ashawala’i wishes to discuss the future with her.”
“You would disturb her rest?” slurred the sleepy guard.
“I know she rises early, before the sun, if she sleeps at all.”
The guard sent for a Paladin officer, who inquired about the Speaker’s business 
and informed him that Mabin was not to be disturbed. Eventually, though, the 
Speaker’s courteous persistence was rewarded and they were brought into the 
silent, plain building, and shown to a disarranged room where a brisk fire 
burned and a woman sat busily writing at a desk scattered with candle stubs. 
“Speaker,” she greeted him, without setting down her pen.
“Councilor. My apprentice, Zanja na’Tarwein.”
Zanja, remembering that the Shaftali do not kneel to their elders, bowed 
instead.
“I think that’s a fresh pot of tea,” Mabin said distractedly.
Zanja served the tea in the Shaftali style, and the Councilor took no notice of 
her, even when Zanja handed her the cup and offered her the plate of bread. The 
Speaker politely expressed his delight at finding Mabin unharmed, and his 
sadness and concern at hearing of the G’deon’s passing. Apparently finished 
writing, Mabin rose from the desk and said impatiently, “Harald G’deon was a 
fool, who brought this disaster upon his own people with his obstinacy and 
idiocy. Now I alone am left to rebuild this ruin. Do you think I even want to 
hear his name spoken again? I only wish he had died sooner.”
She paced angrily to the fireplace, drained her teacup, and held it out for 
Zanja to refill. “Speaker, I will instruct my people to treat you as a Paladin 
commander, so that you may be as informed as anyone is about Harald’s death and 
the Fall, and our plans for the future. Now, as I am the only governor left 
alive, I am being taken into hiding until we can rebuild our strength and 
organize the defense of Shaftal.”
“I am certain you intend no insult,” the Speaker said. “But I am as important to 
my people’s survival as you are to yours. Surely you can spare a little time to 
advise me.”
There was a silence. Mabin took a piece of bread from the plate Zanja offered 
her, and this time seemed, momentarily, to see her. “Are all the Speakers fire 
bloods?”
Though it was surprising to be assessed so accurately with a mere glance, Zanja 
replied, “Yes, Councilor. A fire blood’s insight is useful when wandering a 
strange land.”
Mabin looked away, seeming to dismiss, not just her but all fire talent. She 
said to the Speaker, “I suggest you tell your people to guard their passes. And 
you should make certain the Ashawala’i remain beneath the notice of the 
Sainnites. They kill those who threaten them, exploit those who can help them, 
and ignore everyone else. Make certain that your people are ignored.”
The door opened, and a young woman, somewhat older than Zanja, entered. She wore 
black, bore arms, and her hair was cut short like a Paladin’s. Her gaze paused 
briefly on Zanja, leaving her reeling like a pot that has been scoured. “Madam 
Councilor, we are ready to leave.”
“Will you pack up those papers for me?” Mabin went out to speak to someone in 
the hall, and returned to tell the Speaker the name of the commander she had 
designated to deal with his concerns. She said to the young woman in black, 
“They are gathering the Paladins so I can address them before I leave. You 
travel ahead in the wagon, and I’ll catch up with you on horseback.“
“Yes, Madam Councilor.”
The Speaker scarcely had time to thank Mabin. The councilor was swept out into a 
crush of commanders who had arrived to escort her to address what remained of 
her army. The door shut behind her, and now the room lay silent. The Speaker 
sighed as if with relief, and Zanja hurried over to pour him a fresh cup of tea 
as he sat down in an armchair by the fireplace. He sipped from his cup, gazing 
into the flames as his damp boots began to steam. Papers rustled as the young 
woman in black ordered them meticulously into a pile and then wrapped them and 
tied them in a leather cover. Zanja stood by the tea table and watched her 
covertly.
Zanja could not easily categorize this discomforting young woman. She seemed 
hard and tired, which might be expected in one who had recently survived and 
escaped a devastating attack. Though she looked like a Paladin, Zanja did not 
think she was one. She was old enough to have taken her vows, but her earlobe 
was unadorned. Plus, she had an unsettling quality that made Zanja suspect an 
elemental talent, though she did not recognize which element.
The young woman looked up and caught Zanja’s eye. Her gaze was almost 
unendurable. Trying to back away, Zanja stumbled into the tea table. The young 
woman turned aside without a word, picked up the packet of papers, and left the 
room.
The Speaker said, without removing his gaze from the fire, “We have none like 
her among the Ashawala’i.”
“She is an air blood?” Zanja guessed, for the‘ Ashawala’i had only earth and 
fire clans, and water bloods were rare everywhere.
“She is an air elemental, and a Truthken. Now you know why the Truthkens are so 
feared.”
Zanja still felt the effects of that young woman’s regard, even though she was 
no longer in the room. “Yes, I felt as though her look invaded me.”
“In time she’ll learn more subtlety, I assume. Do you want to hear the 
Councilor’s speech? I myself have no interest in it.”
“I suppose she’ll be inspiring,” Zanja said.
The Speaker glanced up at her, amused. “I have never learned to love Mabin 
either, though she has many admirers. Have a cup of tea, at least. You may never 
again taste green tea as fine as this, and if we don’t drink it, it will go to 
waste.”
She poured herself a cup, and went over to the room’s one small window to look 
out at the dawning day. The window viewed the back of the charterhouse, an 
unkempt garden of herbs and flowers that were just starting to bloom, and the 
track that led to the stables. As she watched, a wagon was brought out and 
loaded with baggage and people. The last to arrive was the young Truthken, still 
carrying the packet of papers, but now escorting another person. Zanja pressed 
her face to the windowpane, intrigued by the strange appearance of the 
Truthken’s companion. She was very tall—taller than a grown man—but thin and 
gangly as an adolescent in a growth spurt, with big hands and feet, wearing 
clothing she seemed to have outgrown. Her hair was a tangled bird’s nest. The 
Truthken walked her to the wagon as if she were a prisoner or a puppet. On the 
tall woman’s face was an expression of blank, stunned despair. Zanja watched the 
wagon roll away. She did not know what she had seen, but she knew that it was 
terrible. She remained at the window long after the wagon had passed out of 
sight.


Chapter Two


One fine day in early autumn, nine years after the fall of the House of 
Lilterwess, two Sainnite soldiers impatiently waited for the stablehand to bring 
them their horses. The cool air was freshened by winter’s distant breath, but no 
hint of the mud season’s first rainclouds had yet appeared in the sky. The 
soldiers complained about the cold, as though they had never lived through a 
Shaftali winter, and did not know they would soon be longing for a day this 
warm.
“A thankless day’s work it will be,” grumbled one, tightening the buckles on her 
cuirass of boiled leather.
“Is this a soldier’s work?” Her companion was younger and bulkier than she, and 
carried a number of weapons: swords, daggers, even a small battle-ax, as though 
he intended to spend the day in grueling, hand-to-hand fighting. “Breaking heads 
to force reluctant peasants to hand over a few coins . . .”
“We’ll take supplies instead of money. Gladly.” She checked her three pistols to 
see that they were properly loaded.
“What, are we filthy tradesmen?”
“We are soldiers,” she said, “who need to eat. And the peasants—”
“—don’t know their frigging place—”
“—literally!” she concluded. “If they would just lie down and do what they’re 
supposed to do . . .”
Their conversation deteriorated. The stablehand, who had become all too familiar 
with the Sainnites’ assumptions about what non-Sainnites were good for, 
deliberately knelt in horse dung as she checked the horse’s hooves. She was 
grimy already, but wanted to make certain the soldiers found her unappealing.
“How long does it take to saddle two horses?” said the man, banging his booted 
foot against the floor as though he were a horse himself.
“That stablehand is always slow. A simpleton.”
“All barbarians are. And they live like animals.” The soldier’s lip curled as 
the stable hand brought out the horses. “Look at her. She’s been rolling in 
horse dung. She may even eat it, for all we know.”
The woman companionably made a retching sound, and set to work checking over her 
mount with insulting care, testing every strap and buckle. The stablehand stood 
back, gaze humbly lowered. Though the soldier had found nothing wrong with the 
horse’s gear, she cuffed her casually on the way out the door.
As the two soldiers rode off to harass the people they called peasants, the 
stablehand raised her dark eyes to gaze after them. She said softly in her own 
language, “You two will die today.” It was no idle threat. She sensed the death 
awaiting them, hidden in the woods not too far out of town.
Zanja na’Tarwein’s prescience had been particularly heightened this year, for to 
live safely among the Sainnites required a degree of caution and 
conscientiousness that verged on the supernatural. For months now, she had been 
dodging attention as meticulously and instinctively as the rat that lives 
underfoot, unnoticed. The gift of prescience was a troubling talent: useful when 
it came to guarding her own safety, distracting and unnerving when she became 
conscious of pending events in which she did not care to intervene. Perhaps a 
dull winter at home among her people would suppress her foresight to a more 
tolerable level.
She had returned to the dreary work of mucking out the stalls, but paused at the 
thought of home. Suddenly, between one breath and the next, she decided it was 
time to leave the Sainnite garrison.
She had covertly learned their language, and she had learned much else that left 
her worried and distressed. The Sainnites were skilled fighters, accomplished 
tacticians, and ruthless oppressors. She did not want to know any more. She had 
done her duty; she had crossed into the Sainnites’ world. Thankfully, the same 
god that required her to travel between worlds did not forbid her to travel home 
again.
Zanja na’Tarwein leaned her pitchfork on the wall, fetched her money pouch from 
its hiding place, dropped it down the front of her filthy shirt, and left the 
stable. At this time of day, the garrison was lively with the orderly and 
energetic activity that she had reluctantly come to admire. A company of 
soldiers was delicately weeding a flower bed—the Sainnites loved flowers, and 
cultivated them in every inch of bare ground. Disabled soldiers were busy with 
the housekeeping: sweeping and scrubbing one or another item that Zanja would 
have sworn had just been cleaned the day before. Pigs were being slaughtered in 
the kitchen yard, and the practice field was crowded with soldiers who sweated 
and grunted and shouted with triumph or dismay.
That spring, when she had first presented herself at the garrison gate, a good 
portion of the day had passed before she was able to communicate that she had 
learned there might be work in the garrison for border people like 
herself—barbarians, according to the Sainnites, who stupidly assumed that the 
border people could not be spies because they had no ties to the land of 
Shaftal. Now, leaving the garrison in early autumn, Zanja had to wait no longer 
than it took the bored soldier to unlock the gate. She didn’t even have to 
display the empty bottle of horse liniment she had brought with her as an excuse 
for going out.
By contrast to the garrison, the streets of the city were practically deserted. 
As the work of harvest drew to a close, the city would fill with farmers. But 
now, Zanja walked down an empty street hung with tradesmen’s shingles, marked 
with glyphs that Zanja had never learned to interpret. One had an Ashawala’i rug 
on display that Zanja remembered selling to a northern trader the year before. 
She proceeded cautiously, for even though someone as ragged as she seemed an 
unlikely target for thieves, smoke addicts were known to steal anything from 
anyone, often in broad daylight. She had been forced to go unarmed all summer, 
and though this was not the first time she had wished earnestly for a weapon, 
she hoped that it would be the last.
She turned down a side street and stepped into the narrow doorway of a public 
bath, startling the proprietor from her doze over the account books. Surely the 
woman had seen plenty of dirty people come through her door, but still she 
wrinkled her nose. “I hope you have something clean to wear.”
Zanja said, “Yes, I stored my belongings with you in the spring. You’ll remember 
me when the dirt is washed off.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Shaftal’s Name, you certainly are changed. I’d better get 
the water heating. A lot of water.”
Alone in a private room, Zanja sat naked on the bench and painstakingly undid 
the tight plaits of her hair. When the woman and her assistant arrived bearing 
between them a vat of hot water, Zanja knelt over the drain and allowed herself 
to be doused with water, briskly scrubbed with brushes and foaming soap, and 
doused again. Her skin was raw before the last of the dirt had been scrubbed 
away. The two bath attendants chattered about people she had never met and would 
never meet as they washed her hair, treated it with various mysterious unguents, 
and combed it for her. In an ecstasy of cleanliness, Zanja gladly paid what they 
charged, and when she left was dressed in her accustomed goat’s wool and 
deerskin clothing, with a dagger at the small of her back and her stablehand’s 
rags left behind on the ash heap. She doubted that the Sainnites would even 
notice that she was gone.
The city was built on a hilltop. As she left the last of its crowded buildings 
behind, the land opened up below her: fields and forest bright in the vivid 
light of autumn. Some fields lay barren, their bounty already picked and plowed 
under. Some were striped with hay rows. Others were alive with industry, as 
wheat fell before the scythe and potato forks turned up the soil. Zanja, though 
her back and shoulders ached from the summer’s dreary labor, felt a moment’s 
guilt at her laziness in such a busy time. She decided to avoid the farmlands 
and sleep in the woods, lest she find herself recruited, willy-nilly, into the 
frenzy of harvest. The weather would hold, she thought, examining the sky. She 
settled her burdens on her shoulders and started briskly northward, toward the 
mountains that at the moment lay far below the horizon.
A few hours later, she found the dead soldiers. The ravens had arrived before 
her, and hopped reluctantly away as she approached, uttering insults in their 
harsh, secret language. The Paladins had done their work as briskly as any 
butcher, and deliberately left the bodies to be found. The man who had banged 
his foot on the floor like a horse had been shot with a pistol and then finished 
with a dagger. The woman whose fist had left an aching bruise on Zanja’s 
cheekbone had been shot three times. The horses had been recruited to serve the 
resistance, Zanja assumed. The two Sainnites must have been ambushed here by a 
number of concealed marksmen, now long gone, perhaps hunting the other Sainnites 
who had foolishly assumed the members of the resistance would be at home helping 
with the harvest.
In the near distance, Zanja could hear the voices of the farmers, breathlessly 
singing a working song to keep their energy from flagging as the afternoon grew 
old. The smell of violence suffused the bright air. The ravens jostled each 
other impatiently, edging their way back to the feast. This was still Shaftal, 
Zanja told herself, but it seemed like an alien land.



A year after the fall of the House of Lilterwess, Councilor Mabin’s book, 
Warfare, had become the manual for insurgency throughout Shaftal. People whose 
lives had until then been the very model of peacefulness joined the Paladins—the 
new Paladins, Mabin called them, for they did not give up their families or take 
complicated vows. Soon, every region of Shaftal that the Sainnites occupied also 
supported a company of irregular fighters who made it their business to cause 
the Sainnites no end of misery. The retaliating Sainnites, perhaps thinking to 
prevent any book from having such an impact again, destroyed all the printing 
presses, the paper mills, the schools, and the libraries. They executed everyone 
whose ear was pierced, everyone who appeared to be learned, everyone who had or 
was rumored to have an elemental gift. They hunted and killed any member of an 
old order, even the Healers, though their vows forbade them to fight. To escape 
the harassment of the Paladins, the Sainnites built garrisons in which they 
could secure themselves, from which they exercised an iron control over the 
commerce of the cities upon which they depended for the taxes that ensured their 
survival. The countryside, however, remained firmly in the control of the 
Paladins and of the farmers who fed and sheltered them.
Zanja’s teacher developed a shortness of breath that left him unable to endure 
the rigors of travel, and she became Speaker at age twenty-two. Traveling beyond 
the borders, she became adept at avoiding the frequent, brief armed 
confrontations between Sainnites and Paladins. She learned the side roads and 
byways, since the main roads were frequently patrolled by foul-tempered 
Sainnites. She could not avoid the cities, though, where to sell her woolens she 
first had to bribe the guards, and afterwards hand over a substantial portion of 
her profits. In the countryside, the Paladins sometimes were not much easier to 
deal with, for, like the Sainnites, they had become violently suspicious of any 
stranger, and especially a stranger like Zanja, whose dark coloring made her 
uncomfortably visible, and whose presence and purpose could not be easily 
explained.
She continued to serve her people and her god, however precariously. But every 
year, she wondered how long she could continue. That she would eventually be 
caught up and killed in the random violence of the unending war seemed 
inevitable. But this year, as she reclaimed her horses from the farmers who had 
looked after them that summer, and continued homeward on northerly roads, she 
carried a new fear with her. The fear haunted her as the roads became narrow 
tracks and finally disappeared entirely, leaving her to navigate her way by the 
stars, the shape of the land, and sheer common sense. The fear followed her as 
she entered and scaled the mountains, following ways so rarely traversed that 
scarcely the trace of a path could be seen. She returned home to her people, as 
she did every autumn, but this year, living among the Sainnites had left her 
wondering whether her people’s future was any more certain than her own.



The flashing mirrors of the sentinels alerted the village of her coming, and her 
clan brother, Ransel, met her on the path as he usually did. “Zanja! Home so 
soon? Did you grow tired of breaking the hearts of the Shaftali women and decide 
to break the hearts of katrim instead?”
She gave a snort of amusement, for Ransel knew perfectly well that she had no 
great accumulation of discarded lovers on either side of the border. “I grew 
tired, anyway,” she said.
“And you missed me?”
She eyed him with mocking doubt. “Well. . .”
He laughed. Ransel was always laughing, always mocking, always telling jokes or 
making up crazy riddles. The raven god, a trickster himself and a great 
practical joker, had chosen Ransel to serve him, and Ransel did so with 
unremitting enthusiasm. “Say you were lonely!” he teased. “Admit that the 
inconquerably self-sufficient Zanja na’Tarwein was about to expire from the 
poison of solitude! Say that—”
He could go on like this forever if not interrupted. “I was,” she said. 
“Terribly lonely. As I always am.”
He fell silent. She put her arm around his waist, and he gripped her 
affectionately across the shoulders. “Well,” he finally said, “You’re lonely no 
longer. Let’s go climbing tomorrow.”
“Climbing! And what exactly do you think I’ve been doing for eight days now?”
“You’ve been climbing alone. Climbing with your brother, that is completely 
different.”
“No doubt. Anything done with you is completely different. But the elders will 
want me tomorrow.”
“Oh,” he sneered. “The elders!”
“Has the weather been fine?”
“Other than the occasional touch of frost and flurry of snow.”
“Will it hold until the day after tomorrow?”
“It might. But whether I will be offended at being put off to accommodate a 
bunch of creaking, self-important—”
“—Leaders of the people,” she said pointedly.
“You’re no fun,” he grumbled. “Did you bring me something?” He glanced hopefully 
at the heavily laden horses.
“I’ll answer that question when we go climbing.”
“Aha! A bribe! Well then, since you know my price, I shall agree.”
They walked companionably together, behind the horses, who kept up an eager pace 
because they could smell the nearness of home. “So tell me the news,” Zanja 
said. She did not usually have to prompt him.
He said, soberly for once, “Well, I don’t know a good way to tell you this, my 
sister. The Speaker is dead.”
She stopped in her tracks. Ransel’s momentum carried him a couple of steps 
beyond her, and he turned around. “Here,” he said. “Sit for a moment. The horses 
know the way.”
He squatted on his heels beside her in the middle of the path. “It was a quiet 
thing. One morning, he simply did not wake up. Salos’a had come during the night 
to carry him across his last boundary.”
“Without anyone there to remind him of the stories of his life.”
“I am sure there was no need. Salos’a knows his life already.”
“I wanted to be there at his death. And I needed to ask him . . .” To the 
astonishment and embarrassment of them both, she abruptly began to weep, and 
could not get herself under control for some time. As much as she looked forward 
to Ransel’s staunch affection, she had looked forward to her long conversations 
with her old teacher, the only one she could confide in. Though she had taken 
over his duties and position, she still relied heavily on his advice. Now, when 
she needed most to ask him what to do, Salos’a had taken him off to a far land 
where he could not possibly be so badly needed.
She raised her head at last. Ransel, uncertain what to do in this unprecedented 
situation, had simply looked away and was courteously pretending not to have 
noticed her tears. She stood up, wiping her face, and they continued down the 
path. After a while, Ransel, somewhat muted at first, began to tell her all the 
other events of the summer, as he always did. By the time they reached the Asha 
Valley, where Zanja’s people thrived in peaceful comfort, she had gotten more 
surefooted as she tread the precarious edge of sorrow, and was able to keep from 
falling into it again.



The next day, she spoke to the elders, who gathered in the elder-house to hear 
her. She told them of her summer with the Sainnites, and she told them of the 
fear she now carried with her. While living with the Sainnites, she had learned 
the extent of their arrogance and their ignorance. She had learned that the 
Sainnites feared Shaftal: they feared its supposedly conquered people for their 
tenacious refusal to give up the fight; they feared the rage and bitterness that 
they themselves had caused; they even feared the long, harsh winter that to them 
seemed arbitrary and undeserved as a curse from a vengeful god. And she had 
learned to fear the Sainnites m return, after she learned that, because they 
were exiles in a land they detested, they could be destructive and vindictive in 
a way no sane people could tolerate. She reminded the elders of the weapons that 
kill at a distance, and of the smoke drug that insidiously killed the will and 
spirit of Shaftali city dwellers.
All morning and well into the afternoon, she tried to convince the elders of 
their danger. When she was finished, they placidly replied that the Sainnites 
were indeed dangerous, and so it was fortunate that they had no reason to even 
notice a remote tribal people like theirs.
They agreed to post additional sentinels in a wide circle a day’s journey 
outside the valley, so that if a danger were to approach them, they would at 
least know of it in advance. But they refused to develop a plan for how to 
defend the village against attack, since it would have required them to explain 
the danger to the Ashawala’i people. “When you are old,” they said to Zanja, 
“you will understand. Now, it is difficult for you to see how easily that which 
is right and good can be changed, and how difficult it is to change it back 
again. You say that our people are endangered by these Sainnites. But you do not 
see that fearing the Sainnites would endanger them even more certainly.”



On a day as warm as summer, Zanja and Ransel went climbing to a place they knew, 
a high meadow not too far from the groaning edge of a glacier. From there, it 
seemed they could see to the end of the world. Ransel entertained her with 
accounts of his many love affairs, and then advised her at length about which of 
the women katrim might be amenable to her advances this winter. She listened 
carefully, for he was a good matchmaker. Eventually, their conversation trailed 
off, and they lay a long time in silence, half-asleep in the warm sunshine.
“You are like an umbilical cord,” she said to him after a while.
Ransel had a sweet tooth, and she had surreptitiously brought him a tin of 
sweetmeats from Shaftal. “An umbilical cord!” he exclaimed stickily. “What kind 
of compliment is that for a katrim?”
“I didn’t mean to compliment you. You’re conceited enough already. I meant to 
say that the Speaker had no friend like you, and I’m thinking that he must have 
dreaded coming home much more than I do. Even with your help, it’s a painful 
passage.”
Ransel unwrapped the stiff waxed paper from another sweetmeat. “He never was 
contented,” he said. “But then, neither are you.”
“I’ll always think I am his student.” Zanja rolled over in the warm grass, 
startling a couple of tiny rabbits back into their holes. “An umbilical cord,” 
she repeated. “You connect and nourish me, and I do nothing but kick you in the 
stomach.”
Ransel gestured with the sweetmeat tin, his mouth too busy for talking.
“I corrupt you,” she interpreted, “with forbidden luxuries. That is no gift.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Good thing your grim moods always pass, for they are very 
tiresome. I love you out of self-interest, as you know full well. Even though 
you whisper not a word to me of all you see and know, people still think that I 
am privy to your secrets, which gives me an excuse to act self-important. Not 
only that,“ he continued, while she uttered a snort of laughter, ”but since you 
are a presciant, you can save me from my own idiocy, if you care enough to do 
it.“
“So long as I’m beside you.”
“Well, your lengthy absences are a drawback. But when matters go badly, you 
surely are the one I want guarding my back. Whoever’s with you will survive just 
as you will. Won’t your prescience send you running home when I most need you 
here? If it does, I swear I’ll do whatever you command, for I’d rather be alive 
and humble than dead and proud.”
Zanja closed her eyes and pretended to doze in the sunshine. She felt so tired 
after her summer with the Sainnites that she wondered whether an entire winter’s 
rest would revive her. But she had not slept well since her homecoming, which 
was one of many things she could not tell Ransel, lest she do him a worse 
disservice than she did by smuggling in comfits for him. Only the elders of the 
people were judged mature and experienced enough that they could safely know of 
the world beyond the mountains without being changed or corrupted by the 
knowledge.
“Why do you sigh?” Ransel asked.
“I suppose I do have talent,” Zanja said. “But it never seems talent enough.”
Ransel nodded, and said sententiously, “The na’Tarweins are never satisfied.”


Chapter Three


Much that Zanja admired about the Shaftali people began to disappear. She saw 
hospitality replaced by suspicion, and open-handedness replaced by closed fists. 
When once strangers had been happy to sit down with her and talk about their 
lives, she now could not enter a tavern unless she was willing to sit in 
solitude with a circle of silence surrounding her. Meanwhile, in the Asha 
Valley, her people looked after their croplands and hunted in the forest, herded 
their goats and spun the goat’s wool. Children respected and learned from their 
elders. Katrim visited other scattered peoples that inhabited the mountains, and 
returned with gifts of beautiful pottery, beaverskin robes, and delicate shells. 
The katrim patrolled and watched over their territory, and no danger appeared. 
Zanja, who year after year was reminded anew of the Sainnites’ brutality, did 
not become complacent. But in the Asha Valley, the peaceful, timeless effort of 
her people’s lives remained undisturbed and unchanged. Perhaps it was true that 
ignorance would protect the Ashawala’i against corruption.
Fifteen years had passed since the fall of the House of Lilterwess, when one 
summer Zanja began to hear of trouble in the Midlands, where in the region of 
Rees a particularly brutal Sainnite commander was devastating the countryside in 
a largely successful effort to decimate the Paladins who opposed him. Working 
her way southward to find out as much as she could, Zanja was accosted in nearly 
every region by wrought-up Paladins. Finally, four days’ journey from the border 
of Rees, she found herself surrounded by one-time farmers, whose hardening to 
Sainnite violence had left them incapable of recognizing the subtle fact that 
not all strangers are enemies.
They confiscated her dagger, her horses and pack animals, her money, and all her 
gear and trade goods, and told her she should be grateful to be escaping with 
her life. It was useless and dangerous to argue with them, so she did as she was 
told, walking away down the road in the opposite direction from the one she 
wished to go. But as soon as she knew she was no longer observed, she returned 
back through the woods. She was able to travel quickly across country, running 
most of the time, keeping the road in sight until she had caught up with her 
stolen horses and their gleeful escort. She followed, careful to keep anger from 
overriding common sense, and watched from a distance as the Paladins finally 
divided her belongings and separated, each going in a separate direction.
It seemed clear that they were not bringing her horses and belongings to their 
company commander. Zanja returned to the original watchpost by the side of the 
road, and spent an uncomfortable night in the undergrowth, within hearing of the 
garrulous farmers, who kept themselves awake with storytelling. At dawn, a lone 
foot traveler approached through the woods to take their report and bring them 
fresh bread to eat. When the lone traveler left, she led Zanja to a remote, 
apparently abandoned farmhouse. Zanja had only to walk up to the door and knock.
“I seek the commander of Damar Company,” she said politely to the startled 
Paladin who opened the door. “I am Zanja na’Tarwein, the Speaker for the 
Ashawala’i.”
She heard the distinct voice of the woman she had followed these two days, 
exclaiming, “Name of Shaftal! I kept thinking someone was following me, but I 
thought it would be impossible . . .”
So many of the Paladin commanders had been killed during and shortly after the 
Fall that a great number of people had been promoted beyond their abilities or 
talent. Fortunately, when she was allowed to enter, the commander of Damar 
Company eyed her with a certain intelligence, at least. “You are a long way from 
the Ashawala’i,” he said.
“I try to learn what I can about the dangers that might threaten my people. When 
I heard about the troubles in Rees, I came down to see what was happening.”
The commander said skeptically, “Rees is no place for dilettantes this year.”
“I am a soldier like you.” Zanja folded her scarred hands before her, though she 
doubted he could see them in the dim light. “But the people of your command took 
my weapon—not here, but on the road to Rees. And they took my horses, my money, 
and my trade goods.”
The woman exclaimed, “They never mentioned—”
The commander hushed her. “Fighting the Sainnites is expensive, I regret to say, 
and Damar is a poor region.”
“So the Paladins of Damar have become thieves?”
The commander gestured impatiently. “We are at war,” he said, as though that 
excused every immoral act. “But I will see to it that your horses and belongings 
are recovered.”
He did not say that he would punish the wrongdoers, but Zanja had no choice but 
to be satisfied for now. So, because there was no help for it, she became the 
guest of Damar Company while waiting for her belongings to be recovered. At 
least she was able to use the time to her advantage, for the commander sent her 
with an escort into Rees.
In Rees, she saw a village that had been burned to the ground because one of the 
households had sheltered a Paladin. She heard about entire families slaughtered 
because one member served in Rees Company. She saw pale, hopeless veterans with 
legs and arms amputated. She finally met some of the survivors of Rees Company: 
harried, half-mad fighters who hurried her out of their camp because they feared 
that the Sainnite commander would exercise her near-supernatural ability to find 
them wherever they sheltered. Zanja and her companion gave the poor souls all 
the food they had, for the Rees farmers were so terrorized that they dared not 
feed their own soldiers any more, and the few surviving Paladins were starving.
Zanja returned to Damar much sobered, to find that most of her goods and horses 
had been recovered, and that the rest, the commander assured her, would arrive 
soon. Soon after her return, a messenger arrived, and the commander summoned 
Zanja. “Can you read?”
“I can read the alphabet, but not glyphs.”
He showed her a note, much begrimed with long travel, that included a 
description of her and her gear, and requested that if she were spotted 
anywhere, she be directed to return home at once.
Never before had Zanja, or the Speaker before her, been summoned home like this. 
She left her goods and pack animals in the care of some honest farmers and 
hurried homeward by the most flexible and least noticeable means of travel, her 
own two feet. She was a hardened traveler, but even though she ran whenever the 
way was reasonably flat, the journey seemed interminable. It was nearly 
mid-summer when she saw before her the sky-piercing peaks of stark gray stone 
where Winter set by next year’s supply of snow.
Katrim watched all the passes from the high vantage of nearly invisible shelters 
of stone and mud, and for many years now the easy paths had been left choked 
with stone as barriers against invasion. She followed a narrow, precarious way 
that paralleled the river down the mountainside, gradually losing altitude, 
until trees came crowding up the canyons once again. At a bend of the river, the 
valley opened up and the village of Zanja’s people came into sight. Ransel was 
hurrying up the path to meet her.
“How long has it been since you saw the Asha Valley in summer?” he asked. “More 
than half your life, I think.”
It was indeed quite odd to see the trees in leaf, the fields of corn and squash 
being hoed, the goats grazing in the flood plain, and the children swimming in 
the river. She had almost forgotten what a fine place this valley was in 
summertime.
“Well, Alastad na’Parsa is dead,” Ransel added.
She gazed at him, baffled. For seventy years, Alastad had guaranteed the success 
of the Ashawala’i crops, given health to the newborns, advised the elders, 
predicted the weather, suggested the best times to gather nuts or hunt deer, and 
eased the dying into death. The Ashawala’i had been fortunate to have an earth 
witch of such talent for so many years, and it was certainly a matter of concern 
that he was dead, and that no earth clan had yet produced another so gifted. 
“But that is no reason to fetch me—”
Ransel had become one of the finest katra dancers in the village, and had the 
scars to show for it. He had a fresh cut on his arm, sloppily bandaged and 
leaking blood. “I know that something untoward has happened,” he said. “Some 
katrim and hunters are in disgrace. The elders need your advice. That’s all 
anyone will say.”
They walked together across the valley and into the village. Busy, preoccupied 
people shouldered their way down narrow pathways between the close-built clan 
lodges. Summer’s warmth had brought forth the village’s miasma. Outside its 
limits, the most noticeable smell had been that of the latrines. Now, the 
changing scents marked the delineations of the village’s many industries: from 
the stink of the dye vats to the piercing smells of the tanner’s yard. The smell 
of burnt fat and roasted corn distinguished the na’Parsa lodge, where a funeral 
feast must have recently been served.
They reached the lodge of the na’Tarweins, upon whose walls each of the nine 
bird gods were painted with equal skill and prominence, so that none would feel 
slighted. Painted elemental flames writhed around the doorway, where a 
loosely-woven summer rug kept out the flies. Ransel told her that the na’Tarwem 
elders wished to see her alone, so she bid him farewell and promised to find him 
in the summer camp, after sunset.
Zanja stepped into the lodge and dropped to one knee. The mother of the 
na’Tarwein clan, a hazy shape in the dim light of the lodge, rose up from her 
stool and stepped forward to accept her greeting. As Zanja’s eyes adjusted to 
the shadows, she identified three other clan elders, each seated upon a low 
stool, with an attendant child cross-legged at their feet. Still kneeling, she 
greeted each of the elders in turn, and only then stood up to be clasped in the 
clan mother’s arms and accept her offer of tea.
One of the children hastened to pour a cup of tea from the pot upon the hearth. 
The precious porcelain cup fit perfectly into the palm of Zanja’s hand, and felt 
light and smooth as a leaf from a tree. She sat down upon the floor at a gesture 
from the clan mother, and slurped politely from her cup.
The clan mother said, “With the death of Alastad, I fear we may lose the 
prosperity of the people.”
Zanja replied, “Surely an earth child will soon take Alastad na’Parsa’s place.”
The elders shook her heads and murmured with regret, as the clan mother said, 
“Earth witches are rare. Hard times lie ahead, I fear.”
“When last I saw Alastad, he seemed in good health.”
Zanja drank her tea while one of the elders recounted the tale of how the aged 
earth witch had been suddenly stricken with a strange paralysis, and how the 
herbalists’ frantic efforts to revive him had failed. Zanja became impatient for 
the end of this overly complicated tale, but restrained herself from rudely 
interrupting her elders. She was finally able to say, “I am glad you sent for 
me, Mother.”
“I would never have called you home for one person’s death, even one so 
important as this. It is not as if your presence could bring Alastad back to 
life.”
Zanja set her empty cup upon the floor before her. A child hurried forward to 
collect it and carry it carefully to safety. “What else has happened?”
The clan mother rose to her feet once again. “Come with me.”
She led the way between the hanging rugs that divided the public space of the 
lodge from its cavernous living and work space, currently occupied only by a 
young woman with a belly like an empty bag, whose newborn infant slept in a 
basket beside her. In summer, the people stayed out of doors as much as 
possible. They would see enough of these walls during the long and bitter 
winter.
At the far end of the lodge, another curtained doorway gave entry to the 
sickroom. There two na’Tarwein katrim stood rigid guard over a man sprawled upon 
the floor. The guards, their gazes evading hers, gestured welcome to a fellow 
katrim, but clearly were to discomforted to speak. Their attitudes, as much as 
anything, alerted Zanja to the shamefulness of the situation, though what she 
saw was deeply puzzling: her clan brother, Tarin, a hunter of some renown, 
apparently ill, but wearing a goat harness by which he was tethered to the wall. 
She squatted down to shake him gently by the shoulder. His drooping eyelids 
opened, but he looked at her blankly, idiotically, his black irises hazed with a 
dull film.
Zanja felt a sickness descend on her. She said, “Tarin, stand up.”
He did as she said, clumsily but promptly. He obediently complied with her 
demands that he make a variety of moves and gestures, and then he remained 
standing until she told him to lie down again.
Now she noticed the sour, moldy scent that sometimes lingered in the alleyways 
and dark doorways of Shaftal. She said, more to convince herself than to confirm 
what the clan mother already knew, “This man is addicted to smoke.”
The clan mother did not reply. Zanja stood up, feeling the sickness not just in 
her belly, but throughout her body, even to her fingertips. “How did this 
happen?” she cried.
“Tarin met a Shaftali wanderer out in the forest, some three or four days’ 
journey to the south,” said the clan mother in a voice like rawhide. “Though he 
and the stranger could not speak each others’ language, they became friends, he 
says. They smoked many pipes together. Tarin began bringing gifts for the man, 
and when that did not seem to be enough, he introduced others to the smoke.”
“How many in all?”
“Seven people, from three clans. But he is the only one who used the drug so 
much that now he cannot live without it.”
“And the man in the woods?”
“We cannot find him. Is it true that Tarin will die without the drug?”
“So I have heard.”
“Then he will soon pay a high price for his foolishness, for his supply has 
almost been depleted. I have daily looked for your arrival, hoping you would 
return before he died.”
Zanja followed the clan mother out of the closed room, back to the common space 
where fifty or more people could comfortably take shelter. They stood together 
in the hot room. Flies buzzed in the corners, and the infant made sucking sounds 
in his sleep.
The clan mother said, “In all these years that you have warned the elders about 
the dangers that threatened us, no one heeded you. Now we have sent for you. 
Think hard on what you wish us to hear.”
“I will consider,” Zanja said, but her thoughts were in turmoil.
The na’Tarwein sighed. “These are uneasy times. Would that we had a single seer! 
But our only seer is you, and what you see is not the future, but the present.”
In the old days, the Speaker would have gone directly to the G’deon to complain 
of this intolerable encroachment on the Ashawala’i, and the problem would have 
been dealt with. Now Zanja said in frustration, “Smoke is a Sainnite drug. Was 
the man in the woods a Sainnite? Or was he just a trader trying to lay his hands 
on Ashawala’i woolens?”
“We do not know.”
“Then I must talk to all of those who smoked this visitor’s pipe. Their 
description of him will let me know if he was a Sainnite.”
“But you have had a hard journey, and now you are angry and worried. Tonight you 
must think and rest, so that tomorrow you can address the problem with serenity 
and clarity.”
“Yes, Mother.” Though Zanja’s body was rigid with rage, she was pleased to see 
that not a trace of anger found its way into her voice. She took her leave, and 
went out in search of her friends.



The summer village, which by day looked like nothing more than a collection of 
pots and fire pits, at night scattered the flood plain with cook fires and 
cranky children. Zanja sat late beside the katrims fire, while they regaled her 
with warrior’s tales of the past season. To listen patiently eventually strained 
her courtesy. The concerns of these, her fellow katrim, seemed trivial to her, 
just as hers would seem fanciful to them. Surely, she thought ungraciously, she 
was like a captured hawk, forced to listen to the tales of mice until it drove 
her mad. At last she lay down where she had been seated upon the much trampled 
grass, and shared Ransel’s blanket, as they had done since childhood. She slept 
badly.
In dead of night, Zanja awakened to a silence so profound that she could hear a 
night breeze hunting through the cornfields in the flood plain. What would it 
take, she wondered, to silence the normal din of the river banks: the shouting 
frogs, the screams of the accuser bugs, who carried on all night long until dawn 
light finally stilled their glee? A cold terror took her, and she shook Ransel 
violently until he sat up, protesting. “Gods’ names, Zanja, a fine dream I was 
having.”
“Shut up and listen.”
In a moment, Ransel muttered, “Who tramples through the frog lands, eh? And at 
an hour when ghosts go wandering? This is a mighty strange silence.”
Zanja had already put on her boots, and went around the katrim’s circle, 
awakening all she could while Ransel tied his boot straps. The katrim were less 
than pleased with her for disturbing their sleep, but ceased their grumbling 
when she said sharply, “The people may be in danger.” A precious fool she’d look 
like later, if her panic was caused by nothing but a froggish whimsy.
“Let’s go see what’s on the frogs’ minds,” said Ransel.
The two of them ran full tilt across the crowded plain. They tread on embers, 
trampled fragile pottery, and tripped over peaceful sleepers, who uttered cries 
of fear that turned to shouts of outrage in their wake. Babies marked their 
passage with startled wails. Zanja could see Ransel’s teeth in the darkness. 
Perhaps he was amused, or perhaps this was no grin, but a grimace, as he 
considered his lifetime of experience with Zanja’s whims—which rarely, if ever, 
turned out to be mistakes.
Let me be mistaken now, she thought, or prayed, to whatever god might be paying 
attention. Let this disturbance we’ve created be on my head. Let me be a 
laughingstock. Just let me be wrong.
They left the summer village and ran through cultivated fields, along a track of 
pounded dirt with ditches on both sides to channel the rainwater. Corn tasseled 
to the left, and to the right lay mounded squash plants, their buds ready to 
twist open with the dawn. Crickets sang in the cropland, but ahead lay silence. 
Zanja and Ransel slowed to a walk and cautiously approached the edge of the long 
downslope, at the bottom of which journeyed the river.
It was called the Asha River both within and without the borders. Its cobbled 
banks kept trees from thriving at its edges, and so Zanja could see its 
glimmering water, which was cold with melting snow even at mid-summer, and the 
horde of soldiers that waded through it. They dragged their equipment and armor 
behind them on little rafts, and those that had completed the crossing drew on 
their boots and buckled their cuirasses in haste and silence. Even the war 
horses, which must have crossed first, as their riders were already mounted and 
standing guard, uttered no sound, and stood still except for the nervous 
twitching of their bobbed tails.
“Oh, my brother,” Zanja breathed, and groped for Ransel’s hand.
His fingers clenched hers. “Is it Sainnites?”
“Yes, it is.” She pulled him back from the edge of the slope. They stood for 
just a moment, staring at each other in the darkness. Zanja thought there might 
be as many as fifty war horses, which meant a full battalion, with twenty 
heavily armed foot soldiers for every horse. They outnumbered the katrim by ten 
to one, and the katrim’s daggers would be no match for the Sainnites’ armor and 
weaponry.
Zanja said, “The people must flee for their lives.”
“Then we’ll need to defend the northern trail, so they can climb the cliffs into 
the forest.”
“You go back and shout the alarm. You have the voice for it. Take half the 
katrim to defend the trail, and send half to me, so we can delay the Sainnites 
to give our people time to escape.”
For a moment, Zanja thought Ransel would actually waste precious time in 
argument. But then he bared his teeth in a bitter, mocking grin. “My commander 
speaks and I obey.”
“Honor to you, Ransel na’Tarwein.” She forced herself to release his hand.
“Honor to you, Zanja na’Tarwein.” He gestured a brisk, graceful salute, and 
dashed into the darkness. She watched until she could not distinguish him from 
the shadows. I will never see him again, she thought. For a dreadful moment, she 
could not bear it. She almost called after him. The two of them would flee . . . 
and live in shame forever after. She took a breath and turned to face the enemy.
The soldiers below efficiently and silently crossed the river. Fifty war horses 
she counted, and three hundred or more foot soldiers. The Ashawala’i numbered 
some 1,500 souls, but only a hundred of them carried weapons. The katrim were 
fine fighters, and fought with each other incessantly: neat, graceful, courteous 
encounters that rarely drew blood. To the Sainnites they would seem like 
children who merely played at war.
Trembling now, Zanja heard Ransel’s voice, clear despite the distance. “Rise up, 
Ashawala’i, and flee for your lives! The enemy is upon us!” Three times Zanja 
heard this cry, until Ransel’s voice was swallowed in the rising uproar.
The Sainnite commanders, certainly hearing the noise, shouted sharp orders. The 
soldiers, working with terrible speed, began to form a battle line. Zanja stood 
alone between her people and disaster, trying to hold it back by will alone. She 
imagined Ransel and the katrim, running ahead of the fleeing people to secure 
the northern trail, the only route up the cliffs that could safely be climbed in 
the darkness. She imagined the Ashawala’i, confused and disorganized, with 
panicked children and crippled elders in tow, running across the grassland. And 
how many of the katrim would have the courage to run the other way, towards the 
river and the enemy?
Oh, but the katrim were arrogant. Zanja had scarcely begun to doubt them when 
they began to arrive, breathless and excited, with their boots on their feet and 
their blades in their hands. Some hunters arrived as well, with their deer bows 
and longest arrows. They could see well enough to shoot the horses, they assured 
her, and she chose not to tell them that the horses were wearing armor. Their 
courage came from ignorance, and she wished that she had more of both.
She locked her terror into a distant dungeon where it could do whatever it 
liked, unnoticed, and hastily sorted the katrim into a battle line. A few of 
them had lances, and she put them first, to try to stop the horses. The hunters 
she poised behind them, and the katrim, with their daggers, standing to the rear 
to await the foot soldiers who would follow behind the cavalry. She took a lance 
herself and stood in front, not from courage but from eagerness for the 
excruciating wait to end. She noticed, with relief and horror, that the cavalry 
had begun its charge.
How much time had passed? How quickly could the tribe climb up that single, 
narrow path and flee into the safety of the forest?
Even though they had to run up slope, the horses picked up speed, and she saw 
ephemeral sparks flash from their iron hooves.
The katrim began to shout: an eerie, shrill, challenging cry. Zanja felt a jolt 
of pride. Perhaps, she thought, we will survive.
She screamed defiance at the monstrous shadows that reached the top of the slope 
and blotted out the stars. Arrows clattered uselessly on the horses’ iron 
plates, but the katrim shouted with satisfaction as one rider fell. And then the 
dust washed over them like smoke. Choking, Zanja felt a wave of riders veer past 
as her lance point jarred off a horse’s armored side.
Like a fist through parchment, the cavalry punched through the line of katrim, 
and wheeled around, sparks showering where iron struck stone. The clenched 
groups of horses opened up like hands and formed a line, and part of Zanja 
remembered how she had once watched Sainnite horsemen practice this very drill. 
At her back now, the foot soldiers were running up the slope. The katrim were 
trapped, like a fly between two clapping hands.
Zanja cried, “Ashawala’i!” She charged a horseman with her lance and dove 
between the horse’s hooves to drive its point into the underbelly. The rider’s 
ax shrilled past her ear. The horse screamed. She rolled away as the monster 
fell, hooves thrashing, the rider tangled in the stirrups. She jerked her dagger 
from its sheath and turned to face a foot soldier, whose blade clashed upon hers 
once, twice, three times. She never even gained her balance, but simply moved 
her weapon to block his, with the rest of her body tumbling after it, whichever 
way it happened to go. There was no grace in it, she thought sorrowfully. She 
pierced him with a blow that was more luck than talent, and saw him fall to his 
knees with her dagger still caught in his ribs.
She leapt forward to snatch her dagger back, but a horse bore down on her. 
Empty-handed, she dodged spiked hooves and gnashing teeth. The horse reared, and 
wheeled. Choking in dust, Zanja found the fallen soldier and jerked her gory 
dagger from his chest. The horse was on her once again. Horse and rider both 
bared their teeth at her, laughing, no doubt, for she was no more than a bee 
trying to sting them with her little blade. The rider’s ax came whistling down 
at her. She fell to the ground and felt its edge slash across her tunic. His 
lance, held in his other hand, glimmered faintly. She rolled, jumped back to her 
feet, and ran under the horse.
The horse reared. She tripped, and saw the big, iron-wrapped hooves come down at 
her. She felt a moment of stunning pain, like a blacksmith’s hammer striking her 
head over an anvil. The dust-masked stars went out like candles.
The war horse trampled her into the stones and dust. The katrim died all around 
her. The peaceful history of the Ashawala’i reached a bitter, bloody conclusion. 
Zanja lay with the others, her blood soaking the dry soil, and the dust slowly 
settled around her.



She opened her eyes to the heavy mist of dawn. Far away, muffled voices called 
in Sainnese. She struggled to her knees, vomited from pain, and fainted. She 
regained consciousness with her head resting on the cold flank of a dead horse. 
Without moving, she raised a hand to feel her bloody head. The morning breeze 
blew the smoke of the burning village across the valley. In the rising light of 
day, she saw Sainnites working their way methodically across the battlefield, 
claiming their dead, finding their injured, killing any enemies found alive. She 
could not stand, but crawled across the bloody bodies of her kinsmen, into the 
smoke.
When she opened her eyes again, she lay wrapped in a fine woolen blanket, in a 
neat hollow guarded by giant stones. Overhead, the sky was a deep blue, with the 
stars starting to come out. “My sister,” Ransel said, “a dozen times today I 
have thought you were dead.”
“I am dead,” she rasped, in a voice harsh with smoke and blood.
“So are we all. Here.” He tilted a gourd cup to her mouth. She drank. He said, 
“You breathed too much smoke, and you have some burns and bruises, but your head 
is your worst injury. A horse trampled you, I think.”
“How did you find me?”
“You found me,” he said. “I was looking for you, and you came out of the burning 
village.”
“What happened to our people?”
“When they heard my warning, they left their belongings and followed me and the 
other katrim to the cliff path. Sainnites lay in wait at the top of the path. We 
fought them. But they were many, and they have strange weapons that explode with 
fire.”
“Names of the gods!” Zanja groaned.
“We fought them a long time,” Ransel continued quietly. “What was accomplished I 
do not know. Did even one of our people escape? I wish I knew the answer, but I 
do not know. I and some other katrim fled when the Sainnites came up the path 
behind us. The cliff path is now choked with bodies. The village is a smoking 
ruin. I walked through the valley hunting for you, and everywhere I went, I saw 
our people slain: elders and children, warriors and farmers. The only people 
alive are those you see here.“
Zanja saw that other katrim were gathered in this hollow, and that many had 
drawn close to hear the conversation. Her vision was blurred and she could not 
count them, but it seemed there were fewer than twenty.
“I was pinned under a fallen horse,” one of them said. “I lay there all night, 
watching the butchery. The Samnites did not rest until no one was left alive. 
Finally, I pulled myself free and escaped in the smoke, as you did, Speaker.”
Others also told their stones, in voices as harsh and lifeless as the voices of 
ghosts are said to be. Zanja listened, thinking that surely she also had 
witnessed the horrors they described, but she only remembered a sensation of 
chaos and then of stillness. To have forgotten so much surely was a mercy, but 
it also was dreadful to gaze at these shattered tribesmen and feel confusion 
rather than sharing their horror.
“The Sainnites must have taken the long path through the mountains,” one of them 
said. “For they have wagons and horses that could not have surmounted the steep 
passes.”
“They must have killed the watchers before they could spread the alarm,” said 
another. “Though the watchers were hidden and it should have been impossible . . 
.”
“No, they knew exactly where the watchers were,” said Zanja. “Tarin must have 
told them—told his friend in the woods, in payment for smoke. He betrayed his 
entire people.”
They were silent then, for this was something they had not known, and could 
scarcely begin to understand. But Zanja understood that if she had only taken 
action immediately to find out what exactly had happened to Tarin, rather than 
delaying to let her anger cool, she might have discovered his betrayal 
immediately and been able to forewarn her people of their danger. Not for the 
last time, Zanja wished that the war horse’s kick to her head had been harder.
Ransel did not know of how she had failed the Ashawala’i, and she was too 
stunned by shame to tell him. He gently tended her wound and gave her more water 
to drink. She could not resist sleeping again, and in her sleep she dreamed of 
Sainnites. She dreamed that they sat around a fire where they roasted a 
slaughtered goat. In their own language, they talked about the hard work they 
had done and about the dreary journey home that lay before them.
When she opened her eyes, she saw stars burning. The katrim roasted river trout 
over a small fire, and talked about revenge. Ransel hovered nearby, and drew 
close when she stirred.
“The Sainnites will march out at first light,” said Zanja.
The other katrim abandoned their meal to come over and hear what she had said. 
“Speaker, how do you know?”
“They told me in my dreams.”
“Then we will follow them, to haunt them like ghosts, to kill as many as we 
can.”
“If we do this, we all will die.” She could see them more clearly now: some fine 
warriors and some she had long considered fools, but with the foolishness burned 
out of them now.
“What does it matter, so long as we can die in honor?” said Ransel.
They all murmured agreement, their voices empty and bitter with loss.
“Then we shall follow them,” Zanja said. She did not understand how she had 
become their leader, or why they listened to her, when her certainty might be 
nothing more than the delirium of a broken head.
She shut her eyes and slept the night through. At dawn, they began hunting 
Sainnites. Zanja went with them, leaning on one or another shoulder, carried 
sometimes, as they ran lightly across the mountaintops while the Sainnites, 
burdened by armor and horses and wagonloads of supplies, trudged below. The 
Sainnites did not realize what haunted their journey until that night, after the 
katrim slipped into their camp like the ghosts they were, and used the hay the 
Sainnites carried for the horses as tinder to set fire to all the supply wagons. 
Zanja could not make that raid with them, but despite her blinding headache, she 
told them where to find the hay wagons and how to avoid the pickets, and only 
two katrim were killed. Fifteen remained, including herself, but they bore the 
weapons of dozens more dead companions, and they knew how to survive in these 
ungenerous mountains. They waited a few days to let the Sainnites lower their 
guard, and they struck again, once or twice a night, night after night, and 
during the day made it impossible for the weary Sainnites to safely forage for 
food, or use the latrines, or even take off their armor. While the katrim ate 
roots and greens and berries and trout, the Sainnites began butchering and 
eating their starving horses.
Zanja and her companions lived ghost lives. They did not speak of the past, or 
of the dead, or of their own deaths. They watched the Sainnites, and slipped 
through the mountains like shadows, and from time to time let fly a precious 
arrow, or cut the throat of a straying soldier. One by one, Zanja’s companions 
disappeared. Like the Sainnites, the katrim were leaving behind them a trail of 
abandoned bodies that they dared not try to find and had no time to burn. The 
mountain vultures and ravens followed them. Zanja could walk on her own feet 
now, but was often disabled by dizziness or blinding pain. The Sainnite soldiers 
continued to speak in her dreams, telling her all their secret plans and terrors 
and blood lusts.
The fifteen katrim became twelve, and then seven. The seven became five. With 
more warriors and more time, they might have eventually destroyed the entire 
Sainnite battalion. But now, with only five of them remaining, and only one more 
pass to climb before the Sainnites could safely exit the mountains, they knew 
their time for vengeance would soon come to an end. None of them wished to 
survive. They camped among stones, high above the miserable Sainnites and their 
disgusting horsemeat. They ate sweet trout flesh and sucked on the transparent 
bones. They ate tart berries and crunched the seeds with their teeth. They 
tallied the Sainnite dead and were satisfied.
Only Zanja had ever traveled so far east of the Asha Valley. She told about a 
treacherous canyon they soon would pass, and suggested that one of them might 
lure the Sainnites into the canyon, while the others dislodged stones to fall 
down on their heads. They drew lots, and Zanja chose the longest stick. That 
night, Ransel put his arms around her and said, “Wait for me in the Land of the 
Sun, my sister. I will not be far behind you.” She fell asleep with her head in 
the hollow of his shoulder.
She would always remember the moment when the mountain fell on her. It was her 
second death, and far more satisfying than the first. She would remember the 
Sainnites gleefully chasing her up the canyon, the four katrim levering the 
rocks overhead, and the canyon wall collapsing onto the people below. 
Mercifully, she would not remember much else: She would not remember when the 
surviving Sainnites dragged her out from under a boulder with her back broken. 
She would not remember how they tortured her, when they realized she was still 
alive. She would not remember when they killed Ransel, who might have been 
trying to either rescue her or deliver her with a merciful blow of the dagger. 
She would not remember that she mistakenly thought she was already dead, and he 
was coming to join her. She would not realize for a long time that in fact he 
had left her behind among the living.


Chapter Four


In a stone cottage tucked into a hollow in the iron-rich hills that surround 
Meartown, Karis, a mastersmith of Mear, sat on the stoop in the morning 
sunshine, fumbling with her bootstraps. From where she sat, she could see a dark 
cloud rising as the furnaces of Meartown were lit. She smoothed her big, sooty, 
callused hands across the stoop’s worn stone, testing to see if the smoke 
paralysis had lifted sufficiently for her to at least be able to sense the 
hammer as she gripped it. The light of the rising sun was blinding.
Lynton moved slowly through the lush garden, his white hair gleaming among the 
bean plants. Bald Dominy came out the open door of the cottage with a packet of 
food for Karis’s dinner. “It’s bread, dried fish, some cheese and a couple of 
apples,” he said. “Be sure you eat it all, whether you want it or not. A person 
your size has to eat.”
She nodded. Dominy or Lynton had said these words, or something like them, every 
morning, all the years she had lived with them. She did not reply, for if she 
tried to talk she would slur like a drunk, since her tongue was still half 
paralyzed. The old man patted her shoulder affectionately. Before she moved in, 
he and Lynton had added an oversized room to their house to accommodate her 
oversized frame. After she moved in, thanks to their incessant fretting, she had 
finally put on the bulk to match her height.
The sunshine chased the lingering poison from her paralyzed nerves. She said, 
without too much difficulty, “Something has changed.”
Dominy shouted to Lynton to be sure to pick plenty of tomatoes. “What’s that?” 
he asked absently.
“Something has changed,” she said again. She felt it, a shifting of the earth’s 
weight, as though the earth and stones were gathering up their strength for a 
great effort. “I feel an urgency.” She pressed her palms again upon the stoop. 
“What has happened?” she asked the warm granite.
Most of the time, Dominy treated her like any other metalsmith. Sometimes, she 
did something that astounded him, and he would remember that she was a witch. As 
she looked up at him now, he asked diffidently, “What does the stone say?”
“It speaks of blood and death throughout the land. That is not new. But it 
speaks of something else, a life.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. It 
pulls at me.” She looked down, as though a child were tugging at her shirt.
“You’re going to be late,” Dominy said.
She stood up. His head tilted back, and back, until it seemed he was gazing up 
at a mountain. He squinted fiercely in the sun. “I’m not going to the forge,” 
she said. “I need to think.”
“You want me to carry a message to the forgemaster, I suppose.” Grumpily, he 
took the food packet out of Karis’s hand. “I’ll get a satchel for this. Where 
will you go? Out onto the heath? Better bring a water bottle, too.”


Far from the danger and stink of the furnaces and forges, Karis walked through 
lands too dry and poor to interest farmers. The sun rose up in a breathless 
rush, the rocks shifted in their foundations, and the seedpods of summer 
shattered open. When the sun was high, she supposed she must be hungry and 
thirsty, so she sat down and ate. Afterwards, she lay on her back and listened. 
A life, the deep soil said to her. Pay attention!
When she came home, Lynton told her she was tired, and fed her a great bowl of 
vegetables from the garden. Dominy told her the forgemaster had merely nodded 
when he heard Karis would not be there. The sun hung low in the sky, and the 
only hunger Karis ever felt was consuming most of her attention: she needed 
smoke. Yet beneath that hunger, she still sensed the vague, irritating nagging 
of the earth. A life, it said. You must do something! But it never told her what 
she needed to do.



Often, when Karis lay awake, but still under smoke, a strange thing would 
happen: her spirit would break free of her insensate flesh to take residence in 
a particular raven. This raven traveled with Norina Truthken, far to the 
southeast. Norina usually contrived to be alone for the sunrise, and on this 
morning, she sat on a split rail fence at the edge of a harvested cornfield, 
waiting to see if the raven would speak to her.
Karis said through the raven, “There is a new presence in the land.”
Norina rubbed her eyes, which were still crusted with sleep. “I don’t 
understand.”
“A person has come into Shaftal, and the land seems to cry out to me, demanding 
that I pay heed.”
Norina gazed into the cornfield. “Is it an earth elemental? The one we have been 
waiting for?”
This possibility had not even occurred to Karis, and she cried out in surprise, 
“And if it is, what then?”
Norina said, quite calmly, “All this will come to an end.”
“And the end of our friendship, too.”
Norina turned sharply to the raven, then. “Is that what you think?”
“You will have more important concerns.”
“I will always be your friend,” Norina said. And, because she was a Truthken, 
Karis almost believed her. “So is it the one we are waiting for?” Norina asked.
“I don’t think it is an earth witch. If it were, then surely I would understand 
what is happening better than I do. I feel an urgency, a danger, an impulse to 
intervene. Perhaps this person has been broken.”
“And you want to go find this person.”
Karis didn’t have to reply. Norina knew her well enough.
“Whatever calls you,” Norina said, “You must not let it call you out of hiding, 
or you will find there the hand of the Sainnites, stretching out to grab you by 
the throat.”
Karis could not speak. Norina said, “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“This presence—it makes you restive.” Norina got down off the rail. “Don’t do 
anything foolish. I’ll be there in a few days.”
Karis’s spirit broke loose of the raven. When she came to herself, she lay once 
again in her bed, with the light of sunrise in her face.



By the time Norina ended her visit, she had reluctantly agreed to try to find 
the person whose presence haunted Karis. Autumn harvest began and was finished. 
The rains soon commenced, the days rapidly grew short, autumn began to turn to 
winter, and still Karis was haunted by nagging, inarticulate worry.
One day, she stayed later than usual at the smithy, and shadows barred the 
roadway as she walked to the tavern. There, she ate her pigeon pie in haste, and 
still could have left before sunset if not for the baked apple that appeared 
before her. “Did I ask for this?” she resentfully inquired of no one.
Someone—she did not know who—said, “Karis, you are getting thin.”
The apple was a gift then, and so she had to eat it, and even to pretend that 
she appreciated it. As she ate and smiled politely, she felt the sun go down 
like a shutter slamming shut. A woman wrapped in sheepskin came in, and everyone 
shouted at her to close the door. “It’s going to snow,” somebody muttered, in a 
voice that spoke of shoveling the paths and carrying the wood and sharpening the 
runners on the sleigh.
Karis’s plate was empty. She left the tavern without saying goodbye or uttering 
a word of thanks, and realized it too late, halfway out of town. Would they all 
forgive her one more time? Could she still depend on them? The presence in the 
land, which before had lured her into untoward expectation, had now begun to 
constantly distract her: not by its demand for her notice, but by its steady 
retreat. Half her attention constantly sought after it, worrying. With her 
attention so divided, she was forgetting to eat, losing track of time, 
forgetting common courtesy, making mistakes that could well be the death of her.
“I can’t continue,” she said. No one answered. The cold had driven everyone 
indoors. The wind carried frost-rimed leaves into shadowed places, and in the 
west stars had appeared. Karis tried to sing to them, forgetting for a moment 
that the smoke drug had destroyed her voice years ago.
She left the cobblestones behind and wandered through the icy mud of the wagon 
ruts, weaving like a drunk on her trembling legs. Will I even make it home? she 
asked herself, for the hill seemed to go up forever. And then home stood before 
her, a thatched cottage with a lamp flame in the window. A black thing dropped 
down from the treetops and struck her shoulder like a blow. She uttered a cry, 
then caught her breath. “So you’re home.”
Crisp feathers rasped on her ear as the raven folded his wings. She fumbled in 
her pocket for something to feed him—a bread end or a bit of grain—but today her 
pockets were full of stones. She could not remember why she had picked them up, 
or where. “I have to smoke,” she said.
The raven spoke in a voice no more harsh than hers. “Then smoke.”
“Come inside. I think Lynton and Dominy are already in bed.”
In her room, she opened the window so the raven could come and go. While she 
filled her pipe with shaking hands, he ate the bread and bacon ends she had 
snatched up in the pantry. Now came a quiet, for with the pipe in hand, her 
panic eased. She could wait a little longer. In the fireplace, the coals caught 
in new wood and flames began to flicker. The raven drank from a bowl. “What did 
Norina find out?” Kans asked.
“Norina found nothing. Nothing to find, nothing to be done. There is a place 
shut up like a strongbox, which stinks of death. The Sainnites imprison people 
there—unfortunates who might have secrets to trade for a merciful death. People 
avoid the place, or stop up their ears so they won’t hear the screams or be 
cursed by the ghosts.”
“Is that all?” Karis cried, when the raven fell silent. “That cannot be all 
there is to know!” Karis paced back and forth across the room until she banged 
into the settle and felt a far-away pain in her shin. She forced herself to 
stop, to breathe deeply, to listen to the silence. For months the person who had 
been broken had endured in that place of horror while she and Norina argued. But 
now that bright spirit was a candleflame guttering in its socket.
“This person’s life has become important to me. Much more important than my own 
life.”
“And what does that mean?” the raven said, as Norina would. “Your life is not 
your own. You will not be foolish with it.”
Karis looked at the pipe in her trembling hand. If she didn’t smoke, she would 
die, and if she did smoke, that flame in the darkness might go out while she 
dreamed and drooled, drug giddy. “You must fly to that place of imprisonment, 
and find that person.“ The raven drank more water, and shook out his dry 
feathers.
“Tonight?” he said.
“Now.” Karis took up a small pouch and emptied it onto a tabletop. She put in a 
dry crust of bread and hung the pouch around the raven’s neck. “Go quickly, good 
raven. Or we will be too late.”



As Karis, having smoked her pipe at last, sprawled upon her bed and watched the 
shadows dance, the raven flew over his kingdom, with darkness above and below. 
The lamplights below had all been blown out, and an impending storm had blotted 
out the lights of the sky. The raven flew on until morning, when the snow began 
to fall. He waited out the storm in the rafters of a barn, which he shared with 
an owl and some bats and an anxious flock of chickens whose eggs he ate 
surreptitiously, hiding the broken shells so the farmers would not know. When 
the snowfall ceased, he flew on, with the sun setting behind him. Below, a 
company of Sainnite soldiers trampled a path through the snow. Then they were 
gone, and night fell again.
The ruins of the House of Lilterwess passed beneath him, a great stone cairn for 
the martyrs of the defeat.
Once again, Karis lay under smoke. Sometimes smoke made her able to see through 
the raven’s eyes. So she now saw the cairn swoop past, and she tried to make the 
raven circle it again, to examine the ruin of the bell tower by the front gate, 
where on the night after Harald G’deon’s death Dinal had stood bravely ringing 
the alarm bell as the Sainnites broke through the gates. Dinal had been an old 
woman, the mother of four grown sons, a lieutenant of the Paladins, the beloved 
friend and lover of Harald G’deon. Karis had only known her as a kind stranger 
who appeared suddenly in the mad carnival of Lalali and offered Karis a way out 
the gates.
Harald, the last G’deon of Shaftal, also lay beneath the fallen walls of the 
building. Sometimes his bones spoke to Karis, but not tonight. After fifteen 
years of delay, watching the encroachments of these invaders and refusing to do 
anything about it, he had died before the final carnage began. The Sainnites, 
still fearing his power though they knew that he was dying, waited for him to 
die, and then attacked.
At this turning point of history, Norina came to show Karis the Way to safety, 
and found her lying vacantly in bed while cannonballs smashed into the building. 
Sometimes, the memory still made Karis desperate with self-loathing. She should 
have saved the House of Lilterwess, but smoke made her incapable of even saving 
herself. Sometimes, it seemed impossible that Norina had been able to forgive 
her.
The ruins had passed, and now there was only darkness to be seen. Karis slipped 
deeper into sleep.



When Zanja opened her eyes to the bitter darkness of the wintry night, she was 
surprised to find herself still entrapped in flesh. It scarcely seemed possible 
her spirit could hold on for so many months when she had seen so many die so 
easily. A blow or two of the blade usually was all it took to sever soul from 
body, a moment of agony and then the soul was translated.
She had been dreaming of all the people of her village, gathered beside their 
summer fires in the Land of the Sun, chasing children, strutting before their 
rivals, stirring pots of fragrant kich. But just as the path Zanja followed 
seemed about to deposit her in their midst, it turned her mysteriously away, 
back into the wilderness, and she was lost again, trapped once more in a 
stinking box of straw, where she had been laid some months earlier like a side 
of meat being cellared for the winter.
She heard a dry, rasping sound, and turned her head. The moon shone through the 
barred window, as it briefly did sometimes, and faint light shimmered on the 
ice-encased walls of her cell. The floor by the window was white with drifted 
snow. Silhouetted against the white, a raven stood on the edge of her box, near 
her head. He preened his wing feathers, just like any other bird after a long 
flight, but she knew him: the Messenger, He Who Decides. At last.
She tilted up her chin so that his blunt beak could better reach her throat. “I 
have been waiting for you a long time, Lord Death.” Her voice whispered like dry 
wind.
“It is not yet time for you to die,” said Death. His voice was harsh, and echoed 
of the deep canyons where he made his home.
“How could it not be time? I have no home, no kin, no clan, no companions. I am 
broken, paralyzed. That smell—do you smell it?—that is my flesh rotting from my 
bones as I lie in my own shit. What more can the gods expect me to accomplish? 
What is left for me except death?”
“You are still bound.”
“Bound to what? The gods?”
“To earth,” the raven said, implacably. In the silence, he paced the length of 
the box, perhaps inspecting her in the darkness. The blanket covered some parts 
of her ravaged frame, but to cover her feet required that she lever herself up 
with her arms to toss the blanket, and she had not been strong enough to do this 
in quite some time. Surely the sight of her feet, spastically curled and with 
half the toes hacked off, would convince even a god that her usefulness in this 
world was at an end. But Death paced back to her head again, unperturbed, and 
fed her a crust of bread, dry and stale and hard as stone, as if she were his 
fledgling. Her mouth was dry; she could not chew. He brought her a beakful of 
snow from the drift by the window, and she managed to swallow the dry crumbs. 
They burned within her like coals in a hearth, and warmed the parts of Zanja’s 
body where she could still feel the warmth: her torso, her arms, the shattered 
places of her heart. But the physical agonies that had only recently been numbed 
at last by cold were not renewed. For a while, she dozed, and awakened to find 
that her strength had gathered and concentrated around the center of that warmth 
in her belly. No, she would not step across the threshold just yet.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the god. The moon had crossed her small window. Pressed against the 
darkness, the god still perched at her head, not a handspan away, invisible.
She said, “You say I am still bound. Perhaps you mean that I am bound to die in 
honor, as I am a katrim.”
Death said, “What do you think should be done so that you could die as a katrim 
should die?”
“It is the way of the katrim to die in joy.” She had spoken the words of an old 
lesson, a child’s lesson, easy to recite when Zanja first stood up in the 
presence of her clan elders and named herself a katrim and proudly said that the 
owl god Salos’a had chosen her to travel between the worlds. But to recite this 
lesson now seemed a bitter joke, though Lord Death did not laugh.
“How might you die in joy?” asked Death.
“You mock me with impossibilities.”
“I do not mean to mock you.” Lord Death is a teacher, but the best teacher is 
the one who waits in silence. She heard the crisp sound of him unhurriedly 
preening his flight feathers, as though he intended to wait a thousand nights if 
necessary for Zanja to offer an answer to her own question.
She did not want to wait so long. She tried to remember what once had brought 
joy to her life, but the massacre of her people lay between her present and her 
past like an uncrossable divide. So she said, “Perhaps a joyful death comes from 
being able to understand one’s life as part of a purpose or pattern. But that is 
the one thing I cannot do.”
“Why not?” asked Death, as though he did not know.
“Because my memory is broken to pieces, and some of the pieces are lost, and the 
rest don’t fit together any more.”
“Then you must recover what you have lost, and remember who you are.”
“Who I was.” Zanja’s bitterness brought forth weak tears, but surely there was 
no shame in weeping before a god.
When it is time for someone to die, the people of the dying one’s clan gather 
around and tell the stories of her life, so that when she crosses the threshold 
she will still remember, and be able to tell that history to the people on the 
other side. But Zanja was the last of her people and so she had to tell those 
stories of her life to herself. This must be what the god wanted of her.
“Where shall I start?” she asked.
“Start where it begins,” said Death.
So she began with her earliest memories of the clattering looms and the light 
drifting in to make the patterns shine as they were slowly revealed on the 
weaver’s loom. She explained that her mother had been a weaver, and had been 
sorely disappointed when her daughter left the weaver’s house as soon as she 
could walk on her own two feet, to return only by force. She told about the 
first time she realized the elders were watching her, the first time she 
understood that she was not like other children, the first time she and Ransel 
became friends in the midst of a desperate fistfight. As the night cracked with 
cold and her heart failed in her chest and her flesh moldered in the straw, she 
told Death all she knew: all that once had mattered, all that shaped her and now 
left her, like trash tossed into a midden heap to be eaten by worms.



When Karis awoke in the winter woods, it was still dark, and the stars were 
falling. They briefly flared and then were quenched, their spectacular suicides 
watched, surely, by none but her, for even the poorest people of the earth would 
have found some kind of shelter from this bitter night. Stiff hair prickled 
against her face. For warmth, she had curled against the belly of a shaggy gray 
plow horse. When she lay down to sleep, she apparently had not concerned herself 
with the danger that she might be smothered by her gigantic bedfellow. 
Stupidity, or daring, or innocence, she never knew what to call the peculiar 
logic of herself under smoke.
She got clumsily to her knees in a loud crackling of frost. The horse lifted his 
huge head and yawned, ground his teeth, then snorted wetly. They had made their 
bed in the undergrowth at the edge of a wood, where the snow had largely 
collected overhead rather than on the ground. That had been sensible of them, 
though most of the sense had probably come from the horse.
Karis tried to stand up, but staggered to her knees again. The horse blundered 
to his feet, dislodging a sudden avalanche of snow from overhead. He nosed her 
encouragingly. “Smoke,” Karis explained. “But never graceful. No more than you.”
With the help of a slender tree trunk, she hauled herself upright. Despair was 
always worst in the morning; she fended it off with curses and eventually was 
able to drag her ungainly body onto the horse’s back. Stung by her urgency, the 
horse jumped forward. She clung to him grimly, angry at her weakness, angry at 
the irresistible impulse that drove her out on this insane fool’s errand, angry 
at the bitter poverty of spirit from which her anger came. This dark and frigid 
morning, where dawn seemed unlikely ever to break, did not bode well at all for 
the day that lay ahead.



Zanja’s voice gave out. In the bitter cold, the god stood sentinel, silent long 
after she had ceased to weep. When she turned her head, the straw crackled where 
her tears had frozen. A hush had fallen, and she saw the faint shimmer of 
snowfall outside the window.
Zanja’s story was nearly done, and soon Lord Death would let her go free. She 
continued, “I don’t know why the Sainnites didn’t kill me. When they reached 
their garrison, it seems they were disgraced. Perhaps, in the confusion, orders 
were bungled, papers were mislaid. Perhaps they simply wanted to get me out of 
their sight. I don’t know how, but somehow I ended up here.”
“Ha!” said the god.
“So I did not set out to cheat you. Haven’t I spent my days in pleading with the 
gods to allow me to die? I am tortured even in my dreams. I walk the path to my 
village and I see it filled with my people. Ransel is there waiting for me. How 
will I explain my long delay?“ The raven seemed to shrug, and Zanja was tempted 
to grab hold of him and twist his neck until the backbone popped, just to let 
him know what paralysis was like. She could no longer take deep breaths to calm 
herself. The god moved cautiously out of reach. Zanja spoke, her voice shaking. 
”You bid me die in joy rather than in despair, but the only joy I can imagine is 
to walk down that path, to enter the Land of the Sun and be free of this body, 
this prison. Is that too much to ask?“
The god said, “You ask not for too much, but for too little.”
“What?” Zanja peered into the shadows at the black shape of the raven, who she 
suddenly remembered was a trickster. “I am too stupid for riddles.”
“It is no riddle, but a choice. Do you choose to die?”
She stared at him. Her heartbeat sputtered like a candle about to go out. In the 
silence, she thought she could hear a quiet footstep in the hall outside her 
door. But it was too early for the guard to make his noisy rounds. Bewildered, 
she whispered, “Now you mock me, Lord Death.”
“No,” said the god gently. “I am giving you the choice.”
No keys jingled in the frozen silence, but Zanja heard the lock of her cell door 
turn. The guard had not come m to feed her for days, but the door swung open 
without a creak from the rust-caked hinges. A presence filled the doorway. Lord 
Death spread his wings and lifted suddenly into the darkness.
Zanja spoke to the vacancy where the god had been. “Then I choose to live.” 
Then, she lay stunned by her own stupidity, asking herself what she wanted to 
live for.
She heard Lord Death’s voice in the darkness, but he was not speaking to her. “I 
am your witness.”
“I heard, good raven,” rasped a voice as harsh as Lord Death’s laugh.
Zanja heard a sound like the snapping of two fingers. A red spark danced like a 
firefly in the darkness, then flared, and became a sputtering flame. The flame 
advanced until Zanja could feel its faint heat upon her frozen skin. Her heart 
managed another weary pulse.
An enormous, long-fingered hand held up the burning wand. Another reached down 
to turn aside the decayed blanket and uncover Zanja’s ravaged remains: ulcerated 
skin, tightly stretched over thinly clad bones, a stick-fingered hand still 
curled into a fist. The stink rose up, muted but not conquered by the cold.
The hand touched Zanja’s emaciated chest. Like a coal in a snowdrift, heat 
shocked into her flesh. Zanja’s heart gave a mighty thud. She grunted, as if she 
had been struck, and gasped burning air into her lungs. Her heart thudded again. 
A river of heat rushed through the conduit of her flesh, up her neck, and into 
the vessel of her skull. Color exploded across her vision. Bedazzled and 
stunned, she uttered an animal cry.
The voice spoke again, in Shaftalese. “Do not be afraid. I have come to help 
you.”
Zanja would not have been surprised to discover that those warm fingers had 
folded back skin and bone to lay bare her faltering heart. “I’m not afraid,” she 
lied.
“Tell me your name.”
“Zanja na’Tarwein,” said the raven, who now rode upon the woman’s broad 
shoulder.
“Zanja na’Tarwein, my name is Karis. My raven has traveled ahead of me, and kept 
you alive at my command.”
“Your raven?” Zanja said. “He is not a god?”
“You thought he was a god?” The woman dropped down beside the box of straw, 
never lifting her hand from Zanja’s breast. “No, he is just a raven. And I—take 
the light and look at me.”
The slender, insubstantial rush light was placed between Zanja’s fingers. The 
sputtering flame trembled in her weak grasp as she lifted it to illuminate 
clearwater eyes, a sun-bleached thicket of hair, deeply drawn lines of worry, 
weariness, and perhaps some laughter. The woman smelled of sweat and wood smoke, 
and there were pine needles trapped in her hair. Her ragged shirt sleeves were 
rolled to the elbow, revealing bulky, muscled forearms. The palms of her hands 
were gray with ground-in soot. She had strolled through the locked door of this 
prison like a phantom, yet she was substantial, physical, powerful. The vitality 
coursing through Zanja’s veins gave her an eye-aching clarity, and as she looked 
at Karis she could not help but know what she was made of. She said, “You are 
neither god nor ghost, so you must be an elemental. I think you are an earth 
witch.”
Karis said, “And you’ve gone from mystery to understanding without asking a 
single question, so you must be a fire blood.” She turned her head as though she 
heard something, and said, “I think the prison guards are up and about. How long 
until they come this way?“
“Not until after dawn.”
“It is well after dawn now. A storm rolled in before first light, which is why 
it seems so dark now. Good raven,” she added, “your work here is done.”
The raven lifted from her shoulder, flew to the window, and was gone.
Zanja said, “Perhaps your raven is no god, but he taught me something I did not 
know. Serrain, I am dying, but even crippled as I am, I’d rather live. I ask 
your mercy.”
Karis gazed at her as though astonished by her good manners. But it seemed that 
Zanja’s careful words had not struck Karis as ridiculous, for she said, “As it 
happens, I am a great mender of broken things. Let me see what I can do.” Karis 
took the rush light and wedged it in a crack between stones. “I need to touch 
you,” she said, as though Zanja’s heart were not still beating eagerly against 
the palm of her hand, and as though her callused fingers did not scratch Zanja’s 
bare breast every time she shifted her weight. The shock of heat again, and 
Karis lifted and turned Zanja as easily as if she were an infant, so that she 
faced the ice-clad wall. Karis stroked a hand firmly down the weeping sores of 
Zanja’s back. Zanja expected pain, but she felt something else: the startling 
warmth of Karis’ touch, and an eerie, crawling sensation as her ruined flesh 
hastily knit itself together.
Then, in the place where her back had been broken, below which she had felt only 
dead weight for months, pain blossomed. Her entire body began to spasm. “Hold 
fast,” said Karis hoarsely, and pinned Zanja down with her weight.
When the fit had passed, Zanja tasted blood from her bitten tongue, and the 
sharp salt of sweat. The weight of Karis’ body lifted. She was gasping for 
breath, as though she had run a long way at a desperate pace.
Zanja had been long enough removed from the lower half of her own body that her 
legs felt foreign to her: ungainly contraptions of sinew and bone; but at least 
she felt them, and even could make them move, however reluctantly, with the 
lever of her will.
She breathed something in her own language, stupefied.
“Hush,” Karis said absently. She had moved the rush light, and-so Zanja watched 
by its light as those big hands delicately kneaded her feet, straightening the 
clenched muscles and stretching and moving the flesh with her long fingers to 
form new, perfect toes, one by one. Karis frowned as she worked, like a potter 
at the wheel, with her eyes half closed, seeming to feel her way with her 
fingers. Her sweat shimmered in faint light as it fell, drop by drop, from her 
chin.
Half drowned in the tingling, burning, cramping sensations of her repaired 
flesh, Zanja felt the pressure of those fingers only remotely, but as new toes 
budded and grew upon her disfigured feet, the feeling of it was so bizarre that 
it was all she could do to keep from snatching her foot from the witch’s grasp.
When Karis laid Zanja’s foot down, she rested her head in her hand for a moment 
as though exhausted or overwhelmed by her labor.
“Serrain,” Zanja said again. Even her voice trembled shamefully. Having given 
Karis this title of great respect, she could not think of what to say, or what 
to ask, or even what words might begin to be adequate.
Karis lumbered to her feet, a great, graceless woman who seemed suddenly weary 
to the bone. She did not speak, but dressed Zanja in gigantic clothing, and then 
tied her onto her back with rope, where she could neither aid nor impede her.
The fugitive journey felt like a fever dream. Karis strode rapidly down dark 
ways where dawn’s faint light had not yet penetrated, bent over in a crouch to 
avoid the rough-hewn beams of the low ceiling. From behind the steel-clad doors 
where other prisoners stared or froze in terrible solitude, there was no sound. 
Karis turned, and turned again, unhesitating. And then they were mounting a 
narrow, twisting stairway that pressed in on both sides and clawed at Zanja’s 
knees. They climbed into light that wormed its way through narrow slits of 
windows and dispersed like dust through the darkness. Karis stopped short, and 
her rapid, shallow breaths swelled and receded within Zanja’s tightly bound 
embrace.
“. . . this cursed country!” said a voice harshly in Sainnese. Boots rasped upon 
stone.
“Remember the grape arbors of Sainna. In winter they dropped their leaves, that 
was how we knew the season. And the wind came in from the north, bringing rain.” 
The speaker paused, perhaps overcome by his own poetry.
“And we sat indoors drinking warm wine.” The guard spat. “I’d rather almost have 
been killed than be exiled in this barbaric country.”
“Our hearts are turned to stone in this land of stone,” said the poet.
The angry man snorted. “A land of ice, more like.”
“Have another swig.”
Zanja smelled the harsh fumes of distilled liquor. The echoes of stone made the 
sound tricky, but by the smell she realized that the two men stood very close 
by. She took a deep breath and smelled the rancid tallow with which they had 
waterproofed their cuirasses. All Sainnite soldiers smell the same because of 
that tallow; she had sometimes been able to track them through the woods by 
smell alone.
“Well, it’s not getting warmer,” said the angry man. “I might as well go feed 
the beasts. They’ll whine like dogs today.”
The poet only grunted. His poetry he reserved for speaking of his native 
country. Like Zanja, it seemed he was a refugee. The two men separated, and for 
a moment, a shadow blocked the dim light at the top of the stairs, then passed. 
Zanja felt Karis begin to breathe again. “I wonder what they were talking 
about,” she murmured.
“The weather,” said Zanja.
“Do you speak their language, or are you just guessing?”
“I do speak it, though with a terrible accent.”
“You speak this language with an accent too, though I’d not call it terrible.” 
Karis stepped out into the wide corridor, into which opened double doors wide 
enough to admit a wagon such as the one that had carried Zanja to this place. 
Karis ignored these massive doors, and went out through a nearby postern door, 
around which mud and slush brought in by the guards’ boots puddled.
At first, all Zanja could see was snow. Then the walls took shape, a solid gray 
against the white sky. The low stone buildings to the right looked like stables; 
those to the left the guards’ quarters. One set of buildings looked no different 
from the other except that one had chimneys and smaller doors. The wind picked 
up and for a moment the entire scene disappeared behind blowing snow. Karis 
started boldly across the yard. The snow on Zanja’s face felt like sparks from a 
fire.
They reached the wall. Karis lifted a hand to the rough stone, and for a giddy 
moment Zanja thought she would simply push her way through, like a mole through 
earth. But she was testing a gray, snow-speckled rope that lay nearly invisible 
against the stone.
Already shivering, Zanja felt as though she were drowning in snow. The prison 
building was nearly invisible. Karis took hold of the rope, dug her toes into 
the thin cracks between the stones, and began to climb. She did it gracelessly, 
hastily, almost carelessly. Zanja hung upon her back, helpless as a bundle of 
laundry. When she turned her head, she could see portions of the compound, made 
ghostly and distant by the gray light and the falling snow.
The snow cleared suddenly, and the central building appeared, squatting sullenly 
under its dusting of snow. On each corner of the square enclosure stood a guard 
tower, whose guards surely could see Zanja as clearly as she saw them. Then the 
snow began to fall again, but not soon enough. She heard the distinct, echoing 
report of a musket shot.
Karis muttered a curse, and hauled herself up to the top of the wall. There was 
a blare of alarm horns. Zanja imagined what she could not see: the doors of the 
guards’ quarters bursting open, and soldiers in their uniforms rushing for the 
stables and for the gates.
The sky swirled as Karis swung down the other side of the wall and swarmed down 
the rope to where a huge horse waited with stolid patience. And then she stood 
in snow, breathing heavily, holding Zanja by the wrist as she cut the rope with 
a sharp knife, until Zanja dangled loose across her back, feet dragging in the 
snow. The rank sheepskin doublet that Karis wore kept Zanja from feeling the 
muscle of that back, but after these demonstrations of strength she was not at 
all surprised when Karis simply picked her up and set her upon the horse’s back, 
then dragged herself up behind her.
The horse jumped as if she had flicked him with a whip, and lunged headlong into 
the woods and down the hill, spraying clots of snow around him. No horse could 
keep up such a pace for long in snow so deep, but by the time he slowed, Karis 
seemed satisfied. “They already are turning back,” she said. “They have no 
stomach for this foul weather.”
Zanja lay slumped against Karis’s shoulder, too weak to sit up on her own, 
hardly able to even hold up her head or lift a hand to brush the snow from her 
face. “This has been a very strange day,” she murmured. And then sleep 
overwhelmed her.


Chapter Five


Snow was still falling when Karis hid Zanja and the horse in the hills, and went 
on foot to let herself into the barn of a fine farmstead near the edge of the 
forest that hems in West Hart. Like everything in this part of Shaftal, the barn 
was built of stone and mortar within a sheltered hollow, with a roof so low the 
beasts sheltered there could scarcely lift their heads. Two cows this farmstead 
owned, and two horses, and a dozen or more sheep. This farmstead was far off the 
beaten track, far enough that perhaps it had never been raided by Sainnites, who 
had been known to butcher the milk cows and strip the cellars to the walls. The 
dark day and shuttered windows had fooled the chickens, who had gone to roost in 
the low rafters though the sun would not set for some time yet. No doubt the 
numbers of this substantial flock would be sadly diminished come spring.
These people were not wholly hostile to strangers, for a loaf of pauper’s bread, 
wrapped in wax cloth, rested upon a shelf just inside the door. A wide-mouthed 
jar with a stopper hung there as well. Karis milked a cow into the jug. She 
found some hen’s eggs in the hay and tied them up with the bread. She could find 
nothing to carry oats in, and finally took off one of her shirts and made a bag 
out of it by tying the sleeves together and pulling tight the neck string. She 
left some coins in compensation for having taken more than was customary, and 
returned the way she had come, walking in her own footprints.



In a goat’s burrow hidden in the nearby hills, Zanja lay as Karis had left her, 
wrapped in the horse blanket, watched over by the raven. She still slept like a 
child, her skin flushed as with fever, her hair a matted tangle, her hands 
limply open against the earth. Her fingers were thin as sticks, and every bone 
stood out harshly in her sharply angled face. Karis lay down the fistful of oats 
she had reserved for the raven, and sat in the opening of the burrow, just out 
of reach of the falling snow. She heard faintly the horse crunching dry oats 
with his big teeth. He needed to be stabled and fed properly, but a good bit of 
grueling travel still lay ahead of them this night.
Zanja had slept the entire day through, collapsed in Karis’s arms like a jointed 
puppet with the strings cut loose. While she slept, Karis nourished her, and 
felt herself slowly emptied, and knew the giddiness that comes from too much 
generosity. When the raven rejoined them, he crept inside the shelter of the 
blanket that wrapped them both, and he muttered in Karis’s ear all he knew, 
every word Zanja had spoken during that strange night. It had been genius to 
send the raven, Karis supposed, but now there seemed something diabolical in his 
masquerade. She had created him intelligent, but he was also without 
compunction.
Now sunset was approaching and Karis still could not decide what to do. When she 
turned her head, Zanja was looking at her.



Zanja awoke in a cramped cranny between two boulders, which was blocked at one 
end by brush and stone, and at the other end by Karis, whose extraordinary 
length folded impossibly into the narrow space. Her back bowed to match the 
curve of the stones; her legs fit tightly to her chest, and her arms tucked to 
her sides, bent at the elbows, with her hands atop her knees. Her shirt hung 
loose at the neck and wrist, and oat grains were stuck m the weave of the 
fabric. Slush and melted snow puddled at her feet and dripped from the curled 
tips of her hacked-off hair. She looked as worn as her stained and poorly 
patched clothing: a used-up woman on the verge of going to rags.
Why did her kith and kin let a woman of rare and valuable talent go hungry, 
cold, and poorly clothed like this?
Karis turned her head, and Zanja caught her breath. She sat up, tossed off the 
heavy horse blanket which covered her, and took off Karis’ sheepskin doublet.
Karis said hoarsely, “No, you wear it.”
“Not while you are cold.”
“I’m not.”
“But you’re trembling.”
Karis lifted one of the hands with which she clasped her knee, and examined its 
tremor without surprise. “It’s nearly sunset.”
“It is?” Puzzled, Zanja examined their droppings-strewn shelter: the raven, who 
ate oats greedily, the plain round loaf of bread and the jug and eggs that 
waited beside it on the ground, and Karis again, who gazed at her steadily, as 
though waiting for something. Zanja remembered how the day had begun, but she 
remembered nothing else. Now, a green and raw energy pulsed in her wasted body, 
like sap rising in winter’s skeletal trees, and Karis, who that morning had 
seemed gigantic in spirit as well as body, now seemed diminished, exhausted, 
worn to the bone. It was as though she had poured herself into the wreck of 
Zanja’s flesh until all her reserves were exhausted.
Zanja said, “Serrain, I don’t understand you.”
Karis slid into the cleft and crouched close to Zanja, so close that drops of 
melting snow from her hair stung the skin of Zanja’s hand. “Why do you call me 
‘Serrain’? What does it mean?”
“I—honor you. I don’t know how it’s proper to address a Shaf‘ tali elemental. . 
.”
“So you’re making me a stranger.”
“No, my people value formality—”
Karis looked away, the line of her body a cipher of frustration. “But if you 
were being impetuous, even foolhardy?”
“Karis.” It did seem foolhardy, even to call her by name like this. “You could 
have my servitude, for surely I owe you whatever you demand. So why demand a 
friendship, which requires an obligation in return?”
“How else could my behavior possibly be explained, except as fulfilling an 
obligation? Well, madness, I suppose.”
“It does seem like madness,” Zanja said.
“Do you think so?” In body and in spirit Karis filled a great deal of space, and 
Zanja was fighting with herself to keep from backing away. There was something 
of the raven in Karis’s way of waiting for Zanja to speak: intent, expectant, 
almost apprehensive. Unlike the fire bloods, earth bloods normally were stable 
as stone, but it appeared that Karis doubted her own sanity.
Zanja said, “Perhaps it only seems like madness since you are a complete 
stranger and have no reason to be obligated to me. But—” The inexplicable 
certainty of insight rose up in her and she said in astonishment, “but in the 
future, I will serve you, and you will indeed be obligated—”
Karis let out her breath as though someone had suddenly slammed a fist into her 
back.
Zanja reached for Karis’s hand. It was surprisingly warm, and had a fluttering 
tremor, like a palsy. Karis’s other hand rested upon her thigh. When Zanja 
touched it to turn it over, it flexed involuntarily but did not pull away. Upon 
this wrist, as upon the other, was inscribed in faded scars an old despair. 
There had been a time, years ago, when Karis had tried to kill herself.
And then she remembered: the gangly, extraordinarily tall young woman, a refugee 
from the fall of the House of Lilterwess, being escorted like a prisoner to the 
waiting wagon. She remembered how she had watched her being carried away, and 
how the sight had laid a horror upon her heart.
She looked up into Karis’s shadowed face. That despairing prisoner certainly had 
been she, though she hardly seemed helpless any longer. Karis broke the silence 
with a voice that strained to seem indifferent, “If I simply sat here in silence 
long enough, would you discover all my secrets?”
“I’m beginning to think I might.”
She still held Karis’s trembling hand. In the silence, she could hear how 
unsteadily Karis breathed. Zanja didn’t say anything, fearing that she had 
already been too presumptuous. Then Karis said, “There was a time that I could 
not endure my life. I wish it were my worst dishonor or my greatest shame. But 
the truth is that I dishonor myself every day, and will do so again today.”
She had spoken these terrible words with a bleak hopelessness that defied 
response. Zanja groped her way out of that silence with uncertain words. “Surely 
... if it were true that you have no honor, then there would be no reason for 
you to be so tortured.”
“I have no honor,” Karis said heavily. “I would—and can—do anything for smoke.”
Three months ago, Zanja would have dropped Karis’s drug palsied hand and pulled 
away in involuntary disgust. But she had seen repugnance in the eyes of her 
Sainnite guards every day since then, as they recoiled from her crippled body. 
Karis, though, had touched her without hesitation or disgust. So now Zanja held 
onto Karis’s hand. “You consider yourself responsible,” she said. “Call it what 
you will, it seems honorable to me.”
A long time Karis gazed at her, until the raven said harshly, “You are in dire 
danger!”
“Oh, shut up.” But Karis gently eased her hand from Zanja’s grasp.
Zanja said, “What kind of danger?”
“More kinds of danger than I can begin to name,” Karis said briskly, and served 
without ceremony the scavenged meal of bread as hard as stone, milk fresh from 
the cow, eggs raw in the shell. Zanja ate like the starved soul she was; Karis 
ate as though she were doing the food a favor. While Zanja ate, she considered 
whether she might demand to be told what Karis had to fear. If she had been 
caught up in this strange woman’s destiny and was somehow to do her a great 
service, then surely she might be in a position to insist upon the truth.
When the last dry crumb was gone and the raven had pecked apart the emptied 
eggshells, Karis said suddenly, “Well, there’s a farmstead not far from here, 
where I imagine they would take you in, and even marry you into the family. 
Isolated places like this get hungry for new blood, and it’s a prosperous little 
farm. I could give you a bit of a dowry, to ease your way.”
Zanja said, bewildered, “Wherever you go, I am going with you.”
“No, you are not.” Karis busied herself with getting ready to go.
The day had succumbed to a cold twilight. Zanja looked down at her wasted limbs. 
“But I am no threat to you. Even in my full strength—”
Karis looked up sharply, and Zanja saw how distressed she was. “Under smoke I am 
utterly defenseless.”
“After you saved my life and took such risks, I couldn’t even think of harming 
you.”
Karis slung the horse blanket over her shoulder.
“But still, you dare not trust me? I’ll swear you an oath. My word is my 
honor—your raven, who knows my entire life, can tell you as much.”
Trembling, glassy-eyed, Karis said, “An oath would make no difference. I can’t 
take you with me.”
Zanja said, “Then leave me where I am.”
“You’ll freeze to death this very night!”
“I do not want a life that has no purpose.”
Karis said angrily, “I’ll carry you to the farm against your will, if I must.”
Zanja waited. Ransel always said there was something uncanny about her ability 
to distinguish a true threat from a bluff. Karis sat back on her heels. “What 
oath?”
“Before my god Salos’a, She Who Travels Between the Worlds, I swear I will value 
your life as my own, protect you from harm when you are injured, serve your 
interests when you are absent, guard your back in every battle, love your 
friends and hate your enemies, and honor your name in life and in death.” It was 
the oath Zanja and Ransel had sworn to each other when they were scarcely more 
than children.
Karis said, “Now you are being foolhardy.”
“You think I would choose to sit warm and dry in some farmer’s cottage, while 
you go forth alone into the bitter night? That I would be content to live out my 
days bearing children and hoeing corn when I could have embraced a perilous 
destiny instead? You do not know me, Karis.”
“I know Norina, to whose house we are going. She will blame you that I put 
myself at your mercy. And you will indeed be in peril.” Karis crawled out of the 
burrow and whistled shrilly for the horse.



The snow lay deep upon the barren hills, which swelled like a lovely woman’s 
breasts under a gray silk sky. In the cleft between them clustered groves of 
leafless trees, and far away in the lower country Zanja thought she spotted a 
speck of light, perhaps a window of that farm where a warm fire burned behind 
thick windowpanes.
It was cold, bitter cold, and would be colder still if the wind picked up. Karis 
waded in knee-deep snow as she carried Zanja down the hillside to the waiting 
horse. Trembling had taken over her entire frame, and she stumbled in the snow 
like a dying animal struggling to remain afoot. Her skin, where Zanja touched 
it, was clammy, and the color had drained out of her face. Zanja had seen many a 
warrior stricken to the heart who looked no better than this: dazed and 
shiny-eyed as her soul already started down the last path. Karis managed to lift 
Zanja to the horse’s back, and stood leaning against the beast’s broad shoulder, 
breathing shallowly as though she might faint, fumbling one-handed at the 
buttons of her woolen shirt.
Zanja worked one hand under the cinch to hold herself steady on the horse’s 
unsaddled back. “Can I help?”
The raven, now perched upon the horse’s rump, said, “Leave her be.”
Zanja looked hastily away as Karis drew a smoke purse out from within her shirt. 
Zanja once had curiously examined such a purse in the marketplace, not realizing 
until later what it was for. It would contain a tin matchbox filled with 
expensive sulfur matches, a charred pipe of carved wood, and a supply of the 
drug, each small piece wrapped in a twist of waxed paper.
The raven said, “The horse will be unable to carry the two of you in such deep 
snow. You’ll have to ride alone, while she walks.”
“I will stay on the horse somehow,” Zanja said. She would tie herself to the 
cinch if she had to.
She heard the crack and sputter of a match being lit, and smelled the stink of 
sulfur, and then a second smell, like burning mold, the scent of dark alleyways 
and dilapidated doorways. Karis sighed out her breath and said, suddenly and 
clearly, “Zanja, the raven is only clever in certain ways. You will have to use 
your judgment.”
“I understand,” Zanja said, continuing to gaze out at the landscape.
“And you must instruct me—much as we both . . . dislike the idea. I will obey 
you. I will—have to.”
The raven said, “You didn’t take a second breath of smoke. Do it now.” Karis 
said nothing, but Zanja heard another heavy sigh. “Now pack the purse—shake the 
ashes out of the pipe first—and button your shirt.”
Zanja took off the sheepskin doublet and leaned down to put it on Karis. Karis 
allowed herself to be clothed and fastened against the cold, all the while 
gazing into Zanja’s face with the eyes of an infant: startlingly blue and 
terribly, invitingly helpless. Zanja said to her, her voice strange and rough in 
her ears, “Good raven, does she have no cap to wear?”
The answer, it seemed, was no, and neither could the raven reassure Zanja that 
Karis’s boots were well greased or her stockings warm enough to keep her feet 
from freezing. Karis had embarked on her cold journey no better equipped than a 
pauper.
Zanja would have to keep Karis moving so that she would not freeze, and perhaps 
in the end the horse would still have to carry them both. For now, though, Zanja 
wrapped herself in the heavy blanket, and hoped that their journey would not 
take so very long.
“It will take half the night at least,” the raven said, when they had started in 
the direction he told her.
Zanja sighed, dismayed anew. “Is Norina her commander? Her lover?”
The raven cawed a harsh and even bitter laugh. “Lover? Smoke deprives its users 
of both agency and desire. And,” he added gleeful at her shock, “Norina will 
happily kill you.”



Some hours had passed when the clouds parted to reveal the light-edged blades of 
the stars, none of which seemed to be in quite the right place any more. Zanja 
gazed up at them, stunned by cold and by the beauty of the night sky, which she 
had never expected to see again. The relocated stars reminded her how far she 
was from home, and how much she was altered, and how much she had forgotten. The 
obedient giant trudged listlessly through the snow, breaking the way for the 
horse and perhaps being broken in the process. The snow cracked like ice beneath 
her weight. The iron chill invaded Zanja’s flesh, cutting like knife to bone.
When Karis tripped over the road stones and fell into the road, Zanja dazedly 
thought that it must be her fault. And then she came out of her daze enough to 
realize what danger they were in. “How close are we?” she cried to the raven, 
who had flown to Karis and flapped around her as she floundered to her feet 
again. There was blood, Zanja saw, in the snow. Earth blood. The spilling of it 
would bless this spot, and the road workers would curse the weeds that would 
displace the stones here with grand abandon, come spring, and only Zanja would 
know why, if she lived until then.
The horse had followed Karis into the road, and nosed her gently, as though she 
were a foundering foal. “Karis, come here,” Zanja slurred. Karis came, and stood 
quietly as Zanja brushed the snow from her shirt front and her hair, stopped her 
nosebleed with the help of some snow, and then felt her hands, which seemed even 
colder than her own. She slipped her fingers into the breast of Karis’s shirt. 
Karis gazed up at her, seemingly relaxed, with her lips parted, but suddenly 
breathing too quickly, and with her heart pounding against Zanja’s hand. What 
did Karis fear? That Zanja would embrace the temptation of that terrible, 
malleable innocence? Or that she would take the smoke purse and so take control 
of all Karis’s choices?
Zanja hastily removed her hand and said, “Karis, your heart is still warm—that 
sheepskin doublet will keep you alive, at least. But you’re too tired to 
continue, and I am too cold. Perhaps the smoke keeps you from even knowing that 
you’re tired. But you were tired to start with, and perhaps you didn’t know it 
then, either.”
The raven had been watching Zanja as if considering whether to peck her to 
pieces. But now, he said with great civility, “We’ve gone more than half the 
distance.”
“How much more than half?”
“Not much at all.”
“Then this journey is going to end badly, good raven. There is no shelter 
nearby?”
“No.”
Zanja’s emaciated frame had begun to shiver uncontrollably, with cold or with 
weakness. “Karis—should have abandoned me— she could have ridden. I should not 
have been so insistent. Now we both are in danger.”
The raven watched her, with inscrutable raven’s eyes.
“We will die without help,” Zanja said.
There was a weight and warmth against Zanja’s knee where Karis had leaned 
suddenly. Perhaps, in that long silence, she was considering Zanja’s words, in 
however slow or strange a way. The raven said, “Follow the road south to the 
third set of milestones, and then go east into the woods. Due east, until you 
reach a ridge, then follow the ridge to the southeast. You understand?”
“Yes.”
The raven still hesitated, as though he wanted to admonish her further, or 
threaten her perhaps. Then, the raven spread his wings, and flew into the 
darkness.
Following Zanja’s instructions, Karis struggled to mount the horse, and even 
using a large stone as a mounting block almost could not succeed. But when at 
last she rode behind Zanja, with the blanket wrapped around them both, they had 
a little warmth for a while, which they shared between them like two starvelings 
might share a piece of bread.
Only in winter did the sky seem at once so bright and so dark. The sharp-edged 
lights of the night sky crowded down upon the frozen earth, but their fires were 
cold. When it came time to leave the road and go east among the trees, a steady 
shower of dislodged snow flung itself at them, like sparks falling from the 
stars’ bitter fires. Zanja began to shiver again, and all her many disciplines 
could not keep her attention from wandering down unlikely and devious paths, 
which more often than not brought her up short at a shattered ravine where 
something had happened that she could not and did not wish to remember.
The horse also was wandering, indifferent to the stars that Zanja wanted him to 
follow, trying only to find the route of the shallowest snow and fewest trees. 
Zanja had not the strength to force him to do differently, and she wondered if 
they were lost, and how they might hope to be found on such a night. Then she 
ceased to be interested in such questions.
Some time later, she fell into a snowdrift, and lay there in a vast confusion of 
mind. The horse’s big hooves stamped down not a handspan from her head, and for 
a moment she thought she lay once again in the Asha Valley, under the hooves of 
a Sainnite warhorse. There were yellow flames and an angry voice shouting, and 
then the horse blundered away. A lantern glared into her eyes, and beside it 
glared the scarred, narrow-lipped, hard-eyed face of a warrior, who seemed to be 
deciding the best way to make an end of her.
Lord Death flapped into the light. “She is under Karis’s protection!”
“Karis is a fool!” The warrior tossed the raven roughly aside. She took Zanja by 
the arm, and jerked her out of the drift. Zanja landed in a tangle, but 
struggled to her knees. The warrior was going to strike her, and if Zanja ducked 
the blow the woman would draw the wicked dagger that, for now at least, remained 
sheathed. Zanja drew herself up to accept the fist instead. The blow never 
landed, and so she had leisure to remember what it was like to strike someone 
who neither flinched nor fought back. She had only ever hit someone like that 
once, and never forgot the shame of it. So now this warrior restrained herself, 
perhaps also remembering other blows struck in rage that she later had cause to 
regret.
The warrior said, after a moment, “You’re a smart woman, whoever you are.”
Zanja would have gotten to her feet then, if she could have, and faced this 
worthy opponent eye to eye and blade to blade. Even were she at the peak of 
strength and skill she likely would be defeated, but it would be an education 
worth its price in spilled blood and injured pride. Scarcely had she thought 
this when the warrior’s scarred face creased with a grim amusement, and she 
unceremoniously hauled Zanja up and dragged her to the lightweight sledge that 
stood nearby, and dumped her into it like a load of potatoes. “How is Karis?”
The man she spoke to knelt at Karis’s feet with a lantern nearby, feeling her 
bare toes with ungloved hands. He seemed unsurprised by the warrior’s abruptness 
and violence. “She’s fine, Norina. A touch of frostbite, nothing serious. Why 
did you never tell me your friend is a smoke addict? It explains so much. . .” 
He glanced over at Zanja, and his eyes widened. “Shaftal’s Name!”
He left Karis to the brisk attentions of the warrior, and beat the snow out of 
Zanja’s clothing, then wrapped her in a bearskin robe. “What happened to you? 
You’re naught but bone in skin.”
“Captivity,” Zanja said.
“Drink some of this, if you can.” He uncorked a small jug and gave it to her to 
drink. “I am J’han, of the Order of Healers.”
Zanja let him feel her hands and breast, but stopped him when he reached for the 
heavy socks that Karis had given her. “Don’t touch my feet.”
“What?”
She could hardly blame him for being so bewildered, but the warrior’s hand 
appeared suddenly on the healer’s shoulder, and the woman said, “J’han, I guess 
I need to talk privately to—”
“This is Zanja,” he murmured automatically, as though introducing friends at a 
festival.
“Just a few words with her.”
The healer climbed out of the sledge and walked out of earshot, shaking his head 
all the while. “What did Karis do to you?” Norina said.
Zanja said, “When Karis found me, I was paralyzed. My back was broken. My flesh 
was rotting. Half my toes had been hacked off.”
Norina snatched off one of Zanja’s socks and looked at what Zanja did not want 
the healer to see: the incongruous, soft pink toes that lay against the others 
like replacement boards in a weathered barn. She muttered, “Karis, I will 
eviscerate you.”
“You’ll have to kill me first.”
“And how difficult would that be? Listen: You were wise to keep J’han from 
realizing what power is at work here. And you’d be unwise to irritate me 
further. The way to guarantee that I don’t simply toss you back into that 
snowdrift would be for you to promise to do whatever I tell you to do.“
“I give you my word that I will do as you say,” Zanja said.
“Good. Start by continuing to keep your mouth shut.” She put dry socks on 
Zanja’s feet, and called the healer back to the sledge. He came leading the 
hang-headed plow horse, which barely seemed able to drag his feet through the 
snow, and tied the lead to the back of the sledge.
“We’ll go now,” Norina said.
The man seemed to know better than to demand an explanation from her. He simply 
got into the sledge, and drew up a lap robe over his legs.



They reached a small stone cottage tucked among the hills, which had a chimney 
wall dividing its two rooms, kitchen at one side and bedroom at the other. In 
the bedroom, Norina stripped Karis naked beside the fire, tossing her wet 
clothing onto the floor, carelessly revealing a magnificence of muscle and form 
that might make a sculptor weep. With Karis folded into the too-small bed, then 
it was Zanja’s turn to be stripped and dumped into a scalding bath, where she 
could not avoid seeing what the Sainnites had done to her. Beneath the grime, 
which at least could be washed away, her loose skin bagged over wasted muscle. 
Her joints seemed too big, like swollen knobs on slender branches. Her breasts 
had fallen flat upon her rib cage; her face, which never had been soft, felt 
like a skull under her fingertips. Her teeth even were loose, though by some 
stroke of good fortune none had fallen out. This alien form was made only 
stranger by the restoration to which it had been subjected. All down her back 
and buttocks, sensitive pink skin patched the brown.
Norina had left her alone, and came back in to find Zanja worn out with washing, 
too tired to resist or even to object when the hostile stranger washed her back 
and took on the project of her hair. Neither of them spoke, and Norina offered 
no gestures of pity, no matter what the sight of Zanja’s devastated body made 
her think. Brusque and efficient, she hauled Zanja out of the tub and sat her 
upon the hearth wrapped in a blanket, and called in the healer to help carry 
away the tub. She returned again in a while, with a bowl of broth. The smell of 
food brought Zanja out of her daze.
Norina sat down upon a battered, three-legged stool that might have been older 
than the sagging stone walls within which they sheltered. Zanja said after a 
while, “I envy you your vigor.”
The preoccupied, battle-scarred face turned as if surprised to find her a living 
being and not just a problem to be solved. She said, “You’ll recover faster than 
seems possible, and you’ll feel the effects of Karis’s immoderate generosity for 
years to come. What is your name again?”
“I am Zanja na’Tarwem. I was Speaker for the Ashawala’i, but now my people are 
all dead.”
After a long silence Norina said, “We have heard of the massacre of the 
Ashawala’i. You’re the only survivor that we know of.”
“Perhaps there were others, but I expect they would have killed themselves. 
Pardon me—if I am to answer your questions, I want to know who is asking them 
and why.”
Norina said, “The speaker for the Ashawala’i by tradition has the G’deon’s ear. 
Where did you serve as a diplomat, with the House of Lilterwess fallen?”
“I looked out for my people’s interests in the northern border towns. Why is it 
your business?”
Norina looked up from her hands. The sardonic expression that the scar gave her 
face seemed much more pronounced. “You certainly are as incessantly polite and 
courteously insistent as any diplomat. But if you had a weapon your hand would 
be on it, am I right?”
Zanja said softly, “No, Norina, I would never signal my intent so carelessly, 
and so sacrifice the advantage of surprise.”
Norina looked amused, as a wolf is amused by the antics of the rabbit she 
chases. “Tell me how you came to be in the Sainnite prison.”
Zanja could play the game no longer. Wearily, so that the angry woman would 
leave her alone and let her sleep, she answered her questions as well as she 
could, considering how little she could remember of the events that Norina 
seemed to find most interesting. With months of pain and solitude and near 
insanity lying between this present moment and the massacre of the Ashawala’i, 
it seemed a distant event in someone else’s life. She had become a ghost, and 
now Karis’s hand upon her heart had raised her from the dead and brought her 
forth into a new world, a new body, a new life. The past seemed irrelevant.
As she struggled to remember those horrible, distant events, she gradually 
became unnerved by the dissecting quality of Norina’s gaze and the weird 
accuracy of her sharply honed questions. And then, looking up impatiently as 
Norina asked a third question about something Zanja had twice told her she did 
not remember, she realized that the unnerving quality of Norina’s gaze was not 
wholly unfamiliar to her.
She interrupted herself, and said, “We have met before.”
“Really. How long ago?”
“How long has it been since the fall? Fifteen years?”
Norina opened her mouth, then closed it again without asking a question. Zanja 
had actually managed to surprise her.
Zanja said, “It was my first year to travel with the Speaker, my teacher. Do you 
remember, in the charterhouse, early in the morning, he was talking with 
Councilor Mabin? You came in to tell her you were ready to leave. You gathered 
her papers for her. I stood over by the tea table, watching you, unable to 
determine what you were. But the Speaker told me later that you are a Truthken.”
Norina said indifferently, “Mabin and the Speaker were arguing.”
“No, it was a cold but courteous conversation.”
“I had just taken my vows.”
“But you had no earring.”
“It was just a few pages of paper.”
“I remember thirty sheets, at least. I have wondered since then if she was 
writing her famous book—Warfare, is that its title?” Zanja added, forestalling 
Norina’s attempt to quiz her on further details, “You were dressed in black. 
There was a brisk fire in the fireplace. The sun was just rising.”
Norina said coldly, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your memory.”
Zanja had thought it might help her cause to remind Norina of their common 
history. Now, she realized that she only had done herself harm, though she was 
too stupid with exhaustion to understand how, or why.
Her bowl was empty, and she wished it full again, but with meat and potatoes 
this time, and some fruit and cheese besides. If not for raging hunger she would 
have fallen asleep where she sat.
Norina finally said, “Your history is not important. I am charged with Karis’s 
protection, and you have come in like a snake under the walls I’ve built around 
her.”
“Karis chose to walk out beyond those walls.”
“It was no choice. Fire attracts earth, and like all earth elementals Karis is 
particularly drawn to broken things that only she can fix. Certainly, you were 
sorely broken.“
Zanja looked up at the Truthken then. “If I had done this to myself just to 
trick her out of hiding, then you would be right to kill me, for I would be an 
abomination.”
“And there the puzzle lies.” Norina stood up and took the bowl, and returned in 
a little while with meat and roast potatoes, an apple and a piece of cheese. 
Little wonder some people become convinced that Truthkens can read their every 
thought as clearly as though they had been spoken out loud. “J’han thinks I am 
insane,” Norina said, “and he asked me to warn you that rich food will give you 
the gripe. You should tell him tomorrow that it did, even though it won’t.” She 
gave Zanja her eating knife, a valuable Mearish blade with an edge of startling 
sharpness, and sat with her booted feet stretched out to the fire while Zanja 
wolfed down the food.
Zanja had swallowed the last of the cheese and was struggling to keep her eyes 
open when Norina said quietly, “I wish I could make you my ally in protecting 
Karis, but we are at cross-purposes. No—” she held up a hand to forestall a 
protest. “I know you are virtuous and honorable and ready to die in her defense. 
I know that you have given her your loyalty, and that there is no truer friend 
than a fire blood. But your visions and passions and moments of insight would be 
like poison to her. So I have no choice except to keep you away from her. I 
don’t expect you to be willing.”
Zanja said, “I don’t understand.”
Norina sighed, and for a moment she seemed almost troubled. “I don’t know how to 
explain it in a way you could accept. Karis is vulnerable and irreplaceable. You 
are an unpredictable visionary. With vision comes risk. Therefore, you must be 
kept out of her life.”
“Karis wants me.”
“Karis wants much that she cannot have. And you would do well to remember that 
Truthkens are executioners.”


Chapter Six


Zanja awakened to pale light filtering through window shutters, and to the 
hushed crackling sound of cinders cooling in the fireplace. She had fallen 
asleep where she sat the night before, upon the hearth, naked, with a second 
blanket that she did not remember being tossed over her. Karis still slept 
restlessly among twisted blankets, with her legs hanging out over the end of the 
bed, but Norina was gone. Zanja used the chamber pot and considered the 
clothing—Norina’s clothing, she assumed—laid out nearby for her to wear. The 
linen shirt and drawers would be worn next to the skin. The underclothing tied 
with laces, but the woolen outer clothing, both tunic and breeches, fastened 
with horn buttons. She then discovered buttonholes at the tops of the hose, and 
had to undress again, so she could button the hose to the underdrawers. She 
tottered across the bedroom in this warm but peculiar attire, and opened the 
door to the kitchen. There, in the light spilling through an unshuttered window, 
J’han Healer sat yawning at the scarred kitchen table with a reed pen in his 
hand. Bowls of dried herbs, a mortar and pestle, and a beautiful brass scale lay 
within his reach.
“You can walk!” he exclaimed.
“Not well.” Zanja stumbled to the hearth, where her knees gave out.
“There’s porridge already made; will you have some?” J’han tucked the pen behind 
his ear, and got up to serve her, following the porridge with warm milk and 
honey, several slices of buttered bread, and an infusion of herbs to build up 
her strength. He brought over a bucket of small green apples, and set it within 
her reach. “Have you had enough to eat?”
He had put so much effort into feeding her that it would have been cruel to tell 
him she was still hungry. He returned to his seat at the table, where he weighed 
and measured herbs into folded paper packets, and sealed them with wax. Though 
the healers, once renowned hospitalers, had become hunted wanderers after the 
fall of the House of Lilterwess, this one, at least, seemed to have found more 
than a home for the winter, for he and Norina had briefly awakened Zanja in the 
middle of the night as they made love in the kitchen.
He did not speak to Zanja again until she began to halfheartedly tear apart the 
mats in her hair. “Let me help—I’ll get a comb.”
So she leaned her head weakly upon his knee, and he seemed happy enough with his 
task, employing every trick Zanja had ever heard of to keep from resorting to 
the scissors, even before she explained, in response to a question, that her 
hair was uncut because among her people shorn hair is the mark of the outcast. 
She liked him all the more when he did not seem troubled that she wept as he 
worked, and she would even have thought he had not noticed, except that he 
commented later, “Someone you loved must have once combed your hair.”
“My brother Ransel,” she said. “He was killed near summer’s end.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. My brother used to comb my hair too. It’s been years 
since I saw him last.”
The healer had gotten up once to tend the fire, when the bedroom door opened 
suddenly, and Karis crouched through into the kitchen, red-eyed as a crapulous 
drunk. She dazedly examined the room as she fumbled with shirt buttons. Her 
wandering gaze chanced across Zanja’s face, and paused.
“Try a swallow of this,” the healer said. He had leapt to his feet, and offered 
Karis an earthenware flask.
“J’han,” Karis rasped in her smoke-ruined voice.
J’han looked startled, as though he had not expected her to know his name.
She sipped from the flask, and lifted a hand to her throat.
“Those with Juras blood have such beautiful voices,” the healer said.
Zanja looked at Karis, startled, as if she had not seen her before. She had 
heard of the Juras, a tribe of giants that were said to dwell far to the south 
of Shaftal, at the edge of a great waterless wasteland. It was said that the 
sound of their singing could cause the stars to tremble in the sky. Perhaps 
Karis’s voice could not be fully mended, but the ghost of its lost richness 
echoed now behind the hoarseness as she thanked him and then sat down heavily in 
a chair that was too small for her long frame. With a crease between her brows, 
she reached down to brush a thumb across Zanja’s tear-stained cheekbone. The 
gesture left Zanja speechless.
“Can you eat yet?” J’han asked Karis.
“Chew tongue,” she slurred.
J’han seemed scarcely able to restrain his curiosity, and the corner of Karis’s 
mouth quirked a bit. “Angry Norina?”
“She is on one of her rampages,” he admitted.
“My fault.” Karis’s big, work-hardened hands folded together, finger by finger, 
and she rested her forehead upon this support as though she had much to think 
about. “Where is she?” she asked after a while.
“She needed to go to Leston.”
Karis raised her head. “Did she sleep last night?”
J’han opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“No,” Karis said for him. “Shaftal protect us.”
Apparently having decided that Karis’s mouth had been released from its 
paralysis, J’han distractedly served her some breakfast. She ate carefully, 
dutifully, without apparent appetite. Watching her, Zanja remembered something 
she had heard once about smoke addicts, but had not heeded because it seemed 
absurd: that they lived in lack of pain, and die for lack of pleasure. Karis ate 
as though she had been trained to do it; smoke surely had destroyed her sense of 
taste, just as it had her sense of touch. And so, Zanja realized with a shock, 
Karis would indeed be deprived of both desire and agency, since the earth bloods 
understand through physical sensation. It must have taken an enormous talent 
indeed for Karis to have healed and rescued Zanja with so little apparent 
difficulty.
“Is there a place where I can sit in the sun?” Zanja asked.
J‘han had returned to his labors at the table. He said with some surprise, “It’s 
bitter cold out there.”
“I’ve been in the dark for months.”
“Well, there’s a bench out by the barn. I’ll let you use my shoes, but I doubt 
you can walk in snow, considering the trouble you had with walking on a solid 
floor.”
“I’ll go out with you.” Karis fastened her bootstraps, and Zanja put on J’han’s 
shoes and his doublet of quilted wool that he had worn the night before. On the 
way out the door, Karis asked for a slice of bread, which she held in the air as 
soon as the door was closed, and the raven swooped down to snatch it out of her 
hand.
Supported on Karis’s arm, Zanja made it to the frost-encrusted bench without 
falling. The light reflected from the snow was bright enough to make her eyes 
tear up. She said, “I don’t know how much you remember. But last night I 
frightened you, and I owe you an apology.”
Karis frowned as if she were trying to remember a dream. “That’s right, you 
did.”
“I should have explained first what I was doing. It didn’t occur to me.”
Karis sat down beside her. “Smoke and rape go together,” she said, “like bread 
and butter. It’s a lesson hard to forget, once learned.”
Zanja felt a searing shame, for she understood far better than she should have 
the attraction of that helplessness. “You never should have taken me with you, 
and I never should have forced you into it.”
Karis said, “But your oath was good.”
“Of course my oath was good. But how could you have known that? And still, we 
nearly died of cold.”
Karis closed her eyes to the bright sun, and murmured, “You sound so like 
Norina, it’s almost funny. And you’re even wearing her clothes.”
Zanja did not find it funny at all, for she might admire Norina’s genius and yet 
have no desire to imitate it. “She and I know the truth in different ways,” she 
said. “My way is much more messy: confused and hazardous. I’ll never have 
Norina’s certainty, but I’ll never want it, either.”
Karis began to laugh, and seemed to find it hard to stop. “Blessed day,” she 
said at last, wiping her eyes upon her sleeve, “You dismay me. What did Norina 
do to you last night, to leave you so bitter in the morning? Not that I can’t 
imagine it, mind you, since I’ve known her half my life.” When Zanja did 
not—could not—speak, Karis looked over at her and said more gently, “You must 
have put her in a panic. I wish I could have seen such a rarity.”
“You flatter me.”
“I dared hope that once she’d seen beneath your skin you might become friends 
somehow. A fond hope, I know; but still, Norina can be a fine friend. She does 
it in her own way, but she’s appallingly reliable.”
“Did you wonder if we might be adversaries instead?”
There was a silence. Karis said in a muted voice, “I confess, that is a novelty 
that hadn’t even occurred to me. I want to ask, adversaries over what? But that 
makes me sound naive.” She leaned her head back and shut her eyes again, wearing 
her sadness like an old and familiar shirt. “But if you had wanted to try to 
control a wild power—” her voice was heavy with irony “—you missed your 
opportunity when you had my smoke purse in your hand and didn’t take it. So it’s 
not power you and Norina are adversaries over, and what else is there?”
Sitting beside Karis, with the warmth from her powerful left arm soaking into 
the wasted flesh of Zanja’s right shoulder, Zanja abruptly found herself unable 
to answer; unwilling, in fact, to continue down this path of conversation that 
she had embarked on so boldly. She said, knowing that she had intended to say 
something quite different, “I have sworn you an oath of friendship, and I have 
foreseen that I am destined to serve you. But Norina says that my visions and 
passions would be poison to you, and she threatened to kill me if I don’t stay 
away from you.”
She felt Karis’s muscles twitch, but when Karis spoke, Zanja heard nothing in 
her voice to explain that spasm of shock or pain. Without emotion, she said, 
“Norina often takes it upon herself to teach people their duty.”
So, Zanja thought, I am to lead an empty life.
But Karis continued after a moment, her voice straining, “When I was young, not 
twelve years old, my master thought that smoke would make me a better whore. 
He’d gone through great expense to raise me from infancy, because he knew that 
my mother’s size and strength had made her popular with the Sainnites. But I was 
such a disappointment to him: willful, disobedient, tearful, rude to the 
clients. And perhaps, as he realized how large I would grow, he also began to 
fear my eventual strength. So he made me into a smoke addict, to ensure my 
compliance.”
Zanja felt Karis’s weight shift, and she turned to find her peering into her 
face. “What would it take to shock you?”
Zanja said steadily enough, “You found me paralyzed and mutilated and lying in 
my own shit, yet you never shamed me for it. Surely I owe you the same 
courtesy.”
Karis looked away, and for a long time neither of them said anything. In her 
full strength and clarity of mind, Zanja might have been able to interpret this 
silence, turning its raw material into a thread of her own spinning. But now she 
could only wait, until Karis took a breath and continued, “That I have a 
purposeful life now, in spite of smoke, is largely thanks to Norina’s 
overbearing, cold-hearted, unscrupulous meddling.”
Zanja said, “You owe me no explanations, Karis.”
“No, I am trying to explain to myself why I would follow her advice in 
opposition to my own—wisdom.” She paused again, as though astonished to hear 
herself use such a word. When she continued, it seemed she was arguing with 
herself. “I know it was wisdom, to save your life. And I would have done it much 
sooner, if not for Norina’s interference.”
Zanja said bleakly, “But now you will accept her interference once again. And 
what am I to do with this life, now that you have given it to me? If I am not to 
serve you, then what am I to do?”
Karis said, “Serve Shaftal, if you must serve.”
“I am just one warrior. . . .”
“Is it an Ashawala’i habit, to display a false humility? It makes me wonder if 
you take me for a fool.”
Zanja sat silent, and then, as Karis began to apologize, interrupted her to say, 
“I am not often admonished for having too little self-importance. But I might 
admonish you for the same thing.”
“Oh, I know that I am important,” said Karis bitterly. “Not a day passes that I 
am allowed to forget it.”



When Norina came into sight, skiing behind the raven that flapped ahead of her 
like a black rag blowing over the snow, Karis walked part of the way to greet 
her, and they stood for a long time, leaning in each other’s arms, as though, 
without the other, neither could stand.
Almost as soon as they ended their embrace, they began to shout at each other. 
Zanja, able to hear the tone of their voices but not the words, turned again to 
look at them only when they both fell silent. The sun shone full on Karis’ stark 
face. Norina, in shadow, seemed grimly resolute. She had taken off the skis, and 
carried them on her shoulder. Karis bent down and took the satchel Norina had 
dropped upon the ground. It seemed a gesture of capitulation.
They turned, and started down the snowy hillside. Norina’s head came to Karis’ 
shoulder, and she took two steps to Karis’s one. She wore a leather doublet over 
her sweat-stained wool longshirt; from a distance, it looked like armor. Karis 
plodded beside her, head down.
“I’m taking Karis away tomorrow.” Norina’s voice was tight with controlled rage. 
“You’ll stay here for the winter, with me and J’han.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Zanja made no attempt to conceal her irony. She had 
half-expected the command, for, much as Norina might hate it, she had no choice 
except to shelter Zanja. But there was no point in pretending to be happy about 
such an uninviting prospect as a winter spent in Norina’s company. Little wonder 
Norina was so ill-tempered, Zanja realized. Even politeness, which was sometimes 
the only thing that made human company tolerable, was completely transparent to 
her.
“She has asked me to help you find a place,” Norina said.
Zanja glanced curiously, not at Norina, but at Karis, who had pressed her lips 
together as though she didn’t trust what might come out of her mouth. “A place 
in what?”
“One of the Paladin companies, perhaps.”
“South Hill Company,” Karis said.
Norina took in her breath and released it. “Karis—”
“The commander has a good reputation.”
“Have you put this matter into my hands or haven’t you?”
Karis replied just as sharply. “Are you going to do as I ask, or aren’t you?”
There was no capitulation here, and Zanja was hard put to sort out which of them 
was giving orders to whom. She did not know enough about the old Lilterwess 
rankings, but a Truthken, as far as she could understand, outranked everyone, 
for in contested matters the law must take precedence. But there was no place in 
that old system for earth or water elementals; their very rarity precluded the 
creation of an Order to restrain them. No rule or way existed for Karis to 
follow, no law that gave Norina dominance. Karis could do as she liked.
“You should think,” Norina said, “of what you’re doing.”
“I have. It makes no sense.”
There was no possible reasonable response to senselessness. Karis could not be 
physically restrained, either. Norina seemed nonplused.
Reluctant to put herself in the middle of a dangerous disagreement that she did 
not even understand, Zanja spoke cautiously. “Serrainim, I beg you not to 
sacrifice your friendship over so unworthy a cause.”
They both looked at her as though they had forgotten her. Then Norina seemed to 
come to her senses and said quite prettily, “I beg your pardon. Of course you 
may not wish to join the Paladins or to concern yourself in any way with 
Shaftali troubles. What is it you want to do?”
“The Sainnites themselves have made this my war. But my first concern is that 
Karis endanger herself no further on my behalf. Last night, I placed myself 
under your command, and so I must agree to whatever you say, regardless of what 
Karis demands. So the two of you have nothing left to argue over.”
Norina said, with scarcely a hesitation. “Perhaps I might reward your 
acquiescence.”
At this point in a negotiation, Ashawala’i protocol required endless protests of 
one’s unworthiness. But such insincerity in the presence of a Truthken would 
have been absurd.
“Karis?” Norina prompted, with somewhat less exasperation.
“I’ll behave myself so long as you take care of her,” Karis said.
“For what your promises are worth—”
“It’s you who have sworn to make my life possible—”
“And how was I to know—”
“You’re the Truthken!”
Norina threw up her hands. “But you are beyond comprehension!”
It was, Zanja realized, a truly astonishing statement for a Truthken to make. 
Not until Karis collapsed onto the bench beside her and roared with laughter did 
Zanja realize it had been a joke.
“It wasn’t that funny,” Norina said after a while. She had leaned against the 
barn wall, and seemed almost despondent. “It was the truth.”
“And whose fault is that?”
Karis took Zanja’s hand again, not to hold it, but to measure it against her 
own. “You’re being very patient with us,” Karis said to her, “While we fight 
like—”
“—A couple of sisters,” Norina said dryly.
Karis glanced over her shoulder. “Loan me your dagger, Nori.”
Zanja had noticed the night before that Norina’s knife could serve as a 
substantial dowry. Now she saw that her fighting blade would have become an 
heirloom among Zanja’s people, a blade with a genealogy, passed among the 
generations of the katrim as lovingly and devotedly as any story of heroism and 
self-sacrifice. Norina gave the dagger to Karis, and Zanja would not even touch 
it until Norina impatiently nodded her permission. It was a subtle weapon of 
austere beauty, with a blade deceptively slender and of startling substance. The 
metal had been folded upon itself, over and over, leaving a wavering, 
overlapping pattern inlaid in its shining steel, like ripples on sand. An 
extraordinarily skilled and patient metalsmith had sweated over, meditated upon, 
and lived with that blade, day in and day out, until it welded into the smith’s 
very dreams and became itself a vision.
“You’re cutting yourself,” Karis said.
Zanja had involuntarily closed her hand around the blade, and it had casually 
parted the fabric of her palm. It could have sliced all the way to bone by 
weight alone, and she might never have even felt it. It seemed amazing, 
impossible even, that the blade had no Mearish mastermark. Surely only in Mear 
did the smithery exist to produce such a blade. But even a Mearish mastersmith 
might well have been awestruck by such workmanship, unable to reproduce it or 
even to say exactly how it had been done.
Zanja said shakily, “It is—an artwork. I’ve never seen its like.” She returned 
the magnificent blade to Norina, who sheathed it absently, seeming preoccupied 
with a Truthken’s arcane calculation.
Karis said, “Perhaps you’ll accept a blade like it, as a poor substitute for the 
friendship we’ll never have.”
Only then did Zanja realize whose vision the beautiful blade embodied, and whose 
hand had held the hammer that folded that bright molten blade into its final 
form. “I’ll send it to you by midwinter,” Karis said. “Have you had enough 
sunshine? I think I might be feeling cold.”



Norina’s bundle contained bread and ham and a pair of new boots that fit Zanja 
as though they were made for her, though in fact they had been made for Norina. 
Norina sent J’han away to attend a difficult birth she had heard about while in 
Leston, and the three of them had a surprisingly peaceable day. Zanja slept and 
ate for most of it, and once when she awakened upon the kitchen hearth she found 
herself covered by the sheepskin jerkin, which smelled, she realized now, of 
coal smoke and the forge. Karis and Norina were chopping vegetables for a ham 
stew and discussing a book of political philosophy. Norina said something that 
Zanja could not understand, and Karis burst out laughing and put her arm around 
her. They stood so for a while, leaning against each other, silent, mysteriously 
united by ideas, knowledge, and experiences that Zanja did not, and could not 
share.
The na’Tarweins were infamous for their jealousies, but Zanja had so far managed 
to avoid that well-worn path. It seemed intolerable that Karis would leave, that 
Zanja would spend the winter here with this admirable but unlikeable woman, that 
these few hours she’d spent with Karis were all she would ever have. Norina was 
the barrier that stood between them. Unfortunately, thanks to the oath that 
Zanja had sworn to Karis, that barrier was permanent.
Zanja would have to make a life for herself alone, on the other side of this 
barren winter. But now she might steal a few more moments with Karis before 
sunset and smoke took her away, and so she sat up and asked Karis to explain 
what philosophy was, and what it was good for. That question took the rest of 
the day for Karis to answer. The sun set too soon.
Thus ended their brief and strange two-day friendship, for the next morning’s 
brief and inarticulate good-byes hardly counted as anything more than empty 
ritual.




Part 2

Fire Night

    Without courage, there would be no will to know.
    Without the will to know, there would be no knowledge.
    Without knowledge, there would be no language.
    Without language, there would be no community.


    —MACKAPEE’S Principles for Community


    Who is seen to speak to the enemy must be silenced. Who
    sympathizes with the enemy must lose their heart. Who dreams of
    peace must dream no more. Those who ravaged the land will be
    eliminated: without compromise, without mercy.


    —MABIN’S Warfare


    When I first met my enemy, she was a glyph, and it was I who
    chose to read her as my friend. When my enemy first met me, I was
    a glyph, and it was she who chose to read me as her friend. So all
    people are glyphs, and every understanding comes from choice.


    — MEDRIC’S History of My Fathers People





Chapter Seven
Emil habitually wintered in a shepherd’s cottage in the highlands, a place so 
solitary and forbidding that he rarely saw another living being, animal or 
human, between first snow and spring thaw. The cold became tiring, but he never 
grew weary of the solitude or the silence. When weather permitted, he would walk 
on snowshoes from one end of the highland to the other, and the austere and 
terrible beauty of that wild land would take root, and create in him a serenity 
all the more precious because he knew from experience how ephemeral and fleeting 
it would prove, come spring. When the wind howled and the falling snow made of 
the vast expanses a small and restless blank, he stayed indoors and read yet 
again by candlelight the words of the great Shaftali philosophers until whole 
passages became as palpable to him as a single word, a single thought. Every 
moment, every breath of frigid air, every flicker of candle and crackle of ice 
became precious. For most of the year his life belonged to the law, but in 
winter, his life was his.
Inevitable spring allowed him one last walk across the frozen water of the 
Finger Lakes, where he cleared the snow to watch the fish through ice as clear 
as glass. But as he stood on a rise of land about to turn toward home, he heard 
the sharp report of cracking ice. So the muddy thaw began.
Some twenty days later, during a break in the rain, he was planting flowering 
peas along the fence when something, a faint sound or a tingling of the skin, 
made him turn sharply, to see a pair of riders coming down the narrow from the 
direction of Gariston. In nearly thirty years as a Paladin he had come to trust 
his small talent for prescience, which never told him very much, but told it 
dependably. Knowing he had no reason for concern, he turned back to his pea 
planting until the travelers had ridden close enough to talk to. The horses were 
tired and muddy to the belly, for the roads surely had scarcely been passable. 
One rider looked cross; the other’s face was a closed door.
“Emil Paladin?” said the cross one. “I am Norina Truthken.”
He bowed to her in the old fashion, though he was not happy that the solitude of 
his last precious days had been disturbed.
The riders dismounted, and it was the silent one that Emil watched. Plain 
farmer’s clothing could not obscure her exotic appearance: the dark coloring and 
the sharp angles of her face. She moved with the fluidity and precision of a 
blade fighter, who had learned her skills in a place where pistols and gunpowder 
had not yet eliminated all the beauty and skill from combat. She looked up to 
meet his gaze with her own: eyes black as night, with a flame in their centers.
“By Shaftal!” Emil reached to clasp hand. “I think I remember your name. Zanja, 
am I right? When I heard about the Ashawala’i, I wondered what had become of 
you.”
“I guess they did make you a commander,” she said.
“I’m afraid they did. And all these years I have been making the best of it.” He 
gazed at her, feeling the distance from which she observed him, remembering the 
reserved but talented young woman she had been. She would be over thirty now, 
and for fifteen years her intelligence had been sharpened by bitter experience. 
He said, “I hope you have come to join my company.”
“Yes, sir,” she said impassively. Her face held back everything. Emil invited 
them to settle their horses and come in for tea.
Once they were all seated in the kitchen, with the Truthken choosing a chair and 
the tribal woman sitting on her heels, he poured tea from his small porcelain 
teapot and sliced bread fresh from the oven, on which they melted slices of 
midlands cheese produced from Norina’s saddlebag. Though the two women had 
certainly been traveling together for days, they exchanged not a word with each 
other. A silent journey it must have been.
Norina said, “Well, Commander, I see I need not explain who Zanja is. I have 
been charged with finding a place for her among the Paladins, and your company 
was suggested.“
“They say that a few survivors of the initial attack all but wiped out a 
battalion,” Emil said to Zanja.
“No, but seventeen of us did kill some sixty Sainnites.”
“It is more than my company has killed in six years.”
Her somber expression cracked away a bit. “Paladin techniques work well in the 
mountains.”
Emil sat back to think and sip his tea, and finally brought himself to say, 
reluctantly, “You will not have an easy time of it in South Hill, and perhaps 
you would be better off in one of the northern units, where they are more 
accustomed to the sight of northern tribesmen.”
“I am accustomed to being a stranger.”
Norina added, “She is too well known in the north.”
“Well, then.”
Norina took a money pouch from inside her doublet. “She has no family to support 
her.” She handed the pouch to Emil, who had not felt such a weight of funds in 
many a year. “A sponsor,” she explained, though it explained little. Where would 
a solitary tribal woman find herself a sponsor in such uncertain times?
“This has been a day of many surprises,” he said. The cups of the traveling 
porcelain tea set were very small, so he refilled them with the rare and 
expensive green tea. Though no one conducted hospitality rituals anymore, Zanja 
courteously complimented the tea’s fragrance and flavor, leaving him with the 
impression that she could have fulfilled her role in the entire ceremony, 
uncoached, without missing a step. She was not a warm woman, he thought, at 
least not on the surface. But oh, she was careful, and, like him, she belonged 
in another world. He fingered his right earlobe, where once had dangled two gold 
earrings that he had dropped into a well many years ago. The holes had since 
closed, but the scar tissue remained.



Zanja sat on the floor of the cramped attic, beside a small window that let in a 
gray, rain-smeared light onto the page of her book. What with the rain and the 
thaw, sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was melting. The letters on 
the page pushed and shoved against each other like people on market day. They 
gave up their secrets only with much coaxing and study. Then, they offended her 
first by ranting at her and then by cozening her.
She leafed through the pages of Warfare. In the kitchen directly beneath her, 
where Emil also read while waiting for the rain to end, she heard him add a log 
to the fire. On a day like this, the Ashawala’i would sit around the clanhouses, 
mending their clothes, sharpening their tools, and telling stories. She wished 
Emil had told her stones, rather than handing her this battered book, with its 
disembodied demands and disguised angers. Mabin’s Warfare, Emil had said, was 
the one thing held in common by all the members of South Hill Company. It was a 
language, philosophy, and history all in one. She needed to know it.
Nevertheless, a rainy day called for a story. Zanja turned the pages until a 
particularly worn page of the book caught her eye. “The Fall of the House of 
Lilterwess,” she read, sounding the letters out loud. Though she had learned her 
letters as a child, during the year she lived with a Shaftali farm family, she 
had not needed to read very much since then. The book also made occasional use 
of glyphs, which she could not interpret at all.
She moved the book closer to the cracked windowpane and read out loud:
“When Harald G’deon died, I had been sitting at the head of the Lilterwess 
Council for three years. It had been considered strange, and even unheard of for 
a Paladin to head the council, but the majority of the council members had 
decided a warrior should lead in times of war.
“Unfortunately, Harald G’deon disagreed with the majority. It is commonly known 
that the G’deon and I, though we accorded each other a great respect, never were 
at peace with each other. It is still true that when my thoughts are in argument 
with themselves it is his implacable voice I hear. He was too great-hearted a 
man, for he could not believe that the Sainnites meant to harm us. While I 
argued and he remained unconvinced, the council sat paralyzed and the Sainnites 
continued to invade our shores. While the G’deon lay dying over a period of many 
months, he refused to the last to name a successor. So the great succession of 
G’deons, who for ten generations have protected and made fertile the land of 
Shaftal, arbitrarily and inexplicably ended, and no one will ever understand 
why—least of all myself. Harald G’deon at the very least, committed a dreadful 
error. Some even call it a betrayal.”
As Zanja read, she realized that she was imagining Mabin, who she had only met 
the one time, speaking these words. On the page, they seemed neutral and 
harmless, but speaking them aloud revealed the concealed anger and sarcasm. 
Harald had betrayed Shaftal with his naive obstinacy, according to Mabin. Zanja, 
disinclined to be generous to a woman she had disliked on sight, suspected that 
Mabin might be in the habit of considering stupid the things that she merely did 
not understand.
She continued to read, listening closely to herself now, and hearing how 
skeptically and ungenerously she interpreted Mabin’s revered text. “The very 
night of Harald G’deon’s death, the Sainnites attacked the House of Lilterwess. 
Harald G’deon must have known of the Samnites’ secret encirclement of our sacred 
home, but he died without the least word of warning that might have spared us 
all the years of sorrow which have followed. That night, many of us lay wakeful, 
fearful for the future. The Lilterwess Council never did sleep at all, but sat 
with our advisors and scribes, free at last to chart a new future for Shaftal. 
At dawn we planned to gather the Paladins and ride forth against the invaders.
“But the night was not even half over when an alarm bell began to ring. Some 
wakeful soul—commonly believed to have been Harald G’deon’s companion, Dinal 
Paladin—must have discovered the breached gate or the assassinated guards. She 
was certainly the first to die that night, but not before her courage made it 
possible for some of us, at least, to escape by a secret way. As I stood on a 
far hilltop that terrible dawn and watched the smoke of destruction blur the 
sun, I and my companions had much cause to wonder for what purpose we had been 
spared, while our friends, lovers, children, and whole history were destroyed 
before our eyes.
“Now our hearts, first stunned by the magnitude of our defeat, then ripped apart 
with grief and rage, have become cold and hard as stone. The law failed us, we 
realize now, because it made us gentle. It relied upon a decency at the heart of 
every community, the willingness of each person in Shaftal to treat the next 
with generosity and understanding. When strangers came who were estranged from 
that decency, our kindness became our weakness.
“Therefore there is no longer a place in this war for acts of mercy. Lest we 
balk at this grim truth, let us always remember that this is a new Shaftal, a 
Shaftal created by the Samnites. This is the land they wanted. Why should we 
suffer our pains while they become rich and fat from our labors? It is they who 
have created this new Shaftal. Let them pay the price.”
Zanja lay down the book, and noted distantly that it had stopped raining. Oddly, 
Mabin’s last bitter statements had caused her to think not of the Sainnites who 
had killed her people and who she had and would continue to kill in return, but 
of Karis. Nowhere did Karis appear in Mabin’s account, except, perhaps, in the 
reference to unnamed companions. Yet she had been there, she and Norina, two 
precious talents saved from the destruction.
Zanja looked out the small window at the darkening sky, but what she saw was 
Karis, apparently a prisoner, possibly out of her mind with smoke, being walked 
by Norina to the wagon. She thought of the old suicide scars on Karis’s wrists. 
Was it simple dislike that made Zanja want to make Mabin the source of Karis’s 
misery, or was it fire logic?
Throughout the cold winter and into the harsh early spring, Zanja had scarcely 
thought of Karis. Karis had sent the artful blades she had promised as a poor 
substitute for friendship, and Zanja had accepted them. Now, she was a Paladin, 
and soon would wage war against the destroyers of her people. Still, thinking of 
Karis now, Zanja felt a restlessness, and a haunting loss. Why? she asked 
herself, and could not think of an answer.
She stood up, remembering almost too late to duck the low ceiling, and climbed 
down the ladder. In the kitchen, a pot of salt-meat stew bubbled on the hearth, 
and Emil darned a sock by the dim light of the fire. His supply of lamp oil was 
exhausted, he had told her, and the last of his candles had been eaten by mice. 
It was when he sat working in the dark like this, refurbishing his gear for the 
hard season ahead, that he seemed most willing to talk.
He said to her now as she knelt upon the hearth, “What do you think of Mabin’s 
Warfare!”
“I notice she does not dwell much on heroism.”
“She always argued that we would win through intelligence rather than bravery.”
“And are we winning?”
“We merely resist. We keep the Sainnites from becoming comfortable, and we keep 
the people of Shaftal from forgetting that they used to be free. We outnumber 
the Sainnites, of course, but their advantage over us is too great.”
“I have studied the Sainnites,” Zanja said, “And I cannot see their advantages.”
“They can make their living by stealing food from farmers— taxing them, they 
call it—while the people of Shaftal must either work or starve. To fight, as you 
and I will fight, is a costly luxury to people who live on the edge of hunger. 
South Hill Company survives on charity: the leavings of the already depleted 
harvest. So we often go hungry, while the Sainnites eat the fat of the land. 
That is their advantage.“
Emil stitched away at the heel of his sock for some time. “I have not 
discouraged you?”
“No,” Zanja said, thinking rather distantly about how her loss had left her with 
nothing to be discouraged over.
Emil cut himself another length of yarn. The yarn was a sorry sight, gray and 
lumpy with weed seeds, and the famous weavers of Zanja’s extinct people would 
have sneered at it. Emil had spun it himself, probably, out of wool gleaned from 
a thorn bush, with a spindle cobbled together from a rock and a stick. He was 
not, she had noticed, ashamed to do things badly, so long as they got done. He 
glanced down at her, where she sat upon the stone hearth. “You don’t like 
furniture.”
“It just seems unnecessary.”
Emil looked amused. “I think the rain is done for now. What do you say, shall we 
spend one more day here, or shall we leave tomorrow and slog our way through the 
mud?”
“Truthfully, my aimlessness wearies me more than any walk in the mud will.”
“And the mud can’t be avoided anyway, this time of year. Well then. Let’s grease 
our boots and pack our bags.”



Outside of Meartown, no one knew whose invention had made the Meartown pistols 
more accurate and reliable than those of the Sainnites. Years ago, Karis had 
determined that the pistol ball rattled about in the barrel when the gunpowder 
exploded, making its trajectory unpredictable. It was she who told the 
metalsmiths how they could make the pistol ball spin instead, by cutting spiral 
grooves on the inside of the barrel. Yet Karis had refused to make a gun or any 
part of a gun. She refused to even make a fighting blade, though the single 
dagger she forged long ago for Norina had become famous over the years, and 
connoisseurs of weaponry frequently appeared at fairs or even in Meartown 
itself, insisting that someone there could make a blade of rustless, folded 
metal that never lost its edge. It was not only this refusal to profit from her 
own genius that baffled Karis’s fellow metalsmiths. Though her apprenticeship 
was long ended, she had never been able to choose a glyph to be her mastermark. 
Even though she had been relentlessly educated, the glyphic syntax of metaphor 
and implication had resisted her every attempt to comprehend it. She was always 
too honest to engage in a purely mechanical exercise, and so when faced with the 
mechanical exercise of choosing a glyph to act as her mark of certification, she 
could not do it.
Without a mastermark she could not be a mastersmith. So Karis never opened a 
smithy of her own, and never took apprentices, and never went to stand behind 
her work at major fairs, and never dressed in silk or soaked her hands to leach 
out the soot ground into her skin. She kept working where she was, and her old 
master paid her five times an apprentice’s wage to keep her from going somewhere 
else.
When the word got out in early winter that she was making a blade, the work of 
Meartown practically came to a standstill, as the mastersmiths of Meartown sent 
all their best apprentices to learn Karis’s secret.
Metalsmithing, a dramatic and dangerous profession, was never practiced in 
solitude, especially not in Meartown. But Karis would rather have made Zanja’s 
blades in private, for she engaged in a private conversation as she shaped them. 
She could have made a model of Zanja’s right hand, including the blood vessels 
and the nerve endings, but to fit the blade to the hand was the easy part; it 
was the less tangible matters that preoccupied Karis to the point that she 
forgot her rapt audience and lost all track of time. She had never seen Zanja in 
her strength. Forging a blade to match Zanja’s fighting style when Karis’s only 
information came from an intimate knowledge of Zanja’s wasted muscles and 
compact skeletal structure was a matter of the purest kind of speculation.
People fight the way they talk, Norina had said once, and so Karis made a blade 
for a gracious and graceful fighter whose manners were the velvet that covered 
the steel. Zanja would win by talent and persistence, not by power, so Karis 
gave the blade an edge that would slip m and out on the moment of inspiration 
and be gone before the recipient of that moment could know that he was dead. It 
was indeed an artist’s blade, and that worried Karis. She realized as she forged 
it that if Zanja fought the way she talked she didn’t belong in a war at all.
Karis loved the work of making the dagger and its companion knife, but hated the 
aftermath. A half dozen people were injured trying to imitate her methods, and 
many others demanded that she show them again how to do one thing or another, 
and explain it this time. She couldn’t have explained what she was doing even if 
she had been willing to do the demonstration. For a while her relationships with 
nearly half the townsfolk were in disarray, and various people had to go around 
reminding other people that she wasn’t like the rest of them.
Later, when the blades had been delivered, Norina admitted that when Zanja 
unwrapped them she had nearly been in tears. She admitted that Zanja fought as 
if she were dancing, and that it was a beautiful but not completely impractical 
performance.
Now, with the spring mud season not even half over, Norina had come to visit. 
Her face was familiar in Meartown, and the people there at least vaguely 
understood her role as Karis’s protector. The rain prevented them from walking 
the barren heath as they usually did, so Karis left the forge to spend the day 
in a tavern instead, and the metalsmiths who constantly sought her advice soon 
began to find her there. After one of these interruptions during which Karis 
solved a problem with a new kind of door latch that the smith was inventing, 
Norina commented, “Meartown’s reputation has become practically legendary in the 
last ten years. While the people of this town conspire to maintain you in 
obscurity, the entire town has become notorious instead.”
Karis pushed away the remains of a meat pie Norina had made her eat. “For years 
you have been congratulating yourself for your cleverness at hiding me here, 
‘one talented artisan among many.’ ”
Norina made a face at hearing her own words quoted back at her. “Well, this year 
I am less pleased with myself. Perhaps the Sainnites will never come here 
looking for an earth witch to slaughter, but surely they must be desperate to 
eliminate the metalsmiths that supply the Paladins with their fine weaponry. 
With Meartown so famous, how could the Sainnites not know where those weapons 
are coming from? They will come, Karis, and when they do, I fear you will not 
flee.”
“And leave Meartown to face its attackers without me? Of course I will not 
flee.”
Norina sighed. “So I was not so clever as I thought. Now, Karis—”
“Don’t waste your breath. I can already recite your arguments in my sleep. These 
people have been loyal to me.“
“They admire and rely upon your skill, but would they die for you?”
“Why should they?” Karis asked.
“Exactly!”
Karis glared at Norina, exasperated. “Well then, Meartown will have to rely on 
the Paladins, as we always have, to keep the Sainnites away.”
“Do you know what lies between Meartown and the Sainnites?”
Karis said, “A couple of rivers, a small mountain range . . .”
“And fifty farmers who think they can fight.”
“And two fire bloods,” Karis said, for Norina had told her earlier that Zanja’s 
new commander was also a fire blood.
“And what’s that worth? Zanja may be a fire blood, but she never won a single 
blade match against me.” She added, grudgingly, “I suppose that Paladin 
commander might prove more difficult to defeat, despite his game leg.”
“You’re awfully surly,” Karis said.
“I’m pregnant.”
“I noticed.”
“It’s your fault! J’han and I have been lovers for years, but the one night you 
sleep under my roof. . .”
Karis began to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. Norina glared at her. “I want 
neither a child nor a husband, and I intended to get an abortion.”
“Yet here you sit with your belly swelling. It’s too late for an abortion now.”
“J’han wants the child.”
Norina’s blunt, strong fingers tapped the tabletop. It was rare for her to 
betray any sign of upset, and Karis looked into her face more closely than 
usual. This was her friend, reliable as steel but much less pliable. It must 
have been a stunning moment when Norina decided to bear the child for her 
lover’s sake; Karis regretted that she had missed it.
“How can I make amends? Shall I give you a painless birth?”
“I don’t know a better midwife than you. But J’han wants to be with me. I’ll go 
to my sister’s house when the time comes, so she can foster the child. Her 
youngest will be just about due for weaning, and I have already written asking 
her to raise my child as her own.”
Norina would not ask for money—she never did. But surely she would need some, 
for her family were plain fishing folk whose ability to live comfortably was 
unreliable at best.
“More ale?” asked the tavernkeeper. Norina grumpily waved her away.
“Did he like her?” Karis asked.
“Did who like who?”
“Did Emil like Zanja?”
“Zanja has mystery, integrity, and wasted talent. Any fire blood would like 
her.”
Karis wondered, not for the first time, if it would be possible to know what 
Truthkens know and not be cynical.
“Now stop worrying about her,” Norina said. “She’s her commander’s concern, 
now.”
“I don’t know why,” Karis said, “but I can’t stop worrying about her. I have no 
control over it.”
Norina studied Karis’s face for a long time, in that way that Truthkens have, 
that leaves one feeling like skin and flesh have been dispassionately peeled 
back from the bone. “Sometimes I get a hint,” Norina said finally, “of why 
Harald G’deon all but drove Mabin insane.”


Chapter Eight


For two days, Zanja and Emil walked through unnamed lands, following a river of 
mud that Emil claimed was a wagontrack. Then, they turned east and traversed an 
uneven, rocky land until they started to pass a few desperately poor farmholds, 
and finally reached something resembling a cobbled road, though it was in poor 
repair. The road improved as they traveled, until they reached a flooded, 
fast-flowing river and a sturdy bridge with a bridgekeeper’s cottage on the far 
side. Zanja paused to get her bearings. To her north lay rising land, possibly 
even mountains, obscured by the lowering sky. “That’s Darton,” Emil confirmed. 
So Zanja placed herself on the sprawling landscape of western Shaftal, with 
Darton to the north, and the region of Mear to the north of that. South Hill lay 
on the other side of the bridge they were about to cross. To its north lay Rees, 
which the Sainnites had devastated last summer. North of Rees lay Damar, where 
almost a year ago Zanja’s horses and gear had been stolen by rogue Paladins. It 
seemed like a long time ago.
This southward-flowing river marked the limit of Sainnite control. Zanja said, 
“So the duty of South Hill Company is to prevent the Sainnites from crossing the 
bridge?”
“Essentially,” Emil said. As they started across the bridge, cold rain again 
began to fall.

* * *

They sheltered that night in a farmstead where Emil was welcomed like a beloved 
uncle, and was handed a bundle of letters and documents that had been 
accumulating for him all winter. The next day, his face was creased along its 
squint lines like pleated cloth, but he did not reveal to Zanja the bad news 
that surely had awaited him in that bundle of letters. The rain that had become 
sleet during the night became a downpour again by dawn, and they slogged on 
through mud the consistency of undercooked porridge.
They walked past many tightly shuttered farmholds, and it was afternoon before 
they turned up a narrow, flooded wagontrack, passing the leafless orchards and 
sodden fields of a large and well kept farm. Five houses and two barns clustered 
in the center of a pin-wheel of walled fields: a prosperous and ancient 
farmhold, with its doors and windows latched shut against the miserable weather. 
But suddenly a door slammed open and the dogs stood up in their shelters to 
bark, though even they were wise enough to stay out of the ram. A young woman 
came running barefoot through the muck and the downpour, only to restrain 
herself at the last moment as though she remembered how austere and learned was 
this gray-haired commander she seemed on the verge of embracing. Ankle-deep in 
the mud, she took his wet hand in hers. “I’m happy to see you, Emil.”
“I gather it has been a dull winter.”
“The winters are always dull!” she cried. Then, her gaze turned to Zanja’s face, 
and there was a moment that seemed to last much too long before she turned back 
to Emil, hostile and questioning. As the rain poured down and the dogs fell 
silent, Emil made introductions, describing Zanja as a newcomer to South Hill 
Company, and Annis as a genius with explosives. Annis gave Zanja not even a nod 
of greeting. “Come out of the rain,” she said to Emil, and Zanja followed.
Inside the commonhouse, a roar of greeting lapsed quickly into silence, as 
though the people thought their old friend Emil had acquired a demonic shadow. 
The children rushed forward to help him with his boots and cape, but Zanja 
unstrapped her own boots and hung her own cape on the hook. Emil already had 
been drawn into the room by eager elders who wanted to hear the news. Zanja made 
her own way to the hearth, uninvited, where a dotty old man ensconced in a 
rocking chair smiled at her seraphically. Three hanging cradles, two of them 
occupied, swung from the rafters, and a nursing mother with an infant at her 
breast watched Zanja with surreptitious anxiety. Zanja squatted on the 
hearthstones, though someone nearby offered her a chair, and after a while her 
wet shirt started to steam.
The room was as crowded as any Ashawala’i clan house. A family so big suggested 
prosperity in spite of hard times: a large and fertile farm, carefully managed 
and not destroyed yet by taxes. The room was filled with industry. On the big 
work table many projects progressed: socks being knitted, tools being repaired, 
writing and other necessary skills being taught, bread being kneaded and shirts 
being seamed. Only the youngest and oldest were not working, and they were being 
watched and cared for instead.
At last, Emil, having done his guest’s duty of exchanging news, said to Zanja 
across the room, “Are you getting warm? Perhaps some tea . . . ?” At least the 
elders were gracious enough to exclaim at their own rudeness once it was pointed 
out to them, and Emil escorted Zanja around the room, introducing her not as 
Zanja na’Tarwein but as Zanja Paladin. He knew everyone’s name. Zanja 
constructed frail conversations out of the flimsy materials at hand: she admired 
babies and handiwork and what she had been able to see of the farm itself, and 
assured one stranger after another that she was delighted and honored to have 
wound up in South Hill. Emil said to her afterwards, “That was an impressive 
exhibition of good manners. You must be exhausted now.”
“How many of these households do you have to visit?”
“Only ten or so right now. By autumn’s end, though, I’ll have visited them all. 
It’s a foolish man who forgets that every loyalty is personal.”
Zanja vaguely remembered having read something like that in Warfare. Though Emil 
frequently quoted the guidebook, and always with apparent seriousness, she 
already knew that while he did what he had to, it was not always without 
cynicism. Now, his performance was not for her, but for Annis, who had just come 
into the small sitting room with a tea tray.
“My parents want to know if you’ll bide the night,” she said.
Emil shook his head. “I want to be at Willis’s house tonight, but I’m thinking I 
might leave Zanja here with you. If you would fetch Daye and Linde and a keg of 
gunpowder, we’ll meet at Midway Barn in three day’s time.”
“She can lie in my bed,” Annis said sullenly, and poured the tea. “Unless 
there’s someone else you’d rather bed with,” she added to Zanja.
“I beg your pardon, but I’m a stranger in this land and there’s much I don’t 
understand.” Zanja expected she’d be saying these words, or words like them, 
rather frequently this season.
Emil seemed amused, and said to Annis, “The members of your family are afraid to 
talk to Zanja, but they’d sleep with her?”
Annis shrugged. “That’s what I hear. Like you said, it’s been a dull winter.”
Emil shook his head. “It’s not just a matter of sleeping,” he explained to 
Zanja.
Zanja said, “My good manners have a limit.”
Annis broke into a laugh and nearly spilled the tea. “Sleep with me, then,” she 
said. “And I do mean sleep.”



Zanja’s first sight of South Hill Company was in a giant rebuilt barn on an 
abandoned farmstead with buildings fallen in on themselves and the fields long 
since returned to forest. She and Annis had followed a meandering course across 
the countryside, gathering companions and gear as they went. Among those who 
joined them was Linde, a middle-aged man who Annis said was heart-bonded to a 
man also in the company and Daye, a gray-haired grandmother, one of Emil’s three 
lieutenants. Annis had been distant, offering grudging information only when 
Zanja asked for it, but Daye promptly set to teaching Zanja the lay of the land, 
the riverbanks and foot trails and hidey-holes where a hunted person could 
simply disappear.
Midway Barn was brightly illuminated by lanterns hanging from the rafters. The 
fifty people gathered there were uniformly pale-skinned, brown-haired, and 
stockily built. They seemed as featureless to Zanja as stones that lie 
stubbornly in a field. Her companions of the last two days having melted into 
the undistinguished brown, the only dye color their clothing makers seemed to 
know, Zanja felt herself painfully exposed and solitary. She started across the 
barn towards the cauldron bubbling upon a makeshift hearth, where Emil perched 
upon his camp stool with one leg stretched stiffly out before him. She cut a 
swath of silence with her passing, and had not taken ten steps before a stocky, 
muscular man confronted her, demanding to know her name and business.
“Sir, I am Zanja, newly come to this company.” 
He looked her up and down. “You are no Paladin.” 
“Among my people I was a katrim, which is like a Paladin.” 
“What you are among your people matters not,” the man declared.
“That is true,” Zanja said, “since my people are all dead.” She waited, 
cautious, wondering if the entire company would greet her with such hostility. 
But the others had fallen quiet, seeming content to listen while this 
belligerent man conducted the challenge and satisfied their curiosity.
The man turned and cried bitterly, “Emil, we are all kin in this company!”
Zanja heard Emil’s quiet voice reply with supernatural mildness, “I am flattered 
to be counted among your kin, Willis. No doubt Zanja looks forward to the day 
that you accord her the same courtesy.”
Zanja brought herself to say with a sincerity she hoped no one would realize was 
false, “Yes, sir, very much.” But the belligerent man turned his back on her, 
ignoring the hand she offered. He squatted down among his cronies, who clustered 
around him like wolves greeting their leader. So Zanja learned, all in one 
moment, who her enemies were to be.



By the time the stew was ready, Daye had taken Zanja on a circuit of the barn, 
and told her the names and families of everyone present. She left her with 
Annis, while she and the other lieutenants, the belligerent man among them, 
conferred in a cluster around Emil, with their steaming porringers in their 
hands. “Willis is one of Emil’s lieutenants?” Zanja asked.
“Willis, Perry, and Daye. The three of them started the company in the year of 
the fall, and we didn’t get Emil until a year later. Until he showed up, Willis 
thought he would be the company commander forever. He and Emil get along now, 
but they didn’t always.”
Zanja glanced at Annis, astonished because up until now Annis had scarcely 
spoken a complete sentence to her.
Annis said, “Willis doesn’t like outsiders. But we aren’t all like him.”
“Of course you’re not,” Zanja replied, thinking that it was possible Willis’s 
hostility might do her more good than harm, in the end.
Annis took her over to the stewpot to fill her porringer, and then they joined a 
circle that had formed to share a bread loaf and butter pot. Zanja exercised the 
good manners Emil had so ironically admired some days ago, and the people she 
ate with gradually began to gain some definition. They noticed and discussed her 
battle scars, and they told her how Paladins fought primarily by ambush, 
avoiding confrontations that put the more numerous and heavily armed Sainnites 
at an advantage. She admitted she would have to learn to use the distance 
weapons, the pistol and the crossbow.
The increasing sobriety of the lieutenants’ conference muted the surrounding 
conversations after a while, and when Emil finally stood up from his camp stool, 
the company, already watchful, immediately fell silent to hear his words.
“It’s spring again,” Emil said. “And amazing though it seems even to me, this is 
my fifteenth year commanding South Hill Company. When I first arrived, I said to 
you that I was astounded and humbled to find myself in command, and fifteen 
years later, that at least has not changed. We’ve learned some hard lessons 
together in the meantime, and this year, I’m afraid, we have some even harder 
lessons to learn.
“Last summer,” he continued, “While we succeeded in assassinating the commander 
of Wilton garrison, our neighbors in Rees were decimated by an assault the like 
of which no company in Shaftal has ever seen. By summer’s end, forty Paladins 
had been killed, their families’ farmholds razed, and at least a thousand people 
left with neither food nor shelter to see them through the winter. By summer’s 
end, in fact, Damar Company and South Hill Company were fighting the battles in 
Rees, for no one in Rees could continue to fight.
“Now, I have learned that the commander of Rees garrison has been reassigned to 
South Hill, and moved to Wilton garrison at the first thaw, along with most of 
the soldiers from her command in Rees. The number of Sainnites in South Hill has 
nearly doubled to some two hundred soldiers. There seems little doubt that South 
Hill is to be their next target.”
He paused. The jovial people crowded into the barn sat silent, stunned.
“I have had a few days to think about this,” Emil said, “but I am sure that all 
of you have been thinking, all summer and winter, about what happened in Rees 
and about what you would do if it were your family against whom the Sainnites 
took retribution. It is our families that make us strong, by sheltering and 
feeding us, but they also make us vulnerable. My first thought is that we must 
find ways to prevent the Sainnites from knowing who we are, so that they cannot 
identify our families, either. My second is that, once the spring mud is over, 
you all must not visit your families again until autumn. We will find some other 
way to get food to eat and we’ll take shelter in the woods.“
He continued, “I have a little more to say, and then I’d like to hear what you 
are thinking. The mystery of Rees is this: the Paladins there followed the 
strategies that have worked for all of us for fifteen years, but in Rees they 
did not work. The company could not avoid the confrontations they knew they 
could not win. The company could not take the Sainnites by surprise. The company 
could not successfully hide from the enemy. So we need new strategies, and we 
need to use the old ones cautiously, without expecting that they will succeed. 
Above all, we need to be prepared, to expect that this year will not be like 
every other year.”
As quietly as he had begun, Emil ended his address, and sat down to hear the 
debate that followed. He did not speak again, except when he was directly asked 
for more information, questions he often could not answer.
The discussion lasted late, and then broke up into smaller de‘ bates, some of 
which continued even after Zanja lay asleep with Annis curled companionably 
against her back. In dreams, she heard people argue about the logistics of food 
and shelter, about battle tactics, ambushes, and bolt-holes. In dreams she 
returned to Rees, but this time it was she who hid in the woods, demoralized and 
terrified. Towards dawn, she began to dream about the massacre of her own 
people, and in her dreams she thought it was possible to prevent it this time, 
if only she could find a spare moment to read the book someone had handed her: 
not Mabin’s Warfare, but a different book, with different rules.
She awoke thinking that there had been a mistake, that this was not her life at 
all. But, unfortunately, it was.



Chapter Nine



Annis began Zanja’s education in a covert lead mine, where Zanja learned to 
recognize and extract lead ore, and practiced smelting it, and eventually poured 
her own pistol balls. The gunpowder lesson proceeded in much the same way. Not 
until Zanja had filled her cartridge pouch with rounds of ammunition made by her 
own hands from ingredients she herself had found did she finally learn to load 
and shoot her pistols.
With the rains over, the company was to gather in the woods, in a place they 
felt confident no one could find for the first time without a guide. Even Annis 
could scarcely find it, for the place was undistinguished and what landmarks 
existed were practically as hard to find as the place itself. At last, with the 
sun setting, they arrived at a natural rocky clearing surrounded by thick 
forest, just in time to fill their porringers with pieces of roasted chicken and 
lumps of hard black bread. Living in the rough hills, Zanja and Annis had eaten 
little more than ground corn, so this meal looked like a feast.
She looked up from the feast to find Emil behind her, with a basket over his 
arm. She had been reciting people’s names to herself while pretending to be 
interested in their eager discussion of the lives and loves of people she had 
never met.
“Can I help you with that basket?” she asked.
“It gets lighter all the time.” He handed out pieces of apple cake to her 
companions, then sat beside her on a convenient stone. “I promised Daye I’d give 
you the bad news myself. The company will divide into three units, to give the 
enemy smaller and faster moving targets, and you’re to be under Daye’s command, 
at her request.”
“That is not bad news,” she said.
“You will be responsible for collecting bread from the farmholds, and 
distributing it to the company.”
“I see. Well, sir, I’ll do my best.”
“The next time you call me ‘sir,’ I’ll demote you.”
“But how would it be possible to demote me further?”
“Zanja, it was a joke.”
After he left, someone said kindly, “Bread is important.”
“It is a child’s job,” she retorted. No one contradicted her.
“At least your face will become familiar across South Hill.”
Zanja suspected that the commanders had another advantage in mind: They wished 
to obscure the links between the company and the farmholds, but without bread 
they could not survive long. So they gave the duty of collecting food from the 
farmholds to a stranger, who had no relatives to be executed in retaliation, and 
who could legitimately pretend to have never heard of South Hill Company. It was 
a sensible decision.
Still, Zanja went to bed angry, and woke up angry in the middle of the night, 
with a dull headache and a full bladder, and a vague sense of dread that seemed 
related to the dreams she could not remember. She crept past her sleeping 
companions and went a little way into the woods. She had re-buttoned her 
breeches and stood wondering why she wasn’t going back to bed, when a voice 
spoke in the leafless branches overhead. “Zanja na’Tarwein.”
A dark shape flapped against the stars, leading her further away from the 
clearing. She followed, with her heart in her throat. The night gave a sigh, as 
a brief breeze lifted and then fell still. The raven dropped out of the branches 
and stalked at her feet like a restless rag of night sky.
Zanja sank into a squat. “What are you doing here?”
The raven said, “You were more courteous when you thought I was a ghost.”
“But now I know you are just a messenger, and that your messages are not 
supposed to be for me.”
“Ha!” the raven cawed. “Norina thinks I serve at Karis’s will, but you should 
know better.”
“Should I? What do you serve, then, if not her will?”
“I serve her secret heart.”
The raven god of the Ashawala’i was an amoral trickster, so Zanja found herself 
unable to believe entirely in this raven’s honesty. She said, “Well, perhaps you 
can ignore Karis’s promises, but I have to honor promises of my own. I am 
certain Norina would forbid me to talk with you.” She rose to her feet to leave, 
though she was not certain she could walk away.
The raven said, “This evening, as the sun set, I saw a thing that might surprise 
you.”
Zanja often had wished she could see from above, like a bird. She said politely, 
“What did you see, good raven?”
“I saw Samnite soldiers creeping through the woods.”
Zanja’s vague dread sharpened. “Are they creeping towards this encampment?”
“Oh, yes. They approach you from the west, spread out, to catch you in a net of 
soldiers as you try to flee.”
“Then should we flee due east?”
“Northeast,” the raven said. “The forest is not so thick there, and the land 
grows steep and rocky. It seems a good place to defend yourselves.”
“Do you know if they outnumber us?” Zanja wondered, then, if the raven could 
even count. She could scarcely believe she was discussing battle tactics with a 
bird, and had to keep reminding herself that the raven shared Karis’s 
intelligence.
“They are greater than your company, but not by much.” She heard the dry sound 
of the raven running a wing feather through his beak. “Zanja na’Tarwein,” he 
added, and she could have sworn it was the god that spoke to her, “you can be 
drearily punctilious.”
He spread his wings, and, only mildly offended, she said hastily, “Well, tonight 
I appreciate your lack of punctiliousness. I’ll try to leave some food for you 
in the camp.”



She found Emil with no little difficulty, finally locating him by his gear: the 
box that contained his tea set, and the camp stool that was never out of reach. 
He awakened at her touch. “Zanja?”
“I think we are in danger.”
He sat up, and seemed to consider, or perhaps to consult his own talent for 
prescience. “Yes, we are indeed in danger.” He reached for his boots. “It is the 
Sainnites, of course. I wonder how they found us.”
“That I don’t know. But I think they are to the west, spread out in the woods.”
“Yes,” he confirmed, in some surprise. “There’s a place to the north and east 
where we might stage an ambush. What do you think?”
“Why not?”
She gave him a hand up, and he grunted as he put his weight on his bad leg. He 
held her hand for a moment longer than necessary. “Two fire bloods,” he said 
thoughtfully. “This is an advantage I had not considered.”
“I’ll pack your gear for you,” she said. “I know how you like it arranged.”
What followed was the most swift, silent, and orderly retreat Zanja had ever 
seen. She had scarcely managed to buckle her belt and sling her knapsack on her 
shoulders when the company began moving into the woods. She delayed a moment to 
put a chicken carcass and a handful of cracked corn atop a flat rock for the 
raven. By then, Daye had sent someone back for her, a laconic veteran who moved 
through the woods as a snake glides through grass. The abandoned clearing lay 
empty behind them, with only the warm ashes of the campfires to tell the story 
of how recently it had been occupied.
An occasional mimicked bird call, far ahead, gave the scattered company members 
a direction to follow. Zanja and her companion sometimes encountered others, 
traveling through the dark woods, but they separated again. The trees began to 
thin, and boulders loomed. Zanja realized from the ache in her calves that the 
ground had begun to rise. The trees dropped away. The bird call sounded: closer, 
but above her. She looked up and saw a rocky hillside pressed against fading 
stars. A dozen dark shapes climbed the rocks; soon she was one of them, hauling 
herself and her gear from stone to stone, sometimes being given a hand from 
above, and sometimes offering one to the climber below. At the top, the entire 
company had gathered, some gasping for breath, some loading their pistols and 
winding their crossbows. Daye had used pebbles to lay out a map on the ground. 
She looked up as Zanja squatted nearby. “Annis says you’re not much of a shot 
yet.”
“This is an opportunity to practice.”
Daye grinned. “Well, first rule of ambush: Don’t be the first one to shoot, not 
even if you feel like the Sainnites are right on top of you. And until you hear 
that first shot, don’t even look to see where the Sainnites are. If you can see 
them, they can see you.“
A half dozen late-comers stood or squatted around the impromptu map as Daye 
reviewed the plans for what must have been the third or fourth time. Others 
gathered around Willis and Perry, being instructed in much the same way, while 
Emil climbed to a high point and took out his spyglass.
The dawning day revealed a lone black bird soaring overhead. The last of the 
company members scattered to find positions in the bulwark of stone, and Zanja 
settled behind a boulder to wait, with her loaded pistols at hand. The dull 
brown clothing of her fellow Paladins melted into stone; their shapeless hats 
disguised their heads and faces. She watched the raven, wondering if with the 
flaps of his wings he sent signals that she could not read.
The rising sun had begun to cast shadows when Zanja heard the distinct, harsh 
tones of a tin signal whistle, and some time later faintly heard a few words 
spoken in Sainnese. No doubt the Sainnites were arguing whether to continue on, 
for to anyone with any sense the hillside was an intimidating prospect. She 
heard a few more words, angry now: a hot-headed commander, frustrated at having 
nothing to show for the long night in the woods. They were going to give up the 
chase, she thought, with a deep sense of relief.
A long silence followed, then she heard quite distinctly a woman just below her, 
saying in Sainnese, “They came this way, that’s for certain. But I say they’re 
long gone—scattered through the forest, impossible to find by now. They used the 
rough ground to obscure their traces.”
A man said angrily, “That seguli swore we would have a proud victory this 
night.”
“Well, the night has ended,” the woman said.
“He has never been wrong before!”
The woman offered no argument, but it seemed it was her ill luck to be the 
target for her commander’s wrath. “Climb up and tell me what you see,” he said.
It was Zanja’s ill luck that the woman began to climb where she stood, perhaps 
two body lengths below Zanja’s hiding place. She waited, hearing the casual 
conversations of the Sainnites below, the chirps of a few early season birds, 
the faint, hoarse cry of the raven. The woman climbed swiftly, impatiently, and 
yet when she reached the other side of the boulder behind which Zanja sheltered, 
she paused, and Zanja heard the hiss of a blade sliding out of its scabbard. The 
Sainnite soldier came around the boulder weapon first.
For a moment, she looked, startled, into Zanja’s eyes, and then Zanja quietly 
embraced her neck with her dagger’s edge, and almost fell with her as the woman 
dropped her blade and grabbed Zanja by the shirt. Zanja hung on the hillside by 
her fingernails, and scrambled back to shelter, briefly seeing a dozen or more 
surprised soldiers staring up at her, or down at the flailing, dying soldier who 
had fallen practically on top of them. In almost the same moment, she heard Emil 
fire the first shot, and in the immediate volley the Sainnites fled for the 
marginal shelter of the thin woods.
Zanja and her companions chased them down the hillside. She leapt over the dying 
soldier, whose heart continued to pump blood onto the stones. She chased down a 
wide-eyed young man whose pistol shot dodged crazily past her shoulder and into 
the sky. He dropped the pistol and jerked a short sword out of its scabbard, but 
by then Zanja’s dagger had sliced through his leather cuirass and into his chest 
so easily it seemed the man’s armor and flesh were constructed of lard. She 
missed his heart, though, and had to try again, and in the moment between her 
first blow and her second, the panicked young soldier took a stumbling swing at 
her. She caught the terrified blow on her dagger, and felt it jar her arm and 
shoulder like a blow from a stave, but she managed to strike him again, and this 
time the blow was true, and the boy died.
In the woods, the Sainnite commander’s tin whistle shrilled, “Come to me!” She 
looked around: scattered Paladins fought and chased the fleeing Sainnites. She 
ran to help a Paladin who seemed overpowered by a towering brute of a man in 
metal armor. She shot him at close range with her pistol, which seemed to do no 
good, then switched her dagger back to her right hand as the monstrous soldier 
turned to confront her. She would sooner take on an angry bull, she thought as 
she dodged the battle-ax that could have taken her head off, and leapt forward 
to slip her uncanny dagger neatly into his armpit. He scarcely seemed to feel 
it, but it bled like a mortal wound, and she and her companion took turns 
baiting him while he bled to death. At last he fell slowly as a slaughtered cow, 
still swinging his deadly ax.
She had a moment, then, to recognize her battle companion. “Is that your blood?” 
she asked, gesturing at Linde’s scarlet-stained shirt.
“I don’t think so.”
They stood together, gasping for breath, watching the great soldier’s eyes glaze 
over. “It took him long enough,” Linde commented.
“I must have just nicked his heart.”
“That was a tricky blow.” Admiringly, he shook her hand.
“I’ve got a good blade,” she said, which was the truth, though he took it for 
modesty. “What shall we do now?”
As if in reply, a volley of gunshots sounded in the woods, and Linde said, “The 
Sainnites have regrouped, by the sound of it, and Emil will be calling a 
retreat, since we no longer have the advantage. Let’s look around for wounded 
Paladins, and start hauling them up the hillside.”
They soon found the company healer, Jerrell, engaged in the same project, and 
the three of them hastily scoured the battleground for fallen Paladins, finding 
one wounded and one dead. They finished off two injured Sainnites as well.
With the exhilaration of battle starting to lift, Zanja fought an overpowering 
nausea. Her limbs trembled as she helped carry the dead and wounded to high 
ground. Her various victims had doused her with their blood, and she wanted 
nothing more than to find a quiet stream and rinse out her shirt. But she had 
been through this horror before, and knew there was no remedy except to wait for 
it to pass. Meanwhile, with the Paladins reappearing in the woods and gathering 
again on the hilltop, Zanja helped Jerrell to amputate the wounded Paladin’s 
mangled arm. When they were finished, she commented unsteadily that she’d rather 
be a warrior than a surgeon.
Jerrell said grimly, “Well, I’ve done both, and I’d say killing a stranger is 
much easier than chopping off the arms and legs of my friends.”
The raven circling overhead tilted its wings and flew into the sunrise. Perched 
on the hilltop with his spyglass, Emil reported that the Sainnites continued to 
retreat. Annis found Zanja, and her excited monologue gave Zanja some relief 
from thinking. She had time to change her shirt and to settle her stomach with a 
mouthful of hardtack before the company began again to travel, carrying the dead 
and wounded, some somber, like Zanja, and some, like Annis, giddy with triumph.
At mid-day, they stopped to rest and eat. Annis was called away to give her 
opinion on a faulty pistol, and Zanja sat solitary in the cool shade of a tree, 
pretending peace for a little while.
Emil limped over with his camp stool under his arm. “Daye says you have 
something to tell me.” He had taken off his doublet, which had been stained with 
a distinct arc of spattered blood. He sat heavily upon his stool, and offered 
Zanja a wedge of cheese to go with her half-eaten piece of bread. She said, “I 
speak Sainnese.”
He gave her a startled look, but said half-humorously, “Of course you do. And 
what did the Sainnites say?”
“Just before the battle began, I overheard a conversation between the commander 
and a soldier, the one I killed.”
“The first of three, I hear.”
“The commander was angry, almost as though he had been so confident of his 
victory that night that he could not believe it had been stolen from him. He 
said, ‘That seguli swore we would have victory this night.’ Then, he added, ‘He 
has never been wrong before.’ Then, because he was in such a bad humor, he sent 
that woman to her death.”
“Hmm.”
Though the days had begun to warm, in the cool woods it remained chilly, and the 
trees had scarcely begun to leaf out. Emil wore his tattered coat, and Zanja 
could hear the faint sound of his watch ticking in a pocket.
Emil said, “What is a seguli?”
“Unfortunately, I have never heard that word before. But I think the seguli may 
be our true enemy—a talented strategist, the same one who gutted Rees Company 
last year.”
“If he truly has never been wrong before, our little escapade today will surely 
leave him—and them—a bit unnerved.” For a moment, Emil looked as gleeful as a 
boy, and then he sobered. “Still, if not for you, they would have found us, and 
it would have been a massacre.”
“We were lucky,” Zanja said. It would not do for Emil to start relying on her to 
predict their battles for him. The raven was gone, and Karis would certainly see 
to it that he never returned.
“We were lucky,” Emil agreed. “It’s the kind of luck we need to survive this 
summer. I hope that it continues.”



Chapter Ten



The important work of collecting and distributing bread to the scattered company 
proved as dull and tedious as Zanja had feared. The greatest challenge it posed 
was that of finding her way—first to the various farmholds that had agreed to 
supply the bread, then to the various encampments that needed it. The farmholds 
most often provided great wheels of hard rye bread that kept well and did not 
crumble easily, but they also loaded her poor donkey with whatever else could be 
spared from their own or their neighbors’ storerooms: carrots, cheese, sausage, 
turnips, apples, potatoes, onions, and ham. At least, when Zanja succeeded in 
finding a company encampment, no one was sorry to see her.
It had become known that Zanja’s prescience had saved the company that night. 
Although most of the Paladins could not bring themselves to treat her as one of 
their own, they were courteous enough, though in Willis’s unit the welcome 
remained particularly cool.
“There you are at last,” Annis said, when Zanja arrived at Daye’s unit with a 
fresh load of bread. “We’re running low on saltpeter, and I have to go to 
Wilton. Emil says to bring you with me, and we’ll meet him and Willis along the 
way.”
The next morning, on the east-west road just outside the river valley, they 
found Emil and Willis waiting for them. The road was busy with market day 
traffic. Willis and Annis, their weapons hidden in their longshirts, became 
indistinguishable from any other farmer. Emil might have been a rather seedy 
accountant looking for work. Zanja wrapped her hair in a headcloth, obscured her 
face with a hat brim, and hoped no one looked at her too closely.
“I want you to learn to read glyphs,” Emil said to her, and produced out of his 
knapsack a sheet of paper. “I’ve written some out for you.” He pointed. “The 
four elements, the four directions, the four seasons, the twelve implements.”
Next to each carefully drawn symbol, he had written its name, followed by a 
brief explanation of the symbol’s implications. The symbols seemed stagnant, 
their implications arcane and irrelevant. “Why?” Zanja asked.
“Indulge me.”
She felt Willis glowering at her back. “Of course.”
To understand the glyphs seemed like knowledge of the most tedious sort. Each 
glyph had primary and secondary meanings, and sometimes meant two things 
simultaneously. Each glyph had a history or special use, and some of them were 
accompanied by lengthy expository tales that complicated rather than clarified 
their meaning. In addition, the meanings of the glyphs interacted with each 
other, so that two glyphs together meant something different from what they 
meant separately. To fully understand these glyphs might require lengthy study, 
and the entire system, Emil told her, included a thousand symbols, though he was 
not certain if anyone remaining alive was familiar with them all. He himself 
knew about half of them, and had despaired of ever learning the other half.
His passion for this strange, ambiguous method of recording and understanding 
ideas was as evident as Willis’s and Annis’s excruciating boredom with it. If 
only out of perversity, Zanja struggled to comprehend what Emil was telling her 
about the glyphs. The more she came to understand them, the more genuine her 
interest became.



Wilton was as big as the largest towns Zanja had traded in up in the border 
country. Located near the junction of two major rivers, it was a warren of 
narrow byways and sudden plazas, with balconies on opposite buildings a mere hop 
apart from each other, and a casual attitude toward garbage that left her always 
on the lookout for dung and debris underfoot or falling from overhead. The 
rivers brought travelers from far-flung communities who were riding the current 
to the seaport and paused here to replenish their supplies and sell some of 
their wares. Many of these travelers looked no more like a South Hiller than she 
did, and some of them even resembled her.
“I won’t say you can get everything in Wilton,” said Emil. “It’s not like it 
used to be, and it’s nothing like Hanishport, where you can get everything.”
“Everything but what you can get in Hanishport’s neighboring town, Lalali,” said 
Willis. “Of course, in Lalali you’ll be robbed and murdered in the bargain.”
The taverns had set up their tables in the streets, the better to entice the 
farmers to drink what money they had rather than buy seed or tools or pay their 
taxes. It seemed a hopeless enterprise, however. This early in the season the 
farmers come into town for market day hadn’t much to sell, and they all had a 
pale, winter-pinched look, and a way of keeping their hands up their sleeves.
Emil and Willis had come into town to talk to Willis’s brothers, who worked at 
the garrison. Annis left to make some arrangements with one of her chemist 
friends.
A row of beggars sat against a wall with their empty hands lifted, moaning tales 
of being reduced to poverty through no fault of their own. Emil tapped Zanja’s 
arm and pointed at the garish sign that hung over the door. As was common 
throughout the country, the business folk of Wilton used glyphs to identify 
their shops. Merchants used only one symbol, the tavern keepers two, which made 
the name of the taverns amusingly ambiguous. However, the symbols were always 
represented as pictures: in the case of this tavern a wheel and a hoe.
The tavern was empty. Willis shouted for ale.
“So what is this place named?” Emil asked Zanja, as they sat at a battered 
table.
“Progress Through Hard Work,” she hazarded. “It seems rather an odd name for a 
tavern.”
It was an elementary reading compared to what Emil could do, but he nodded 
approvingly. “There’s a humor in it—most people would miss the joke entirely 
these days, and simply call this place the Wheel and Hoe.” A big, light-footed 
woman entered from the arched doorway that led to a steep stone staircase. Down 
its length echoed the wail of a baby.
“So sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know my husband had gone out.”
She served them heavy mugs of ale and went into the kitchen to warm up some pies 
for them.
“Husband,” snorted Willis. When Zanja glanced at him curiously, he added, “City 
folk use it to mean something completely different from what it truly means, and 
then they call us backwards. These are the same people who let their kin live on 
the streets, like those beggars out there, rather than keeping them decently 
clothed and fed.”
“Those beggars are smoke sick,” Zanja said.
“All the more reason why they need their families,” Willis snapped.
“So what would you call this woman’s man?”
“Not her husband,” Willis said obstinately. “Where is the household? Where are 
the other parents for the child? It’s just the two of them. That’s no family.”
Zanja took a swallow of the bitter ale she’d never developed a taste for, and 
ate the greasy pork pie the alewife set in front of her. The woman’s husband 
returned, and they had a brief, bitter argument behind the closed door of the 
kitchen. When Willis’s brothers arrived, the ale husband came out smiling and 
rubbing his hands, and wouldn’t leave them alone until Emil threatened to go to 
another ale house.
Willis’s brothers smelled distinctly of the stable. They were identical twins 
who dressed alike and ate alike and finished each other’s sentences. When both 
of them turned their attention upon Zanja, she realized that they probably made 
love together as well, and she had to struggle to keep from revealing how 
repellent she found the prospect.
There was a certain affliction that every member of Willis’s family seemed to 
share, a single-mindedness that sorely tried her patience. “Tell me about this 
new commander,” Emil said. “You have at least seen her, haven’t you?”
“She’s young,” said one.
“And handsome,” said the other.
“How young? Is she one of this new breed, Shaftali-born?”
“She’s older than fifteen!”
Emil rather wearily reminded the brother that, though it had been fifteen years 
since the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, the Samnites had been a presence in 
Shaftal for a good fifteen years before that.
“I suppose she could be thirty,” said a brother. “Maybe a bit older.”
“What does it matter?” asked the other.
“The young ones sometimes speak our language, and they understand us much better 
than their fathers did. I think they are the more dangerous enemies because they 
don’t make as many stupid mistakes.”
The brothers looked at him blankly. “Sainnites are Sainnites.”
“Exactly,” said Willis impatiently.
Emil looked as if the three of them together were enough to give him a headache.
The brothers told him that the soldiers reassigned from Rees had arrived all at 
once, before the thaw. There were too many of them for the brothers to notice 
any one in particular. They complained at length about the great quantities of 
baggage the two of them had carried that day. In particular, they remembered 
some large, remarkably heavy trunks that the two of them had been unfortunate 
enough to have to move into one soldier’s quarters. “Trunks full of rocks,” they 
said bitterly. “A lot of rocks.”
“Weapons,” suggested Willis.
“Oh, sure, it could have been ax heads or something made of iron, though what 
one soldier wanted with so many of them I don’t know.”
“It was books,” said Zanja.
Willis and his brothers burst into raucous laughter. “Books! Even we don’t have 
books anymore, and at least we know how to read!”
But Emil said somberly, “Books? What kind of Sainnite would have such a 
collection of books?
“Perhaps a Sainnite young enough to be fluent in both languages, so he can read 
Shaftali books.”
“And educated at least a little—though how that might happen I don’t know. Some 
of them must be able to read, but not in Shaftalese.”
“And he’s influential enough that his commander allows him to fill a wagon, when 
most soldiers have only one small trunk, and whatever they can carry on their 
backs.”
Emil turned to the brothers. “Find a man like that,” he said. “A young Sainnite, 
fluent in both languages, educated, and influential, who arrived with the others 
from Rees. Find out everything you can about him.”
The brothers gaped at him as though he was a street corner magician pulling 
coins out of children’s ears. Willis, predictably, protested, “You don’t even 
know this man exists. It’s just guesses.”
Emil said quietly, “No, it’s fire logic.”
Willis banged his tankard on the table. “I need more ale.”
Zanja gave him hers. The thick stone walls retained the day’s chill too well, 
and the fire on the hearth was stingy at best. Dour Annis came in, and greeted 
the brothers with indifferent kisses. Probably the brothers were her cousins, 
like just about everyone in South Hill. Then she kissed Zanja, much less 
indifferently.
The four of them left the brothers drinking their ale, and followed a circuitous 
route to a road that ended at the garrison wall. There was no gate; the wall 
rose up out of the road’s debris. The city buildings stood aloof, with the 
basements of the buildings that had once stood there filled with the rubble of 
their demolished walls. The garrison wall had been built of reused stone blocks. 
As they stood there, a soldier strolled past along the battlement, eating an 
apple. He carried a long gun by a sling over his shoulder. He did not even 
glance down at them.
“The main gate is to the west,” said Emil, “and there’s two postern gates, all 
guarded. We’ve dreamed up half a dozen ways to break in over the years, but 
we’ve never actually done it. Let them hide away inside their walled city ... if 
they’ll just leave the rest of Shaftal alone.”
They walked to the main gate, and Emil went into a shop within sight of it to 
visit a friend who had made it his habit to watch the comings and goings of the 
garrison. When he reappeared, he reported that his friend had nothing useful to 
tell them. If a Shaftali spy were visiting the garrison, he or she had the sense 
to go in by the postern gate, and if the owner of the trunks of books were going 
in and out, he looked no different from any other soldier.
Willis’s mood seemed to have only grown more foul as the day continued. 
Apparently, he did not like that Emil taught Zanja about glyphs, nor did he like 
that their intuitions had proven so compatible. But why he was so irritated by 
these things Zanja could not imagine.
As they walked through the rich farmlands of the river valley, Annis talked to 
Zanja about her experiments with gunpowder and other unstable compounds. It 
seemed incredible she had not even injured herself, when she clearly deserved to 
be blown to bits.
In this community of huge, fantastically intermarried families, Zanja’s 
loneliness was becoming intolerable. She experimented with touching Annis’s arm, 
wondering if she herself would be blown to bits. Annis turned her head at 
Zanja’s touch, and her glance was not unfriendly. “We should go away somewhere 
so you can practice shooting,” she said.
“Sometime soon,” Zanja suggested.
Annis smiled. Apparently, not all South Hillers were hopelessly unsubtle.



The land slowly put on the clothing of summer: first white and pink, then many 
shades of green. The Sainnites regularly hunted South Hill Company, commonly by 
daylight, less commonly by night. Lookouts within and without Wilton signaled 
troop movements with fire and flag, and, inevitably, when the Sainnites arrived 
at one or another encampment, their prey would have fled. South Hill Company set 
traps, lay in wait, and struck back, though their enemy rapidly grew cautious 
and canny and so did not fall for their tricks often. Thus, every fallen 
Sainnite was a cause for celebration.
Zanja occasionally led the Sainnites on a merry chase through the wild wood, but 
more often she and her food-laden donkey took refuge in a thicket as the 
soldiers marched past, and instead of fighting or fleeing she spent much of her 
time straining her prescience, trying to calculate where and when she might find 
the hungry Paladins, who, by making themselves difficult for the soldiers to 
find, also made it difficult for supplies to find them.
The second full moon that Zanja had seen in South Hill was starting to wane as 
she and her donkey climbed wearily into the highlands where Daye’s company had 
retreated for a few days of rest. A startled, haggard picket challenged her, for 
even in a place so remote from the garrison they dared not relax their guard. 
Zanja gave the poor man some bread and dried fruit, and made her way into the 
camp, where her appearance was greeted with an exhausted chorus of huzzahs. Daye 
intervened to keep the donkey from being stampeded, and handed over the fresh 
supply of food to the cook, who in turn sent a phalanx of helpers to fetch 
buckets of water and start chopping vegetables for stew.
“Tonight will be our first night’s sleep in three days,” Daye explained. “And 
we’ve hardly eaten since yesterday.”
“I could not find you,” Zanja said apologetically. “By the time I was done 
dodging Sainnites. . .”
“Well, I don’t blame you. It’s just frustrating, not being able to send my 
people over to the nearest farm for food when we get hungry. The lack of beds 
and baths, well, that’s not so pleasant either. You’re looking pretty tired 
yourself.” She examined Zanja critically. “How long since you haven’t spent a 
day on your feet?”
Zanja shook her head; it was too much trouble to count.
“Too long, then. You rest with us tomorrow.”
“People will go hungry.”
“Let them shoot a deer or snare some rabbits, like we’ve been doing.”
Daye told Zanja the way to a nearby hot spring, in a rocky meadow where the turf 
would satisfy the donkey. The spring was easy enough to find, for it was marked 
by flapping flags of drying laundry. Though the pool’s edges were trampled and 
some suds lingered, Zanja had the steaming, stinking place to herself. She 
tossed her dirtiest clothes in to soak, then lay herself down in the scalding, 
sulfurous water and decided she would never get up again.
People came to collect their laundry, and Zanja managed to exchange a few groggy 
words of conversation with them. They left; Zanja dozed, and was awakened by 
more laundry being tossed in to join hers. Then Annis came into the water and 
waded to the deepest, hottest part of the pool, where Zanja lay stunned by heat, 
with her head propped up on stone. Zanja put her hands on bare skin that was 
heated by the earth’s center and slippery with minerals. Annis’s hands stroked 
from ribs to hips and then to Zanja’s breasts, and Zanja let her kiss her, lazy 
and slow, and eventually her hands found their way to the insides of Annis’s 
thighs. For a while Zanja was unmoored, half drowned, dazzled by sharp flashes 
of sunlight, of pleasure, of simple release. Annis was a laughing, easy, and 
uncomplicated lover.
When they had finished, Annis got up and began briskly pounding her sodden 
clothes with stones. Bewildered, Zanja watched Annis sink to her elbows in soapy 
foam. Had she just been entertaining Annis, helping stave off boredom while her 
clothes were soaking?
“I had so much gunpowder in my clothes I was a walking explosion,” Annis said 
cheerfully.
“I know what you mean,” Zanja said.
“Listen,” Annis said, not seeming to have heard. “I’ve invented something, and I 
think it might be rather fine. It flies! Don’t tell Emil—I want to show him, and 
see his face light up.”
When Zanja lay with her fellow katrim, it had been both intimate and perilous, 
for the katrim were simultaneously fellows and rivals, who with no immediate 
enemy to fight, could only pick fights with each other. To lay down their 
weapons for a while and offer each other intimacy and comfort instead was never 
casual, though it was always assumed to be short-lived. But Annis’s 
carelessness, Zanja thought, was insulting.
“That was fun,” Annis said, as she hung her laundry on the bushes, and did not 
even seem to notice when Zanja failed to agree with her.



The wearying, hectic game of dodge, retreat, and regroup dulled Zanja’s pain, 
but honed her intuition. She stockpiled food at Midway Barn so starving company 
members could get supplies there even when it was impossible for Zanja to catch 
up with them. One night, she spotted the signal fires that warned Willis’s 
company of an enemy attack, and she was able to guess where Willis would make 
his new encampment, and left food for them to find when they arrived. No doubt 
Willis would call it luck, or common sense. A few days later, she arrived at 
Midway Barn with a fresh supply of food, and was astonished to find Emil there, 
alone, sipping a cup of tea and reading a dispatch.
He was haggard, but grinned like a boy at her surprise. “I hear you’ve started 
leaving food supplies—not where the unit is encamped, but where they will be 
encamped soon. That’s quite a trick.”
“I’ve only done it twice.”
“It’s a pity you can’t tell us where the Sainnites will be, the way they seem to 
do with us.”
“It’s a pity you can’t do it either,” she said.
“Yes. But apparently I can predict where you will be. Come with me to Bowen’s 
Farmhold, will you? Three survivors from Rees Company are guesting there, and 
sent a message asking to be admitted to South Hill Company. We’ll be there in 
time for supper, and the Bowens always set a good table.”



It was a fine day: bright and warm, and shot through with swooping birds that 
dove like flame from out of the sun and swooped over the treetops, ecstatic with 
passion. The two of them took a high trail that Zanja had not followed before, 
with a slender rivulet chuckling along beside them. For half the morning, Emil 
thought his own thoughts, and Zanja, long accustomed to solitude, felt no need 
to interrupt with an attempt at conversation. They reached a high, remote 
meadow, where occasional fat bees shot past like pistol balls. There, they sat 
in the sun to rest, and the donkey promptly set to grazing. Emil took a packet 
wrapped in paper out of his doublet pocket and handed it to her. “This is for 
you. You’d have gotten it much sooner, but it took my friend in Wilton over a 
month to find.”
Zanja did not know what to do with a gift. “Untie the string,” he urged. “You’ll 
laugh when you see what it is.”
She opened the packet, and then she did laugh, for Emil had given her a pack of 
fortune-telling cards. “Emil, you are a desperate man.”
“Yes,” he said, suddenly serious.
“Glyphs!” she exclaimed, looking more closely at the cards.
“These cards were traditionally used to teach glyphs to schoolchildren. I’m 
afraid it’s a rather artless deck. I’ve seen some that were almost too beautiful 
to touch—but I suppose you wouldn’t want to be carrying artwork while running 
through the woods and rolling around in the mud.”
Zanja shuffled through the cards, looking at the woodcut illustrations, printed 
in brown, and the glyphs stamped on each corner in red. Most of the glyphs she 
had not seen before, but even those she was familiar with seemed much less 
ambiguous when paired with an illustration. She found a raven, who dove 
earthward with a message satchel round his neck. She found an owl, who flew 
across a chasm with a person dangling helplessly from one claw. She found a 
woman standing in an open doorway, and lay that card flat upon her knee.
Emil took up the card and examined it critically. “The Woman of the Doorway 
really should look less grim and more ambivalent.”
“Is she going out, or coming in? Or is she simply unable to make up her mind?”
“They say she stands poised between the danger without and the danger within.”
“Of course.” Zanja took the card from him and traced the shape of the glyph with 
a fingertip. “Uncertainty and judgment, and the dangers of decision. 
Possibilities and dangers and the fact of our existence here—” she tapped the 
woman’s head, to show which “here” she meant. “Always deciding.”
“To some fire bloods, the cards explain themselves. I suspected they might 
explain themselves to you.”
She surreptitiously wiped her face dry. What was wrong with her? She restlessly 
sought and found the owl card, and showed it to Emil. “Is the person being 
carried a passenger, or prey?”
“Ah, well. That is the heart of the question, isn’t it? Do we seek wisdom, or 
are we kidnapped by it?”
Zanja said, half to herself, “It was the owl god that chose me to serve her.”
“No wonder your way has been so hard. That glyph must be your name sign, then.”
“Which is yours? No—I will guess.” She sought through the deck, and pulled out a 
card: a man standing alone on a hilltop, with stars shaped like arrows falling 
down on him.
“Solitude,” Emil said. “Also sometimes called Contemplation. The man on the hill 
sees forever, and might be destroyed by what he sees. Yes, it’s my card,” he 
added, as she glanced at him inquiringly, “Now tell me: What is the threat to 
South Hill Company? Just pick a card and let me do the thinking.”
She chose a card that depicted a plain box, with the lock broken, the lid half 
open, and the interior hidden in shadow.
Emil said. “But what is in the box?”
She pulled out and tossed down a picture of a burning flame.
“Whose fire is it?”
She lay a third card down, and cried in disgust, “That can’t be right!” It was 
the Man on the Hill.
But Emil spread out the three cards in the grass. “Am I the one who threatens 
South Hill? Well, obviously my judgment on this matter is questionable, but I 
don’t see how it could be possible. Let’s consider what else it might be. The 
flame, of course, is the elemental fire that enlightens and destroys: love, 
rage, desire, revolution, creation, and destruction. The box has to do with 
secrets that might be revealed, so paired with the flame it suggests elemental 
divination or revelation. When the flame is paired with Solitude, it usually 
means fire talent, fire logic, the solitude that comes with being a visionary. 
And all three cards together. . .” He looked at them, frowning.
“It might be a warning that for us to practice divination like this somehow 
makes you the danger that threatens South Hill. Or it might be a suggestion that 
divination will allow us to counter a danger that is not yet revealed.”
“It might mean either or both of those things. But I see a third possibility—one 
that I want to reject because it seems like an impossibility.” They sat a long 
time in silence, with Zanja gazing down at the cards and seeing how their 
meanings ceaselessly shifted and yet somehow began to stabilize. Emil had looked 
away from the cards, and gazed out at the vista that lay before them. He said at 
last, “When those falling stars pierce the heart, it feels like this.”
“It feels like an owl’s claw,” Zanja said.
He turned to her with a warm, wry smile, his squint lines all furrowed against 
the sun. “Well, what do you now see in the cards?”
“I see that the Sainnites have a seer.”
“If that’s true, then he must be a madman. To nurture a seer takes great care 
and deliberation, and the Sainnites seem incapable of both.”
“He may be a madman,” Zanja said, “but what he’s done to us so far, and to Rees 
before us, seems more like genius.”
“Yet—however difficult and exhausting the process—we continue to evade his 
insight. That may be the best we can hope to do against such an enemy.” Emil 
stretched out his stiff leg, preparatory to standing up. She stood and offered 
him a hand, which he clasped in his so gently that she found herself again 
bewildered. The Ashawala’i were never so demonstrative, except perhaps with 
their closet kin. “To hell with protocol,” Emil said. “Between the two of us, we 
can see through the tricks of an inexperienced seer— but not if I have to chase 
you across half the region every time I want to talk to you. These volunteers 
from Rees don’t know it yet, but one of them—” he grunted as she helped him up, 
“—is going to be our new bread runner. Maybe more than one of them, since I 
suspect you won’t be easy to replace.”



Chapter Eleven



The three units rotated positions again: Daye’s unit occupied high ground within 
spyglass sight of Wilton; Perry’s unit retreated into the highlands for a few 
days of rest, and Willis’s unit camped in between, in the thick woods west of 
the rich farmlands that surrounded Wilton. Since being promoted to runner, Zanja 
had traveled several times between Emil and Daye. It was never too difficult to 
find Daye’s unit: it did not take a seer to know that they would be on one or 
another hilltop near the edge of the flood plain that surrounded Wilton. But to 
find Willis’s unit would be tricky, even though, as far as Zanja knew, they had 
not decamped recently. She had been walking through the woods since sunrise, 
merely hopeful that she was following the right path.
Sweating in the warm morning, Zanja slipped through a thicket and emerged onto 
clear ground again. She paused to listen, and heard only faint bird song. Then a 
shot rang out, and a pistol ball smacked into a tree not a hand’s breadth from 
her shoulder. A second ball whizzed past, singing in a high, thin whine, but by 
then she had dived into the thicket again. She paused to load a pistol and then 
crawled further into the thick woods, then lay down in the dirt and waited with 
her heartbeat thrumming in her ears.
The woods lay dead silent. The birds began to sing again. Her heartbeat slowed; 
her instincts told her that whoever had shot at her was gone. Still, she did not 
continue her journey until midday filled the forest with dull sunlight. It was 
afternoon when a watchful picket outside the encampment noticed her cautious 
passage through the woods, and challenged her. “Why are you lurking?” he asked, 
when he recognized her. “Do you want to get yourself killed?”
Willis kept his camps in exacting order, with all the gear packed away, so it 
could be easily snatched up should it become necessary to flee or fight. Lately, 
through, the Sainnites no longer chased the Paladins into the woods, and seemed 
satisfied to simply disrupt their sleep, night after night. It was a policy of 
persecution that did not subject their own soldiers to much danger, while 
continuing to wear out the Paladins. Willis had sent Emil an impatient message 
that next time the Sainnites approached his camp, he intended to attack rather 
than retreat. Emil had dispatched Zanja to find out his plans in more detail.
Willis sat talking with a sharpshooter who was said to be his lover, several 
other opinionated and incautious people, and a couple of his brothers, who 
tended to repeat whatever he said as though they had thought of it themselves. 
Whatever Zanja’s assessment of their characters, these were seasoned and 
courageous fighters, and she supposed she might learn something about the value 
of aggression from them.
Willis spotted her and said with extraordinary joviality, “Well, well! 
Unfortunately, you have missed the midday meal.”
“I was delayed by being shot at in the woods.”
“That’s strange. Perhaps a lone Sainnite is out there today. Either that, or it 
was that spy we’ve been watching out for.”
Zanja said, “Well, I never saw who it was, but it makes no sense that someone 
who wants to avoid notice would have shot unnecessarily. Are you certain that it 
wasn’t a member of your company taking a shot at me?”
“Well, if you didn’t answer the hail—”
“No one hailed me.”
“Then it was no Paladin. We don’t shoot at our own.”
“Of course not,” Zanja said, and perhaps she might have left it at that, but the 
memory of the wasted afternoon rankled. “But how can I be confident that 
everyone in South Hill Company recognizes me as one of their own?” she asked.
She had said it quietly enough, but Willis reacted as she might have expected, 
with a roar calculated to make her regret having even mentioned such a 
possibility. “No one questions the truthfulness and honor of my people! If my 
man says no one answered his hail, then that is what happened!”
“No one hailed me,” she said again.
“So it wasn’t one of my people!”
“Then you have a sniper lurking in the woods, and had better beware. A solitary 
person could easily slip past your pickets.”
“My pickets are always watchful,” Willis said dismissively.
Mechanically, bitterly, Zanja gave him Emil’s message, and then tried to listen 
closely as Willis and the others explained their plan to her. She had intended 
to ask Willis to show her the site of his intended ambush, but now could not 
convince herself to remain any longer than strictly necessary. If she left now, 
she could reach Daye’s unit before dark.
“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” said Daye, when Zanja had found the 
encampment, shortly before sunset. They were dousing the cookfires to make it 
harder for the Sainnites to find them in the darkness, but the stew was still 
hot. The evening watch was already in position; the night watch slept; the day 
watch played cards or dice by the fading light. Daye claimed she had nothing 
important to do, and sat and chatted with Zanja while she ate.
“Is Annis away?” Zanja asked.
“She’s conducting experiments again, now that she’s got more gunpowder. That 
child is rather excited about something, but won’t tell me what.”
Zanja ate a few mouthfuls. “I need some advice,” she finally said.
She had come to trust Daye during the months that she served under her command. 
Daye had been the first to congratulate her on her promotion, and to point out 
that now Zanja’s swift mind would prove even more important than her swift feet. 
Now, Daye paused in plaiting her gray hair, and looked at Zanja inquiringly.
“I think someone in Willis’s unit tried to shoot me today,” Zanja said. “And I 
think that Willis commanded it.”
“That man,” Daye said, apparently not much surprised, “is an ass. I’ve known him 
his whole life, and he has always been an ass. It’s hopeless.” In silence, she 
finished plaiting her hair, and Zanja cleaned out her porringer with a bit of 
bread.
“I’m just a stranger—” she finally began.
Daye cut her off. “You’re a smart fighter and that prescience is an asset to the 
company. I’ll talk to Emil.”
“I can talk to him myself.”
“No, Emil and I have a long history. I am the one who tells him the truths that 
are so bitter no one else dares tell them to him, and he has to listen because 
I’m his elder. The older I get, the blunter I get. You young people waste so 
much time on niceties.”
Zanja said, “I don’t want Emil to think I’ll run to him every time I have a 
problem rather than solving it myself.”
“Well, this is the kind of problem he needs to know about. He’s always had one 
good reason or another to put up with Willis, but he truly can’t endure the man. 
So he ties himself in knots trying to be fair, and ends up looking the other way 
when he shouldn’t.”
Zanja said, rather astonished, “Should you be telling me all this about my 
superiors?”
“What!” Daye laughed. “South Hill thrives on gossip. Fertilizer, we call it, to 
make the crops grow.” She added, more seriously, “When Emil told me about his 
decision to promote you, I could see there was more to it than simple admiration 
for your good sense. You and him, you seem like kinfolk to me.”



Zanja awoke from troubled sleep to the sound of a pistol shot. Her unreliable 
prescience had once again failed her. Shouting, she leapt out of her blankets 
and snatched up her dagger. Gunpowder flashed all around the encampment. She ran 
through a chaos of confused Paladins at the closest gunpowder flash, following 
the distinctive oily stink of a Sainnite cuirass. The soldier was still blinded 
by the flare of his own gunshot, and, before Zanja was even full awake, she had 
dispatched him. She did not know where she had cut him, but the smell told the 
tale of her sloppy work. If she survived the night, it would be in clothing as 
foul as a butcher’s.
Barefoot, half blind, she attacked another opponent. The two of them had come 
too close to killing each other before they realized they were allies. The guns 
flashed around them, deafening. She and her fellow Paladin screamed at each 
other, asking each other what to do. Then he collapsed at her feet and she 
stared at him stupidly. Pistol balls buzzed through the clearing.
Move or die. She dodged through the darkness and the billowing gunsmoke. How 
could the Sainnites keep shooting so long? In their zealousness they would 
surely soon be shooting each other.
She heard a metallic whistle, and the guns fell silent. By some devil’s luck—too 
little luck, too late—she had broken through the ring of soldiers, and now as 
they tightened their noose upon the trapped Paladins, she was outside of it, as 
helpless to save them as they were helpless to escape.
With only a dagger in her hand, she followed the tightening circle of soldiers 
inward. She heard a scream, and bit her own tongue. The clearing seemed filled 
with soldiers. She might kill one more before she herself was killed, then no 
one would survive to light the signal beacon, or carry a message to Emil.
She got herself under command and slipped back into the dark wood.
She had scarcely gotten her bearings when she heard a tentative bird call. The 
racket of battle was already falling silent and she dared not whistle back, but 
stumbled about until she had found a handful of others: some survivors of the 
evening watch, who were booted and armed and frantic with guilt; some barefoot 
like her, with or without weapons; several of them injured, one certain to die 
before the night ended.
Knowing that Zanja reported to Emil, the people who had been on watch gave her a 
garbled account of not having seen a bit of movement in the valley all night, 
until suddenly the firefight erupted. “They must have slipped out of Wilton last 
night. Somehow, our spies there didn’t notice. And they worked their way towards 
us from the north, along the rim of the valley where we couldn’t see them. 
That’s what we think happened.”
Zanja paid no heed, for how this horror had happened seemed irrelevant. “We need 
to light the beacon,” she said.
“There’s three people up there already, like always.”
“They would have lit the signal fire by now if they were still alive.”
“Shaftal’s Name!” someone said, raw voiced. “These Sainnites are devils!”
But they were too experienced to waste precious time cursing the enemies. The 
five that were still in condition to fight set out for the beacon hill, which 
pressed itself like a blunt knucklebone against the stars. But, as Zanja more 
than half expected, the hill crawled with Sainnites, with more arriving even as 
Zanja and her companions watched. It had been a well-planned attack, the 
Paladins bitterly told each other. The Sainnites must have attacked the beacon, 
the watchposts, and the encampment simultaneously, and now two-thirds of Daye’s 
unit was almost certainly dead.
But now the Sainnites appeared to have nothing better to do than to keep the 
Paladins from lighting the beacon. Zanja and her companions returned to the site 
of the encampment, finding it now occupied only by the sprawling dead. Daye had 
died fighting—“As she intended to,” said one of the survivors dully.
Zanja sorted through her trampled gear, blinded by tears, feeling as choked for 
breath as though she were drowning. But one part of her stood distant from her 
grief, coolly reminding her that she had survived worse horrors than this. 
Mechanically, she found and put on her boots, holstered her pistols in the belt 
that crossed her chest, slung a light haversack upon her back, and abandoned the 
rest of her gear where it lay.
“Listen,” she said to the others, who stood in an aimless, stunned group. “The 
Sainnites have bigger plans than this tonight, or they wouldn’t be troubling 
themselves to secure the beacon. We need to learn what they are doing, and then 
we need to run messages to Willis, Perry, and Emil. Some of us need to go to the 
nearest farmholds to get help for the wounded and to carry away the dead. Do any 
of you watchers have a spyglass?”
They all walked the short distance to the overlook, where more bodies lay. It 
was impossible to see much in the dark, but the column of soldiers marching 
briskly towards them across the valley along the east-west road would have been 
difficult to miss. Zanja handed back the spyglass to its owner. “I’ll carry the 
news to Perry and Emil,” she said, and began to run.



The pallid light of dawn was warming Zanja’s shoulders when the road began to 
edge its way around an appealing meadow, where anyone with any sense would break 
their journey to rest and water their horses, if they had them. She herself 
paused to fill her canteen at the brook, and then stood for a while, wasteful 
though it seemed to stand so quietly while disaster unfolded around her. Her 
thigh muscles quivered with fatigue, but surely the Sainnites also would be 
weary after marching all night, and even on a forced march would have to take 
the time to rest and eat. This meadow seemed a likely place for it.
She took herself up a gentle hillside on the far side of the road, and settled 
down among the dappled shadows to eat her honeycakes and fight off desire for 
sleep. Soon, a few outriders arrived on worn-out horses, and while the horses 
were being watered, the riders searched their immediate surroundings for 
lurkers. The bulk of the army arrived soon after: 150 soldiers, Zanja counted, 
all heavily laden with the kind of gear that might support a long and rigorous 
journey.
Perry’s encampment now lay a hour’s journey to the south. Zanja got heavily to 
her feet, and as soon as she had found a deer path to follow she began to run 
again, which relieved her from the need for further thinking, until the path 
abruptly popped her into the channel of a chattering brook. On the other bank, 
Emil sat waiting for her. Stupid with exhaustion, she gaped at him. Two of his 
messengers lay under the trees nearby, apparently sleeping.
He said, “I sent a message to Perry some time ago, and I expect his entire 
company will arrive shortly. Have you alerted Willis and Daye?”
“Daye’s dead,” she gasped. “Attacked last night. Most of the company was killed. 
I was with them.” She sat down where she was, rather too quickly as her legs 
gave out under her. For a little time they sat in silence, with the brook 
between them. Then, Emil breathed in, white-faced, and asked calmly for more 
information. She told him all she knew.
He sat silent. She groped for something more to say. “How did you know to send 
for Perry’s unit?”
“I heard a voice in my sleep. But when I awoke, it kept talking to me for a 
while. A voice in the sky. It was very strange. Perhaps,” he added, not much 
seeming to care, “I am losing my mind.”
Zanja looked around for any sign of a big, black bird. “Well,” she said, in a 
neutral tone. But in the midst of her exhaustion, she felt an extraordinary 
relief.



Chapter Twelve



Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, until they could no longer see 
the way, Zanja and her twenty companions made a swift, hectic journey through 
the woods, following a path cut through the wild lands that they jokingly named 
Bandit’s Road. The older Paladins told how that path had first been cut—how in 
the interval between planting and harvesting, Emil had recruited farmers and 
dray horses from all across the region to help in the enterprise, which none of 
them had thought necessary. Every year since then, a grumbling expedition walked 
the length of the path with saws and axes to clear away the year’s growth and 
deadfall. Now, more than one old timer patted Emil’s shoulder and apologized for 
cursing him behind his back.
The Bandit’s Road paralleled the east-west road, but rather than meandering 
around the hills and wild lands, it cut directly through whatever lay before it, 
straight as a compass could make it. Zanja and her companions could not know how 
far ahead of the Sainnites they traveled, but that they were in fact ahead of 
them seemed certain.
That first night, Zanja awoke from exhausted sleep, and tottered out to the edge 
of their haphazard encampment. There she found Emil sitting by himself, weeping 
for his dead where no one could see him. She sat with him, dry-eyed. In time, he 
wiped his face and in a rough voice admonished her for not resting when she had 
the chance.
“I’d say the same to you,” she said, “if you were not my commander.”
“My blasted knee keeps me awake. But I drank a potion for it and should be able 
to sleep soon.” He tilted his face back so the starlight shone on his deeply 
creased skin, and added, in a voice still hoarse with sorrow, “I’ve heard no 
speeches from the sky tonight.”
Zanja said seriously, “Surely the voice will speak again if it seems we need 
more guidance.”
“You believe we are watched over?”
“I believe the gods take the shapes of birds when they choose to speak to us.”
“I am not a religious man.”
They sat in silence, until Zanja said, “I imagine the Sainnites have their seer 
with them, and he will have realized by now that we are running ahead of them. 
So if we cannot take them by surprise, how are we to stop them from crossing the 
bridge?”
“Have you ever tried to shoot a mouse with a pistol?”
“I should think,” Zanja replied after a moment, “that any self-respecting mouse 
would no longer be where it was, by the time the pistol ball arrived.”
“Exactly. And where would the mouse be instead? I doubt even the mouse knows.”
“So our best strategy is no strategy?”
“When seers predict the future, they are simply telling themselves stories, as 
you and I tell stories to each other. And they have the gift for knowing which 
of many possibilities are the most likely. The better educated they are, the 
better the stories they can tell themselves. But if all the possibilities are 
equally likely, then how will our enemy know where to point his pistol, and when 
to pull his trigger?”
“He will not know.”
“That’s what I hope. I suppose it depends on just how smart he is.”
After a moment, Zanja added, “No strategy? Willis won’t like that.”
“Don’t tell him I’ve been hearing voices.”

* * *

When Zanja last crossed this bridge, the river had been flooded. But even though 
spring thaw and mud were long past, it remained a most intimidating river that 
muscled its temperamental passage between the steep shoulders of the hills. It 
could not be safely forded, someone told Zanja. Before the bridge was built, the 
river was so much trouble to get across that few people bothered, which 
explained why Darton had so few inhabitants to this day.
A cottage stood by itself on the hillside above the sturdy bridge and the wild 
river, with a vegetable plot in the back and a fat, pampered cart horse running 
loose on the grassy hillside. As Zanja and her companions came down the road, 
having reached the end of Bandit’s Road and arrived at the east-west road with 
no Sainnites in sight, a peculiar old man came trotting down the hill to meet 
them. “You pay a toll to cross this bridge,” he said, and counted heads and 
began doing calculations. Perhaps haggard, heavily armed brigands were an 
everyday sight to him.
Emil stepped forward. “Sir—”
“Don’t interrupt!”
“Sir, I am Emil, Commander of Paladins, South Hill Company. I regret to inform 
you that we have come to tear down the bridge.”
The bridgekeeper gaped at him. “You’ve got no right!”
“I am a ranking commander, authorized by the Lilterwess Council to act on behalf 
of the Shaftali people. I do have the right.”
Zanja had flopped down with the others by the side of the road, too stupefied 
with exhaustion to even consider the enormous labor that yet had to be 
accomplished that day. When the bridgekeeper submissively started his way back 
up the hill, Zanja somehow got her legs under her and tackled him, and almost 
immediately regretted it. The man uttered a harridan’s screech and swung his 
fist wildly, narrowly missing her nose. Still screaming, he fought her like a 
crazy man, slamming a foot into her shin and getting a good punch to her ribs 
before she managed to get him to the ground, with a dagger at his throat and a 
fist in his hair for good measure. “Check the cottage!” she shouted to her 
companions. “Stop fighting!” she yelled at him.
He let his muscles go limp, but then, wild-eyed, turned his head and sank his 
teeth into her forearm. Zanja cut him then, and though it apparently took a 
moment for his pain to register, the man released his teeth from her flesh to 
shout in outrage, “You’ve killed me!”
“Dead men don’t argue,” said one of Zanja’s companions dryly, having come over, 
somewhat puzzled, to help restrain him.
Emil came down from the man’s cottage. “That little house is built like a 
fortress and is crammed with guns. With the clear shot he’s got of the bridge he 
could have held us off all day.”
They trussed the bridgekeeper to a tree, where he screamed curses until they 
plugged his mouth with a kerchief. Besides the cut in his neck, he had broken 
his hand punching it into the pistol that came between his fist and Zanja’s 
ribs. Anger seemed to be keeping him from feeling it, but he certainly would 
regret losing his temper soon enough. Zanja went up to the cottage to have the 
bite in her arm washed with soap. She and her companion returned to the bridge, 
lugging baskets of food ransacked from the cottage: preserved meats, bottled 
pickles, dried fruit, tins of crackers. Emil and the others had finished 
inspecting the bridge by then, and, standing in a group, they fished pickles 
from the jars with their fingers, chomped the dried fruit, and smeared preserved 
meat on crackers and ate them in a single mouthful. The luxury was wasted: they 
would have eaten raw horsemeat with just as much enjoyment.
“A good team of dray horses is what we need,” said one. “But that little horse 
on the hill won’t be worth the effort it will take to catch him.”
“What we need is Annis and a couple of bags of explosives.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“What we have, however, is a couple of axes and our bare hands,” said Emil.
They glumly studied the sturdy bridge, jaws working, passing the pickle jars. “I 
guess we’d better get busy,” someone finally said.
They chopped through the massive timbers one by one, and pulled apart the rubble 
pilings, stone by stone. By sunset, the bridge had begun to groan. The river 
joined the game, pushing and pulling at the teetering structure, until the 
bridge collapsed into the water, and the river broke it up as though it were no 
more substantial than a sugar cake. Not one member of the company was unbloodied 
by then, but no one had been carried away in the collapse of the bridge, so they 
found the energy to utter a ragged cheer that was more relief than jubilation. 
Then Perry looked around at the battered company and said wryly, “Well, we’re in 
slightly better shape than the bridge, though not by much. Good thing there’s 
been no sign of the Sainnites. Rather than fight or escape, I’d beg them to put 
me out of my misery.”
The sun was setting. They dragged themselves a little way into the woods and lay 
down on the ground like wounded animals.



Zanja awoke with rocks embedded in her cheek and big black ants crawling through 
her hair. The members of her company were strewn like corpses across the 
hillside. Others moved among them in the mist, shaking them awake, offering to 
fill their porringers with porridge spooned from the kettle that two people 
carried between them. She turned and saw Willis squat down beside Emil to shake 
him vigorously by the shoulder.
“What were you thinking? You left the bridgekeeper tied to the tree, and he told 
us exactly where you had gone. If the Sainnites hadn’t turned around in their 
tracks—”
“What?” said Emil in a voice blurry with exhaustion. “When did they turn 
around?”
“We met them on the road before dark.”
“That was before the bridge fell.” Emil sat up, rubbing his face. “Shaftal’s 
Name! Were they just a decoy? What are the Sainnites up to in the flatlands, 
while all of South Hill Company is out of the way?”
Zanja felt a peculiar, urgent impulse to be alone. She got to her feet with 
difficulty, and limped into the woods, where night had not yet given way to 
dawn. With the awakening voices of her company sounding far away behind her, she 
sat upon a fallen tree cushioned with damp moss. She felt only half awake: some 
part of her still dreamed of the ringing ax and the scraping away of her skin on 
the heavy stones. Her wandering thoughts vaguely considered a young man, a 
Sainnite, cleverer and further-seeing than she, who knew before she did what she 
was going to do next, and danced her on strings like a puppet at a fair. She 
noticed that in her bloody hand she clasped one of the bridgekeeper’s crackers, 
and she gazed at it in some bewilderment.
“What am I doing here?” she asked. Then, the storm-battered doors of her mind 
creaked slowly open, and she broke the cracker to pieces and lay them on the log 
beside her. Like a shadow untouched by daylight, Karis’s raven appeared from the 
shadows and landed softly beside her.
These seven months of her reclaimed life had largely been filled with hectic and 
dangerous effort. In the peace of the wood, Zanja felt how illusory was all this 
activity, how empty her life truly was.
In a voice as racked as any smoke addict’s, she said, “Good raven, I brought you 
this bit of bread.”
The raven ate. Zanja said, “Your help has been vital these last few days. Even 
though the Sainnites may have tricked us, I am sure that if we had not destroyed 
the bridge, the Sainnites would have crossed it.”
The raven, his cracker eaten, turned on Zanja an intelligent gaze. “Zanja, at 
dawn for just a little while, my soul inhabits the raven.”
“Karis!” Zanja saw her hand reach out under its own power, as though to grasp 
the muscled arm of her friend and not the raven’s rasping feathers. “Karis!” she 
cried, but said no more, for the words that crowded forward were dangerous and 
filled with longing.
Karis said through the raven, in a voice as hoarse and frayed as her own would 
be at this hour, “I also am surprised. The raven is not supposed to be in South 
Hill.”
“I understand that. But I think he is watching over you. He intervened to help 
prevent the Sainnites from crossing into Darton.”
The raven—Karis—was silent. Whether her silence meant confusion or displeasure 
was impossible to know.
Zanja said cautiously, “Surely you did not think it would be too difficult for 
me to realize you live in Meartown.”
“Well, you aren’t supposed to know.”
“Like everyone in South Hill Company, I have good reason to protect the forges 
and furnace that provide our weapons. My reason is just more personal than 
most.” Zanja added, “And thank you for my dagger. It is such a fine blade that I 
sometimes think it could fight on its own. I often wonder why you have not made 
more of them.”
“Every time you bloody the blade, I know it, and I feel my responsibility. 
Therefore, I make carpenter’s tools, mainly. They are rarely used for killing.”
Zanja said, “Dear gods—and Norina allowed you to forge me a blade?”
“I never told her. I have the same problem with her blade, but she rarely has to 
use it. Listen, we haven’t got much time to talk.”
Zanja said hastily, “There’s a danger here that you should know about. The 
Sainnites have a seer, who is now in South Hill, using his vision to direct the 
actions of the soldiers. Do you know what happened in Rees?”
“Yes, I have heard about it.”
“That was the work of this seer. And now the same disaster is happening in South 
Hill. Emil and I together are clever, but I believe the seer has just proven to 
us that he is more clever still.”
The raven stared, then said in a low voice, “Now I am unnerved.”
“No more than I.” And Zanja, was, indeed, deeply afraid, with the kind of fear 
no soldier dares admit to, upon realizing that defeat was all but predestined.
Karis said abruptly, “I must go.”
“But won’t you tell me what you can do to help us?” Zanja cried. But the raven 
spread its wings and was gone, and she sat alone in the bird-loud wood, as the 
rising sun dropped down through the darkness a thousand streamers of gold.



Chapter Thirteen



In the disordered camp of South Hill Company, Emil took the first few steps of 
the day, his face white with pain. Five years ago, when a pistol ball had 
shattered his knee, for a while he had both hoped and feared that his career as 
a Paladin commander at last would be over. But Jerrell had put his knee back 
together again, and, disappointed, he had continued on.
In South Hill’s river valley, the farmers stood in their fields, puzzled by the 
pall of smoke that sunrise had revealed. What had burned? Why had the fire bells 
not been rung? Someone spoke of hearing faraway screams during the night, and 
thinking it was a dream. Slowly, they began to fear that something terrible had 
happened.
In the Sainnite encampment by the east-west road, a young man sat up in his 
blankets, fumbled for his spectacles, and cried in the language of his mother, 
“Oh, what have I seen?” A camp cook turned from his busy stirring to glance over 
at him curiously. But, even with his spectacles on, the young man saw only his 
vision—and it was like nothing he had ever seen before.
The raven flew east and north across the Midlands for three days, until he came 
to Norina’s cottage in the woods. There she had returned for a rest from her 
wanderings up and down the length of the region, where she ceaselessly rewove 
and repaired the fabric of the law, which the Sainnites tore apart again, before 
and behind her.
The raven tapped on the window to wake her up, and she went into the kitchen to 
let him in. She bore the weight of the child lightly enough, but she did not 
awaken as easily or gracefully as she used to. She fumbled at the window latch 
and then sat heavily by the cold hearth, rubbing her face. “You’ve been gone 
over twelve days.”
Embodied in the raven, Karis said, “This raven went to South Hill again. And 
I’ve spoken to Zanja.”
Looking through the raven’s eyes was strange, for he had two fields of vision 
and could see Norina in only one of them. As she leapt to her feet and cried 
out, “What!” then strode in agitation across the length of the kitchen, she 
moved from one eye to the other. “I ought to wring your neck!”
“You’re right; you ought to. Why don’t you do it, then?” Karis flew the raven 
over so Norina could reach his black neck easily.
Norina’s hands unclenched. She lifted them up as though to directly entreat the 
goddess Shaftal for assistance, though she could hardly be described as devout.
“Zanja told me that it was a Sainnite seer that caused such havoc in Rees last 
year. And this year he’s in South Hill.”
Norina walked back to the hearth and sat down. Her face had lost its color and 
the scar across her cheek stood out like a brand. “Tell me everything that she 
said. Every word.”
Karis told her. Norina stirred the coals and then sat without moving until the 
few flames that she had coaxed out of the ashes died down from neglect. She 
covered her face with her hands. When she looked up, she had slipped from dismay 
back again to anger. If her infant could survive a tumultuous nine months in 
Norina’s womb, Karis thought irrelevantly, the rest of the child’s life surely 
would seem easy and restful by comparison.
Norina said, “What you don’t see, and she can’t see, is how she endangers you 
with her concern. If it is in fact true that the only seer in all of Shaftal is 
a Sainnite—and that the only person in Shaftal besides myself who is devoted to 
you has made herself his enemy—it will not be long before the seer begins to 
dream of you. If it has not happened already.”
Karis, muddled by air logic, rather plaintively said, “I am not sure I 
understand you.”
“He will know of you through thinking of her. Perhaps he will know more of you 
than she does—and certainly, she knows too much already.“
“For all these months, Zanja has kept her counsel—”
“She will not tell the seer. She will not have to. It will come to him, that’s 
all.” Norina leapt to her feet and started pacing again. “We have to get her out 
of South Hill.”
Karis said flatly, “She will not go. Not without an explanation.”
“She will do whatever you ask her to do, Karis. Her obligation to you—”
“Her obligation to me is counterbalanced now by her obligation to her company, 
to her commander. They are in desperate straits. She will refuse to abandon them 
without a reason—a compelling reason.”
Norina stopped in the middle of the room. “No,” she said. “I will not tell her 
more, when with every breath I wish that she knew less.”
“Well then, it seems there’s nothing we can do but hope.”
“Hope!” Norina spat it out, like a curse.
Karis, more present in that kitchen than she was in her own body, which, 
unattended, fought its daily battle to overcome the paralysis of smoke, could 
feel the closeness of sunrise. This conversation would soon end.
“You have to leave Meartown,” Norina said.
“You know I will not.”
“It won’t take long for this seer to realize that when you’re under smoke you’ll 
walk up to him as trustingly as a newborn lamb. Your first obligation is to 
survive unharmed. Not just for the people of Meartown, but for the people of 
Shaftal.”
Karis said nothing, which Norina would recognize as rebellion. Norina said, 
finally, “I’m going to write to Mabin. Perhaps she can do something.”
Karis tried to remind Norina that Mabin hated her and probably wouldn’t care if 
she were killed by the Sainnites, but the words came out garbled, and she 
realized that she had come back to her own skin, speaking inarticulate sounds 
with a mouth still paralyzed by smoke. A speckling of sunlight lay upon the 
eastward-facing windows, and she heard faintly the sound of Dominy stirring up 
the coals of the kitchen fire.
He came in with a pot of tea later, and found the garden doors flung open and 
Karis standing in the doorway, neither outside nor inside, pulling on the 
twisted locks of her hair as though they were ropes connected to thoughts, and 
her thoughts were drowning. It would not be one of her good days.



Before the weary Paladins arrived at Midway Barn, where Emil’s messengers 
anxiously awaited his reappearance, worrying shreds of news had already reached 
them: tales of farmsteads razed and entire families disappeared. Emil came out 
from his solitary hearing of the messengers’ reports, looking drawn and gray 
with pain and exhaustion. Four highland farmsteads that had been steady 
providers of bread and supplies to South Hill Company had been burned to the 
ground; and of the farm families, even the children, no one remained, though no 
bodies had been found. Some hundred people in all had gone missing.
He delivered no inspirational speech, but left to closet himself with Linde, 
whom he had selected to replace Daye, along with Perry and Willis. Zanja sat 
among the others, a filthy, bloody, half-starved band of ruffians, and waited 
for her turn behind the healer’s curtain. The smell of chicken stew cooking 
seemed about to drive them all insane, when the one-armed bread runner 
fortuitously arrived with the donkey, Zanja’s old companion, heavily laden with 
great wheels of flat bread. Without butter or broth to dip it in, the bread was 
dry as sawdust, but they ate it gratefully. Slowly, Zanja began to hear a murmur 
of her companions’ old stout-heartedness. She sat with them, and ate dry bread, 
and plotted revenge.
Later, after a chilly bath of water splashed from a stream, with her poorly 
laundered clothing drying in the hot breeze, and her bitten arm, blistered feet, 
and raw hands bandaged and salved, Zanja let herself enjoy the illusion of rest 
and comfort. She was asleep in a patch of sunshine when Emil woke her. His drawn 
face, dirty clothing, and even the staff on which he now leaned, reminded her 
how desperate their situation had become.
“That bite in your arm isn’t festering, is it?” he asked.
“No, Emil.”
“That’s fortunate, I suppose. Jerrell tells me that the surviving Paladins are 
going to fall ill or succumb to one or another infection if they don’t get some 
rest and a few decent meals in them.”
“I ate some bread.”
He responded with a flash of his old humor. “That’s practically a feast. And 
you’ve slept, what, an hour or two? That should be more than enough.”
“What do you want of me?”
“I want you to find Annis, but it can wait until tomorrow.”
“You don’t know where she is?” Zanja had thought of Annis in passing, but had 
been willing enough not to think of her too long. Her name had not been on the 
list of dead or injured, so she assumed there was no reason for concern.
“No one knows where she is. Her family, though, is one of the three that has 
disappeared. Her home is burned, they tell me. When she came in from her 
experiments, she would have heard all this. I am a bit concerned about what she 
might do.”
Zanja got to her feet—stiffly enough, but apparently with enough grace to win 
her a glance of unabashed envy from Emil. This grueling journey had all but 
crippled him. “There are others who know her haunts better than I.”
“None of them are fire bloods who have been her lover.”
She muttered, “Nothing escapes you, does it?”
“By the land, I wish that were true!” He put a hand upon her shoulder. “Listen: 
you need a place to shelter out the winter. To partner with the daughter of an 
established farm family can only be to your benefit. But if it turns out you 
have to bring her to me at the end of a rope, do you think you could?”
“I’d rather not.”
“If you had to?”
She said reluctantly, “Yes.”
“Good.” Emil added, rather bitterly, “But do hold onto what shreds of decency 
you can.”



The next day, Zanja made her way to Annis’s family farm. There, the black, 
burned-out walls of seven buildings gaped like the jaws of corpses. All around 
them spread lush fields of knee-high grain and white-blossomed potato plants. 
Zanja stood at the edge of an orchard, where a din of insects made the voices of 
the man and woman walking through the field seem very far away. Zanja had been 
watching them for some time. They had walked from building to building, looking 
in at the tangles of charred wood contained by each stone shell. Once, they 
ventured inside, but came out again quickly, coughing and wiping away tears. Now 
they walked meditatively through the fields, pausing sometimes to discuss 
something vehemently, with sweeping gestures that seemed to include the entire 
landscape.
As they drew close to the orchard, they spotted Zanja and stopped short in 
confusion. She stepped briskly out into the field, taking care to avoid 
trampling the seedlings, but stopped at a distance so they would not be too 
frightened of her, and bowed. “I am Zanja Paladin of South Hill Company, a 
friend of Annis’s. You are her kinfolk, yes?”
The two of them clutched each other in dismay, but the woman said cautiously, 
“Everyone in South Hill is her kin.”
They looked enough like Annis that it seemed certain all three of them had a 
parent in common, but then the South Hillers seemed peculiarly indifferent to 
ties of blood; what united them into families was the land alone. Now that 
Annis’s family was gone, the land they had farmed was an orphan, an event as 
rare in South Hill as the orphaning of a child. This event presented the entire 
community with a problem: Who was now obligated or entitled to tend the crops? 
This must have been the problem this brother and sister had been pondering.
The man said, “South Hill Company should have no interests here. Where were you 
when the farm was burning?”
“We were chasing the enemy and burying the dead,” Zanja said.
“I hear you were off on a hare-chase, tearing down Darton Bridge for no good 
reason when you should have been here.”
The woman jerked his arm roughly, and he fell into sullen silence.
Zanja said, “Please, if you see Annis, would you tell her that I’m looking for 
her? I’m worried about her.”
Both the farmers seemed startled at the suggestion that someone might actually 
care for their eccentric sister.
“I’d like to look at the buildings. Would you mind?”
The siblings did not respond. Zanja walked over to the remains of the 
commonhouse. Portions of the walls remained standing, though the roof had 
collapsed in a crazy tangle of charred timbers that filled the interior. Cradles 
had hung from those rafters. Now the acrid stink of destruction seared Zanja’s 
lungs, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.
and pain ballooned in her skull as she stumbled through the fierce heat of the 
flames where people were trapped and screaming and she followed the rhythmic 
signal of a newborn’s cry: the na’Tarwein infant she had last seen in a basket 
beside her sleeping mother. And the blazing fire swam in her vision, now close 
and now far, hot enough that it seemed her flesh must cook upon her bones, and 
she stumbled through smoke, walking on embers, following the sound
“Madam!”
and the infant’s voice fell silent and as Zanja stumbled up to the na’Tarwein 
clanhouse the roof collapsed and the roar and pressure of flames drove her away, 
wheezing and reeling in a daze of pain and horror
“Madam Paladin!”
The farmer spoke with sharp impatience, but when Zanja turned her face, she 
stepped hastily backwards. Zanja put a hand to her face and found it wet, not 
with blood from her head wound or a dead Sainnite, but with tears. “Some of them 
burned alive,” she said.
The woman took another startled step backwards. “But we have not found any 
bodies.”
“In my own family.” Zanja rubbed the side of her head, where the rough terrain 
of a scar crossed her scalp. Until this moment, she had forgotten that, 
bleeding, dazed, scarcely even conscious, she had walked through the burning 
village hoping and failing to save just one life from the disaster, a single 
child.
“Your family?” The farmer said. “Are you from Rees?”
“I’m from the northern borderlands. We have Sainnites there, too.” Zanja dried 
her face with a corner of her headcloth. “What are you and your brother going to 
do?”
“Well, as for me, I can’t endure to see this good crop go to waste. But my 
brother wants to cry for justice at the gates of the garrison.”
“Justice? Does he think this crime was done by a civilized people?”
The brother said angrily, “The Paladins are much too busy to occupy themselves 
with something so trivial as justice. So there is no law left in South Hill, 
except the law of the Sainnites.”
“Law? You are at war!”
Zanja parted from the farmers with cold civility, and traveled through the woods 
towards the powder cave. Her anger at the man’s stupidity burned itself out, and 
ashes remained: a fire-gutted village, a corpse-scattered, charred cornfield, 
the coarse laughter of the Sainnite butchers halfway across the valley. Zanja, 
weaving through the mists, falling over the bodies of her friends, seeking 
Ransel among the dead, so that she could lie down beside him, and cut loose her 
soul from its bindings.
The Ashawala’i also had never realized they were at war.



Chapter Fourteen



At least one keg of gunpowder was missing from the powder cave. Zanja waited 
there until a summer downpour had lightened to a mist, then she traveled east in 
dead of night and slipped into the river valley under cover of darkness. She lay 
in a copse until dawn. Every time she closed her eyes, pain blossomed in her 
healed skull, her heart began to pound, and she saw flames.
With her weapons and gear tied in a bundle on her shoulder, Zanja joined a group 
of farmers headed for Wilton Market. They tolerated her presence as a herd of 
horses tolerates a donkey in their midst.
In Wilton, Sainnite soldiers lounged in the sun like lizards on rocks. Zanja 
concealed her alien face behind the bundle on her shoulder. The tide carried her 
into and out of a crush of market stalls, where baskets of beans in a dozen 
different colors, and round, flat, and finger-shaped potatoes crowded up against 
caged chickens, squalling babies, vendors of steamed dumplings and roast nuts 
and honey candy, and the occasional seller of fine goods: silken scarves and 
ribbons, handmade lace, silver jewelry. A couple of Sainnite officers rode down 
the crowded street on their jumpy war horses, and Zanja found herself crushed up 
against one of these rickety stalls, along with a man carrying a basket of 
mewing kittens and a woman with a sack of potatoes. Unable to move, close enough 
to the stall’s baubles that she could have stolen one in her mouth if she had 
wanted, she had no choice but to examine them closely, while the stall man 
shored up the fragile structure by bracing it with his own body. The Sainnites 
passed and the pressure eased, but before Zanja moved on she bought one of the 
baubles, a simple pendant like a miniature plumb bob made of deep green stone. 
What would Emil think of how she was spending the money he’d given her? The 
thought sank like a rock into still water. She moved on until she saw a sign 
depicting a flame rising out of stone.
Transformation, of course, is the business of chemists, but the flame-and-stone 
also was a traditional call to revolution. Nevertheless, no one except her stood 
in the street outside the chemist’s shop, mesmerized by the audacity of the 
weather-worn sign. Someone bumped into her and snapped at her for blocking the 
way. She stepped into the dim shop, and bowed briefly to the chemist, the shop’s 
only occupant, who used a pestle to grind a mess of odd ingredients into a fine 
powder. A thin, vigorous woman with her gray hair braided and tied with a red 
ribbon, the chemist nodded but didn’t leave off her work until the grinding was 
completed. Then she came over to the counter, wiping her hands upon her apron.
“Yes,” she said, “do you have a receipt for me to fill?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Good, then. I hate to see healthy people dose themselves. So you need a potion 
for someone else?”
“For a friend. She needs something to calm her heart. She’s wild with grief, and 
it’s making her ill.”
The chemist tutted absently. “Lost a child?”
“Her whole family is gone. The Sainnites burned her farm. Haven’t you heard 
about it? Her name is Annis.”
The chemist seemed to hesitate just a moment, then she shrugged. “That’s country 
news,” she said dismissively. “So, she’s maddened by grief and you want to ... 
what? Make her sane again? Make her family come back? What?”
“I want to give her some peace so she can think,” Zanja said. “I’m afraid she’ll 
do something foolish. Is there some drug that will make her talk to me?”
The chemist wrote a few glyphs in chalk on a piece of slate. “I’ll have it done 
tonight. Where should I send it?”
Zanja named an inn she had noticed just a few streets over. The chemist jotted 
down the inn’s glyphs on her slate. Perhaps she had studied in a Lilterwess 
school, and might even have been a healer once. A lot of the old healers were 
chemists now, according to J’han, and practiced their art on the sly.
“And your name?” said the chemist.
Zanja took the slate from her and drew upon it the Snake glyph, for betrayal, 
and crossed it out, then wrote out her name, and gave the slate back to the 
chemist, who accepted it without a word.



She used what remained of her funds to bespeak a private room at the inn. The 
room overlooked the street, which became only more crowded after sunset. Perhaps 
it was a holiday, or perhaps the giddy laughter and music on the street below 
was a symptom of something else: a relentless tide, a surge of rage threatening 
to break through. Zanja sat in the window and felt her own tide surging. She 
drank water; the people below drank ale.
There was a tap on the door. “Chemist’s delivery.”
Zanja opened the door and let Annis in. “It’s good to see you. Have you eaten? I 
can have supper sent up for you.”
“I ate.” Annis seemed perplexed and even peeved that Zanja had not been more 
surprised to see her. She paced the room agitatedly. “How did you find me? You 
can just tell Emil to leave me alone.”
Zanja sat in the window again, leaving Annis an unimpeded route to the door, if 
she decided to take flight. She had no intention of bringing her back to Emil 
against her will. When she had decided this she could not remember. “I found you 
by luck and good sense, and Emil has no idea where you are. Tell me what you’re 
up to,” she said.
“It’s none of your business.”
“Then why did you come here to see me? You didn’t have to.”
Annis glared at her. “Why did you come here?”
“I thought you might want some help.”
Annis stopped dead in the middle of the room.
Zanja said, “You searched for your family’s bodies, didn’t you? Like I did.”
“They’re alive, as far as I know. I suppose the Sainnites figured I’d come 
begging for their lives, offer myself in their place, tell everything I know 
about South Hill Company.” Annis spat in the general direction of the garrison. 
“Bunch of idiots.”
“On the other hand, you can hardly hope to rescue them.”
“I don’t even know where they are.” For a moment, she looked exhausted. “But 
even if I could rescue them, my home would still be gone. I have nowhere to go, 
nowhere to rest.”
She began pacing the room. “The Sainnites build with wood, did you know that? 
Even though everyone knows how dangerous it is to build with wood in a city. 
Stone is too cold and damp for them.”
“My people built with wood also,” Zanja said. “And the Sammies burned the entire 
village to the ground.” They looked at each other. “Tomorrow is the dark moon,” 
Zanja added. “And it’s about time the Sainnites lost a village of their own.”
Annis suddenly calmed, and sat on the bed. “Emil won’t have his people acting on 
their own. He might put us out of the company.”
Zanja looked bleakly down upon the crowded street of a community that would 
never be hers. “He and I are fighting different wars.”
Annis rubbed her hands together gleefully. “You won’t believe what I’ve got to 
show you. It’s made of paper, like a kite, but it flies like an arrow. It’s got 
a fuse up the middle and in the very tip a cargo that explodes.”
Zanja said, “That sounds rather startling.”
“Startling? It’ll scare the Sainnites half to death. Come on, we’ve got some 
work to do, and then we’ll have some fun.”
Zanja stood up. The room moved around her. Her head filled with an appalling 
pain. Ransel came out of the mist, and put his arms around her. “I knew you 
would survive,” he said. “Now we shall have vengeance.”



Any wall can be breached, but Zanja had never imagined that it would be so easy 
to break into the Sainnite garrison. They did it with a spindly ladder that they 
had cobbled together in the basement of the chemist’s shop. It was a dark night; 
even starlight was veiled by thin clouds. No one noticed them carrying their 
ladder through the streets of Wilton. No one cried a warning as they climbed the 
ladder to the top of the wall, dragged it up, and dropped it to the other side 
so they could climb down. The wall was nice and wide; it made it easier to 
maneuver their awkward burdens.
Even as Zanja worked with Annis in the secret factory in the chemist’s basement, 
she had not really expected that they’d get this far. Surely the Sainnite seer 
would anticipate that they would arrive, reeking of gunpowder and other less 
common concoctions, bearing their bags full of brightly colored lethal gifts: 
packages of fused gunpowder, odd constructions of sticks and paper that Annis 
swore would fly. But it seemed the Sainnites were not expecting them. Perhaps 
even a seer could not predict something so unpredictable as this night.
She and Annis tucked their ladder into a shadow. The only light came from the 
smoldering cords they carried at their waists, which Annis called slow lucifers. 
The lucifers glowed very faintly, like coals in ashes. A pair of Sainnites 
scuffed past along the wall, talking amiably in a low murmur. One of them 
carried a lantern, but its light didn’t travel far. Zanja and Annis hid the 
faint light of the lucifers behind their cupped hands.
They had entered an ornamental garden that was rank with the perfume of 
night-blooming vines. White moon flowers glowed in the shadows, and delicately 
formed trees drooped across the walkways like lace curtains. They crossed the 
garden cautiously. Its wooden fence was merely ornamental. They climbed it 
easily and followed a cobbled walkway between buildings, out into the main yard. 
Here sprawled the stables and the carriage houses on one side and the barracks 
on the other, with the headquarters between, facing the gate. The architecture 
was strange. The rooflines were curved, parts of the buildings jumped forward 
like arms or wings, and beads of wood dripped from the eaves.
Most of the barracks windows were propped open to let in the night breeze. Annis 
showed her teeth again, and gestured silently toward the stable. Briefly, her 
hand was warm in Zanja’s, and then they separated. Zanja set out to find a way 
to the stables. Since all the passageways radiated out from this courtyard, it 
took some time for her to negotiate the maze. Finally, huddled against the 
stable wall, she noticed for the first time that there was a guard at the stable 
door. However, many of the stall windows were propped open. They were too small 
to climb through, but when Zanja looked in she could see that the stall walls 
were only shoulder high, which suited her purposes.
She went as close to the edge of the courtyard as she dared, and signaled with 
the smoldering tip of her lucifer. She could not see Annis at all in the 
shadows, but in a moment her lucifer appeared as well, drawing the shape of a 
flame in the darkness. The flame: transformation, revolution. The collapsing 
poles of the clanhouses, the burned out shell of the farmhouses. Fire for fire.
Zanja started unpacking her bag of flying explosives, and balanced one on the 
ledge of each open stall window. She held the tip of the lucifer to each fuse 
and blew on it to make the smoldering red tip flame and catch the fuse. It was 
rhythmic, meditative work, easy to do even in the darkness. The horses grew 
restive as she worked her way around the stable. She used some rockets with 
medium length fuses, and had switched to short fuses when she heard the harsh 
hiss of the first rocket. Then she saw it fly in a hissing spray of sparks 
across the inside of the stable, the horses braying with terror at its fiery 
passage, and then the rocket exploded with a bang and a blinding flash of light. 
The horses screamed. Shod heels crashed against the wooden walls. Zanja lit the 
last fuse and started running, though the crazy woman in her head wanted to stay 
and watch the rockets soar, trailing fire and a glowing white smoke, carrying 
their explosive cargo to the many things that are all too ready to burn in a 
stable: hay, for instance. There would be plenty of hay.
She could hear explosions now from the barracks as well, and shrill shouts. 
Overhead, a balcony door banged open, and a woman rushed out, cursing as she 
pulled on her shirt. Zanja paused directly beneath her to light one of her 
packages and toss it through a street-level window into the upholstered cushion 
of a chair. The package was a lightweight thing, made of little more than paper 
and gunpowder, with a little bottle of liquid fire at its center, but the sharp 
report of its explosion echoed down the narrow passageway, and it was followed 
by a blinding white flame. The night stank of gunpowder, and was filled with 
shouts and the banging of doors.
Zanja hid in the shadows of a side door until it looked as if all the building’s 
occupants had rushed out to fight the fire, then she went in, pistols in hand. 
The building was dark and quiet, the stairs easy to find. But as she started up 
them, a man suddenly came rushing down, and fell into her when she shot him. She 
managed to catch herself on the handrail and the soldier fell all the way down 
the stairs.
Zanja stopped in his bedroom, where the bedding was thrown to the floor. She 
pried a board from the bed, tucked it under her arm, and went out onto the 
balcony. The drooping roofline was an easy climb from the balcony rail, but 
after she had put all her burdens onto the roof she went back to set off an 
explosion in the middle of the straw mattress. The floors were covered with 
straw mats, as well. No wonder almost every room had a fire bucket filled with 
water by the door.
The rooflines, which protected the passageways between buildings against 
weather, seemed almost designed to allow a fugitive to escape across the 
rooftops. Only occasionally did Zanja have to use her board to cross the gap; 
usually it was a mere step. She paused at nearly every building to climb in 
through a window and set off fire bombs in the beds, now that every soul in the 
garrison seemed to be out on the streets.
From the rooftops she could see the barracks on one side and the stable on the 
other, fully engulfed in flame. No bucket brigade or even a water engine could 
have put out those fires; the Sainnites would be devoting their energies to 
keeping the fire from spreading. As Zanja stood watching, she saw the glowing 
passage of a rocket shoot across the rooftops. She set one off herself, in 
reply. It skittered up the slope of the roof and shot into the air, where it 
exploded in a shower of fire. Almost immediately, Annis replied with another, 
like a star with wings. “Beautiful!” Zanja cried out loud.
The next time she paused in her aerial journey, she noticed that her backtrail 
was marked by flames. Some scattered buildings far from her trail also were 
burning, perhaps set on fire by the burning gobbets that dripped from the 
rocket. Zanja set off a couple more rockets, but then stopped, fearful that 
they’d give away her location. Annis set one off as well; she was only a couple 
of buildings away now.
Zanja climbed off the roof to another balcony, which overlooked the garden. The 
garden below lay serenely empty; no one patrolled the walls. She could hardly 
believe her fortune, but clearly the first concern of the Sainnites was to fight 
the fires. Grinning, she stepped through the balcony door, into the room beyond.
“Stop right there,” a man’s voice said quietly. “I’ve got a pistol pointing 
right at you.”
Zanja stopped. Her thoughts were strangely quiet; her heart scarcely even jumped 
in her throat.
The man was a pale form on the other side of the room. He was breathless with 
fear or exertion—exertion, she decided, for his voice seemed calm. “I really 
don’t want to shoot you,” he said. Strangely, he spoke fluent, unaccented 
Shaftalese.
“Then don’t,” Zanja said.
“Just promise not to set my house on fire,” he said.
Zanja was poised to duck his bullet and leap out the window. This, though, she 
had not anticipated.
“I have books,” he said. “An ancient, priceless collection. Shaftali books. 
Irreplaceable books. No civilized person would choose to see them burn.”
Zanja said stupidly, “But the house next door is already burning.”
“I just need time to get the rest of the books out into the garden, where 
they’ll be safe.”
“My war is not against books.”
“Well then, I am not your enemy.” She heard the sound of him setting down his 
pistol onto a tabletop. “There’s a lamp just to your right,” the man said. As 
she groped in the darkness and lit the lamp with her lucifer, he said, “I’ve 
been watching your progress for a while. You are having quite a frolic. I hoped 
I might get a chance to meet you.”
The flame revealed a man, remarkably young, dressed in a nightgown. Spectacles 
glinted in the light. Without the uniform, he looked no more like a Sainnite 
than she did. “I’m Medric,” he said. “I don’t know your name, but I know that 
you are trapped in the past. Would you like to sit down?” He sat in a chair. The 
lamp illuminated walls lined with nearly empty bookshelves, and a small chest 
stood half full on the floor. Even with the fire coming at him, Medric had not 
packed his books sloppily, but had methodically fit them into the chest as 
though he were solving a puzzle.
Zanja said, “You wanted to meet me?”
“In my dream you were an owl with feathers of fire. You flew back and forth over 
the rooftops, dripping flames onto the houses. They caught like tinder behind 
you. Are you truly a seeker after wisdom?”
The garrison was burning in the glass of his spectacles. He had known it would 
burn, and had not warned his people. The Sainnite seer now sat with his elbows 
on his knees and his hands clasped. He did not move as Zanja drew a pistol. “The 
past makes us what we are,” he said, “but the present makes us what we will be. 
If you shoot me, I will have a kind of peace that part of me wishes to embrace, 
and you will spend what remains of your life—and it will not be long, I’m 
afraid—refusing to read the glyphs of possibility. If you do not shoot me, 
however, anything can happen.”
Zanja sat down in a chair. She did not holster her pistol; neither did she point 
it at him. “You let me burn down the garrison.”
“It was the only way I could get you here. I need to ask your advice.”
“Advice?” Zanja lay back in the chair and laughed like a madwoman, and could 
hardly make herself stop. When she had gotten herself under control, she wiped 
her face with her hands, and found them wet with tears. “Well, why shouldn’t a 
lunatic give advice to a seer?”
“My vision has been too small,” he said. “And now I think I have begun to see at 
last, I see most clearly my own corruption. How can I redeem myself?”
“Redeem yourself? In whose eyes?”
He gazed at her, his face flickering with flame. “In the eyes of my mother’s 
people. In the eyes of Shaftal.”
“Your mother is Shaftali?”
“My mother was Shaftali, and my father was Sainnite. Somehow I must come to 
peace with myself, and how can I do that so long as this land is at war?”
A breeze came through the open windows and the air was thick with smoke. Still, 
Zanja sat contemplating a glyph she could not read. Was this danger? Or was it 
opportunity?
It was danger for certain if she delayed much longer, and this young man’s books 
would be nothing but ashes if he didn’t get back to work. “I can’t answer your 
questions,” she said.
“Not right now, perhaps.” He stood up. His long, fair hair was caught back with 
a blue ribbon. He pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. “There’s a 
grove of trees just north of the city. I’ll be waiting for you there in, oh, 
five days, at high noon. If you decide to send an assassin instead, I’ll know. 
Still, I’ll be there, and I won’t hold it against you. You must make your 
decisions just as I must make mine.”
“You know perfectly well that I won’t send an assassin.”
“In five days you might come to your senses.”
Zanja had gotten dazedly to her feet and picked up the satchel of explosives. 
Annis was waiting in the garden, and surely would not wait much longer. When the 
seer held out his hand she clasped it and then wondered why she hadn’t even 
hesitated. “Won’t you tell me your name?” he said.
“Zanja.”
He smiled again, less tentatively this time. “Zanja, I dreamed that we were 
friends.”
“That would be some other world you dreamed of.”
“Yes. But you are the one who travels between the worlds, are you not?”
He was not much taller than she, and when she found herself caught within his 
gaze, it meant neither capture nor dominance, but a stare between befuddled 
equals. At last Zanja spoke, and not exactly to him: “The gods have quite a 
sense of humor.” So she left him, and went down the stairs and out into the 
garden, where the air was choked with ashes and the brays of terrified horses 
and the raw shouts of voices scoured by smoke. But now she could not remember 
exactly what she was doing here, or even who she was or why she had wanted to 
burn down the garrison. She had crossed a border. And now she was lost.
She found Annis pacing the garden. She was exalted with fire, and once she began 
talking could not stop until Zanja shook her sharply by the shoulder. They 
climbed the wall, and this time left the ladder rather than carry it home, but 
they had to make their way without being noticed through a roused city. The 
balconies were crowded with onlookers fascinated with watching the fires or 
fretful with the possibility that the fires might spread beyond the garrison. 
They passed below, unmarked, and avoided all contact with anyone, lest the smell 
of smoke and gunpowder that suffused their clothing betray them. By dawn, they 
were far outside the city, having buried the remains of their explosives, and 
having bathed with soap and washed their clothing as well. At sunrise they stood 
on a hilltop on the north end of the river valley. A pall of smoke lay over 
Wilton, and Sainnite soldiers moved like locusts across the lush farmland of the 
river valley.
“Emil will kill us for this night’s work,” Annis said placidly. “But not until 
he hears how we did it, so he can get the word to other companies. And actually, 
since I’m the only one who knows how to make those rockets, I guess he’ll have 
to let me live. You’re the one who’s going to be in trouble.”
“Yes, I am in trouble.”
They had neither food nor drink, except for water dipped out of a stream and a 
couple of handfuls of watercress. Annis was still eating her watercress one leaf 
at a time, and wrinkling her nose at the peppery taste. Zanja could not remember 
tasting hers.
“I have an idea,” Annis said suddenly. “We’ll lie.”
Zanja put her head in her hands. “Of course.” Annis never even noticed that she 
was laughing bitterly to herself. “Why not?” she said. “What have I got to 
lose?”
It took more than a day for them to find South Hill Company, encamped at the 
Fens Overlook, a rise of land on the northern tip of the river plain, that was 
protected from armed incursion by a marsh on one side and a particularly tangled 
woodland on the other. The company was too far from Wilton to have seen the 
rockets explode, but not too far to see the smoke that still lay in a haze 
across the river valley. Emil, having already received a report from his spies 
in Wilton of the garrison fire and the wonderful explosions that preceded it, 
was in a quiet fury. His spies had told him it was wizardry, but Emil had not 
doubted that it was Annis. He did not question Zanja’s explanation that she had 
been seeking Annis in Wilton when the explosions at the garrison brought her to 
the garrison wall, when she had intercepted Annis during her escape.
Normally, Emil was not one to vent his anger in public, but he berated Annis 
before the entire company, a disgrace she endured with rare dignity, perhaps 
because she could not help but recognize that it was not contempt that made the 
rest of the company stare at her so, but awe. When Emil had finished chastising 
her for taking matters into her own hands, the company members welcomed her with 
suppressed glee. Emil turned his back on the lot of them and stalked away.
Zanja could not sleep, though she was so tired her thoughts kept blanking out, 
like candles snuffed in a gale. She wandered restlessly until she found herself 
at the very edge of the fen, which bubbled and stank in the afternoon heat, 
while a flock of geese uttered shouts of outrage at an outsider that had 
intruded on their peaceful foraging.
Zanja spread her glyph cards out and stared at them. The Woman in the Doorway: 
unmade decisions or ambivalence or even lack of courage left her standing there 
upon the doorsill. Paired with the Raven, it was Karis. Paired with the Owl, it 
was Zanja. The Man on the Mountain: solitude, contemplation, far-seeing. By 
itself, it was Emil, Zanja’s commander and friend. Joined with the Box and the 
Flame, it was Medric: dreamer, destroyer, bespectacled book-hauling boy with a 
blue ribbon in his hair. Zanja realized vaguely that she had a headache. The 
cards swam before her vision as if they were swirling in a whirlpool. She could 
not see the pattern; pieces of it were missing. She shuffled frantically through 
the deck, tossing down cards at random: Sorrow, the Book, the Sword, the 
Guardian, the Cave, the Lover, and at last the Madwoman.
She turned to find Ransel sitting on his heels beside her. His goat’s wool tunic 
was ragged and bloodstained; the woven pattern that marked him as a na’Tarwein 
was obscured by dirt. Upon his back he carried three different bows, and a half 
dozen quivers of arrows. Just as he had been when he died, he was thin from hard 
travel, hollow-eyed with hunger, anger, and sorrow.
He gestured a hand toward the mess of cards. “What does it mean?”
“A Sainnite has asked me to be his friend. Now nothing makes sense.”
Astonished, Ransel leaned towards her. “Why are you listening to the words of a 
Sainnite?”
“Because he reminds me of you, my brother.”
“Am I to be glad of this? Shall I say, ‘Oh praise the gods—my sister will betray 
our people for memory of me’?”
“How can I betray a people who are all dead?”
“We watch you,” he said. “In the Land of the Dead, we wait for vengeance. When 
we saw you take the hand of the enemy, we cried out in dismay.”
“You are dead,” she said softly. “To you it must seem simple.”
“Do you remember how our people were betrayed? It was a Sainnite, who came into 
our territory. Tain na’Tarwein called the enemy his friend, and revealed to him 
all our secrets. Will you not learn from our clan brother’s mistakes?”
Zanja could think of no reply. She looked away from him, and when she turned 
back, Ransel had disappeared. In his place sat Salos’a, with a mouse clasped in 
her claw. “The madwoman in the middle,” said Salos’a, “does she think she can 
hold all these powers in a circle around her? Does she not know that each one 
pulling her in a separate direction will tear her apart?”
“The madwoman in the middle is too bewildered to think,” said Zanja. “No matter 
what she chooses, something is betrayed.”
“Then choose to cross the boundary. That way, you will not betray yourself.”
Salos’a spread her gray wings and the cards lifted up and swirled in the air, 
and Zanja realized that she had not understood the pattern before because it had 
been static. She had not realized that it was only through movement, through an 
endless alignment and realignment, a pattern that was never stable but always 
changing, that the glyph pattern had meaning. Only by seeing it in motion could 
it be understood.



When Zanja truly woke up, the sun was just setting, the cards lay in the dirt, 
and whatever she had understood about their pattern in the course of her vision 
had been lost as she crossed the border from vision to wakefulness. Once again, 
she understood nothing.



Chapter Fifteen



That same afternoon, while Zanja was sleeping beside her scattered cards, the 
volunteers began to arrive. They came because the burning of the garrison had 
excited their imaginations: young, vigorous men and women whose labor would be 
sorely missed on their home farms. Some had been sent by their families, but 
most had simply come of their own desire, convinced that this was the beginning 
of the end, and the Sainnites would soon be entirely evicted from South Hill.
Emil, preoccupied with the hasty decisions that had to be made, noticed Zanja 
only in the way he noticed all the members of his company, as a presence or an 
absence, as one preoccupied with accomplishing a worthy task, or as one 
currently available for such a task. Zanja looked haggard, and he remembered to 
ask Jerrell to check on her. Linde had suggested that Zanja be given the task of 
teaching bladework to the hotheaded young farmers, few of whom actually owned 
any fighting weapons. The farmers under her tutelage were much cowed, he 
reported later, and some complained bitterly after two days of drills, that 
farming was easier work than what they were being subjected to. A few of them 
went back to their farms, and the rest of them were learning how to fight: 
nothing fancy, Linde added, but the kind of things that might enable them to 
survive a fight long enough to get out of it.
Two more days passed, and Emil began to feel like a shipping merchant. 
Wagonloads of arms and other supplies had mysteriously begun to arrive, more 
than the company could use or store. He made plans to again divide the company 
into units, each with a separate supply line. He slept little, and had to devise 
charts in order to keep track of things.
Meanwhile, couriers reported that the Sainnites seemed gripped by an odd 
aimlessness, and that the people of Wilton had gotten together a committee to 
protest some of the punishments that had been visited on them in retaliation for 
Fire Night. Buried in a welter of detail, Emil began to feel harried. At the 
same time, he found he had become too tired and preoccupied to think much about 
strategy.
When he saw Zanja again, she was walking through the camp with three or four of 
the new company members trailing behind her admiringly. Annis, who seemed to be 
thriving on the attention showered on her since Fire Night, was talking 
excitedly as she walked beside her, making broad, sweeping gestures as if she 
were about to fly like a bird. By contrast, Zanja seemed still as a cat, remote, 
almost uninterested. She still looked haggard.
Emil jammed his papers heedlessly into his lap desk and set out after her. Her 
trail of followers dropped away when they saw him coming, and then Annis 
abruptly ended the conversation and ducked away. He could hardly blame her for 
deciding to avoid him. Zanja turned to him, and for a moment there was something 
disturbing in her face, something too vague and fleeting to name. Her foreign 
manners took over and she bowed stiffly. “Commander.”
“Don’t do that. Soon the whole camp will be bowing and siring me and I won’t be 
able to endure it. Come and have some tea with me.”
She followed him silently to the fire, and silently watched as he fussed over 
the teapot, and silently sipped from the delicate cup balanced between her 
fingers, and silently accepted more tea. The camp turned around them like a 
wheel rolling down a road, but here at the camp’s center all was still. Emil 
waited for her to tell him what was wrong; she had retreated beyond his reading.
She spoke at last, when he had served her a third cup of tea. “Soon it will be 
midsummer.”
He nodded. “We have accomplished little this season, and lost much.” He 
considered again what she had said. “And soon a year will have passed since your 
tribe was destroyed.”
Emil followed the direction of her gaze. She was staring into the few flames 
that flickered red in the hot ashes of the cookfire.
He was tempted suddenly to douse them. Much had burned lately in South Hill: 
farmsteads, the garrison, and too many funeral pyres. When Emil thought about it 
too long he too would despair, as though he saw the whole of South Hill and even 
all of Shaftal in ashes.
When he looked up, Zanja was holding out the teacup. He took it from her and 
absently packed it away.
“Emil, with your permission I’d like to spend the day by myself tomorrow.”
He felt an overwhelming envy. “Of course. For what, may I ask?”
“I’m trapped m the past and must cross over into the future. The gods demand it 
of me.”
Emil rubbed his face, feeling harassed again. So quickly did his peace fray away 
lately. “When you know how to get there, take me across with you,” he said.
She looked bleakly amused, as though he had asked, like a naive child, for 
something no one in their right mind would want. She took her leave without 
replying.



Zanja arrived early at the grove, and hid herself in the bushes to wait. Medric 
also arrived early, carrying a basket in one hand and a book under his arm. He 
looked like a Sainnite today, in leather riding breeches and a shirt of bleached 
linen, though he wore no cuirass and carried no weapons that Zanja could see. 
His hair lay loose upon his shoulders and kept falling into his eyes as he 
studied the book in his lap. Before he started to read, he exchanged his 
spectacles for a second pair that he kept in a pouch around his neck. When Zanja 
at last decided to come out of hiding and approach him, he peered at her over 
the top of his lenses. “Zanja, is that you?” Considering that he was a seer, he 
could not see very well.
She squatted beside him, and he gave a start when she felt the front of his 
shirt, but he did not pull away from her. His boots concealed no blade; even the 
basket contained only food. Zanja said, “How were you going to cut the cheese 
without a knife?”
Medric shrugged, in the middle of exchanging spectacles again, with one pair in 
each hand. “You have one, don’t you? The Way of the Seer forbids me to eat 
cheese—I brought it for you.”
He put on the other spectacles and smiled suddenly, as though she had only just 
arrived. “But you’re no longer a fey creature bristling with marvelous rockets. 
So daylight pares away the night’s illusions, eh? You decided not to kill me, I 
hope, during all that time you were studying me from those bushes over there.”
Zanja drew one of her pistols and showed him that it was not loaded.
“Then what were you watching me for?”
“To make certain you were alone. And when it became apparent that you were, I 
began to wonder why your people might allow you to go forth unescorted. Surely 
you are valuable to them.”
“They wouldn’t allow me to do it, I’m sure, had I asked anyone for permission. 
You’re older than I thought you were.”
“My years feel very heavy lately. You look like a little boy to me.”
“I’m almost twenty,” he said, sounding as young as he looked. “My years feel 
heavy also.”
To bear a seer’s burden alone could rapidly turn a boy into an old man. 
Certainly, though Medric’s face was young, his eyes were old. “In this world,” 
he said, “this world in which it is possible for us to be friends, perhaps you 
might share a meal with me. When we go out of this place, what we do here need 
not matter any more.”
“You are young if you still can believe that. Whether I eat with you or not, it 
will change nothing. So I say we might as well eat.”
Besides bread and fruit, the basket also contained cheese and butter and 
sweetmeats. Medric tasted all of these things, as if to show Zanja that they 
were not poisoned, but then he ate only bread and fruit: the brown bread, not 
the white. Where he had gotten fresh fruit so early in the season Zanja could 
not imagine, and she had never seen anything quite like this fruit. He called 
them grapes, and said that they had just arrived by wagon from the south, where 
summer came early. They grew on vines, and, unlike most tree fruits, could 
travel long distances without bruising.
“We use it to make wine, and everybody complains that it’s not half as good as 
the wine from the old country. I used to drink a great deal of it.” Medric 
offered Zanja the bottle in his hand, which contained not wine, but spring water 
flavored with mint.
“But spirits are anathema to seers,” she said.
“So I learned.” Medric looked, for a moment, rather haunted. “I seem destined to 
learn to survive by nearly killing myself first.” Indeed, Zanja thought, he must 
have come desperately close to being claimed by the madness which always is the 
dark shadow of insight, and that madness still seemed terribly near to him, as 
though he could reach out at any time and put it on like a hat.
“A seer should have a mentor,” she said, as though he were a young man of her 
clan who had come to her for advice.
“The Sainnite community treats elemental blood like a contamination, not a thing 
to be nurtured. When it became clear that I might be useful to my people after 
all, they found me a Shaftali tutor, and then had to kill him within the year 
for spying. I rather think he encouraged me to become a drunk, and who could 
blame him? But if he had helped me instead, and if I hadn’t spent all last 
summer in a drunken stupor, perhaps I would have come to my senses before all 
those people in Rees had been killed. No, I had no mentor,” he added bitterly. 
“Even now, all I have is this, and I haven’t had it long.” He tapped the book, 
which lay beside him upon its cloth wrapping. Zanja was curious enough to spell 
out the title, The Way of the Seer. The book looked as though it had been read 
to pieces.
Zanja ate more of the sweet grapes. For sanity’s sake Medric had embraced 
asceticism, but for her it was only deprivation, which was to be endured like 
grief and solitude and tedious hard work. Right now, there was food to be 
enjoyed, and she enjoyed it. For all she knew, she might have only bread and 
water tomorrow.
Medric smelled strongly of smoke, and she wondered how the Sainnites were 
enjoying living in ashes. “Did your people blame you for failing to predict Fire 
Night?”
“Of course they did. What good am I to them if I can’t avert disaster?” His 
young face looked as old and tired as Emil’s did lately. “I fear they will never 
see that they brought disaster upon themselves.” With his chin resting in his 
hands, he gazed across the lush farmlands of the valley. “Only recently, I 
realized it myself. Everything I have done that my people admire me for—or at 
least that they don’t vilify me for—has been wrong. I am a boy, misusing my 
talent to prove my worth to the people who will never accept me. To be a seer, 
the way I have to follow is a difficult one: difficult and terrible.”
He hesitated, with his head bowed over his hands. “I have dreamed of you, Zanja, 
and of the Man on the Hill, your commander, many times. You have a kinship with 
him, a kinship I first recognized as a danger, for together you constitute a 
formidable enemy. Together, you do much with little. Alone, I do little with 
much. So my admiration, I confess, is fraught with envy. I am asking you to give 
me an entrance to his trust. He is the way by which I might leave my father’s 
people and serve my mother’s instead. You are the way by which I might reach 
him.“
Zanja said, a long time later, “First you must find an entrance to my trust.”
“Yes,” he said. The single word seemed heavy, an acknowledgment, an acceptance, 
the marking of an irrevocable step already taken. But then, strangely, he began 
to tell her a story.
“When my father’s people, whom you call Sainnites, first arrived on the shores 
of Shaftal over thirty years ago, they were the vanguard of an influx of 
refugees. My father was my age then, and from childhood I have heard him talk of 
the lands left behind, and the battles he fought there, like his father before 
him. In Sainna and the surrounding countries, people were born into castes, and 
my father’s people were the Carolms, a caste of soldiers. They were mercenaries, 
really, living in bands or armies rather like your tribes, except that they 
might be hired by one warlord or another, and they would fight against another 
band of Carolins like themselves. This was how they had lived, for time beyond 
memory. Though the old people remember those times fondly, it seems as though 
they were a poor and even desperate people, especially during times of peace 
when they had little choice except to turn brigand.
“Well, I don’t really understand the entire story, because the Carolins 
themselves never wholly understood it—it was their business to do as ordered, 
not to understand. Apparently, Sainna and all its neighboring countries went to 
war with each other, a war that lasted many long years, in which thousands of 
Carolins died on both side. It seems as though it was the nature of this kind of 
war that it was ultimately a war of resources: How long could the warlords 
afford to field their armies before the resources ran out? As it happens, Sainna 
began to lose, and it became apparent that all the Carolins of Sainna would be 
executed without mercy. So the Carolins began casting about for a place to flee, 
and their only choice really was to set to sea. They bought, borrowed, or stole 
ships and over a period of some five years many thousands made their way here to 
Shaftal, though thousands of others died and continued to die in the last years 
of the war.
“My father was among the earliest to arrive, and the people of his band found 
ways to make themselves welcome in a small seaside community. Others, though, 
were met with hostility and fell into their old habits of thievery and 
brigandry, which brought the Paladins upon them. The Carolins did not know about 
Shaftali winters, and a good many of them died because they entered the season 
unprepared. Tradition and ignorance made it impossible for them to farm; they 
got no help from the people of the coast who rapidly grew intolerant of them, 
and I’m sure there were good reasons for it.
“In some places they turned to old methods of slavery, which is why the drug the 
Shaftali call ‘smoke’ first arrived here. Enslaving the farmers was a failure, 
for farming is far more complex and difficult to learn than we ever imagined it 
to be, and once the smoke killed the knowledgeable and experienced farmers, we 
were worse off than we had been. Perhaps some ten years had passed by then, and 
at last the Carolins realized that they were not going to survive except by 
making war upon Shaftal, and so it happened that we became what we are today: we 
ourselves are warlords now, and I have to say that the whole history of the 
Carolin relations with Shaftal has been characterized by a kind of ignorant 
incompetence brought about by our inability to break with the past. We can only 
do what we have always done, even though it is destroying Shaftal and ourselves 
along with it.”
He stopped to sip some spring water. Because he seemed to expect that Zanja 
would make some comment she said, with genuine astonishment, “Although I have 
fallen in with learned friends, not one of them knows this history. And you talk 
about ignorance on the part of the Sainnites!”
“Well, here is an example of it. The Carolins teach their children that the 
Shaftali are better off because of us—that we’ve released them from servitude to 
the Lilterwess magicians, and that most of the Shaftali secretly love us for it. 
At the very least, it is argued, the Shaftali have exchanged one bondage for 
another, which surely is no more onerous. They have no idea that the Shaftali 
were never subject to the Lilterwess, but that all of them were subject to the 
law. They can’t imagine that Shaftal had no lords. It doesn’t help that the 
Shaftali and the Carolins speak different languages,” Medric continued. “Even my 
parents could barely communicate with each other.”
Zanja rummaged in the basket, but she had eaten all the grapes and she didn’t 
like the sweetmeats. She cut herself another piece of cheese, thinking about how 
much more likely it seemed that Emil might accept Medric, not because of 
everything he had told Zanja but because he clearly was, or should be, a 
scholar.
The silence had lasted quite some time. She glanced at Medric, and found him 
staring blankly over the top of his spectacles. She did not disturb him from 
whatever vision he was having, but in a moment he shook himself out of his 
reverie and murmured in his father’s language, “Almost I can see it—an ordinary 
winter day, writing my book by the fire—except that it’s in a Shaftali cottage 
and the windows open into vast spaces.” He sighed.
“What are you saying?” Zanja asked, so he would not know that she understood 
Sainnese.
“I’m sorry, I was talking to myself.”
“Your mother must have had fire blood, didn’t she? Did she fall in love as fire 
bloods do, for no good reason, and pay a high price for it?”
Medric said quietly, “Well, she always said there was a reason, a good reason 
that she herself could not explain, but I always had the feeling it had 
something to do with me. Certainly, if ever a fire blood felt herself driven by 
a sense of destiny and obligation to a future she could not wholly envision, 
that person was my mother. You’re a bit like her, I think, else why would you be 
here?” He smiled his tentative smile, like a man too accustomed to receiving a 
hostile reception. “You know the old saying, fire bloods are the hinges of 
history.”
Zanja did not know the old saying, but she replied with odd bitterness. “You 
will not lay your mother’s project upon me, Medric. You must open and close your 
own doors.”
“I know.”
After a moment, Zanja picked up his battered book and leafed through it. The 
book surely had been through the war before it ever made its way to the hands of 
a man who could actually read and use it. Much of it seemed to be philosophy, 
but it also contained whole chapters of practical advice on how to live. One 
phrase struck Zanja: “Live for the future or not at all.” She shut the book and 
gave it back to Medric, who had been anxious during the whole time she held it.
“All my books have come from the bottoms of soldiers’ foot-lockers,” Medric 
said. “They keep odd things sometimes. The soldier who sold this book to me had 
it from a Lilterwess school that she helped burn down.”
Zanja said, “Do you happen to know why the Carolins attacked the Ashawala’i? 
They were a peaceful mountain people, famous for their woolens . . .”
“Oh, I know all about it. That whole incident is infamous, you know. But it was 
particularly important to me. There was another Shaftali-bom Carolin seer, a 
year or two older than I. She had a dream that she interpreted to mean that the 
Ashawala’i were going to defeat and destroy the Carolins. Not one of the 
Ashawala’i could be left alive, she said, or her prediction would come true.
Medric opened his book and said, as if reading from it, “Such dreams should 
cause self-examination, reassessment of purpose and intention. But to simply 
react to dreams like puppets on strings leads to panicked, superstitious 
insanity. The best seer in the land sees only a very small part of the truth.” 
He shut the book. “The Carolins don’t understand that, and neither did the other 
seer until perhaps she realized, after the Ashawala’i had been destroyed, that 
the insane enterprise itself might be the cause of the Carolin downfall. We lost 
an enormous number of soldiers on that one campaign, and you cannot imagine what 
an impact such a loss had on a practically childless people. Anyway, she killed 
herself.”
There was a silence. “I don’t know why I didn’t learn from her mistakes,” he 
added. “Why do you want to know about the Ashawala’i?”
“They were my people,” Zanja said.
She felt the presence of the ghosts: the infants burned in their baskets, the 
children massacred in the arms of their parents, the old people shielding the 
young, the katrim with their light weaponry broken in their hands. Medric 
studied her through lenses glazed with light, and said quite softly, “So now you 
are the arrow in the bow we ourselves have strung.”
“Tell me how I am going to destroy the Sainnites. I am very curious.”
He gazed at her steadily, long enough that she began to feel uncomfortable, and 
finally said, “I don’t know what you are going to do. If I did know, I would not 
tell you. But I will tell you this, for what it’s worth: The elemental flame 
either transforms or destroys, and we fire bloods have the power to choose which 
of those it will be. I have made my choice. When you have made yours, I will 
meet you here again.”
He took a folded piece of paper from where it was tucked between the pages of 
his book, and gave it to her. It was a map, roughly sketched, though it was easy 
enough to identify Wilton, and the river, and the fens, and the location of 
South Hill Company’s encampment, which was clearly marked, along with the 
locations of the pickets. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for the Sainnites 
to locate such a large encampment, but still it was a shock to see it all neatly 
laid out like this. “We’re going to attack tonight,” Medric said. “We’ll come up 
the river, here, and through the woods.” He traced a path with his fingertips. 
“And we’ll surround you, trapping you between us and the swamp. We won’t attack 
until near dawn, so we’ll have enough light to shoot by.”
He took the map and put it back in the book. “Zanja, now I ask your mercy. It’s 
hard enough to live with the betrayals I’ve already committed, the deaths I’ve 
already caused. Please don’t use this knowledge to ambush the Carolins.”
Zanja could think of nothing to say, no promises she felt able to make.
Medric wrapped his precious book in linen and packed up the basket. He looked 
very tired. “I have been acting as my own enemy, finding ways to undermine my 
own plans. Our gaol is full of South Hillers who I insist must not be harmed. I 
have allowed you to burn down the garrison. Now, tonight’s attack will surely go 
awry. As you might well imagine, my position among the Sainnites will soon 
become impossible. But I will no longer dream for them, no matter what disasters 
result. I must find my way with a larger vision.”
He stood up. “I wish the same for you.”



Chapter Sixteen



During the half day of furtive travel along back ways and across planted fields, 
and finally across a portion of the fens which entailed much wading hut at least 
was passable, Zanja had plenty of time to consider and reconsider her situation. 
Now, as sunset approached and she stopped on firm ground to strap her boots on 
before starting the last climb up the slope to the overlook, she marveled at how 
visible the campfires were. As she approached the camp her wonder only 
increased. No picket challenged her, and she walked into the heart of the 
encampment practically unnoticed.
There was much distracted hustle and bustle, with goose being roasted on spits, 
the mess of occupation being tidied up, and many excited people clustered in 
arm-waving conversations, for there never was a South Hiller who could talk 
without gesturing. At the smoky heart of the encampment, though, there was a 
stillness where Emil bowed and poured tea from his porcelain teapot. His three 
lieutenants flanked him, their faces pink with washing, dressed in their 
cleanest longshirts, their heavy boots tucked up close to their stocky farmer’s 
bodies. Annis sat among them, charmingly flushed by something being said to her 
by the erect, gray-haired woman who sat beside her upon Emil’s stool. This woman 
was boldly dressed, like the three other strangers who sat somewhat behind her, 
in Paladin’s black. Even from a distance Zanja could see the flash of three 
golden earrings in her left earlobe. The three earrings of Right, Rank, and 
Regard had once been worn only by a high commander, a general. Only one such 
person remained alive now, in all of Shaftal.
Zanja felt a great weariness, a heaviness so overwhelming she could not continue 
forward, and scarcely could continue to stand. Transfixed by this exhaustion, 
she did nothing when Councilor Mabin turned her attention to Zanja, as though, 
of all the gazes that were turned on her, it was Zanja’s that mattered. For a 
long, strange moment they looked into each other’s faces across the distance 
that separated them. Then she spoke to Emil, who hastily set down his teapot and 
walked over to Zanja.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her.
“The Sainnites are going to attack us tonight, here at Fen Overlook.”
It seemed a measure of their friendship, or perhaps of Emil himself, that he did 
not even make her explain further, thus making it possible for her to avoid 
directly lying to him.
He said, “Well, our watchers would have noticed if a company had left the city 
gates yet—it’s still light enough to see. So we have some hours at least in 
which to decide what to do.”
“I think so.”
“You look weary to death.” Emil gripped her by the shoulder and somehow she 
became able to walk with him up to the smoky fire.
The general had never taken her gaze from them. Now she rose to her feet. “Zanja 
na’Tarwein?” All the other conversations around the fire fell abruptly silent.
“Madam Councilor,” Zanja said, “you may not remember, but we have met before.”
Mabin said, “I remember you. You are much changed in fifteen years.”
Zanja scarcely could fumble a reply as Mabin, the legendary author of Warfare 
and the head of Shaftal’s shadow government, expressed her sorrow over the 
massacre of the Ashawala’i and welcomed her formally into the Paladins. It was, 
or should have been, a triumph for Zanja to be greeted like this by the 
councilor herself, with all the company watching. But her status in South Hill 
no longer seemed relevant.
“Norina Truthken has written to me about you several times,” Mabm said.
Zanja felt quite witless. Emil said quietly, “Sit down—maybe some tea will 
help.”
Zanja sat beside Annis and held up her porringer for Emil to fill with tea, for 
he had distributed all six of his teacups already. She drank too quickly, 
scalding her mouth, while Emil said to everyone at the fire, “Zanja thinks the 
Sainnites are going to attack Fen Overlook.” He added, for those who did not 
know, “She is a presciant.”
Silence greeted Emil’s announcement, and then a fierce argument and discussion 
which Zanja could not heed. In the midst of it Annis put her mouth against 
Zanja’s ear and whispered, “Mabin’s taking me away with her, to make rockets for 
the Paladins!”
“That’s good,” Zanja said, then realized, when Annis pulled away sharply, that 
she should have said something else. “I’ll miss you,” she added belatedly.
Annis showed her teeth. “Sure you will.”
Zanja tried to pay attention to the discussion that swirled around her. Willis 
argued that South Hill Company should set a trap for the Sainnites, if Emil was 
so certain that Zanja’s prescience was dependable.
“We must not attack them!” Zanja cried. They all looked at her, but Zanja 
couldn’t think of an explanation for her reluctance to ambush the Sainnites. She 
put her head in her hands and wished desperately that her skull would simply 
explode. “If we attack them,” she said, “it will be a disaster.”
Emil said, “Annis, please find Jerrell and tell her to bring a remedy for a 
headache.”
“Are we to spend the entire season running and hiding from a figment of the 
imagination?” Willis’s big fist had clenched. In the twilight, with the light of 
the flames moving across it, his fist seemed monstrous. It pounded upon his knee 
in a fever of frustration and Willis’s voice rose to a shout. “It is a coward’s 
way!” His fist opened up, and he pointed across the fire, at Zanja. “Before 
this—foreigner—came to South Hill, we were not cowards! Here we have a perfect 
opportunity—she says—to do the Sainnites some damage. But no, we dare 
not—because she says no. Prescience is nothing but an impulse—an instinct—and 
maybe it’s the instinct of a warrior who has lost her nerve!”
Emil’s hand pressed down heavily upon Zanja’s shoulder. She had not even noticed 
him coming around to her side, but the hand on her shoulder shored up her 
disintegrating discipline. Emil said,
“Willis, since you hold fire talent in such contempt, perhaps you might be 
happier in a company that does not have a presciant as its commander.”
Willis sat back, his face flushed. “I’m just sick and tired of missing our 
opportunities. Now that you have new counsel you pay no heed to the old.”
Emil could seem astonishingly harmless, but he did not look harmless at that 
moment. “You question my judgment, the councilor’s judgment, and gravely insult 
a fellow Paladin who has repeatedly risked her life this season, and this is all 
you have to say?”
There was another silence, then Willis, his face bright red, said, “I beg your 
pardon—sir. I meant no insult. I was overzealous.”
Emil said nothing. His hand still lay heavy upon Zanja’s shoulder.
Willis looked directly at Zanja and said, “I hope you will pardon me as well.” 
There was no mistaking the hatred with which he said these words.
Zanja wanted desperately to challenge him to a duel and win a more sincere 
apology on her own terms. But this was not the Asha Valley, and Willis was no 
katrim. She said, as stiffly as he had, “Of course I will pardon you.”
Everyone began to talk then, as though nothing had happened. But no one else 
suggested ambushing the Sainnites. The discussion focused on the logistics of 
retreat, for their fifty fighters had swelled to a hundred, and they had 
precious equipment to protect.
JerrelPs infusion did little for Zanja’s headache. When Emil’s circle dispersed 
to spread the word that they were breaking camp, Zanja got to her feet and 
nearly fell over.
Emil caught her and said, “What is it? Are you ill?”
She said, “Willis thinks you are ripe for replacement and is just biding his 
time, waiting for you to prove yourself incompetent. But my precipitous rise in 
your esteem has made him think that I am a pretender to a position that he 
considers rightfully his.”
“Yes, yes,” Emil said patiently, and felt her forehead.
“You trust me because I’m so much like you. Even a fool like Willis can see it.”
“No, I trust you because I know you’re trustworthy. What is the matter with 
you?”
“Last summer, a Sainnite war horse kicked me in the head. I was like this for 
months afterward.”
“Sit down. I’ll have someone get your gear. I want you to stay with me tonight.”



By full dark, South Hill Company had dispersed, with a third of the Paladins 
under the command of each lieutenant, hauling gear and supplies to new 
encampments on the various overlooks. Zanja traveled in the smallest group, 
which consisted of Emil, the distinguished guests, and a few fleet-footed 
couriers. They traveled m a wide circle, north through woods so thick that the 
dignitaries had to lead their horses, west through farmlands, then south upon 
the dark road, back to the end of the lowlands, just to the southwest of Fen 
Overlook.
Mabin had insisted on accompanying Emil, though Emil was concerned that the 
Sainnite seer might detect her presence and send the soldiers out hunting her. 
The two of them sat awake while the rest of their small company slept, though 
Zanja was only pretending. Without witnesses surrounding them, the two 
commanders acted less formally, and it seemed apparent that they had a long 
acquaintance, though they did not act like friends. After a while they walked 
away, and Zanja was able to doze upon the hard ground. When she woke up later it 
was still dark, and her head seemed ready to finally split open and spill its 
contents.
No doubt Emil was keeping watch upon the stone overlook, waiting to know for 
certain whether Zanja’s prescience had been accurate. She could go to him and 
tell him the whole truth: that she had lied to him, that she had twice failed to 
kill the Sainnite seer, that she feared she was being tempted into treachery by 
a man who understood her better than she understood herself.
She got up and made her way through a haze of darkness and pain, until she could 
actually see him, a thin, still silhouette against the stars, the Man on the 
Hill. Her affection for him washed over her and brought her to a standstill. 
Wasn’t he already making his precarious way between the fragile and competing 
loyalties that held South Hill Company together? Already, he had to know the 
minds of his people, the minds of the enemy, and his own mind. Surely it would 
do him no good if she imposed her burdens upon him, in the selfish hope that 
somehow they would become easier for her to bear.
“Zanja,” said a low voice. “Are you having trouble sleeping? Sit with me a 
while.”
It was Mabin. Like Emil, she sat alone m the darkness, waiting for the dawn. 
Zanja went over to her reluctantly. “Councilor.”
“It’s not a good night for sleeping. I’ve been watching the torch bugs swarm. 
Sit down, sit down.”
Zanja squatted nearby, wishing that she’d had the sense to stay in her blankets 
until sunrise. Even with Mabin just a dark shadow, still she felt too closely 
watched, as though Mabin were a fox, and she a mouse.
“I hear that fire bloods are often tormented by nightmares,” Mabin said.
“Yes, madam, so I hear.” Was Mabin lonely, or troubled, to be inviting a total 
stranger into intimacy like this? She added, lest she seem too rude, “But I am 
just tormented by my headache.” A swarm of torch bugs swirled in a nearby bush, 
like sparks in a wind, except that the air was warm and still.
“Emil seems to think highly of your abilities.”
“I think highly of his.”
“So do I,” Mabin said after a moment, as though she’d had to think about it. 
“Yet I confess, I am concerned. Like that man tonight—Willis was his name?—I 
wonder that he is willing to let an opportunity go by like this, just on your 
say-so. How can we even be certain of the existence of this Sainnite seer?”
“How can we not be certain of it?” Zanja said reasonably.
“Because it seems so unlikely! And it’s always possible that the Sainnites are 
just better strategists, or luckier than we. And perhaps the whole point is to 
make South Hill Company cautious, so that at the very moment when you must act, 
you will hesitate. And we must not lose control of South Hill.”
For a dizzying moment, Zanja realized how likely it was that Medric was using 
her for this very purpose Mabin had described— that he had discovered in a 
vision her closeness to Emil, and so had realized that he could subvert the 
entire company by subverting her. This was the nightmare that caused Zanja such 
dismay, but she could not endure to consider it directly for longer than a 
moment. She said, though she was sick of explaining herself, “I can never depend 
upon my prescience to serve me when I need it to. But when it does serve me, it 
has never been completely wrong. And Emil’s and my talents seem to complement 
each other, for when he forms the questions I can form the answers, and he has 
the knowledge to interpret those answers, and I in turn can sense whether or not 
his interpretation is the right one. So we are more certain together than we 
would be separately: certain of each other and certain of what we know.“
“ ‘A steeliness disguised in ritual humility,’ Norina wrote of you.”
Irritated by this reminder of the Truthken’s heavy hand, Zanja said, “My people 
believed that courtesy comes from strength, not from weakness, and that it was 
no shame to be constantly reminding each other that without this fabric of 
ritual courtesy our tribe would have fallen apart.”
After a moment, Mabin said, “Norina also wrote that you are wasted in South 
Hill. I want to bring you with me, to help me plan strategy for all of Shaftal.”
“Thank you, madam, but Norina is wrong. I belong where I am.”
Mabin’s head lifted as though now she was surprised. If she had ever been turned 
down before, which seemed unlikely, certainly it had never been so promptly and 
directly.
“Well then,” she said, with ill-disguised irritation, “It is your choice, of 
course. Let me ask you directly what concerns me. What makes you think the 
Sainnites have a seer?”
“The glyph cards told us.”
“It was a divination?” Mabin sounded appalled.
Zanja rose abruptly to her feet. “Madam, Emil surely is better qualified to 
explain our method. I know you will excuse me, for I feel quite dizzy and must 
go lie down.”
But as she returned to her blankets, Zanja heard Emil utter a grunt of surprise 
from atop the pile of boulders where he kept watch. She reached him in a few 
strides, in time to see the fading aftermath of a rocket’s faraway explosion.
“Oh,” Emil said, “it was beautiful. Did you see it? That Annis is a genius.”
Mabin had come up behind Zanja, too late to see the fireworks. “What happened?”
Emil said, “One of the scouts set off a rocket. Not over trees, but over the 
river. That explains why we’ve seen no sign of the Sainnites on the road. They 
came up the river.”
“By boat?”
“No, not against the current, surely. More likely they simply walked up the 
riverbank.“ Emil’s teeth showed in the darkness; he was grinning with relief. 
”The Sainnites are nervous now, I’d wager, after seeing that rocket. What do you 
think they’ll do, Zanja?“
“I don’t know,” Zanja said. She was sick of her talent, sick of being asked 
questions and then being challenged for knowing the answers.
“Well, let’s pretend they continue onward and find the camp empty. They’ll take 
the road home, won’t they, rather than walk home on rocks?”
“Then they’d follow the edge of the fen and come out just below where we are,” 
she said.
“So we’ll get a good look at them, anyway, and be able to see how they’re 
judging our strength.”
Perhaps just to be certain that the message had been received, or perhaps out of 
sheer delight, the scout set off another rocket over the river. “Oh,” Mabin said 
when it exploded, “that is a sight. We could set those off just for show. A 
waste of good gunpowder, though.”



The sun had fully risen when the soldiers finally appeared. They had not fled 
the woods in panic at the prospect of an ambush, and instead they seemed to have 
spent the time since dawn scouring the woods.
Mabin, peering at them through a spyglass, muttered as they marched away, 
perhaps repeating to herself the advice in Warfare to never make a direct attack 
on a large company in broad daylight. She turned on Zanja a glance that was 
almost a glare. “Well, your prescience seems reliable enough. So perhaps this 
business of a Sainnite seer is also to be believed.”
Emil rescued Zanja, taking her to the fire where camp porridge cooked in several 
porringers tucked into the hot ashes. Emil used his own porringer to mix up a 
horrid, bitter concoction that he made Zanja drink.
“I dared not give this to you last night,” he said, “for if it’s your old injury 
doing this to you, I feared you would sleep so deeply you would never wake up. 
I’ve seen it happen.”
They were sitting by themselves, so Zanja said in a low voice, “Did you hear my 
conversation with Mabin?”
“Most of it. Apparently, she’s got some kind of hornet in her hat.”
“Is it so bizarre to practice divination?”
“Not at all. Mabin probably played at it herself when she was a girl.”
Zanja was beginning to feel very odd, as though her head were separating itself 
from her shoulders. The nearby Paladins seemed very distant, and the birdsong 
seemed to come from another world entirely. “Emil,” she said, carefully shaping 
the words lest they come out strangely, “I think she wants me dead. Since I will 
not come with her.”
“I think that you’re delirious,” Emil said gently.
“She wants me out of South Hill. I don’t know why.” The pain abruptly drained 
out of her and she stared at Emil, stunned by the suddenness of it.
“Finally!” he said.
“This is a very strong potion.” Her words came out like polished jewels. 
“Sometimes your knee hurts a great deal, doesn’t it?”
Emil pretended he hadn’t heard, or else Zanja was so confused she hadn’t 
actually said anything out loud, but only in her head. Emil said. “I have to 
tell you, I see nothing sinister in Mabin wanting to snatch you away from me. I 
wish I had a hundred more like you, myself.”
“A frightening prospect,” Zanja said seriously, but Emil laughed out loud.



They traveled through the forested heart of South Hill. As she walked, Zanja 
imagined the ambush they could have planned. In her mind, they killed some 
twenty soldiers. Those twenty could never be replaced. And now that she thought 
of it, Zanja realized she had never seen a Sainnite child, and precious few 
soldiers who were younger than Medric. Were the Sainnites, like katrim, 
forbidden to bear or beget? If so, then they depended upon outsiders to bear and 
raise their children for them. Of course, the whores of Lalali were one example 
of how to make this happen, though a brothel village was hardly the place to 
raise soldiers. The babies would be taken away somewhere, perhaps to a garrison 
operated by disabled and retired Carolins whose job it was to raise and train 
the next generation of soldiers.
If the Paladins could find and kill those children then that, surely, would 
destroy the fighting spirit of the Sainnites.
“Dear gods,” Zanja whispered.
“Careful.” Emil, who had not been out of arm’s reach all morning, caught her, 
for she had nearly fallen.
“Do the Paladins make war on children?”
“Of course not.”
“The thoughts I’m having.”
“Here.” He moved her aside so that others in their party could pass. “The potion 
I gave you to drink sets the thoughts askew, like a fever.”
The black-garbed dignitaries, with their audacious earrings and upright 
attitudes pushed past them, one by one. How simple life must be for them, Zanja 
thought. To never have to distinguish right from wrong, and simply follow the 
law.
She and Emil walked behind them, side by side. Theirs was a far more complicated 
path.



Chapter Seventeen



Mabin and her entourage left with Annis in tow, and Zanja, despite her 
presentiments, remained unmurdered. Neither pain nor disordered delirium 
returned to trouble her.
It soon became apparent that Mabin had mobilized all of Shaftal to the defense 
of South Hill, and the steady tribute of food, supplies, and hardened veterans 
from all across the country rapidly transformed their rebel band into an army 
that Emil was hard put to organize or command. These were not soldiers, but 
guerrilla fighters, and Emil, though he could convince anyone to do anything, 
was no general. Nor, he complained rather wearily to Zanja, had he ever aspired 
to be one.
Zanja traveled ceaselessly among the five units of thirty that Emil, who needed 
no longer be so fearful of the Sainnites’ greater numbers, positioned on the 
high ground that rimmed the river valley. Whenever the Sainnites left their 
garrison, South Hill Company knew of it almost immediately, because Emil's spies 
set off signal rockets that could be seen for miles around. Always conscious 
that each time she bloodied her blade Karis knew about it, Zanja fought in the 
three clashes that proved the Paladins’ new strategic dominance. What followed 
might have been called a siege, except that between the Paladin encampments and 
the Sainnite garrison lay some of the richest farmland m South Hill. The 
Sainnites began to do what they seemed best at: methodical, thorough, mindless 
destruction. While the ancient orchards were toppled and the farmsteads and 
fields were burned, the valley farmers, bitterly angry at Paladin and Sainnite 
alike, hauled their children and animals and what belongings could be salvaged 
out of danger. Wagons crowded the roads of South Hill. The farmsteads outside of 
danger were overwhelmed with refugees and their belongings. At a time when only 
steady, careful attention to the crops could prevent the coming year from being 
a hungry one, all of South Hill lay in chaos.
Though South Hill Company could not prevent the Sainnites from razing the 
valley’s rich farmlands, they also could not endure to stand by and do nothing. 
Despite their disadvantage at direct, hand-to-hand combat, scarcely a day passed 
without at least one skirmish in which the Paladins crept up on Sainnites under 
cover of waist-high corn or drainage ditches choked with rushes, exchanged 
gunfire, and then fled in much the same way. The Paladins who spent their days 
crawling through the weeds took to calling these engagements hide-and-seek 
raids. It was no game, though, but a deadly, dangerous business that put 
Jerrell’s bone saw in high demand.
With every casualty Emil seemed another year older. Willis’s unit alone aged him 
by ten years, and Willis’s gloating reports of thirty or more Sainnites injured 
and killed did not make Emil less grim. He sent Zanja with a brusque message 
that she delivered, word for word: “We are not engaged in a contest to determine 
who can kill the greatest number of Sainnites. And the people of South Hill will 
not thank us for burdening them with an overwhelming number of crippled 
fighters. You are to have no more casualties, even if that means that you 
conduct no more raids.”
Willis heard this message with amazing equanimity. “No more casualties,” he 
said. “Well, I suppose he thinks I have his prescience, eh? Oh, but you do have 
it, don’t you?” He turned to his cronies, for, unlike Emil, he took his strength 
from numbers, not solitude. “It seems a worthy experiment, doesn’t it, to see if 
prescience can protect us from casualties?”
“Oh, yes,” they murmured, and Zanja did not need prescience to know that this 
conversation had been long planned.
“You want me to go out on a hide-and-seek raid?” she asked.
“We’re going out on one today.”
Zanja looked around that circle of hostile, grinning faces, and felt very tired. 
What was the price she would have to pay to be a full member of this company? 
They cared only about Sainnite corpses, it seemed. Well then, she would give 
them some, though she doubted it would be possible to give them enough.
So she found herself, in the company of some ten others, creeping through the 
corn plants towards one of the few valley farmsteads left standing. An earlier 
check with the spyglass had told them that the Sainnites were out in force, but 
once the Paladins had slipped into the valley they could no longer see how the 
enemy was deployed, and could not even be certain where they themselves were, in 
relation to the farmstead. The corn rows were as straight as a planting plow 
could make them, but still Zanja could not see more than a few feet ahead, and 
at times could scarcely see her own companions. Surely the Sainnites are 
expecting us to come down the corn rows, she thought, and turned to suggest to 
the Paladin closest to her that it might make more sense to approach from the 
drainage ditch. But her companions had all disappeared.
She turned as a breeze parted the corn leaves to reveal the soldier keeping 
watch at the end of the row. She dove crossways into the corn. Something like a 
hot poker punched her in the thigh. She turned and jumped the other direction, 
like a rabbit evading a wolf. Perhaps the fickle wind would not betray her 
again. Another gunshot. Someone shouted in Sainnese that she had gone towards 
the corncrib, whichever direction that might be. She headed away from the voice, 
cross-row. She fell, and was puzzled that she could no longer walk. She crawled 
instead, until she tumbled out of corn plants into mossy water. She lay among 
the rushes, her pistols under water, thinking how nice and cool it was there in 
the ditch. It seemed impossible that she would be found. She rested her head in 
the crook of her arm and thought she might sleep for a while, she was feeling so 
tired.
The pain inserted itself slowly into her unwarranted peacefulness, irritating as 
a voice telling her to get up and do some more work. She ignored it—she had felt 
worse pain and lived. But it grew worse, much worse, and finally she sat up, and 
noticed with surprise that the water she lay in had turned a bright scarlet. She 
found a neat hole scorched into the canvas of her breeches, and pulled them down 
to reveal another neat, blood-weeping hole in her thigh. Such a small wound, she 
thought, pretending that she did not know that a pistol ball’s worst damage was 
usually below the skin. She could not make a bandage—her clothing was muddy and 
soaking wet—and so she buttoned up her breeches and lay down again in the water, 
and forced herself to listen to what the world would tell her.
She heard a rapid volley of gunfire. After a long silence, she heard a second 
volley. The Paladins had circled around, she thought sleepily, after using her 
as an uninformed, unwilling decoy. She heard the sound of flames, and for a 
while she lay wounded in a different valley, listening to the sound of Sainnites 
burning a different village. I must get up, she thought, and woke to find that 
she already was crawling down the drainage ditch, though not until she saw the 
smoke and saw the soldiers did she realize she had gone the wrong direction. She 
watched them curiously, these angry soldiers stranded far from home in a hostile 
land, and understood too well what it was that made them want to burn everything 
to the ground.
She turned away from the burning farm, and began dragging herself down the 
drainage ditch again.
From the bottom of the ditch, she watched the shadows move and the sun set. 
Despite the summer warmth, the water’s cold set into her bones. She hauled 
herself out of the ditch and into the road, where she lay shivering. She heard 
the far-away bells of Wilton ringing the hours. Until it was too dark to see, 
she watched her blood seep into the dirt. At last, the search party that she 
knew Willis would have to send for her, if only for the sake of appearance, 
found her and carried her back to camp.



“I’m not going to die,” she told Jerrell, “and you’re not going to cut off my 
leg.”
Jerrell argued, but Zanja was adamant. Jerrell removed the pistol ball instead, 
which was bad enough, since it took some cutting to even find the ball, which 
was embedded in the thick muscles above the knee. When Zanja awoke in the 
afternoon, Emil was sitting beside her, with his legs stretched out before him 
and his back against a tree, gazing with a strained expression toward the 
smoking ruin that had once been one of the richest farmlands in Shaftal.
“What’s wrong with that seer?” he asked.
She began to sit up, and he turned to her. “I’ll get whatever you need. Jerrell 
says you are to lie still.”
“What I need can’t be gotten.”
He smiled wryly, and set himself to fetching and carrying the small comforts 
that he could provide: a cup of water, a bag of beans for a pillow. He checked 
on her clothing that hung in the sunshine, declared it not dry yet, and settled 
once more against the tree. “So,” he said, “in famine the Sainnites also go 
hungry, and famine is exactly what will happen in South Hill this winter. What 
seer would be so short-sighted? These Sainnites don’t behave like people with 
insight at all. In fact, they act like mindless brutes, as they always have. 
Could the seer be dead, or gone?”
“Maybe he’s lost his mind,” she said.
“Maybe he’s stopped dreaming. It happens.”
“Maybe he had a bad love affair.”
“Maybe he’s fallen ill.”
“Maybe,” Zanja said, “he’s had a change of heart.”
Emil looked out at the smoke-hazed valley, then back at Zanja. “Surely not. We 
fire bloods are cursed with loyalty. To turn traitor against the people we call 
our own—it’s not in us.”
“Sometimes insight overrides loyalty,” Zanja said, too bitterly.
They sat in silence for a while. So long as Zanja didn’t move, the pain in her 
leg was not unendurable.
Emil said softly, “Every time I close my eyes, I dream the same dream. A man 
sits before me, with a wooden box in his lap. He holds it up to me, as if 
proffering a gift, and opens the lid. I can’t see what’s in the box, but I know 
that I want it desperately.”
“What does he look like?”
“The man? Oh, I don’t know. It’s all in shadow: a big, dark room with a single 
lamp flame. Why does it matter?”
“It matters,” Zanja said, but felt that she could not explain. Later I will 
explain, she thought wearily, but now I cannot endure any more consequences.
“Well then,” Emil said, “next time I dream of him, I’ll try to get a look at his 
face.” He took her hand in his. “My dear, with only one leg, you’d still be 
invaluable to South Hill.”
“Of course Jerrell sent for you.”
“When a member of my company chooses certain death—”
Zanja said, “Do you remember when the bridgekeeper bit me?
“It wasn’t so long ago.”
“Which arm was it?” She held out both her arms, and after some hunting, Emil 
found the scar, nearly faded to invisibility.
“So you heal clean,” he said. “But a pistol ball—”
“Sir, Jerrell has already lectured me.”
“Sir!” He sat back a bit.
“My brother,” she amended. “I am not choosing death out of despair. I know my 
leg will heal.”
He looked at her for a long time, as if studying a particularly complex pattern 
of glyphs. “Someday,” he said finally, “you will tell me your secrets.” He took 
her hand again. “I’ll instruct Jerrell to trust your judgment, if you tell me 
the truth about what happened yesterday. Willis says that your companions lost 
you in the cornfield. They realized the Sainnites were watching for them and 
retreated, and only then noticed you weren’t with them.”
“I’m sure they abandoned me deliberately,” she said. “But unless one of those 
who was with me in the cornfield admits to it, I don’t see how it can be 
proven.”
“One of them will admit it soon enough,” Emil said quietly, “and I’ll finally 
have a good reason to rid myself of Willis, though I suppose his kinfolk will 
hold it against me forever, no matter how good my reasons are.” He sighed. “Do 
you know, in the old days, the G’deon might drive a spike into the heart of a 
particularly irritating enemy, and from that day every beat of the heart would 
lie in the G’deon’s control. That’s the way to solve my problem with Willis—keep 
him alive, let him continue as a lieutenant, but let him know that at any moment 
I might choose to let him drop down dead.”
He drew up his knees, looking for all the world as if he meant to continue 
talking to her all day. “Unfortunately, my powers are limited, and whatever I do 
will have unwanted consequences. Tell me something,” he added abruptly, “Do you 
feel up to reading the cards?”
“I don’t even know where they are.”
“They’re drying in the sun, like everything else you own.” He fetched them, and 
counted to see that all of them had survived, warped and mud-smirched though 
they were. As Zanja shuffled the cards aimlessly, he asked, “What characterizes 
the state of conflict between South Hill and the Sainnites?”
Zanja picked a card she’d not studied yet. It depicted a balance, or 
shopkeeper’s scale. Emil glanced at it and nodded without much surprise. “What 
would tilt the balance in our favor?” he asked.
Zanja could not choose a card. “Are you thinking too much?” Emil asked after a 
while.
“It’s as though every card is the answer.”
“So in order to tilt the balance we’d have to alter the entire Universe? Well, 
try this question instead: What is the most important factor in tilting the 
balance in our favor?“
Zanja chose a card and tossed it down before looking at it. It was the Owl. 
“Hmm.” Emil grinned without much humor. “Well now, this is getting interesting.”
Zanja shifted uncomfortably. Her injured thigh ached.
“So tell me, what is the Owl to do?”
Zanja laid down another card without looking at it, then saw that it was the 
Door. She sighed.
“What will immediately result from this decision that the Owl must make?”
She lay down another card, and Emil gave a small start, but said nothing. The 
glyph was one Zanja did not know; the picture showed an opening into a hillside.
Emil shook his head, and asked, “What will be the long term result of this 
decision?”
The last card seemed the most ambiguous of them all: it showed the silhouettes 
of a ridged horizon, with the sun above, either rising or setting. Emil moved 
the cards into an organized row and scowled unhappily at them. At last, he said, 
“Well, either this is a piece of arrant nonsense or a message of great portent. 
Based on what I see here, I want to say that it appears that you, Zanja, are a 
crucial factor in events with implications that reach far beyond South Hill. You 
are in a position where you must make a difficult decision even though you feel 
you cannot decide. Your decision will result in some kind of grave danger: a 
danger of spirit of body or both. It may very well lead to death.” He touched 
the card with the opening in the hillside. “This is the door to the labyrinth, 
the underworld. It is always dangerous but not necessarily fatal. Now, it is not 
clear who or what is endangered, but it may be you, or South Hill Company, or 
something much more important than any of us here. In the end—” he touched the 
Sun card “—there will be hope or loss of hope. An end of everything or a new 
beginning. It could go either way.”
Then there was silence.
Emil contemplated the cards. “Surely if this were nonsense I would recognize it. 
So what am I to make of this?” Then he grinned with a wry amusement. “Or, more 
specifically, how can I help you to make the right decision?”
“Anyone else would insist—demand—that I explain,” Zanja said.
“But if this is a true reading—and you would have told me by now if it 
wasn’t—then I have to assume that you don’t feel able to explain. If you don’t 
feel able to do it, then for me to insist that you do would only complicate your 
situation when it seems I ought to be making it simpler.” He looked up at her. 
“I must somehow help you without actually understanding what I’m doing or why 
I’m doing it. Tell me what to do.”
“In truth, I—am at a loss. These portents—they do not explain anything.”
“They tell me that you are caught up in something that’s much more important 
than you realize.” He turned the Door card so that it was right-side-up for 
Zanja and tapped it with his fingertip. “What can you tell me about this?”
Zanja said, “If I decide wrongly, then you are the one that will be endangered.”
“Me personally?”
“Emil—you have made yourself my friend. How could it not be personal? But it’s 
difficult to imagine that what happens to you won’t affect South Hill Company, 
our entire enterprise here, or the whole history of Shaftal which brought us to 
this point.”
“So. You’ve been avoiding me ever since the night we evacuated Fen 
Overlook—maybe even longer, since Fire Night. Something happened that I don’t 
know about.” He clasped his hands across his knee, as though restraining himself 
from doing something else: hitting her, embracing her; it was impossible to 
tell. “How can I help you?” he asked again. “Or is it absolution you need?”
“Tell me, in your dream—”
He raised an eyebrow. “You think my dream is relevant to this?”
“What is in the box?”
He tapped a finger on the Sun card. “Hope,” he said. “Or at least the hope of 
hope.”
“Would you die for it?”
“Yes, I would. So—am I going to die for desire’s sake after all, like every 
other fire blood since the dawn of time? Should I get my affairs in order? You 
understand,” he added gently, “I think it’s about time I had something worth 
dying for, something better than this idiot’s war.”
He held her hand for a while, then offered her a handkerchief from his breast 
pocket, and picked up the cards that she had let rail. Then he fetched Jerrell, 
who checked Zanja’s bandage and agreed to arrange for her family to give Zanja a 
safe place to recuperate, as soon as she could be moved. She gave her another 
potion to drink. The memory of Emil sitting quietly beside her, cleaning and 
oiling her pistols for her, accompanied Zanja in her sleep, in her dreams, into 
the day that followed, and into the night that followed that. It was such a 
small thing, and yet at the time she most needed it, it gave her a great peace.



Chapter Eighteen



In the silent night, the warm air lay heavy and still, and starlight blurred 
behind a lingering haze of smoke. Leaning on a staff, Zanja shuffled through the 
silence where accuser bugs should have shouted from the tree branches. But the 
trees all had been cut down, and without the intervention of their uplifted 
hands, the sky pressed down upon the earth like a smothering blanket. Here on 
the dark plain, the farmers slept by smoldering barns and clenched their fists 
in their dreams. It seemed the whole world had been put to the torch.
Zanja’s staff scraped gravel. Her foot dragged behind her; her patience wore 
thin. She had left the Paladin camp as early as she dared, but by the time she 
reached the grove outside of Wilton she had heard the city bell ring midnight. 
The grove, of course, had been cut down. She saw no sign of Medric, and sat upon 
a stump to wait.
She waited, listening to the clock toll out the passing hours. At last, she 
accepted that he was not coming. All her distress, it seemed, had been for 
nothing.
She thought she had allowed enough time to reach the camp again before summer’s 
early dawn overtook her, but her leg had stiffened as she waited, and then the 
wound reopened as Jerrell had warned it would if she didn’t keep it still. Her 
leg was bathed in warm, slow-flowing blood, and a lassitude came over her. So 
the horizon had begun to lighten when she climbed the steep path through the 
trees, past the inattentive pickets and back across the boundaries of the 
Paladin camp.
As she headed for her abandoned blankets, she heard a camp cook bang a pot as 
the flames of a cookfire began to crackle. It still was dark among the trees. 
She walked in shadow, careful, worried, wondering what had become of Medric and 
what she should do now. When Willis rose up from beside her empty bed, she 
stared at him, stupid as a rabbit in torchlight, unable to imagine what he was 
doing there, or what it meant.
She heard the others rise up out of darkness where they had been hidden. She let 
her staff fall, lest they mistake it for a weapon, and held out her empty hands. 
Contrary to what Ransel used to say, she did in fact know when to give up.
“So you deign to return to us,” Willis said. “Where have you been all night?”
I should have put up a fight and gotten myself killed, she thought, now that it 
was too late.
Willis struck her. She fell, and the earth did not catch her. She fell into the 
darkness, into the vortex of that catastrophic year.
A grinning Sainnite forced her to watch what he did to her, even though she 
could not feel it.
The Paladins lifted her up, and he struck her again.
He cut off her toes, one by one. His companions held her head by the hair, so 
she could not look away.
“Tell me where you have been!” he cried. He raised his fist.
A war horse’s hoof struck her in the head. She fell.
Ransel jerked her up by the hair. His familiar, battered war blade shone in a 
light too vivid to be sunlight.
“You are a traitor!” he cried, triumphant. The Paladins, startled and 
bewildered, or angry and jeering, gathered around.
“You are no longer one of the people!” Ransel cried. The As-hawala’i people 
stood silent, accepting his judgment.
He struck her, and she fell. She did not know anymore who was her brother, or 
her companion at arms, or her enemy. She fell, and she fell.



She opened her eyes, but could scarcely see. Upon bare ground, she lay bleeding, 
unwatched. It was a contemptuous inattention, for they certainly knew that she 
could not flee: she had no toes; her back was broken. Ransel had cut off her 
hair, thus rejecting her from the tribe. Why had they not brought her the 
suicide drink? The Ashawala’i had given all other outcasts that mercy: why not 
her?
She felt blindly for her weapons. The dagger was gone, and the pistols. But her 
small knife was still tucked into her blood-smeared boot.
She held the blade to her own throat, but could not cut deeply enough. She began 
to weep. “Lord Death, now I choose you.” Her fingers were painted with bright 
red ink. She wrote a message to him upon the shining metal of the blade. Then 
someone noticed, and with an exclamation snatched the knife out of her hand.



At the height of a stroke, Karis dropped her hammer. The red hot piece of iron 
fell from the tongs, and those also clattered onto the stone floor. A boy rushed 
over with the water bucket, but she dropped to her knees upon the stone floor, 
and swept her hand across it to clear the debris. With a scrap of iron she 
scratched a line upon the stone, then another crossing it, then a third.
“That’s the Raven,” said the boy helpfully, water sloshing out over his feet.
“What?”
“That’s the Raven glyph. Isn’t it?” The boy peered down at the marks she had 
made. “Your mastersign!” he said, apparently trying his best to make sense of 
her crazy behavior. “The messenger of good and bad fortune. It just came to you, 
right? And you wanted to write it down before you forgot, right? And now you can 
be a forgemaster, and you’ll take me to work for you?”
“The Raven.” Karis looked again at the marks she had drawn on the floor. 
“Something has gone terribly wrong.”



Zanja lay paralyzed in a blood-stained hay cart. At a distant mountain peak, the 
moon lifted her pale face to the starry sky. Except for the occasional calls of 
the soldiers on watch duty, the Sainnite camp lay silent. Zanja watched the sky, 
able only to wait, now that all choices had been taken away from her.
A slight sound made her turn her head, and a slim shadow separated from the 
darkness: lithe and silent, grinning teeth shining with moonlight. “Oh my 
brother,” she breathed. “Why do you risk your life for me? I am already dead, 
but you can still live.“
He came to her, though, silently laughing his raven’s laugh. “You trickster,” 
she said. “You have come to take my life in mercy at last.”
Yes. His blade was in his hand. She smiled at him, her courageous friend. “Come, 
then,” she said. And then a Samnite uttered a warning shout, and they rose up 
and killed him.
It had happened again. It would happen again, again, and again, while she lay 
hopelessly screaming, and Ransel’s sturdy heart pumped his lifeblood onto the 
ground. Over and over, he came to deliver the mercy blow, and over and over they 
killed him.



A heavy door grated open. There was a terrible blaze of light and a flapping 
shadow, like a big bird’s wings. “Come out of there,” Willis said.
“She’s been unusually quiet the last few hours,” another voice said doubtfully.
Emil’s voice, low and quiet, said, “She has been shouting and you left her 
unattended? She has a serious injury!”
For Emil, quiet meant angry, angry almost beyond speech. “I’m going in after 
her,” he said. But Zanja had managed to get to her feet by then, and shakily 
walked into the light. Emil was just a shadow she could see even with her eyes 
closed, and surely she was no more than a shadow to him, a being of the 
Underworld, a house habitated by memory.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
He should not be merciful to her, or he would die. But she took the hand he 
reached down to her, and let him haul her out of the darkness, into the dusty, 
milling chaos of a hot and sunny farmyard.
Through a blaze of tears brought on by sunlight, she saw farmers in their 
summertime work clothes, come to see who had been locked in their cellar and 
why. She saw each of Emil’s lieutenants, who had never, even at a funeral, 
seemed so grim. She saw many other Paladins, some who had jeered at her, some 
who might eventually have become her friends. All of them stared at her, and at 
the dignified man she’d had the temerity to call her brother, not so long ago.
His rage was masked, but she felt it like knife on bone. “You have made friends 
with a Sainnite,” he said.
She knew what she had to do. “Yes, sir.”
“And you went out the other night to meet this person?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What for?”
This time, he would not die. He would not help her as his enemies lay in wait. 
Better for him to hate her than to die because of her. She said, “I went to lead 
an attack on Willis’s unit, but they said they were not ready.”
His hand rested on his pistol. This close to her, he would get a good shot, and 
even in anger would shoot well, kindly, remembering his affection even as he 
knew it was betrayed. But then he sighed, and all was lost. “I know that is a 
lie,” he said.
A voice spoke behind Zanja. “She intends her lie as a gift.”
Zanja did not have to turn to know who had spoken. A black shadow flapped upon 
the ground in front of her. Her frail courage faltered.
Emil said, his voice still soft with anger, “A misguided gift.”
Zanja said, “Sir, it is my calling to transgress, but it is my duty to cause no 
harm by that transgression. Let me do my duty.”
Emil gazed into her eyes, expressionless, unblinking. And then he turned away, 
to speak to his lieutenants. “This matter will not turn out the way any of us 
might expect. It seems ill-advised to do this so publicly, when so much damage 
already has been done to our community.”
Willis said, “No,” as though he already was the commander. This was, certainly, 
his spectacle.
Emil smiled oddly, without amusement. “Well then, at least let’s get into the 
shade, for courtesy to our guest.” He gestured toward an arbor of flowering 
vines, where there were some inviting benches in the shade.
Zanja turned then, and looked into the scarred, sun-browned face of Norina 
Truthken. “What are you doing here? It is not your business.”
Norina said, “Who did you think would come?”
Though Zanja had lived with her until four months ago, she’d had no idea that 
Norina was pregnant. Even the heavy clothing of winter could not have concealed 
it now. Though her dust-stained clothing and red-rimmed eyes suggested a heroic 
journey had brought her here so quickly, her jutting belly hinted that at any 
moment she might deliver a child. Just the thought of her as a mother made 
Zanja’s head hurt.
Karis’s raven rode upon her shoulder. It was a most uncanny sight.
Zanja could barely walk the short distance to the arbor. The bullet wound in her 
leg had not healed at all as she lay helpless in the Underworld. At least she 
could escape the sun and sit upon a bench, though everyone else except Norina 
remained standing. A man-at-arms stood beside Norina, bristling with weapons 
like a brigand.
Willis began, “I found Zanja’s bed empty shortly after dark, and—”
Emil said, “I know what happened, Willis.”
“But the Truthken—”
“If Madam Truthken wishes to know something, she may ask.”
The watchfulness of Norina’s gaze, and the black bird on her shoulder, hardly 
seemed calculated to set anyone at ease. She said, “Lieutenant—Willis is your 
name?”
Willis jumped, and Zanja felt something, the faintest prickle of anticipation. 
“Madam Truthken,” he said belligerently.
“You have not told the truth.”
“I am not lying! Anyone who was there will confirm—”
“You wanted Zanja dead, and were desperate for an excuse. That is what you have 
not said.”
His face went white, but his chin came up. “I admit I had my men abandon her in 
a firefight. But I did that because I knew she was a traitor, and Emil would not 
see it, just as he will not see it now. I did it to save the company.”
Norina gazed at him, expressionless. “So you named yourself commander.”
Dazzled and bewildered by the vivid shine of truth in the midst of this 
nightmare, Zanja said, “He acted under Mabin’s command.”
She heard the faintest sound from Emil: a grunt of pain or surprise.
Norina’s gaze on Willis’s face never wavered. “She says the truth?”
“Yes,” Willis said, with more apparent pride than fear.
Norina blinked, once, and turned to Emil.
Emil said in a strangled voice, “What did she offer you?”
But Willis, seeming to think he had the upper hand, said loftily, “That’s 
between me and the councilor.”
The bloody fool would get command of South Hill Company. Zanja could feel no 
more horror; the betrayals had accumulated until she hardly noticed them. But 
the look on Emil’s face was worse than her own pain.
Norina stood up. “Commander, I need to speak to you alone.”
They stepped aside. The five lieutenants, two of whom Zanja scarcely knew, 
shuffled their feet and muttered to each other. The man-at-arms stood stolid as 
a plowhorse, but his gaze never ceased to flick from one person to the next. 
Zanja ached in every part of her body. She felt her face with her fingers, to 
find her eyelids swollen, her lip split, her cheekbone raw and bruised. Her leg 
hurt with a dull and insinuating pain. She kept forgetting where she was, and 
the faces of the lieutenants and the observers kept changing, from Paladin to 
Sainnite to Ashawala’i.
Norina and Emil returned. Emil said somberly, “I will communicate with Mabin on 
what to do with you, Willis, but meanwhile you are relieved of duty.”
Willis’s face turned red with anger. “And the traitor? You’ll let her go 
unpunished, of course!”
“We have not yet addressed the problem of Zanja,” said Emil evenly. “But I have 
relevant information that I doubt any of you have yet heard. The Shaftali 
prisoners were set free from Wilton garrison last night. Some of those from 
Annis’s family came direct to me and told me about how they’d been freed by a 
Sainnite man, who unlocked the doors and escorted them safely out of the 
garrison and out of the city itself, all under cover of darkness.”
“A Sainnite?” repeated Willis in disbelief.
“Yes. In fact, the freed prisoners carried a letter to me from him.” Emil turned 
to Zanja. “What did you tell this Medric, the night Willis found your bed 
empty?”
Zanja said, though it took a great effort, “I never saw him that night.”
Emil glanced at Norina. “Madam Truthken?”
“Truth,” Norina said.
“What were you intending to tell him?”
“I was going to bring him to you, to have you meet him.”
“Truth,” Norina said.
“Why?”
“He wanted to join the Paladins.”
Norina said, “I can’t judge the truth of hearsay.”
“Ah, yes. But Zanja believes what he told her to be true?”
“I can’t be certain, Commander. She wants it to be true, but for this very 
reason she does not trust her judgment—and for other reasons as well,“ Norma 
added, as though she were reading words being written as she spoke. ”I think she 
is unbalanced. How long has it been since she ate, or drank?“
“Just two days,” Willis said defensively. “Maybe three.”
“Wounded and bleeding. And your man says he heard her screaming.”
“What matter? She’s a traitor!”
“You believe that she’s a traitor,” Norina corrected him. “The truth, however, 
has yet to be determined, and cannot be determined when she is scarcely even in 
her right mind. Commander, I am here for my own reasons, but since you have 
asked me to arbitrate I must insist that you at least get her some water.”
Emil sent someone for water, and while that was being brought, Norina took a 
cloth bag out of the pocket of her doublet and tossed it to Zanja. It contained 
some kind of old dried fruit, gone hard as rawhide and practically as tasteless. 
Zanja held a piece in her mouth, and as it softened and dissolved a sudden 
clarity came to her: enough at least for her to realize how weak she was, how 
worn out with despair and horror. With the second piece the pain in her leg was 
eased, and with the third she sat erect and pushed some loose strands of hair 
from her face, and thanked the girl who had brought a dipper of water for her.
She said, “I met Medric on Fire Night. And though I was and am still half afraid 
that he might be engaged in some kind of elaborate trick, I took the risk of 
talking to him, because I thought the benefits could be great. It’s he who told 
me that the Sainnites were going to attack us at Fen Overlook.”
There certainly were some huge gaps in this story she’d told, but Emil at least 
seemed able to fill them in. He glanced at Norina, who said, “Clearly the 
truth.”
“What have you told him in return?” Emil asked.
“He asked only to meet you, Emil, and I told him nothing.”
“Truth,” Norina said.
Willis exploded. “What does it matter! She spoke to a Sainnite! She did it in 
secret!”
There was still something Zanja might do. She said, “Medric is a better man than 
you, Willis.”
Norina said, “Zanja, be quiet.”
“He said he would prove his trustworthiness to me, and he has proven it. 
Meanwhile, you have proven that nothing matters to you but your own ambition.”
Norina said, “Silence her!”
But Zanja cried, “There is just one traitor here, Madam Truthken!”
With all her strength, she flung herself at Emil’s weak knee, and he toppled 
like a rotten tree at exactly the moment of the pistol blast.
Zanja lay across him, gasping, terrified that she might have flung him into the 
line of fire rather than away from it. Then, Emil raised a hand and gently laid 
it on the back of her head. “Quite a display of prescience. What in Shaftal’s 
name do you think you’re doing?”
She said, for his ears only, “That man just guaranteed that he would never 
command South Hill Company.”
His chest heaved: was he laughing? She could not tell, he was otherwise so 
solemn. “Careful!” Linde had rushed over and seemed ready to disentangle them by 
flinging Zanja wildly out of the way. “Calm down, Linde, I’m not hurt. But she 
already was injured and it’s only worse now.”
Linde lifted Zanja and set her on the bench, then helped his commander to his 
feet. Linde’s face was white with shock, but not so white as Willis’s, who half 
stood and half hung within the grips of the other lieutenant and Norina’s 
man-at-arms. “I did not aim at Emil,” he said desperately to Norina, who had not 
moved from where she sat, and if anything seemed uninterested in the chaos 
before her. “I would never shoot my commander! It was her, the traitor—I lost my 
temper, is all!”
Emil walked over to him and hit him, a contemptuous blow that scarcely left a 
mark on Willis’s face, but silenced him effectively enough. Across the yard, 
that contemptuous blow registered in the faces of a dozen or more people, who 
although they had not heard what was said, surely could read the language of the 
scene, like any other staged drama.
“And you think that a man who cannot command himself can command a whole 
company?” He added, “Madam Truthken, is there a traitor here?”
Zanja felt so strange, so empty, so tired, that she wondered how she could still 
be present in this strange place. Norina said, “Zanja has merely exercised a 
fire blood’s usual foolhardiness. As for Willis, it is most ambiguous. Willis 
meant to shoot Zanja, but he meant it as a blow to you. So in the eyes of the 
law, perhaps it might be argued that you were his true target. In any case, I 
would refuse to hear him as Zanja’s accuser, for he only loves the justice that 
serves his interests, and only sees the Law as a tool to achieve his desires. He 
is untrustworthy, but technically he is not a traitor.“
“Let Willis go,” Emil said. Willis was released. “Get out of my sight,” Emil 
added. “And get out of my company. If you want to complain to Councilor Mabin, 
you are free to do so. The rest of you, please step away. I wish to talk to the 
Truthken alone.”
Reluctantly, they left. Emil sat heavily on the bench beside Zanja. “This is a 
fine mess!”
Across the green, Willis had already reached his people, and no doubt he quickly 
began to explain his version of what they had seen. But they stood back, 
apparently uncertain whether they wanted to be known to be his supporters any 
longer.
Norina said quietly, “Shall I leave?”
“If you don’t mind, Truthken, I think it best that I avoid the appearance of 
conspiring with Zanja and so it would be most useful to me if you remain.” Emil 
folded his hand and rested his forehead upon them in an attitude of utter 
weariness. “Zanja—You and I are at cross-purposes, of course. I am much more 
interested in saving your life than I am in saving my position. At the same 
time, you are trying to save my position and seem little interested in saving 
your life.”
Zanja said, “My brother, you have died for me a hundred times. I could not 
endure it anymore.”
Ransel looked at her blankly.
“Don’t be a fool,” Zanja implored him. “Every time you try to help me, you die. 
Do not burden me with the terrible memory, I beg you! If you do not die, you 
cannot blame me for failing to avenge you.”
Ransel took both her hands in his. “My sister,” he said gently, “the past is 
done and cannot be changed. Come forth out of the Underworld.”
Emil was holding her hands. He said quietly, “Madam Truthken, this must be the 
anniversary of the massacre of the Ashawala’i.”
Norina’s eyes narrowed, as though she had been handed a package that might or 
might not be a gift.
“I think she’s half out of her mind,” he added, “and she certainly cannot 
recover here. I ask you to take her under your protection, and bring her to a 
healer.”
Norina stood up. “I will, of course. But first, I think I’d better guarantee 
that the rogue lieutenant of yours can’t get his forces organized, or we may 
find it difficult to get safely out of South Hill. I’ll leave my man here, to 
give you the appearance of propriety. I don’t think any of your people have 
noticed that he’s deaf.“ She picked up the bag from beside Zanja and gave her a 
handful of the dried fruit. ”What became of your blades? You don’t know? All 
right, I’ll find them for you. Is there anything else you own that’s too 
precious to leave behind? All right, eat that. Come, raven.“
The raven flew to her shoulder, and, gesturing to her man to remain, Norina 
walked over to the knot of people that had formed around Willis. The knot 
loosened as Willis’s people stood back to let him face the Truthken on his own. 
No doubt she would use her substantial powers and authority to make his present 
and future life as unpleasant as he deserved.
Emil commented, “A formidable woman, even for a Truthken.” He took some folded 
papers from his doublet’s inside pocket. “My first letter from a seer. He 
devoted most of it to successfully convincing me to spare your life at any cost. 
As for the rest, he says he had a dream that the land would recognize him as her 
son, and so he’s going forth into Shaftal on his own. He wrote that he has left 
me all his books—had them shipped downriver to a storehouse in Haprin for me to 
pick up. I feel like I’ve been bequeathed a child by a total stranger.”
Zanja said, “I wish you could have met him. You would have liked him.”
“I admit I find his letter both intelligent and convincing. It’s a very strange 
sensation to be saying such things about a man who has helped to kill so many of 
my friends.”
“But he was trapped. When the walls of the House of Lilterwess fell, the 
Samnites themselves were buried in the rubble. And we all are buried there with 
them, crushed and suffocating under the stones.”
“Hmm. Now you are talking treason. Good thing there’s no one but me to hear.” 
Emil unfolded his letter from Medric again, and Zanja saw how creased and 
smudged the paper was. This letter had forced Emil to subject it to uneasy and 
intense scrutiny, and perhaps its contents still were being delivered to him as 
he glanced at it once again, still seeming uncertain how to read it. “He wrote 
some glyphs here at the bottom, do you see? It seems like a message to you. At 
least, here is your Owl, your Raven, your Door.”
In fact, Medric had written at the bottom of the page each of the glyphs from 
Zanja’s frantic card reading the day after Fire Night. But now, no madwoman lay 
at the center of the circle, holding together or being torn apart by contrary 
forces. Instead, there was a glyph Zanja did not know how to read. She touched 
it with her fingertip, and Emil said, “That’s Fellowship, the union of friends 
to serve a grand design. What do you think he means by it?”
“I think he’s nineteen years old and hasn’t yet lost his hope.” 
“Zanja na’Tarwein,” Emil said, “may that hope one day be yours and mine as 
well.”



When Norina returned, Willis walked behind her, carrying some of Zanja’s gear, 
including her missing blades. One of his people also followed, leading the 
horses like a servant. Truthkens must be obeyed, in small things and in large. 
Zanja hastily chewed and swallowed the dried fruit. It lay within her, warm as 
earth in summer. The wound in her leg stopped seeping blood, and when she stood 
up, her vision remained clear.
Emil buckled her weapons belt onto her and put the knife into her boot sheath, 
and helped her mount one of Norina’s horses. She must have looked a ruin as she 
rode out of that place, tired unto death, with her breeches blood-encrusted and 
her face marked and swollen from Willis’s fist. When she looked back, she saw 
Emil, standing serenely alone in the middle of the roadway. He lifted a hand in 
farewell. So long as he stood there, Zanja knew, no one would dare chase after 
them. He was still standing there when the road took a turn, and he was gone 
from sight.



Part 3
The Hinge of History

      All love is made of insane hope.

      —MACKAPEE’S Principles for Community


      The past is always with us. For the blood that soaks the earth cries out 
      for justice. And without justice we never will have peace.

      —MABIN’S Warfare


      Between victory and defeat, between offense and revenge, lies
      a third possibility: neither a compromise nor an abandonment, but a 
      marriage.

      —MEDRIC’S History of My Father’s People






Chapter Nineteen



Like a great wheel the year turned; and now the sower dropped to the horizon, 
and up rose the gatherer with her arm outstretched to capture the ripe stars and 
put them in her basket. All day, in kitchens across Shaftal, the ripe fruits had 
been cut up to be dried in the sun, or cooked with sugar to make preserves, or 
covered with hot syrup to be baked into pies during the dark half of the year.
Now it was night, and in the most northwestern borderland, the general of the 
Paladins sat awake in her lamplit study with a bowl of golden apricots untouched 
upon her desk. The aging general of the Sainnites also sat awake, drinking wine 
and pacing restlessly as he made the messenger from South Hill explain again and 
again how the South Hill garrison had managed to lose track of the Sainnites’ 
only seer.
Somewhere between these two generals, in a silent glade well away from the road, 
Zanja lay staring into the darkness, and did not flinch or even seem to notice 
when Norina began to peel the bandage from her wounded leg. And on the river 
which runs east past Wilton, Emil stood at the bow of a boat that lazily rode 
the current towards Hanishport and the sea. After fifteen years as the commander 
of South Hill Company, he had left South Hill, and never would return.
How could he continue to command, when his general had proven herself such a 
fool? Norina Truthken had told him quite forcefully that Mabin had valid reasons 
for her actions that would never be explained. But whatever Mabin’s reasons, no 
matter how valid they might be, that did not make it any less impossible for 
Emil to continue as commander. He wrote Mabin a letter, he delivered South Hill 
Company to Perry’s capable command, he bid his friends farewell, and he left 
South Hill.
His lifetime of service had left him impoverished by Shaftali standards, for he 
had no family to go home to, and the friends who had served as family in the old 
Paladins were dead or fighting in the war. Still, he could not seem to bring 
himself to be concerned about his own future. He felt only his freedom.
The boat reached Haprin at mid-afternoon. He made his way to a storehouse near 
the docks, where he showed a woman his letter from Medric and she waved him into 
the building without even looking at it. “It’s four big trunks, halfway back on 
the right side,” she said. “You’ll be needing a wagon.”
Once beyond the light of the doorway, he walked through a darkness that rustled 
with mice and bats. He hoped that the trunks were good ones and he would not 
find the books chewed to pieces. Halfway down the long, dark building, a sudden 
light flared as though someone had lit a match. The flare became a lamp wick’s 
steady glow, and the flame disappeared, though Emil could track it by the light 
it cast. In his recurring dream, he had followed that glow of light through 
shadows just like these. He remembered these half-seen crates, the dusty, dim 
shadows, the rustling of the mice. His heart’s desire waited for him here.
The crowded shapes would form an open space here, which would be filled with 
light. And so he found a glowing nest of blankets tucked among the massive 
trunks. The man from Emil’s dream sat quietly beside a small brass lamp, which 
did not illuminate his face. Upon his knees lay a plain, flat wooden box with a 
broken latch that once had locked with a key. The man said nothing, but held the 
box up to Emil.
Emil knelt and took the box. He opened the hinged lid, and laid the box down 
upon the floor so that the lamplight shone inside. The papers carefully 
preserved within were padded with small pillows of down and silk. On the top 
page was written, “Principles for Community,” and underneath, scarcely readable 
in faded ink, the name “Mackapee.”
Emil did not touch the fragile paper, but he bent his face close to it, and 
breathed deeply. He could smell, so faint it scarcely was there at all, the 
scent of peat smoke. The Mackapee manuscript had not been burned after all.
He saw that his life had been a spiral, first veering away from loss, but now 
turning back to a new beginning. He had done his duty. Now, at last, he could 
follow his heart.
“You can only be Medric,” he said.
“Sir, can you return this manuscript to its rightful place?”
“It belongs at the library at Kisha, which has been destroyed.” Emil carefully 
closed the lid of the manuscript box. “I’ll have to build a new library, and a 
new university. And first, I’ll have to make Shaftal a place in which libraries 
and universities can be built.”
The young man said, “That’s not a bad idea.”
“It’s an undertaking so large I doubt anyone alive now will live to see the end 
of it.”
“Oh, no, I think you’re wrong. But in any case, ‘What’s worth doing is worth 
merely beginning.’ ”
“So wrote Mackapee, the first G’deon of Shaftal. Have you read the manuscript?”
“The manuscript? No, sir, it has not been removed from its box. I’ve studied a 
printed copy.”
Emil took up the little traveling lamp by the handle, and lifted it so it 
illuminated Mednc’s face. The seer’s lenses glowed with flame. “You are young,” 
Emil said.
“I suppose. You’re exactly as I dreamed.”
“You dreamed of me? What did you dream?”
Medric’s gesture took in the dark warehouse, the glowing lamp, the fortress of 
books. Emil set down the lamp rather sharply, and sat back on his heels. When 
two fire bloods share a dream, it is said, their fates are linked forever.
Medric peered at him. “Are you all right, sir?”
“You’ll help me build that library.”
“You’ll accept my help?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Oh.” Emil began to laugh. “That’s right; you’re the enemy.”
It seemed to also strike Medric as terribly funny, and his hilarity didn’t run 
dry until his spectacles fell off and he had to retrieve them by feel.
Emil said, “A few days after Fire Night, when Zanja was on her way to meet 
you—though I didn’t know it then—she said she was trapped in the past and needed 
to cross over into the future. I foolishly asked her to take me with her. So 
here I am, bewildered mainly by my lack of regret.“
Medric smiled. “I crossed over also, knowingly and willingly. But what became of 
her?”
“I managed to get her safely out of South Hill. That’s all I know. But let me 
thank you now, while I’m thinking of it, for your letter. It helped me to do 
what was right, and I needed that help desperately.”
“Well, I’m glad I’ve done some good for once.”
“Have you eaten? May I buy your supper?”
Medric gathered himself up and rose to his feet. “I confess, I haven’t eaten in 
a day or two, and not because I’m fasting for a vision.”
“You’re penniless, of course, which is why you’re sleeping with your books.”
“Your books.”
“My books, if you insist. Yet it seems that you accompany them.”
“Sir, the books are not a bribe. Ever since I began to collect them, I knew that 
I would have to deliver them to a proper caretaker. I simply could not bear to 
leave them unguarded.” Medric offered his hand to help Emil rise.
Emil took Medric’s hand and let himself be helped. Medric was slightly built and 
had a soft hand, but he was not without muscle. Only a fool would underestimate 
him: no accident had brought them to this place, but the active, determined 
intervention of a gifted seer. His air of uncertainty was merely an affectation.
Emil said, still holding his hand, “My name is Emil. If you call me ‘sir’ again, 
I’ll start calling you ‘Master Seer’.”
Medric looked appalled. “Please don’t, Emil.”
“Let’s get some food in you.”
Emil could not bear to leave the manuscript unattended, so they took it with 
them. At the inn, Medric asked for bread and vegetables, causing the cook to 
look at him askance, but Emil accepted roast capon and a pie of fresh peaches. 
Over food, their conversation turned from somber to hilarious, and Emil laughed 
until his ribs hurt, wondering if that lightness in his chest could possibly be 
his heart. If it was his heart, it was on holiday.
After supper, he purchased a wagon and a sturdy dray horse, using almost all the 
money he had taken with him. Haprin had a ferry that would take him across the 
river; from there he would go to the western border where he could store the 
books with his friend the shepherd. After that; well, he supposed some plan 
would come to him.
It was nearly dark when they returned to the storehouse. Medric showed Emil the 
other rare books in his collection. He had found them one by one through dreams, 
he said, stored at the bottom of one or another soldier’s footlocker. He had 
collected a couple of hundred books by the time he finally got the one he was 
looking for, The Way of the Seer, and each book had its own adventure story of 
unlikely survival in a hostile world. They talked about the books until the lamp 
oil ran out and left them sitting shoulder to shoulder in a sudden darkness.
Medric said, “Sometimes this summer I have envisioned myself in another place: a 
stone cottage in a lonely land, with sleet tapping on the shutters and a warm 
fire burning. And I’m not alone there. I ask a question, and you come and sit 
down next to me. You tell me how the past became the present. You get a book 
down from the shelf and read it to me.”
Emil said, “It’s still a long time before sleet taps on the shutters, but 
tomorrow is close by. I hope you’ll be traveling with me.”
“I will,” Medric said. “Don’t go.”
Emil could feel Medric’s warm breath stirring the air between them. He found 
Medric’s face by feel and carefully took off his spectacles and put them safely 
atop the trunk. Then, in a bed that was made of as much book as blanket, he made 
love to a son of the enemy. It occurred to him later that even his oldest and 
most loyal friends would not forgive him this transgression, or even worse, 
they’d misunderstand and pity him. He lay in the rustling darkness of the 
warehouse with Medric asleep in his arms, and could not bring himself to care 
what anyone thought of him. He had broken with the past, and the future was a 
book he could hardly wait to read.



Chapter Twenty



After a day or two of travel, Zanja stopped expecting the upbraiding she 
deserved. In fact, Norina accorded Zanja a certain kindness, though from outside 
it might have looked more like indifference. She had looked after Zanja’s 
injuries, patiently soaking loose the bandage from the wound, and rebandaging it 
every day after that with an expertise that she must have acquired from J’han. 
She insisted that Zanja rest even though she could not sleep, and hounded her 
into eating. She and the man took turns riding, while Zanja rode all the time, 
and she would not permit Zanja to do any of the work at all, except small things 
she could do while sitting down. It was easier to acquiesce to her iron will 
than it was to resist, and so, in spite of the circumstances, Zanja’s injuries 
began to heal.
Other than insisting brusquely that Zanja obey her, Norina left her alone. Zanja 
rode blindly behind her companions, carried forward only by the momentum of the 
journey. She did not know where she was, or in what direction she traveled. She 
did not care that she lived, and took no interest in what might happen to her 
next. Days passed, and she did not even speak. She wept without noticing her own 
tears.
One morning, she raised her head and noted that they were traveling northward. 
They followed a rutted, unmarked track through rugged, mountainous country. Some 
time passed, and she looked down and noticed Norina walking at her stirrup, 
breathless, putting a hand occasionally to the horse’s side for balance. “You’ll 
miscarry,” Zanja said.
“I’m as likely to miscarry as you are to die from sepsis,” Norina said.
Some time later, Zanja said, “I feel I could die from sorrow first.”
But Norina said, quite sensibly and with surprising kindness, “You’ll start 
feeling better soon. The first year is over.”
A long time later, Zanja asked, “Will Willis get control of South Hill Company?”
Norina laughed. “That man? Not even in his dreams.”
That night, Zanja plunged into a deep and restful sleep, from which she woke as 
if rousing from a summer fever. She bathed in a cold stream, washed and mended 
her shirt, and took out her blades to check and clean them. The small knife in 
her boot was blood-encrusted. She fingered the scab on her neck, remembering 
what she had done, amazed that her crazed logic had brought aid after all.
“The raven is gone?” she asked Norina, as they ate camp porridge by the fire. 
The man-at-arms was already saddling the horses.
“Naturally, I sent him with a message to Karis that you are all right.”
“I want to send Karis an apology. I must have startled her when I wrote that 
message on the knife blade.”
Norina ate a few mouthfuls of her porridge before commenting, rather wryly, “I 
have to say, your methods are ingenious.”
One night they were kindly welcomed and generously fed in a woodcutter’s camp, 
where the people were desperate for news and stories of any kind at all. Zanja 
lay gazing at the stars, which had not been so close since she left the 
mountains of her people.
Soon, they climbed down out of the mountains and followed a river to the 
northwest, and slept one night at a farmstead, in the hay. The farmers fed them 
even though they were respectively too injured, tired, and pregnant to work; 
they would not hear of a pregnant woman going hungry; and they nearly convinced 
her to sleep in a bed instead of the barn. Norina was not tireless, and when 
Zanja turned to look at her that night she caught her off guard, and just for a 
moment could see how worried she was. Then Norina turned her head, and her face 
was stone again.
At midday, they entered a village at a crossroads, which Norina said was called 
Strongbridge. The bridge was indeed impressive, and was frequently crossed by 
heavy wagons. The inn-yard they entered served as a kind of depot where huge 
dray horses stood harnessed while the drivers paced the cobbles, stretching 
their stiff legs, eating the meat and bread hauled out to them in baskets, and 
swigging tankards of ale against the oppressive heat. The inn itself was of 
startling size, recently painted red and green, with flowers cascading over its 
roof from an enterprising vine. Among the flowers a raven stalked. In the 
rectangular gap of a second floor window a very tall woman was intricately 
folded, nearly invisible in shadow. She looked as though she might be trapped 
there.
“Zanja,” Norina said sharply, to call her attention to the girl who waited for 
Zanja to hand her the reins.
Zanja dismounted, and left horse and companions standing in the yard. She could 
not run yet on her injured leg, and the front door jerked open before she had 
reached it.
She had half forgotten how big Karis was. She filled the doorway, her shoulders 
almost wide enough to touch both doorframes, head bowed to fit below the lintel, 
big hands clasping the timber frame as though she might simply collapse it, and 
make the inside out, and the outside m. And then it was as though the earth 
itself had clasped Zanja in a bruising embrace and lifted her half off her feet, 
and made as though to completely encompass and engulf her.
Her ear was against Karis’s heart. She gripped her with all her strength. She 
would not let Karis go again. All the forces of the Universe might range 
themselves against her, but she would not let Karis go.
“Just leave us alone, Nori,” Karis said after a while.
A long time later, Zanja lifted her head a little, and realized that Karis had 
practically folded herself around her, and seemed not at all inclined to release 
her, though she did raise her cheek somewhat from the top of Zanja’s head when 
she felt her move. Zanja said, “I’m making a mess of your shirt.”
“How would anyone know the difference?” But Karis produced a sweaty handkerchief 
from somewhere, and Zanja used it to wipe the remaining tears and dirt from her 
face. “We’re making spectacles of ourselves,” Karis said.
Around the bulge of Karis’s bicep Zanja could see into the public room, where a 
couple of hardened drinkers stared at them. “Surely there’s a path by the 
river,” Zanja said.
Zanja’s limp gave them as good a reason as any to walk arm in arm despite the 
sweltering heat. She felt dazed, in a strange land, with no familiar landmarks. 
Dear gods, she thought, what boundary did I just cross? As they walked through 
the town, Karis stopped to buy some steamed buns from a stall, which did a 
desultory business. The streets were largely deserted, dogs lay panting in what 
shade they could find, and every window was propped open. On a day like this, 
the entire population of Asha Valley could have been found in or near the river, 
and so it was here. The shady shoreline was crowded with lounging or dozing 
adults, and still more swam along the banks, keeping an eye on the shrieking 
children. They found a solitary place at last, where the current was probably 
too swift for swimming, and they sat side by side upon the damp earth. Damsel 
flies covered a branch over the water like jewels on a rich man’s jerkin. Karis 
gave Zanja a dumpling. Its meat filling was so spicy it made Zanja’s eyes tear 
up again.
“Now stop that,” Karis said.
“It’s really spicy. Gods know I’ll cry at anything lately, but this time it’s 
not sadness.”
Karis took a bite, and closed her eyes in concentration, chewing. “I guess maybe 
I can taste something,” she said finally.
“It’s like eating coals from a fire,” Zanja said.
“Is that good? It certainly sounds interesting.”
“In a painful kind of way.”
Zanja had not quite remembered the utter chaos of Karis’s hair, which grew in 
every direction and was twisted into vinelike tendrils that looked impossible to 
comb or tame. She had not quite remembered the intense blue color of her eyes, 
or the fine lines that radiated out from them like the splines of a fan. She had 
remembered that Karis’s physical presence was a kind of a shock, like a stone 
tossed into water or a live voice penetrating a dream, but when they last met 
Zanja had been unable to truly feel the impact of it. Now, with every breath 
that lifted Karis’s shoulders, every pulse in her throat, Zanja felt her own 
heart turn over. When Karis turned to her, she did not know what to do. Should 
she confess? Should she look away?
Karis said, “I’ve thought about you constantly.”
Zanja opened her mouth, but didn’t trust whatever might have come out of it. 
“How is it possible that you can act like this without desiring me?” she might 
have said.
Karis said, “Take off your pants.”
Zanja felt a disorientation, then got a grip on herself and said with 
difficulty, “My leg is healing.”
“Please, Zanja, I beg you. The trajectory of the pistol ball has torn up the 
muscles of your thigh. Even if it heals you’ll have scarring inside your leg, 
and the muscle won’t work right because of it, and I’ll never be at peace if I 
don’t fix it.”
Zanja unbuttoned and pulled down her breeches and lay upon her side while Karis 
cut the bandage from her thigh. She would turn this experience into a test of 
discipline, for she seemed to be sorely in need of such an exercise. “Can you 
leave the scar?”
“For bragging rights?” Karis sounded amused.
“I was abandoned by my fellows in the middle of a firefight because they wanted 
me dead. That hardly seems a thing to brag about. But I’d rather not have to 
explain why I don’t have a scar to show for it.”
“All right. I’ll try to restrain myself.”
The violence of metalsmithing had not spoiled Karis for more gentle crafts. She 
almost made the healing seem as if it were not work at all, except that 
occasionally a drop of her sweat fell and landed on Zanja’s skin. Zanja worked 
to keep her breathing steady and her muscles relaxed; her old trainers would 
have been proud of her. When Karis’s warm hands lifted from her thigh, it was a 
relief but also a loss.
“That’s better,” Karis said.
Zanja pulled up the bloodstained remains of her pants. “How do you do it,” she 
asked shakily, “without being able to feel?”
“I feel a little. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”
“When I think of what you could do . . .”
“Don’t think about it.”
“The man that got you addicted to smoke—”
“He’s dead already, not that it does me any good.”
“I’d like to kill him again.”
“You’d have to wait your turn.”
Behind the clear eyes, the powerful, passive muscles, the soot ground into her 
skm, and the quiet, waiting expression of her face, lay a deep anger. Zanja 
said, “Karis, you are not tame, merely caged.”
Karis made a sound as if she had accidentally sliced a finger. “You know, 
talking to you is a bit like chewing on hot coals.”
Zanja broke into a startled laugh.
“My raven said you were in a black despair.”
Zanja said grudgingly, “Norina has been as kind as I would tolerate, and I guess 
it’s done me some good. You must have done something dramatic, to force her to 
treat me so gently.”
Karis showed her teeth. “Oh, I did.”
“Did you threaten to come get me yourself?”
“Threaten? No, she is immune to threats. I started to South Hill moments after 
I’d gotten your message, and I challenged Nori to give me a reason to turn back 
and let her go in my place.”
Karis lay upon her back and gazed up into a sky as blue as her eyes. Her shirt 
collar was unbuttoned and sweat collected in the hollow of her throat. Zanja 
shut her eyes and begged the hot afternoon to anesthetize her. After a long time 
she said, “But Norina seems desperately worried, and much as I don’t like her I 
must respect her. I wish I understood what she understands.”
“Mmm. This is what you sound like when you’re being diplomatic. It’s not chewing 
coals anymore, it’s more like—oh, I’m no good at metaphors. You tell me one.”
Zanja tried to think of texture, for although Karis could not taste, she surely 
could feel enough to be able to tell soft from hard. “Those crisp cakes with 
chewy pieces of fruit in them,” she suggested.
“They feed those to me when I’ve forgotten too many times to eat. They must be 
mostly butter. What are you laughing at?”
“You don’t like those little cakes?”
“I hate being treated like I’m an invalid.”
“I apologize. It’s my own ignorance that makes me resort to indirection. I don’t 
know what I’m supposed to say or know. I don’t know what might hurt or offend 
you.”
Unlike the sun-parched sky at which she gazed, Karis’s eyes were a bright, 
unfaded blue. She squinted them shut suddenly, as though sweat stung them. “When 
Norina takes you away, you won’t know any more than you do now.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Zanja said.
Karis turned her head. “Norina is my protector because she’s dangerous.”
“Yes, but she has more to lose than I have.”
“Are you going to make me demand that you obey her?”
“Are you going to treat me like a servant?”
“Are you going to make me choose between you?”
“Why not? Norina makes you choose.”
“She has a good reason.”
“What good reason could she possibly have?”
Karis said unsteadily, “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m bound by obligations I can’t explain to you. Why are you so 
cantankerous? Is it the heat?”
Zanja said, “From beginning to end, this year has been a disaster. But I’ve 
learned something that you and Norina both don’t know: how impossible it is to 
really make a choice, when the best choice of all is an option you couldn’t even 
imagine.”
Karis blinked up at the glaring sky. “Say that again, but fill it up with human 
experience and leave out the abstract words, and maybe I’ll understand it.”
“The Sainnites defined my choices for me. And before that, the Ashawala’i did 
the same. Because I am a katrim, and because the Sainnites are fools, I am 
living a life that I hate. I’m thinking I should do something else.”
“I see,” Karis said.
“In much the same way, Norina makes it possible for you to live within your 
cage. And so long as she helps you tolerate captivity you never will break free. 
You’ll have no reason to try.”
“Shaftal’s Name!” Karis sat up abruptly.
Now ends our friendship, Zanja thought.
“Oh, you are dangerous,” Karis said.
She settled back onto her elbows, and in the heated silence the accuser bugs 
suddenly began to shrill. After a long time, she said, “Norina has insisted that 
you be left in ignorance, lest you do something disastrous. But now it seems 
that you have done something disastrous because of your ignorance.”
“Names of the gods! What have I done?”
“I can’t tell you—that’s Norina’s business. But I think I will point out to her 
that to continue to leave you in ignorance seems, at best, ill-advised,” Karis 
said. “And to treat you like a servant seems ridiculous, since you will 
not—cannot—act like one—except as a kind of play-acting. And to send you away 
has proven impossible since no matter how far you go I continue to hold onto you 
in spite of all advice and common sense. Norina insists that I must 
not—cannot—simply call you my friend. I am a smoke addict, and she is a 
Truthken. Only an idiot would trust my judgment over hers. So tell me what I am 
to do, Zanja, for I am at a loss.”
Zanja said, “Why don’t you seek the advice of a seer? It just happens that I 
know one, and—”
She had to stop, because Karis had begun to howl with laughter. Nonplused, she 
waited for Karis to recover from her mirth, which had a certain bitter edge to 
it, for she seemed almost to be sobbing by the end, and had to wipe her tears on 
the tail of her shirt. “You have no idea—” she gasped.
“No idea at all,” Zanja agreed.
“I’m sorry,” Karis said. “Tell me about your seer. Tell me how you met.”
“I met Medric on Fire Night,” Zanja began. “Emil had sent me to find Annis, who 
had gone rogue after the Sainnites torched her family’s farmstead, and my search 
brought me to Wilton, where I found her. But along the way, something began to 
happen to me, and I began to do things that made no sense . . .”
But at least one thing she had done did make sense. She opened the pouch that 
held her glyph cards, and shook out from the bottom, where she had nearly 
forgotten it, the pendant of green stone and silver wire. “That day I bought 
this for you, though I had no reason to even imagine that I would see you again. 
I thought I had lost my mind. I was starting to remember things in a way that 
seemed insane. But perhaps it was, after all, a kind of prescience. When the 
veil between present and past tore apart, so also did the veil between present 
and future. I hadn’t lost my mind; I merely knew something I had no business 
knowing.”
She put the pendant into Karis’s hand. “You see, now I have given you the 
pendant. I look forward to someday understanding how everything I did that day 
makes as much sense as buying this pendant did.”
Karis seemed dumbfounded, and said not a word as Zanja resumed her tale, but lay 
back in the grass with the pendant in her fist, resting against her breast, 
until Zanja had described her last sight of Emil standing in the middle of the 
road, and then fell silent.
Then Karis said, “Name of Shaftal, it does make sense. Norina has been 
wrong—wrong from the first moment I sensed your presence in Shaftal. Zanja—” She 
swallowed. She was breathing as though she had run a race. “Yes, I do want to 
speak to Medric, very badly.”
“I can bring him to you. Unless I’ve sorely misjudged him, he would make himself 
easy for me to find. He wants nothing more than to do some good in Shaftal. It 
doesn’t bother you that he’s half Sainnite?”
As Zanja talked, Karis had gotten to her feet. Now, she gazed down at Zanja, and 
her face seemed very far away, and shadowed suddenly as her height blocked out 
the sun. “What is it exactly that you think I am?” she asked.
Zanja stared up at her. The people of the Juras tribe were yellow-haired, 
blue-eyed, extremely strong giants. But Karis’s Juras mother had been a Lalali 
whore. “Your father would have been a very big man,” she said. 
“And a Sainnite.”
“No doubt. I suppose that would matter to some people.” 
“To some people, it is the most important thing about me.” 
“Well, Karis, you know some tremendous idiots.” 
Karis leaned over, and took hold of Zanja with both her hands, and set her on 
her feet. “So long as you’re not one of them,” she said, and Zanja saw that she 
was smiling.



Beyond the inn-yard and the inn, behind the kitchen, grew an undisciplined 
garden where climbing roses and fragrant herbs tangled into a blooming thicket, 
over which bees operated in a hum of industry. The beehives stood at the 
garden’s edge, nearly half a dozen of them. Bees bumped into Zanja and Karis as 
they walked across the flight path, their feet crunching in the dried bee 
corpses that littered the ground. Zanja followed Karis into the tangle of roses, 
and Karis in turn followed a path to a lathe house overgrown with rich, green 
vines. The door had fallen off its hinges. Within, Norina lay upon a bench in a 
mossy shade garden planted beside a spring. The bubbling pond was filled with 
sodden wooden crates that contained bottles of milk and wine, kept cool by the 
cold water. The shade garden seemed damp and almost chilly compared to the 
sun-sodden outdoors. Norina lay on her side with her head pillowed on one arm.
Zanja hesitated at the doorway as Karis knelt beside Norina and lay a hand upon 
her gravid torso. She smiled so sweetly that Zanja wondered how anyone could 
remain angry with her. Even Norina could be cajoled, for after a moment her 
scarred face creased with a rare smile. Bits of sunlight that came in through 
the lathwork speckled them with sparks of brilliance.
Leaning upon the rotting door post, Zanja saw how it must always have been 
between them: bound by an affection sturdy enough to survive all the 
disagreements and power struggles that were inevitable between two such willful 
women.
They talked in low voices, then Zanja heard Karis say, “Are you certain you want 
to know?”
Norina opened her shirt and Karis put a hand inside to feel her belly like the 
midwife or healer she would no doubt have been, had the elements in her blood 
been less radically out of balance, and had the story of her life been less out 
of true. “It’s a daughter,” Karis said. “Ready and restless to come out of 
there. And a vigorous child she’ll be—how could she not be?”
“How indeed?” Norina grumbled. “Conceived by an earth witch’s meddling—” Norina 
buttoned up her shirt. “It’s been a bittersweet year,” she said heavily.
They both were silent then, until Norina said quietly, “Karis, it’s a terrible 
position you’ve put me in. Ten years ago, when I offered to help you, I never 
offered to be your jailer.”
“You’ve given me ten years I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Nori, I want you to 
tell Zanja what you’re afraid she’s done.”
Norina sat up. “No, Karis, I told you . . .”
Karis looked over at Zanja, who would be just a shadow against the blaze of 
sunlight. “Zanja, come here.”
The grotto smelled of mold and rotten wood, but it certainly offered relief from 
the heat. Zanja used her porringer to dip some water from the spring; it was so 
cold it made her teeth ache. She brought some more for Karis, who drank it with 
the air of one accustomed to doing as her caretakers told her. Karis said, when 
Zanja had squatted on the ground beside her, “Since Norina refuses to talk, 
perhaps you would talk to her instead. Tell her about Fire Night, and about 
Medric.”
Zanja told her tale again. When she had finished, there was a silence. Norma 
gazed into Zanja’s face as though she were reading and re-reading an unexpected 
letter and could not decide if the news it contained was good or bad. Then she 
put her head into her hands.
“Truth?” Karis said.
“A fire blood’s truth,” Norina said grumpily. “As full of mystery and metaphor 
as a blasted book of poetry. I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Well, I think it only sensible to accept this seer. In fact, if what you fear 
is as inevitable as you say, I don’t see what else we can do.”
“You want to trust him?” Norina seemed appalled.
“Put him through your Truthken’s meat grinder first if you want.”
“A seer? His truths will change from one moment to the next. There is no point.”
“There must be a way.”
“No, Karis.” She sat forward on the bench, implacable. “No.”
Karis said, “Nori, I can’t continue like this.”
Nonna stood up abruptly. “Near fifteen years you’ve trusted me—”
“Sit down,” Karis said.
There was a silence. To Zanja’s surprise, Norina sat down. The spring made soft, 
lapping sounds, like a cat drinking milk. “You are not infallible,” Karis said. 
“I intend no insult by pointing this out, no more than you intend to insult me 
when you remind me of my many weaknesses. This time, I want you to trust me. 
Tell Zanja the truth. Let her find this seer and bring him to me.”
“No.” Zanja had never heard a voice so cold.
“If you don’t do it, I will.”
“Then you have no further need for my advice. And I have no desire to either 
struggle with you further or to participate in your folly. You’ll go to your 
doom without my help.”
In the dim light, Karis’s face seemed very pale, but this time she made no move 
to stop Norina from standing up and leaving. It was Zanja who leapt up and 
blocked the door.
“Are you insane?” Norina said softly.
“You’re making a mistake.”
They looked at each other, eye to eye, more than long enough for Norina to 
figure out that Zanja was no threat to her, and her entrapment in the lathe 
house was an illusion. But Norina didn’t move to push past Zanja. She turned and 
said to Karis, “No matter what I do, I am forsworn. Only you could put me in 
such a position.”
Karis said, exasperated, “You’re too angry to think. Even I know a way out of 
your dilemma.”
It was unusual, and gratifying, to see Norina so taken aback. To see her cold 
face quirk with wry humor was even more surprising. “You’re getting very subtle 
for an earth witch,” she told Karis. And then her unnerving gaze shifted to 
Zanja’s face. “I assume you’re wondering why Mabin arranged your murder. It was 
to prevent you from delivering to the enemy one of Shaftal’s most guarded 
secrets. But you had already done what she most feared, when you crawled through 
Medric’s window on Fire Night.”
“I had? What had I done?”
But Norina apparently had said all she would say. She shifted her heavy, 
off-balance torso, pressed her hands to the small of her hack, and waited. 
Beyond her, Karis sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. 
Whatever they were waiting for, they seemed prepared for it to take a while.
Perhaps they expected Zanja to determine for herself whatever it was that 
Norina’s vows prevented her from telling her. Zanja took her glyph cards from 
their pouch. “You say I know an important secret, but what secret do I know?” 
She looked down: in her hand she held the Woman of the Doorway. “Karis is 
Shaftal’s most guarded secret? Why?” She sorted through the cards, wishing for 
Emil’s insight. Her fingers stopped: she held the card called Death-and-Life. 
The G’deon’s glyph.
She could not take a breath. Norina held her arm in a painful grip. She must 
have seemed on the verge of falling over. “But Harald G’deon didn’t—” she 
protested, and stopped. Who really knew the truth of what had happened the last 
day of Harald’s life? Not many people would have been in his sickroom, and 
almost everyone had been killed by the Sainnites soon afterwards. She looked up 
from the card to Karis, who was making a serious study of the dirt beneath her 
feet. “He laid his hands on you before he died. He vested you with the power of 
Shaftal.”
Karis raised her gaze and said to Norina, “Now may I speak? I think she is under 
a misapprehension.”
They waited rather long for Norina to calculate a grudging answer. “Yes.”
“When Harald died, I was the only earth witch in Shaftal. They found me and 
brought me to him at the last moment of his life. As he died, he dumped his load 
of power into me. I did not know what was happening, and it was done without my 
consent. After it was done, and could not be undone, my unworthiness was 
discovered. It became apparent to everyone that Harald could not have intended 
to make me his successor, but only to use me as a receptacle.”
“By the nine gods!” Zanja turned to Norina. “For fifteen years Shaftal has been 
in turmoil—”
Norina said quietly, “Despite having been so foully treated, Karis serves 
Shaftal with more honor and consistency than anyone thought possible.”
It was a statement amazing in its sincerity, for Zanja had come to think that 
Norina admired and respected nobody. Even Karis looked rather surprised.
Zanja said, “I mean no disrespect, but I don’t see how.”
“She accepts obscurity, she chooses not to exercise her significant powers, she 
resists the lure of smoke as much as she can, she lives when sometimes her life 
is unendurable, and someday she will pass on the power she carries, and give 
Shaftal a G’deon.“
Shaken, chastened, Zanja could scarcely think of a response. So this was how a 
woman so dishonored might reclaim her honor and even be a hero. Yet the tragedy 
of Karis’s life made her own tragedies seem almost ordinary. She said, “How can 
I help her?”
Norina said, “I guess I should have trusted you from the beginning.”
It was like a river reversing its course by an act of will, with a new current 
just as inevitable and irresistible as the old. Zanja must have been staring at 
Norina in blank amazement, for Norina’s grim expression finally gave way to one 
of sardonic humor. “Now, Zanja, get yourself in hand. The ritual must be 
completed.”
“You acted as your duty required,” Zanja said.
“Formidable enemies can make formidable friends.”
“I’m hardly in a position to refuse—”
“Well, that’s a bit half-hearted,” Norina said.
“There’s no point in lying to you.”
“That’s true, but this little drama is for Karis, not for me.” Norina glanced at 
Karis. 
“She’s satisfied enough.” She took Zanja’s arm, and propelled her back to the 
bench and to Karis, who got up and fiercely embraced them both.
Norina said, “You were going to let me leave.”
“And you were going to go.”
They examined each other rather cautiously. For the length of their friendship, 
Zanja thought, Norina had been reading Karis back to herself like a book read to 
a blind woman. Surely she must have been unnerved to look up from her reading 
and find the other chair empty and the door standing ajar.
Zanja said, “You’re afraid that Medric knows of Karis, even though I told him 
nothing?”
“She created you,” Norina said, “just like she created these blades we carry, 
just like she created the ravens. So she is in you, and when Medric met you, he 
met her as well. It may take some time for the small bit of truth he’s seen to 
become a whole, but if he’s the seer you say he is, then it will happen.”
“So I must find him, just as Karis says.”
“Well, I must consult with Mabin before we do anything.”
“You know that won’t work,” Karis said. “Giving birth will lay you up for a 
while, and you won’t even be around to consult with anyone. And if Mabin forbids 
us to contact him, as I’m sure she will, what then? You know that Zanja won’t 
stand quietly by while Mabin’s assassins hunt Medric down.“
“Good luck to them,” said Zanja. “That man has already outsmarted the smartest 
commanders in Shaftal. But no, I don’t owe Mabin any loyalty. Medric, however, 
deserves all the help I can give him.”
Norina said, “Unlike both of you, I still answer to the councilor, and will 
until I die. So what am I to do?”
“Go ahead and write her a letter,” Kans said. “Tell her what we’re doing, but 
don’t ask permission.”
“She won’t be happy. She’ll say you’re overreaching yourself, and she’ll blame 
me.”
Karis said, “Oh, I’m sure she will. But you can endure it.”



Chapter Twenty-one



“Don’t send that letter!”
Awakened by Medric’s cry, Emil put an arm around him. Sometimes, when Medric 
became restless in his dreams, Emil could soothe him without awakening him. But 
Medric turned away, mumbling urgently.
The sky had clouded over. A summer shower would give relief from the dust, 
thought Emil. He got up to check the oilcloth that covered the trunks of books 
in the back of the wagon. When he returned, he found Medric sitting up in the 
tangle of blankets, fumbling frantically for his spectacles.
“We’re running out of time!” Medric looked around himself rather wildly.
“Are you awake? Or still asleep?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t see.”
Emil found his spectacles for him. Medric peered up at him and said, “I’m 
awake.”
Five days they had been traveling lazily, following the wagon down the dusty 
road, holding hands. It was summer, and all across Shaftal, Sainnites and 
Paladins were desperately killing each other. Emil knew this holiday of his 
could not last long, but still he asked, “What are we running out of time for?”
“Zanja is looking for me,” Medric said. “She needs us both, more urgently than 
she knows. But we can’t leave the books. How much further do you think we have 
to go?”
“Four days travel, or thereabouts. Where is she?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Medric disengaged himself from the blankets. “I’ll tell you 
if I can see a map.”
Emil fetched the map and lit the lantern. When he sat down, Medric leaned 
against him. Emil tucked him close and kissed his head.
“Maybe we can just ignore everything,” Medric suggested.
“I don’t believe that’s an option you’ll find in Way of the Seer.” Emil kissed 
him again, and unfolded the map. Medric pointed. Emil asked, “Strongbridge? What 
is she doing there?”
“Being a hinge of history.” Medric sighed. “Oh, well. The letter’s going to be 
sent, and nothing I can do will stop it. If I could, maybe it wouldn’t make any 
difference anyway.” He studied the map. “I suppose that to find me, Zanja will 
go to where she knows I was last, and wait for me to come to her. She’ll wait a 
few days, and eventually work her way to Haprin, for she knows I shipped my 
books there, doesn’t she? And then she’ll be able to find out that you and I 
left together, and perhaps even which way we headed. So she’ll guess where we’re 
going, because she’s been to your shepherd’s cottage before, and come after us.”
“She will,” Emil agreed, stunned by the simplicity of it. So this was how Rees 
Company had been systematically slaughtered, one person at a time. It was best 
not to think about it.
Medric rolled up the map, and blew out the lamp. “After we’ve secured the books, 
we’ll turn back and go to her, and meet her on the road somewhere. Now we can 
sleep.”
But when Emil awoke at dawn, Medric was still awake, and had spent the night 
pacing back and forth, watching the clouds gather and then disperse without 
issuing a single drop of ram.



Karis came home again to Meartown, to the furnaces and the forges and the teams 
of gigantic horses hauling wagonloads of ore from the nearby mines. Because 
Meartown was less than a day’s foot journey from Strongbridge, Norina had 
reluctantly let her go as she had come, alone. Norina had her own journey home 
to make: to her first home, the seaside village far on the southern coast, to 
the rambling house in which she had been born, and where her older sister now 
ruled, a benign matriarch by all accounts.
The region of Mear was a place of hostile, stony hillsides and occasional, 
straggling trees, home to many kinds of mice and the foxes and hawks that ate 
them, but unfarmable and, except for a few places, too barren even for sheep. In 
spring a few tiny flowers bloomed among the stones; in winter the snow blanketed 
the land and blew into drifts taller than Karis could reach. Yet, for hundreds 
of years Meartown had thrived in the middle of this wasteland, its fires stoked 
by coal mined from the same hills that the iron came from; all its other needs 
came in by wagon. The road to Meartown was like a heart’s artery, and there was 
no road better laid or maintained in all of Shaftal. All summer long the road 
crew wandered that road, filling potholes and replacing stones; all winter long 
that same crew worked the snowplows.
The barren land inspired a barren kind of love, an intellectual and passionless 
appreciation for its empty spaces and harsh, stony ridges. By day, the sky was 
brown with coal smoke, and she spent most of those days within the gray city of 
the forges. Hemmed in by stone and metal, she longed for green and living 
things. She sighed as she walked into Meartown that afternoon and waved a hand 
at Mardeth, who collected the gate toll from outsiders. “So you’re back,” 
Mardeth called. “Have you eaten today?”
Karis sat down by the town well and ate the lunch that the inn had packed for 
her that morning—more of those dumplings that had made Zanja cry, there by the 
river.
Present yet absent, Zanja moved across the countryside like a spark of light 
through darkness. If Karis had shut her eyes and started to walk, she would have 
walked directly to her side. With her whole being, she yearned to do that very 
thing.



In Strongbridge, Karis had bought Zanja an ugly, hammer-headed, evil tempered 
horse. With one touch, Karis had won the willful horse’s abject devotion. The 
horse, who she named Homely, proved himself a sturdy mount, with an easy, light 
gait and an eagerness to run that Zanja did not always rein in. She had left 
with most of Norina’s equipment: her saddle, her spare shirt, her cooking gear, 
and her maps. Zanja had never seen such beautifully drawn and detailed maps, 
though many of the details made no sense to her. They were judicial maps, Norina 
said, copied from an original that still survived in a secret archive. But 
Norina had overwritten the maps with her own notations, which had been 
incorporated when the map was re-drawn by an artist who could not resist 
ornamenting what blank space remained with drawings of boats, trees, castles, 
and the like. The maps had been re-drawn perhaps a dozen times since Norina 
first began carrying them, and now she admitted that even she sometimes had 
difficulty distinguishing the roads from the welter of detail.
Following obscure but direct routes, along byways and cowpaths that are usually 
known only to locals, Zanja traveled east and then south, and in six days hardly 
saw a single soul. Not until she drew close to Haprin and camped for a few days 
just over the hill from the main road did she even have a conversation—with an 
enterprising farm girl who visited every day to sell her eggs, bread, and milk. 
With nothing to do but wait and think, Zanja found herself sorting through the 
events of her life as though they were glyph cards, picking and choosing which 
ones had significance, and deciding what that significance would be. She had not 
spent such a peaceful time since she could remember.
At last, she roused herself to go into Haprin and make inquiries. A watch woman 
at one of the warehouses was much taken with her, and for the price of a dinner 
told of a bespectacled young man who had slept beside his shipment for some days 
before he was joined by an older man, and they left with the trunks, by wagon, 
headed for the ferry. Yes, a man with hair going gray, his face creased by wind 
and sun, but definitely not a farmer. “A Paladin,” said the watchwoman, who by 
the end of the meal was speculatively stroking Zanja’s knife-scarred hand.
“I don’t suppose he had a limp.”
“Yes, he did. But a night with that young fellow did him a world of good.”
“You amaze me,” Zanja murmured, more amazed, in fact, than she let on. Though 
the friendly watchwoman was appealing enough, Zanja disappointed her hopes, and 
went back to her solitary camp, to gaze up at the brilliant stars and think of 
Karis.
In Strongbndge, after Karis had gone to her room to smoke and then sleep under 
the watchful guard of Norina’s tireless assistant, Norina and Zanja had shared a 
fine supper. As was inevitable, Norina commented on how well Zanja was 
comporting herself, and particularly complimented her efforts to keep secret the 
fact that she was in love with Karis. The Truthken was not as unsympathetic as 
Zanja had feared she would be, but neither had she held back the facts, both 
about how Karis had been brutalized in Lalali, and about how smoke irrecoverably 
destroys sensation. The unpleasant conversation certainly had helped to cool 
Zanja’s ardor.
But she lay now, thinking of Karis’s big, gentle hands stroking her injured 
thigh. That touch had ruined her, she thought wryly, for now she wanted nothing 
else. She could only hope, as she had promised Norina, that she would recover 
quickly.
The next day, as she rode down the main road to the ferry, Karis’s raven dropped 
out of the sky onto her shoulder. “Something is wrong!”
A startled farm family that shared the road with her drew back, staring 
fearfully.
“What do you mean?” she asked the raven. “Did Karis send you to me? Did you see 
something from the air that I should know about?”
The raven uttered a strangled caw, as though he had half forgotten how to talk. 
“It is Karis,” he managed to say. “Something is wrong with Karis.”
Zanja never got on the ferry.



Seven days later, in an evening that had turned suddenly cool after sunset, 
Zanja rode up to the Meartown gates. The stars had come out, and the gate was 
closed: a gate of iron forged in the form of ivy climbing a trellis, with 
spear-shaped leaves tipping the gate’s top, edged, no doubt, with sharpened 
steel. Though Zanja had allowed Homely regular rest, she had scarcely slept, and 
now she saw the beautiful, deadly gate with a terrible clarity of exhaustion and 
panic. Not since the night of the frogs had she been forced to function in spite 
of such horror. “Something is wrong!” she shouted at the cranky old woman who 
came too slowly out the metal-hinged door of her stone house. The town stank of 
dust and coal.
“Stop ringing the cursed bell,” the woman said, holding her ears. “The town’s 
children are asleep.”
Zanja made her hand stop pulling the bell rope. Her exhausted horse had not even 
jumped at the noise of the ringing.
“And come back in the morning,” the woman said. “You can sleep by the road 
there. There’s a pump so you can water your horse.”
“I’ll climb the gate if I have to, and come pounding at your cottage door.”
The woman said dryly, “This is Meartown. We know how to make a gate here.”
She started to turn away, and Zanja shouted at her back, “Do you know Karis? Do 
you know her best work? Look here!“ She thrust her dagger through the gate’s 
bars. ”She doesn’t give these blades to many people, does she? For pity’s sake, 
look at me, look at the raven on my shoulder. I am her friend!“
The woman took the dagger from Zanja’s hand, scrutinized it, and gave it back. 
“You do have a fine blade,” she said doubtfully. She peered through the gate at 
the bird on Zanja’s shoulder. “And a strange pet.”
“Mardeth,” the raven said, the first word he’d spoken in many days. “Help her.”
“Shaftal’s Name!” The woman snatched up the key at her waist and unlocked the 
gate. Zanja all but fell through as it swung open. “You’re not the one I 
expected,” Mardeth said.
“I’m Zanja. Norina’s pregnant.”
“Well, blessings upon her,” Mardeth said automatically. She examined Zanja, then 
stepped forward to take Homely’s reins. “You’ve had a bad time of it. Come in 
and take a bite to eat, before I show you the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house. 
You’ll be needing your strength, won’t you.”
Zanja followed her, too dazed with hunger and weariness to protest or demand an 
explanation. It wasn’t until she sat in the woman’s kitchen with the teakettle 
starting to hiss and some bread and cold meat before her that she thought to 
wonder why the gatekeeper might have been expecting Norina to come frantically 
ringing the gate bell in the middle of the night. She nearly leapt up and ran 
out to the yard, where the woman was watering the horse and giving him some hay, 
but she made herself eat instead. She’d be needing her strength, Mardeth had 
said.
Mardeth came in, and cut her a piece of pie. “Your horse isn’t in too bad shape. 
Leave him with me tonight, and I’ll have him shod in the morning. Looks like 
you’ve been keeping him in oats but not feeding yourself. Are you out of money?”
“I’ve got enough for the shoeing.”
“As if the blacksmith would accept a single coin from you. I’ll send around to 
the other mastersmiths and take a collection to help you on your way. We were 
getting ready to send out some people ourselves. It’s taken us this long to 
figure out that she’s not somewhere nearby, off her head or injured somewhere. 
Six days we’ve been scouring the countryside. What’s the matter with you?”
Zanja had knocked the pie into her lap and sent the plate spinning to the 
hearth, where it clanged on the stones like the gate bell, and set the woman’s 
dog to barking. “She’s disappeared?” 
“Yes, of course she’s disappeared. What else are you here for?” 
“The raven couldn’t tell me what was wrong. I thought she might be ill.”
“Well now, that’s odd,” the woman said, looking askance at the raven, who paced 
restlessly along the back of a chair. “Very odd indeed. Not that I know a thing 
about elemental ways, but they say a witch’s familiar knows everything she 
knows, and if the raven doesn’t know anything, what does that mean, I wonder?”



Mardeth rousted up a neighbor to let them out the gate and keep an eye on it 
while she was gone. “Lynton and Dominy live up there a ways.” She pointed into 
the nearby hills. “Karis has lived with them, oh, for some years. There’s some 
trees up there, and a bit of a spring, and it seems to make her happy.”
As they hurried up the steep, scrupulously maintained road, Mardeth told Zanja 
how it had happened that Karis disappeared in the middle of the night, but no 
one realized anything was amiss until the next evening, when the forge master 
finally came looking for her at her house. They had wasted all the time since 
then trying to find her in the environs of Meartown, having assumed that she had 
come to harm somehow on one of her wanderings. That her harm might have come in 
the form of a human being seemed not to have occurred to any of them until 
finally one of the two men noticed a broken door latch in Karis’ room. “In all 
the years they’ve known her,” Mardeth said, “she’s never broken anything. She 
can be clumsy as an ox, but she’s never even cracked a teacup. And it was a 
good, strong, Mearish latch. No, someone must have broken it to get into her 
room from outside. But why would anyone wish to do her harm? Especially someone 
from around here?”
She glanced at Zanja and realized she was weeping. “Now then,” she said 
awkwardly. “I’m sure we’ll find her.”
Something about the image of Karis blundering around a kitchen with a fragile 
teacup in her hand had left Zanja devastated, and she could scarcely stem her 
tears even when they arrived at the cottage, where two aged men welcomed them 
in. They seemed eager when they realized Mardeth was at their door, perhaps even 
hopeful that she brought good news. But when they saw Zanja’s face, they fell to 
weeping themselves. “She’s dead, is she?” said one.
“Now calm down, you,” Mardeth snapped. “We know nothing at all, and the stones 
themselves would defend her from harm. Put on the kettle there, Dominy. This 
one’s just in tears because she didn’t know until now what had happened. She’ll 
be all right in a minute, when it’s done sinking in. Now all of you sit down and 
I’ll make the tea.“
“No, I want to see her room,” Zanja said. Lynton took her down the dark hall 
through a wide door at the end, and Zanja stood there in the doorway to Karis’ 
bedroom as the man hurried to light a couple of lamps. The flames illuminated a 
high, raftered ceiling, high enough that even Karis would not have to worry 
about banging her head on it, and several pieces of oversized furniture: a 
chair, a work table piled with books and debris, a settle by the fireplace, a 
huge, high bed with the linens in disarray, and a double door constructed almost 
entirely of glass that looked out upon a garden. The old man swung the doors 
open and showed Zanja the broken latch.
“Was her room in such a mess when you found it? The bed and such?”
The old man shrugged. “No different from usual. We’d come in every few days and 
clean for her, not that she noticed. She never had time for tidying up, and 
never lost anything, anyway.”
Zanja sat on the settle. She was learning more about Karis now that she was 
missing than she’d ever learned in her presence. “Would you leave me alone, 
please?”
“Of course. Madam.” He touched his forehead, an old-fashioned gesture of respect 
rarely seen these days. Not only had they all assumed she was a member of the 
Lilterwess like Norina, but he, at least, apparently assumed she was a ranking 
member. He left the room without another word.



The room was still imbued with Karis’s presence. The raven, who had come in with 
her, flew to a claw-scarred chair back near one of the windows and fluffed up 
his feathers sleepily. Faintly, Zanja could hear voices in the kitchen, and the 
sound of water being poured for tea. She picked up a book from the floor, and 
spelled out its title: Principles of Clarity. Some of its pages were bent, as 
though Karis had tossed it impatiently aside. A small pot on the hearth 
contained a hardened, resinous substance—hide glue, Zanja thought, which would 
soften when warmed, and harden again when taken off the fire.
Zanja stood up abruptly, and began methodically searching the room. In the trunk 
were more books and a few articles of clothing, some clean and roughly mended, 
some dirty and stinking of the forge and Karis’ sweat. The sheepskin jerkin that 
Karis had been wearing when they first met lay in there, and several pairs of 
socks, badly darned. The men who looked after Karis were not much good with a 
needle, apparently.
Small models of machinery, constructed of slips of wood and amber dabs of glue, 
cluttered the tabletop. A book lay open to a page of diagrams of waterwheels, 
but this was no grain mill Karis had been designing. Zanja turned one of the 
miniature wheels, and watched it operate a thing like a hammer. Another one 
operated a bellows, of the kind used in the forge. Karis’s model was so precise 
that it even blew little, rhythmic puffs of air.
Zanja hunted through the room, but though she found Karis’s belt on the floor, 
with sheathed knife, tin cup and various small tools still dangling from it, she 
did not find pipe or smoke purse. Zanja checked for loose boards in the floor, 
felt the stones of the wall, and finally found Karis’ hiding place in the 
chimney, where a small stone had cracked loose from its mortar. A wooden box was 
crammed into the hollow behind it and could only be worked loose with great 
effort. At last Zanja slid open the lid and folded back the oilcloth covering; 
it was filled to the top with small cubes of smoke, at least half a year’s 
supply. Since Karis’s kidnappers had not hunted for this supply, they must have 
brought some with them. Surely a woman who could unlock doors with a touch would 
easily escape, unless her captors kept her continuously under smoke. She was 
being poisoned three or even four times a day.
Now Karis would be—had already become—like all the other smoke users. Something 
was wrong, the raven said, and then he began, inexorably, to become ordinary. 
The evidence had lain before Zanja all along. Karis was not dead yet, but she 
might as well be dead.
Zanja began to think again: cold, hard thoughts. She took out her glyph cards 
and picked out the four glyphs that, among other things, symbolize the four 
directions. Ten times in a row she plucked the same card from the four in her 
hand, the one with the glyph that meant “north.”
She fell asleep on Karis’s bed. One of the men came in later, to take the boots 
off her feet and tuck a blanket around her against the chill. She tried to say 
something to him about the morning, but he hushed her, saying, “We’ll take care 
of everything.” One by one, he blew out the lamps.



Chapter Twenty-two



They brought Homely to her at dawn. He had bitten the man who tried to ride him, 
and so they led him to her, ignominiously tethered behind a stolid cart horse. 
His hooves were newly shod, his tack and all Zanja’s gear refurbished, and his 
saddlebags were filled with food. “Is the blacksmith all right?” Zanja asked 
Mardeth.
“Oh, he’s used to temperamental horses.” Homely bared his teeth at Zanja, and 
she had to grab the raven by the feet to keep it from taking flight at the sight 
of all the people who had come to see her off, but horse and raven both calmed 
down once she was mounted. Mardeth handed her a money pouch, and Dominy gave her 
sweet rolls and boiled eggs to eat as she rode. Two or three dozen other people 
had made the trek to the hollow for no other purpose, it seemed, than to stand 
around and look at her. Mar-deth murmured that some of them stood ready to 
accompany Zanja, if she wanted them.
“It’s not numbers I need,” Zanja said, though she would have given almost 
anything to have Ransel, or Emil, or even Norina, at her side. As she rode away, 
a chorus of good wishes shouted after her. When she looked back, the townsfolk 
all stood in a forlorn huddle around the two old men, who were still waving 
their red kerchiefs. Ten years they had looked after Karis, as much as she would 
let anyone look after her. “Idiots,” Zanja muttered. She needed someone to rage 
at.

* * *

At noon, the raven spoke. “Pendant,” he said.
Zanja had been riding cross-country, following whatever animal trails and 
streambeds she could find that went more or less northward. She had recently 
stumbled onto a deeply rutted dirt road. While the horse rested, Zanja searched 
up and down the stretch of road, sometimes kneeling in the muck that remained 
from a recent rain storm. Finally, she found it, buried in the mud: the pendant 
of green stone that she had given Karis beside the river in Strongbridge. A torn 
piece of green ribbon trailed from it as she pulled it out of the mud. Karis 
must have torn the ribbon that first dawn, when she started to come out from 
under smoke, and realized something was wrong, before her kidnappers forced her 
to smoke again. That was the dawn that the raven had flown to Zanja with his 
dreadful message.
“You’re watching, aren’t you Karis?” Zanja said, after she had started on her 
way again, with the raven on her shoulder. “I can’t feel you any more, but at 
least sometimes you still see me through the raven. I must seem very far away to 
you, just as you seem to me. Can you hear me now?”
“Yes,” the raven said.
“Can you tell me where you are?”
“Mabin,” the raven said.
“Mabin? Has she been captured also?”
The raven looked at her blankly, and said nothing more.
The countryside remained treeless and desolate, and the road she followed 
northward seemed to go nowhere, though wagons traveled it often enough to keep 
the grass from growing in the ruts. Norina’s maps showed empty, un-annotated 
countryside.
One morning, as Zanja saddled her horse behind the knoll where she had spent the 
night, a single rider loped past. The only remarkable thing about him was his 
horse, a luxury Zanja could not have afforded if she hadn’t been given money so 
generously by friends and by strangers. She continued more cautiously, traveling 
far to one side of the road rather than upon it. Here and there were sudden 
fingers of rock pointing at the sky. She noticed, atop one of these, a watchkeep 
huddled in the shade of a lean-to that looked almost like a pile of brush, if 
one didn’t look too closely. Zanja slipped past in the countryside behind him, 
where the lean-to blocked his view, and from there she could see the little bell 
tower upon which he could ring his alarm.
She soon came upon the thing he guarded: a lush green valley much like the 
valley of her birth, with a small, but busy village at one end—a village with 
walls, and a sentry at the gate. The valley had been carved out of the earth by 
a river that cut a deep swath across the countryside as far as Zanja could see 
in either direction. This river, at least, appeared on Norina’s map, though the 
valley and the village did not. As she watched the village from the rim of the 
valley, Zanja realized it was not a village at all, but a military 
settlement—not of Sainnites, but of Paladins. She had found the hidden heart of 
the Shaftali resistance; Shaftal’s government in exile.
Both the glyphs and her own judgment pointed inexorably into the valley. Zanja 
wanted to violently brush away the possibilities that tickled at her skin. Had 
Karis been kidnapped and cruelly drugged, not by Sainnites, but by the Paladins?
To break into a Paladin stronghold without assistance or even the vaguest idea 
of where to hunt for Karis seemed insanely foolhardy. She would do it tonight, 
she decided, and shut her eyes to think.
It was a warm summer afternoon, and the accuser bugs droned their shrill curses 
down in the valley. Nearby, Homely chomped away at the grass, and the raven, 
perched overhead atop a pointed rock, cleaned his feathers busily. It was a 
commonplace kind of sound, like the rustling of paper. In the midst of her 
dismay, Zanja felt a sudden, unlikely sensation of peace.
When she opened her eyes, the summer sun hung low and red, glaring into her face 
like coals of a fire. She could still hear the rustling paper sound, but she 
could not see the raven. She rolled over, groaning, for she had fallen asleep 
with her back against the pile of rocks. The man sitting nearby turned a page of 
the book in his lap, nodding and chuckling to himself. His spectacles were 
glazed red with sunset. “Dear gods,” Zanja said.
Medric looked up from his book. He seemed rather the worse for wear: a rag tied 
back his stringy hair, and dust covered his drab clothing. “I guess you were 
tired. Some warrior you are.”
Two additional horses grazed companionably with Homely on the other side of the 
clearing. She got stiffly to her feet, and found a smokeless fire burning at the 
other side of the rock pile, where a soot-black pot stood empty, and a porcelain 
teapot steeped upon a stone. Emil sat there on his folding stool, just looking 
up from the book upon his knees. “You’re awake at last. Now we shall have some 
answers.”
“You’ve left South Hill?”
He closed the book carefully, and wrapped it in a jacket of leather. “It was 
time I remembered what my life was about.”
“I hope you’re here to help me.”
“Sit down. Despite that nap, you still look ready to collapse.” Emil opened his 
padded box and took out two teacups. “Why else would we rush up here into the 
wilderness like madmen chased by rabid hounds, except to help you? Help you do 
what, by the way?”
Medric sat on Zanja’s other side. “Zanja, I see history rippling away from you.”
Emil smiled affectionately at the Sainnite seer. “Medric is full of wild stories 
he’s made up from reading too many books.”
Medric said, “It’s not possible to read too many books. To read too few, now 
that’s possible.”
“Medric says there’s a third road for Shaftal. We—the three of us—are at the 
crossroads, he says.” Emil offered Zanja a cup of tea. The cup might have been 
made of flower petals that released a delicious fragrance. Somewhere, Emil had 
invested in some very expensive tea. She took a sip. Her hands were shaking like 
any smoke addict’s.
Medric said, “Zanja, where is the lost G’deon? Somehow, she must be saved!”
Emil murmured, “Set that cup down before you drop it. It’s irreplaceable, you 
know.”
Zanja put the cup on the ground.
Medric said, “I saw her in a dream, a woman like a mountain, but shackled hand 
and foot, blinded, with her tongue cut out. . . .”
Emil put his arm around her. Zanja lay her head back upon his shoulder and 
stared up at the sun-red sky, which swirled and swam in her vision. “But she is 
not the G’deon.”
“She is. I know what I dreamed. The land cries out to her to give it healing.”
Emil said, “Zanja, have mercy. Who is she?”
“Karis. The Woman of the Doorway. How can she be G’deon .. . a half-Samnite 
smoke addict?”
“She’s a smoke addict?” Emil cried.
“She’s Sainnite?” said Medric.
“But if Harald G’deon meant to choose her, and not just to use her as a kind of 
storage, then every moment, from the day of her birth—and even before—the people 
of this land have failed her.” And then it came to Zanja, the truth she had not 
wanted to know, and she started wildly to her feet, crying, “Mabin did this to 
her, and it’s my fault! Dear gods—” Something was impeding her, and she 
struggled with it blindly until a mild voice entered her awareness, saying her 
name. Medric stood before her, his hair having come loose, somewhat out of 
breath. Emil had her by the arms, from behind.
“Sit down,” he said. “You’re off your head and that’s never good when someone 
carries weapons as sharp as yours. Sit down and explain.”
She sat back down, her knees gone weak, and let Emil talk her into some 
semblance of calm, until he trusted her with a teacup again.
Medric said, “The G’deon’s choice of a successor had to be confirmed, isn’t that 
right?”
Zanja said, “Norina told me that Harald waited until the last possible moment to 
send for Karis, and then he did it in secret. But perhaps he did it on purpose, 
so he could get around the council, for everyone knows that he was at odds with 
them, and with Mabin in particular.”
“Well, it’s true that Harald’s last years were fraught with controversy,” said 
Emil. “For he insisted that we accept the Sainnites, which was a very unpopular 
idea. Are you saying that for fifteen years we have had a G’deon vested but not 
confirmed? And that she has been willing to live in obscurity all this time, 
while the land is torn to ruins around her?” Emil paused, and shook his head, 
and added more gently, “By Shaftal, what else could she honorably have done? To 
exercise such power outside the constraints of the Lilterwess—”
Zanja said, “She was constrained, not just by smoke but by Mabin, who indirectly 
controlled her through Norina, who exercised all her formidable powers to keep 
Karis tractable.”
“Norina?” Medric said.
“The Truthken, Karis’s oldest friend.”
Emil said dryly, “Ah, I see. Air logic. Inflexible and absolutist. No doubt 
Norina believes she is doing her duty. But what do you mean when you say Mabin 
did this to her? What has been done, and why do you blame yourself?”
“Someone sent a letter,” Medric said.
“Norina sent a letter. To Mabin.”
“And Mabin did what?”
“She kidnapped Karis. And holds her prisoner down there, in that garrison.”
Medric said, “So whatever was in that letter convinced Mabin she needed to act, 
and quickly.”
“The letter told her that Karis had sent me to find you, and bring you to her.”
Medric looked baffled, but Emil said, “Oh, I see.”
“What?”
“Well, what would you have told Karis, when you met her?”
Medric said, “That she is the hope of Shaftal.”
“And that,” said Emil, “Would be the one thing Mabin never wants Karis to hear. 
Not from a seer, anyway. Not if she intends to keep Karis from knowing the 
truth.”
“Mabin doesn’t command the border people,” Zanja said, “so she doesn’t command 
me.”
“Me neither, obviously,” Medric said cheerfully. “How soon do you want to leave, 
Zanja? Shall I load my pistols?”
Emil put his head in his hands. “She still commands me. Which of my vows and 
beliefs shall I betray today?”
Zanja said, “Well, the truth is—” She had to take a breath to steady herself. 
“Truth is, I have no hope of rescuing Karis. All I can do is to rescue her 
living remains. She has been under smoke day and night for over ten days now. To 
save what little can be saved is hardly worth becoming forsworn for.”
Emil raised his head. “But fire logic can encompass the grandest of 
contradictions, and I have done my share of encompassing these last few days. 
Why should I not continue?”
On Zanja’s other side, Medric uttered a snort of laughter.
Emil continued gravely. “So of course I will go with you to rescue what survives 
of our G’deon. And perhaps once we have done that we will find something else to 
save from this disaster. Surely three fire bloods together can redeem even the 
most hopeless situation.”
Medric went away to load his pistols, which was a task complex enough by 
daylight, but which seemed to give him no difficulty even in the darkness. He 
had been raised to be a soldier, after all. Zanja said to Emil, “I thought you 
were a celibate.”
“Hmm. Of course my position required a great deal of restraint, but surely you 
didn’t think it was by choice. Fire blood and celibacy? You know better than 
that.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“So. I always suspected that with Annis you were settling for a poor 
substitute.”
“You know more than I did,” Zanja said. “You’re usually very good at minding 
your own business, Emil.”
He chuckled. “And you’re usually better at protecting yourself from a prying old 
man.” He took her hand. “A smoke addict. You might as well be celibate. Why do 
you say this disaster is your fault?”
“When I first met Karis, Norina said I would endanger her, by making her 
restless. If Karis had simply stayed as she was, passive and invisible as she 
has been, Mabin would have had no reason to do anything to her.”
“That certainly sounds like air logic,” said Emil dryly. “But you and I, we know 
better.”



Though the village walls were well guarded, it was not particularly difficult to 
breach them. Two presciants and a seer could hardly help but recognize the 
moment it was safe to climb the wall. They scrambled over and huddled in the 
shadows on the other side as a watchman passed, and then Zanja whispered, “This 
place has never been attacked, I gather, or they would not be so relaxed.”
“It’s never even been discovered,” Emil said. “The closest Sainnite garrison is 
a long way from here, you know, and the Mearish folk are notoriously secretive. 
But the few survivors of the fall are housed here, and so I doubt anyone ever 
becomes complacent.”
They set forth, walking in a group, like soldiers done with the day’s work, and 
what with the dark night and the unlit streets they were able to cross from one 
end of the small village to the other without attracting notice. They saw no 
taverns or shops, just a series of residential buildings that looked a good deal 
like military barracks, and a great exercise yard at the village center, with a 
huge horse stable. The settlement was even about the same size as the Wilton 
garrison, and Zanja noticed Medric shaking his head as though bemused.
“I have no idea where your Karis is,” Medric said, when they had crossed the 
village. “She’s here, though.”
“We’ve got the whole night to wander the streets,” Emil said. “And tomorrow 
night, and the night after that.”
Zanja pulled the four glyph cards from inside her shirt, and shuffled at them 
while looking at the stars to establish a sense of direction. The card she chose 
told her to go south, back the way they had come.
They paced back down the wide boulevard, pausing at every cross-street to 
shuffle the cards. “Now this is very conspicuous behavior,” Emil commented.
Prescience had a way of fraying away into ambiguity and uncertainty if it was 
relied upon too deliberately. When, while standing upon one street corner 
without moving, the glyphs told Zanja to go south, then west, then south again, 
she was not much surprised. “I guess we’re finished,” she muttered, and stuck 
the cards into her shirt.
Emil nudged her and pointed at Medric. He had wandered up against the wall of 
the tall corner building, which had no windows at all on the first floor, and he 
was gazing upward at a lit window. He gestured at them sharply, and they dove 
into the shadows against the wall as a big, slump-shouldered, shambling figure 
moved restlessly to the window, only to be eased impatiently away by another, 
smaller person.
Emil put his hand on Zanja’s shoulder. She was, she realized, scratching at the 
mortared stone with her fingernails, as though to dig through into the building 
with her bare hands.
Medric came up to them. “Just for a second there, I felt the mountains turn over 
in their sleep.”
Emil grabbed them both by their sleeves and marched them a distance away. 
“There’s a good reason why nobody quite trusts us fire bloods. One minute we’re 
inspired visionaries, the next we’re drooling idiots. Don’t you two turn idiotic 
on me.”
A black shape hurtled at them from out of the darkness overhead. Zanja snatched 
the raven out of the air before he plummeted into Emil’s stomach. The raven 
uttered a squawk, then settled down and let Zanja perch him upon her shoulder. 
“The good raven doesn’t see well in the dark,” she explained. Then, a thought 
came to her. “Karis, do you hear me?”
“Yes,” the raven said, and Medric and Emil both jumped with surprise.
“Lie down and pretend to sleep, and be patient. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” the raven said.
“Then do it now. We are coming for you, but you must wait for us.”



They walked through the village and came back at the building from another 
direction. The building’s only door opened into a walled courtyard rather than 
directly to the street. The courtyard’s arched gate stood closed and locked. The 
wall was smooth, impossible to climb. Nor was there enough space to slip over 
the top of the gate even if it could be surmounted. In any case, the courtyard 
had an alert watchman, who paced determinedly from one end to the other, and 
paused every couple of rounds to peer through the gate and examine the roadway. 
The other three walls of the house presented blank faces, and offered no access 
to the roof, either, even if it were possible to get from the roof into Karis’ 
room.
Zanja drew her companions away from the building again, to the shadows of 
another street corner. Emil was vigorously shaking his head, though she had not 
said a word. “We are not assassins,” he hissed.
Zanja turned on him in a fury. “Well then, if we can’t attack the guard, what 
are we supposed to do? Rattle the gate and ask politely to be let in?”
“Zanja, these are our people, not our enemies.”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“Right now it doesn’t. Later, when you can’t forget that once you were a 
warrior, but then you became a murderer, it will matter very much. You have a 
good reason for killing that young man. All murderers have a good reason for 
doing what they do.”
Medric hushed them urgently. “This is not the place to argue moral philosophy.”
“I should never have accepted your help,” Zanja muttered.
“But you did, and now you’re stuck with me. Zanja, listen to me: If they were 
going to kill her outright, they would have done it by now. So let’s study the 
problem and come up with a solution we all can live with. We have time.”



They found a sheltered place within sight of the walled courtyard, and settled 
down in the shadows. Medric promptly fell asleep, with his head upon Emil’s 
shoulder. Emil seemed to doze as well, but Zanja kept watch as the night settled 
into a stillness broken only by the ring of the guard’s iron-studded heels upon 
stone.
The stars gradually disappeared, and there was a faint rumble of thunder. As 
lightning flickered suddenly over the village walls and the first scattered 
drops of rain began to fall, she heard hurried footsteps and a man in a rain 
cape came around the corner and rushed up to the gate, cursing. The guard in the 
courtyard came over, and they argued bitterly as the gate lock rasped open. The 
gate swung open and now both men stood outside of it, still arguing. A blinding 
flash of lightning illuminated their faces, distorted with rage and streaked 
with rain. The two men flinched from the light. Then they wordlessly traded 
places, one stepping into the courtyard, one starting angrily down the street.
Zanja had braced her pistols, one upon each knee. As the angry guard disappeared 
from sight, she slid the guns back into their holsters. Emil, whom she had 
thought was asleep, said, “There will be a way in.”
“Guns make killing too easy. It becomes a habit, like it has with Willis and 
with Mabin. It keeps us from thinking of other ways.” But she could not take her 
gaze away from the gate, which had been open, and now was closed. The new guard 
began pacing across the courtyard, in the pouring rain. She could hear his boots 
ringing on the stone.
“Rockets!” Medric exclaimed suddenly, his voice blurred with sleep. “Who made 
the rockets? On Fire Night?”
“You mean Annis?” Zanja said blankly. Then she said it again. “Annis.” She got 
hastily to her feet. “Of course. Mabin brought her here.”
The raven leapt from Zanja’s shoulder and dove into the ram. They followed, but 
lost sight of him. They circled around into the alley, and finally spotted the 
raven, sitting miserably in the downpour upon a second floor windowsill, tapping 
patiently on the glass. The men ducked into the shadows, but Zanja stood in 
plain sight, with the rain running down her face. The raven tapped steadily, as 
though he meant to keep tapping until he drowned. Zanja stared up into the 
downpour, her eyes blurred and stinging. When the window jerked open suddenly, 
the wet raven fell off the windowsill with a squawk.
Annis stared down at her.
“Have you got a moment for an old friend?” Zanja said.
“Zanja!”
“Myself.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Emil’s in trouble. I think you can help.”
Annis disappeared, then reappeared to toss a rope out the window. Of course, 
Annis would never tolerate being shut up in a building, unable to come and go as 
she pleased.
Knots tied regularly in the rope gave Zanja better purchase than she might have 
expected on such a wet night, but climbing the rope to the window was no easy 
task, and hauling herself over the windowsill was even more difficult. Annis 
dragged her into the room, and then helped her up from an ungainly sprawl. 
“How’s the rocket business?” Zanja asked.
“I’m making big, nasty ones now.” Annis started to pull the rope up, but let it 
go when Zanja clasped her hand. “You’ve got quite a chill on you. You better get 
those wet clothes off.”
“Would you make a fire for me?”
“Oh, sure.” Annis knelt on the cold hearth to lay a fire. She had some big 
sulfur matches to light it with, but everything seemed to be a bit damp, and it 
took her some time to get a fire going. Zanja talked as she got undressed, so 
that Annis would heed her voice more than the sounds outside. She told Annis a 
tale of selfishness and betrayal in South Hill, a tale that ended with Emil 
imprisoned by his own company for treachery, with his life endangered by 
Willis’s assassins, who could not afford to wait for a Truth-ken to arrive and 
sort the whole mess out. The situation required Mabin’s intervention, Zanja 
said, and she had burned through three horses getting here ahead of Willis’s 
men.
Annis blew the tinder into flame, then sat back on her heels. “You’re right; 
I’ve got to help him somehow. He’s been like a father to me. I suppose I have 
some influence with Mabin . . .” As she looked up, Zanja contrived to be taking 
off her last item of clothing, her shirt, which she innocently hung on the chair 
back. Then, feeling Annis’s gaze, she looked directly into her eyes. “I really 
have missed you.”
It was easy, almost natural, to embrace her and kiss her. Annis wore only a 
hastily-buttoned shirt, and was more than willing for it to be unbuttoned again. 
Zanja took Annis to the bed and laid her down upon it, with a knee between her 
thighs and her tongue in her mouth. She dragged the shirt from Annis’s shoulders 
so it entangled her arms. Annis was entirely distracted when Zanja heard Emil 
grunt as he hauled himself over the edge of the window. She jammed a fistful of 
the bedsheet into Annis’s mouth, tossed her onto her belly, and twisted the 
tangled shirt into a fetter. Annis struggled, but Zanja held her face into the 
pillow until she fell still, no doubt half smothered.
“Well,” Emil said, as he came over to the bed, breathing heavily, “an 
unconventional solution.” He helped Zanja to contrive to bind Annis more 
securely to the bedframe. Then he covered Annis modestly with the blanket and 
sat on the edge of the bed, admonishing her to behave herself, while Zanja 
hauled Medric through the window. Annis stopped fighting the tethers after a 
while.
The raven flapped heavily on sodden wings to the windowsill. Zanja patted his 
feathers with a towel to sop up the worst of the wet. Medric had knelt on the 
hearth to take apart and clean his pistols and reload them with dry gunpowder. 
He did it as if he had an impatient commander screaming at him to do it faster. 
As Zanja came over to put on her wet shirt, he asked, “Now what?”
“I don’t know. Any ideas, raven?”
The raven shook his wet feathers and brooded.



Karis lay rigid in the too-small bed, with the rain sound rushing past her. From 
far away, she watched three bedraggled rescuers crawl through an open window. 
One was like a knife blade white hot from the forge—one was like a knife blade 
tempered and honed— and one was like the forge itself. Fire and earth makes the 
forge; fire and earth makes the blade.
She must not sleep. Oh Shaftal, she prayed. Oh Shafted I must not sleep. She 
could not remember why. Oh Shaftal I must not move lest the watcher awaken. Oh 
Shaftal.
The raven turned his head and now she saw Zanja: wet and thin and grim as death. 
Zanja—implacably loyal—Oh Shaftal protect her heart, she is so true, the truest 
blade I ever forged. Zanja save me I am gone to smoke, I am gone.



Karis. I know you can hear me. Karis, I am at your door.
The rain whispered now. The voice whispered in her raven’s ear. Karis do you 
feel me I am here. Silence. Presence. Do you remember when I was imprisoned 
doubly imprisoned and you freed me. In bed, Karis remembered what a good night 
that had been, how tired she had been, and then the hunger that drove her was 
sated and she could rest for a while. She remembered Zanja, limp as an exhausted 
child, sleeping in her arms as the snow fell. For a few hours, for a night, the 
world had been as it should be, and her heart had been at peace.
Now I am here for you but you must unlock the door.
A whisper: Unlock the door. Dear gods Karis unlock the door.
Karis touched stone through plaster, the stone of the wall which was rooted in 
earth, and breathed in. Presence. She sat up in the bed.
Dear gods Karis unlock the door.
She stood up. Her body was stone. She could not move except when pushed. The 
white hot blade, the forge, the pumping bellows. Fire and earth makes the forge. 
The room swirled around her, dark and blurred with smoke. She stepped. The floor 
shall not creak. She stepped. The watcher shall sleep. She stepped. I am the 
key. Open. Oh Shaftal. And now she is looking at herself and the room is full of 
smoke and she opens her eyes and she sees the raven looking at her. Presence. 
Zanja has touched her. Dear heart.



“Dear heart,” Zanja breathed.
Karis opened her mouth. The raven croaked, “Zanja.” Emil whispered, “There is 
someone in the room.” With Karis’s limp, cold hand clasped in both of hers, 
Zanja listened. She heard even, deep breaths. She looked around the door-jamb. A 
candleflame flickered on a tabletop; a woman’s head rested on the table, her 
arms dangling, as if she had been hit from behind with a hammer. Zanja grinned 
into Karis’ vacant stare, and in a moment saw the faintest twitch of a smile. 
Slow-witted was not the same as no-witted.
“Hurry!” Medric hissed. Then Zanja felt nearby, a faintest stirring, the 
restlessness of a time-tempered intelligence and a bitter, ruthless heart. 
Someone was awakening; someone had heard something. Mabin.
Karis could not be hurried. One step at a time they took her down the stairs. 
When they came up they had climbed at a distance from each other to keep the 
treads from creaking, but now they could not be so artful. Karis had no shoes. 
Her steps were silent but her weight was not. The building sighed under the 
burden of her.
On the floor above them, a door opened and there were footsteps. A moment later 
the four of them slipped into Annis’s room and Emil eased the door shut. “It has 
no lock,” he breathed, and began moving furniture to block the door.
A shout echoed down the stairwell. Medric had already gone out the window and 
was halfway to the ground. Footsteps thundered up the stairs. How long would it 
take for the building’s occupants to figure out what had happened? The confused 
guard out m the courtyard would insist no one had come in or out. How long would 
it take for them to realize that rescuers must have come in through a window? 
Emil was pulling up the rope. They would have to lower Karis, who scarcely 
seemed able to place one foot in front of the other and certainly could not be 
expected to climb down a rope.
Zanja abruptly took out her knife and hacked Annis’s bindings to tatter. Annis 
jerked the gag out of her mouth.
“I need your help,” Zanja said.
“After you made a fool out of me? I think I’ll just do the same to you. It seems 
fair!” Annis leapt off the bed and started for the door, clearly expecting Zanja 
to jump her.
“Annis, this is no game. Karis is the G’deon of Shaftal. Settle with me later, 
if you must, but help her now.”
Annis stopped short. “What? Is this another one of your tales?”
“It’s the truth. Come and help us lower her to the ground— she’s too heavy just 
for the two of us. Come! There is no time!”
Annis hesitated, but she had always been impulsive. “Oh, all right!” she said, 
but her face glowed with excitement.
Emil was ready. Despite, or perhaps because of the smoke, Karis looked panicked 
as they dropped her over the edge. The three of them popped their shoulder 
joints and burned the skin off their hands lowering her safely to ground, but 
then Medric had her, and Zanja could breathe easier. Annis went out the window, 
followed by Emil. Throughout the building, doors were being slammed open, but no 
one had yet been sent out to check the surrounding streets. Mabin’s people still 
thought that Karis was still somewhere in the building.
Emil had reached the ground. The sky opened up in a fresh downpour. Zanja swung 
out the window and only then remembered the raven. His feathers were fluffed 
comfortably m the warmth of the fire, and he seemed disinclined to leave, but 
finally flew to the windowsill the third time Zanja called him. She slid down 
the rope as Annis’s door crashed open.
There was a pistol blast, and the raven exploded like a feather pillow ripped 
open. In the street below, Karis uttered a terrible, wordless cry, and fell to 
her knees.



Chapter Twenty-three



Annis said, “This way.”
They ran, propelling Karis forward with one person pulling at each arm, and 
another pushing at her back. Annis darted ahead, light-footed, grinning like a 
child set loose to play. They ducked into a narrow back way. Behind them, 
Mabin’s people jammed the house’s single doorway, struggled into the courtyard, 
and shouted at the guard to unlock the gate. With no idea which way the 
fugitives had gone, Mabin would have to divide her forces at every turn. Soon, 
Zanja and her companions would outnumber the pursuers. Pistols would not fire in 
the rain; she and Emil might well be testing their long unused daggers before 
the night was done.
“This way,” Annis called. They fled down an alley where garbage piles awaited 
the trash wagon. They trampled through a vegetable garden, where squash vines 
tripped them and soft mud clung to their ankles. They crashed through a gate 
into another garden, and then between buildings to more gardens, and at last to 
the wall.
“There’s a door in the wall right around here,” Annis said. “So people can 
escape to the river should they need to.” She hopped on one foot, belatedly 
putting her shoes on muddy feet. She had put on a shirt, but her breeches were 
still tucked under her arm.
Zanja could hear Mabin’s people shouting the village awake behind them. Karis 
leaned in her embrace, cold and soaking wet, gasping for breath. She heard a 
bolt shoot open, and Emil said, “Annis, don’t take the path. That way, through 
the woods.” Annis leapt forward, happy in the chase. The three of them followed, 
compelling Karis through the thicket, where a tracker might be able to follow 
their route, but not until daylight and not until the rainfall had ceased. They 
made their way to their horses and put Karis on Homely. The rest of them went on 
foot, heading westward, into the wilderness.



It rained all night and well into the morning, and then the sun split the clouds 
open like a bright hammer upon gray stone. Zanja, trudging across the rocky 
landscape with her hand on Homely’s stirrup, sensed a quickening in the giant 
riding beside her, and looked up to see that Karis had lifted her hanging head 
and was squinting up into the sun. “Karis, are you awake?”
Karis glanced bleakly down at her.
Zanja put her hand upon Karis’s sodden knee, wondering if she would even feel 
the touch. A steady tremor ran through the muscles under her hand, like the 
vibration of a heavy wagon upon cobblestones. “Should I explain what has 
happened?”
Karis shook her head.
If reason and will broke free of smoke’s paralysis before bone and muscle did, 
then Karis had been considering her situation for some time already. Perhaps she 
felt the vacancy of amputation where her raven had been; perhaps she had sorted 
through the dreamlike memories. She seemed, now, to become aware of the hand 
upon her knee, and she covered it with her own. Her hands already were 
trembling.
Zanja said, “I took the box of smoke from your room. You still have your smoke 
purse.”
Karis dried with her sleeve the wretched tears that had streaked her face. “Can 
we stop?” she slurred.
Zanja shouted ahead at her companions, who had outpaced Homely and his heavy 
burden, then led the horse to a bit of a rise, which she hoped might be less 
muddy, and helped Karis to dismount. Karis lay down with her back against the 
earth, like an uprooted plant digging herself back into the soil.
Zanja took hold of her hand again.
“Help me.”
Zanja had cobbled together courage before, using whatever poor bits and pieces 
of strength she had at hand. But to do it for another person, when she herself 
felt hopeless, was not an easy feat. She stated the bitter facts, as Norina 
would have. “If you continue to use the drug as you have been doing, you’ll die. 
But if you stop, that also will kill you.”
A tremor rippled through Karis’s form, like a small wave running ahead of a 
devastating flood. “Another choice,” she gasped.
Wouldn’t there have to be a tenuous route, halfway between one death and the 
other? If there wasn’t one, what harm was there in pretending like there was 
one? “A dance,” Zanja said. “A balance. Use enough smoke to keep you alive, but 
not enough to kill you. Every time you smoke, wait a little longer. In time, you 
will be using the drug just once a day again.”
Karis said hoarsely, “And in the interim, this agony. Death sounds easier.”
“No doubt it is easier. No doubt it would have been easier had I chosen death a 
year ago, when your raven gave me the choice. There’s been a number of times I 
wondered why I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you?” she gasped. Her eyes were blank with pain.
“I knew I was caught up in something, and could not endure to die with my 
curiosity unsatisfied.”
Karis smiled faintly. She placed Zanja’s hand upon her breast, where the hard 
outline of her smoke purse lay under the shirtcloth. “Take it.”
“I don’t want to decide for you—”
“Don’t be so scrupulous.” Another tremor, stronger than the last, shook through 
her, and Karis took a shaky breath. “It won’t be pretty. I’ve seen smoke addicts 
die—because they could not— light a match. And no one thought to light it for 
them.”
Zanja unbuttoned Karis’s shirt and lifted the purse from around her neck. Then, 
she put the green pendant in its place, knotting the torn and mudstained ends of 
the ribbon.
Karis seemed to find it difficult to breath. But she asked, “Are you—all right?”
“Is this earth logic, to worry about me when it’s your life that’s at risk?” 
Zanja added, “When I saw the Sainnite army crossing the Asha River in dead of 
night with my people helpless before them, that tried my courage. This is not 
any worse.”
“This is my worst fear.”
“Don’t face it alone.”
“So that’s the secret.”
Karis sat up so Zanja could hold her: against her shoulder, within her arms, 
between her legs, an embrace that could have scarcely been more intimate if 
they’d taken off their clothing. When the first convulsion came, it had Karis’s 
shocking strength behind it, and Zanja could no more hold her still than she 
could have reined in a maddened plowhorse. She learned to ride it through, 
evading Karis’s flailing limbs, holding on by gripping her own wrist across 
Karis’s ribs, so that she still would be there when the seizure was over. Each 
time a seizure passed, Karis lay limp against her shoulder, sobbing for breath, 
clammy with sweat, and later weeping, bleeding from a bitten tongue and lips. 
Finally, she scarcely seemed conscious anymore and Zanja lit the pipe for her 
and helped her smoke. The convulsions stopped, and then the tremors, and Karis’s 
head grew heavy and her hands slid down to rest upon the grass that she had torn 
up earlier by the roots. Her eyes glazed and closed, and Zanja could not rouse 
her.
She must have uttered a cry, for when she looked up Emil was kneeling beside 
her. He felt the pulse in Karis’s neck and said, “Zanja, surely you don’t think 
either one of you can repeatedly endure such a torment.” He must have watched 
from a distance and been hard put not to intervene.
Zanja’s exhaustion washed over her then, as though Emil’s acknowledgment had 
raised a water gate. “I am the only one who can help her to walk this hard way, 
though watching her do it breaks my heart.”
“For the gods require you to show the way across the borders. I understand that. 
But if you lose her, you will lose yourself. It’s a poor friend who would stand 
by and let you do such a thing needlessly.”
“Needless?” She considered for a while. “Heedless, certainly. Haven’t you heard 
that hopeless passion brings out the worst in the na’Tarweins?”
“I’m afraid this is the first I’ve heard of it.” Emil uttered an unkind snort. 
“I take that to mean you’ll try to listen to me, but you’re making no promises. 
Well, even when I was your commander I couldn’t depend on you to follow orders.” 
He felt Karis’s pulse again, and said, “She’s got a strong heart, doesn’t she? 
Earth witches are notoriously hard to kill. I say you need not be so impatient 
for a cure. Let her move more slowly out of her darkness.”
Zanja let the reassurance calm her own more volatile heart, and as if in 
response Karis stirred, and Zanja looked down to find her eyes open, though 
blank and senseless.
“We can try to get her back on a horse,” Emil said. “My horse looks the best of 
the three now, though that’s not saying much. I doubt we can travel much 
further, but Medric says we’ve entered into an elemental’s domain, unlikely 
though it seems in this wilderness, and he says this man or woman will 
investigate our presence and either offer us hostility or sanctuary. Let’s hope 
for the latter, shall we?”



They continued to travel in the direction they had been going, with the river 
canyon to their right. Some trees had begun to appear in the pathless waste. 
Just after passing a grove of these at midafternoon, a ululating cry echoed 
behind them. Zanja turned to find a rag-tag group of people emerging from among 
the trees—children she thought them at first, until she saw that at least two of 
them had hair gone to gray. Over Emil’s objections she walked back to them 
alone. Even alone, with her hands held out in friendship, she seemed to frighten 
them, for they drew back, wide-eyed, as she neared them. Some wore only 
necklaces and girdles of white shells, and others wore strange woven garments of 
rough men. Some carried spears of wood, split into three sharpened points. An 
old man emerged from their midst and came out to her. He spoke in a language she 
had never heard, a language like water on stone.
Surely they had traveled beyond the borders of Shaftal, into the wild lands of 
the west, which, like the northern mountains and the southern plains, was 
tenanted by tribal people. This tribe into whose territory they had wandered 
clearly were too anxious to be warlike, and probably it was usual for them to 
avoid strangers, rather than seeking them out like this.
Zanja said, in Shaftalese and then again in the language of her own lost people, 
“We must have shelter. Will you help us?”
The man replied. She was too tired to listen, too tired to even try to 
distinguish one sound from the next. He took a step forward, and held out his 
hand. A large leaf in his palm unfolded to reveal a bit of fish, brown with the 
smoke that had preserved it. Enemies do not eat each other’s food, so Zanja took 
the warm piece of smoked fish and put it in her mouth. The wild people 
immediately stepped forward, peering at her curiously.
Emil had the wit to bring out some of their own meat and bread, and the wild 
people all ate a mouthful of their food, while those of Zanja’s company ate some 
of the wild people’s fish. During this necessary waste of time, the old man 
walked up to Karis, cautious of the horse, and stood for a while beside her, 
looking up at her. Then he put a hand upon her bare foot, and Karis, who 
throughout the day had scarcely seemed conscious, heavily lifted her head. He 
seemed startled—perhaps by her size or blue eyes—but did not step back. Karis 
opened her mouth as if to speak, though she could not, and the old man bowed to 
her. He turned to his people and spoke to them, and they all bowed to Karis, 
with their hands upon their hearts.
The old man was a water witch, Medric enthusiastically told Zanja, delighted and 
amazed by such a rarity, despite his own exhaustion. Zanja felt no amazement, 
only relief that she needed not cross the boundary of language in order to 
explain herself to the man, at least not today.
They followed the tribal people down a steep and crooked path into a deep cleft 
in the earth. Here, captured between cliffs as steep and barren as stone walls, 
lay an island-scattered azure lake carved out by the river long ago, with a 
cattail marsh along one edge and a stony beach along another. Here a half dozen 
tiny boats of lath and hide lay upon the shore, and dozens of others sprinted 
across the water’s surface like paddle bugs. The sound of laughter echoed across 
the waters, and some curious children came swimming up the shoreline, slick and 
bright-eyed as otters. Somewhere, Zanja supposed, there was a village, but 
weariness and sunlight reflecting off the water blinded her so she could 
scarcely see to keep her feet from wandering off the path.
They walked along the stony beach to a place where the floods of ages had 
undermined the cliff face, making a wide and shallow cave, which a crowd of 
industrious people had nearly finished walling off with gathered stones. Upon a 
simple hearth, a row of fish pierced on a green wand were being roasted, and a 
pile of flatbreads warmed. When Zanja came out from helping Karis into the cave 
and laying her down upon the rush mat within, Emil already had started water 
heating for tea, and the people seemed intrigued by his iron cooking pot. Medric 
and Annis had gone away with the horses, and all their gear lay in a pile upon 
the beach.
After Zanja had spread the damp blankets out to dry in the sun, she joined Emil, 
who was drinking a cup of the bitter bark infusion that eased the pain in his 
knee. The water witch and a few others sat with him, sipping with some 
astonishment from porcelain cups of green tea. Zanja bowed to the water witch 
with her hand on her heart, as his people had done to Karis earlier, and he 
gravely bowed to her in return. Emil said, “What will you have, green tea or 
willowbark or both?”
She took both, and when Annis and Medric returned they shared the hot fish, 
flaking the meat from the bones and wrapping it in the warm flatbread. Medric 
said, “These people live on one of the islands out there, and hardly ever set 
foot on ground at all. I wish I knew the language; there’s so much I want to 
ask!”
Zanja already thought of them as Otter People: a lithe and small and playful 
folk. She taught Medric the words she had already learned involuntarily while 
listening to the Otter People talk. She knew “water,” “fish,” “boat,” “bread,” 
and the word by which the Otter People referred to the five of them, which she 
supposed meant “guest” or “stranger.” The verb patterns would take longer for 
her to grasp, but she expected she would be speaking simple sentences in a day 
or two. All of them, Otter People and stranger alike, engaged in the game of 
word exchange, and soon the Otter People roared with infectious laughter. The 
water element had something to do with time and weather; very little else was 
known about it. Apparently, it made a people of great merriment.
Zanja found that humor difficult to endure, and finally she excused herself to 
check on Karis. Tucked within her womb of stone, Karis lay curled upon her side, 
with a hand resting palm down upon the rock. Sweat plastered the hair upon her 
face. She opened her eyes at Zanja’s touch, but her gaze remained dull and 
blank.
Medric had come in behind her. “She has a fever,” Zanja said, and added in 
frustration, “Despite all the elemental talent gathered there on the beach, she 
is our only healer, and if she could heal herself we would not be in this 
predicament.”
Medric said quietly, “And the smoke will not easily let her go. There’s a reason 
why my father’s people use it to enslave.”
“What does the future hold for her? Have you no idea?”
“I feel that we’ll be safe here, at least for now. I cannot see beyond that, 
because Karis’s life is in the balance.”
“There must be a way to tilt the scale.”
“Zanja, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

* * *

Though Zanja sat beside Karis that night, waiting for just a word or two with 
her before she slipped away again, Karis went directly into convulsions without 
ever leaving her stupor. It was all Zanja could do to get some smoke in her, and 
afterwards she paced up and down the length of the stony beach in a bitter rage, 
unable to endure the fact that she was losing a battle she did not even know how 
to fight. She did not sleep at all.
All night and all day Karis burned with fever, and not even water remained long 
in her stomach. She had already gone thirteen days without food, and could not 
survive much longer. Zanja could not endure watching her starve to death like 
every other smoke addict, and, in desperation, withheld the drug from her one 
night. After a long while, the violence of Karis’s seizures began to alternate 
with a death-like stillness. Zanja finally lit and smoked a pipe herself, 
breathing the foul-tasting stuff into Karis’s mouth and lungs for her, one 
mouthful at a time, until Karis opened her eyes and stared at her in bleak 
horror. At least, Zanja thought, she seemed to be conscious for once.
Then her wits deserted her entirely, and the gift of smoke was thrust upon her 
willy-nilly, if a complete cessation of rational thought and physical sensation 
could be called a gift. Later, she would remember that she had become like a 
worn-out child, who curled where she was upon bare stone and shut her eyes to 
sleep.



She awoke puzzled, heavy-bodied, tortoise-slow. A big hand smacked her cheek, 
and the dull shock of pain and surprise brought her upright. It was morning, 
well past dawn. She dimly smelled the cookfires’ smoke, and heard the laughter 
of the Otter People as they gathered up their nets. A fist caught her braids and 
she was jerked back down onto the pallet beside Karis, and a muscled arm 
embraced her throat.
Karis’s voice rasped in her ear. “You will not smoke again. Swear.”
Clawing at the blacksmith’s muscles, Zanja choked, “No.”
“Swear!”
Black spots swam before Zanja’s eyes. “Only—to save—your life,” she gasped.
“My life is not worth such a price!”
And then she was shoved irresistibly away onto the bare stone, where she lay 
until her vision stopped swirling and she dared sit up, rubbing her neck and 
testing the hair at the back of her head to make certain it was still attached. 
“It’s good to see you feeling so well,” she said, speaking with some difficulty.
Karis lay upon her back, breathing convulsively, tense with rage, as though she 
was about to leap up and wreck the cave and all its contents, like a berserker. 
Zanja got up and went to the door. Emil and Medric lay in each other’s arms on 
the stony beach, groggy with love and sunshine. She shouted imperiously at them 
to bring some porridge, and they both stared at her.
She went back in, and knelt at Karis’s side, and begged her pardon for taking a 
risk she’d had no choice about and had every intention of taking again should 
the need arise. Her patent insincerity was enough to make Karis smile weakly. “I 
guess I didn’t make much of an impression.”
Zanja rubbed a bruised elbow. “You made an impression all right.”
As Emil came in with the porridge, followed by Medric, they each in turn blocked 
the sunlight and cast the cave into shadow. Emil still limped badly. He bowed 
ironically as he handed Zanja some porridge. “I had checked on you just minutes 
ago.”
“I was rudely awakened and it made me ill-mannered. I am sorry.”
“Well, you’ve been under a strain,” Emil said more kindly. “How is she?”
He looked directly into Karis’s face and recoiled with surprise.
Zanja remembered then what it had been like to meet Karis for the first time, to 
feel the shocking, palpable presence of her intelligence, like a handshake that 
leaves the hand aching. Emil, whose talent made people’s hearts transparent to 
him, dropped heedlessly to his knees. Karis gazed at him in some puzzlement, 
then at Medric, who had crouched, wide-eyed, beside him, and then she turned to 
Zanja and said, “I should know these people.”
“They helped in your escape and have been with us ever since. These are my 
friends, Emil Paladin and the seer Medric.”
“How could this be?” Karis said blankly.
Much to Zanja’s relief, Emil’s look of astonishment gave way to a genuine smile. 
“Well, Karis, Medric had a dream that Zanja needed us, and so as soon as we 
could we traded our dray horse and wagon for a couple of riding horses, and 
nearly killed them coming here cross-country, rather to Zanja’s surprise. But 
for us it was very simple, really.”
Karis looked from him to Medric.
Medric said, “Karis, you are the hope of Shaftal.”
There was a silence. Karis said, “So I see that, like all seers, you are mad.”
Zanja convinced Karis to eat while she explained where they were and how they 
had gotten there. Before she finished the tale, Karis’s tremors began again, and 
Medric and Emil delicately took their leave. Karis set the mostly empty bowl 
aside and lay back upon the plain pallet, wan and hollow-eyed. She said, “I 
didn’t want and never would have chosen the ancient office of G’deon. But your 
fire blood friends seem enchanted by the glamour of it.”
Zanja said, “Oh, yes, it is quite glamorous. I myself am struck dumb by the 
glory of it.”
Karis shut her eyes, and said heavily, “I know I should laugh. But the truth is 
too bitter. For fifteen years I have carried this weight within the flawed 
receptacle of my flesh and bones, and as if that weren’t enough, have also borne 
the burden of Mabin’s unremitting censure and Norina’s overbearing solicitude. 
Mercy could only be had from the secrecy that allowed me to be a mere earth 
witch and metalsmith of modest ambitions. Now that mercy is gone.”
Zanja said, “So now you must become accustomed to being treated with affection 
and respect by three fire bloods. Why is it terrible to be so richly perceived 
now?”
Karis flinched as a particularly strong tremor shook her frame. “If I live—then 
I will fail your hopes. Shaftal—I am so tired.”
“Our hopes for what?”
Karis shuddered again. Sweat beaded her forehead as if she endured an intense 
pain. “Whatever you want. Deliverance. The healing of the world. All things I 
cannot do.”
Zanja said softly, “Even the gods could not save my people from destruction. So 
if Shaftal is to be saved, it seems it must happen in a more ordinary way. 
Karis, how can I give you peace? Shall I tell you that I’m simply fulfilling my 
long overdue obligation in a trade agreement? You broke into a Sainnite prison 
and saved my life and rescued me; now I have broken into a Paladin prison and 
saved your life and rescued you. It’s a simple exchange. Or would it make you 
feel better if I tell you that once I’ve made you indebted to me I have every 
intention of abusing your sense of obligation? That would make you feel better.”
Karis began to laugh, but it was painful to watch.
Zanja said, “But the truth is that I dare not let you die, nor dare I release 
your secret to the world, for Norina will hunt me down and skewer me.”
“That’s true,” Karis said. “But it’s not the whole truth.”
“Well, of course, I am devoted to you. So why can you accept devotion from 
Norina and not from me?”
Karis’s hand clenched convulsively in Zanja’s, her palm sticky with sweat. “I 
accept Norina’s duty,” she said. “But you have no excuse.”
The convulsions began.



Even the worst of battles has an end, but for Karis the siege never seemed to 
lift. Three times between each sunrise, Zanja sat beside her as she fought her 
tedious, horrifying struggle, only to give in, over and over again. With 
slowness that seemed unendurable, Karis won back her life from smoke, gaining 
ground so slowly that many a time it seemed as though she won nothing at all. It 
was a wearying, desperate, grinding labor of will that yielded too little 
reward. Days of sudden fevers and devastating fits of nausea gave way to days of 
dispirited exhaustion and irritable boredom. Then, Karis made a water clock by 
piercing a hole in an empty pot and hanging it to drip water into a container. 
This clock became her enemy, and the changing containers Zanja put down to catch 
the water defined the progress of the combat. For seven days the time Karis 
called her own could not fill one of Emil’s tiny porcelain teacups. But then the 
teacup overflowed and Zanja’s battered tin porringer replaced it.
Ten more drops of water today than yesterday, and tomorrow it would be ten more. 
Medric timed the water drops with Emil’s watch, then worked a cipher on the 
stone floor with a piece of charcoal. At this rate, a year would pass before 
Karis was smoking only once a day again. Zanja made him erase it before Karis 
could see the grim numbers.
One afternoon, when Zanja came out of the shadowed cave into the rich warmth of 
the late summer sunshine, Medric was waiting for her. Karis had just smoked, and 
had fallen into an exhausted sleep. This was not the first time either Medric or 
Emil lay in wait for Zanja, but only now did she realize that it was no 
accident. The two of you are taking turns,“ she said.
Medric grinned. “It’s a measure of how preoccupied you are that it took so long 
for you to realize it. Here, sit down. I want to talk to you.”
She sat on one of the large stones that served them as furniture. The entire 
population of the Otter People’s village seemed to be out on the lake this warm 
afternoon. One of the young people engaged in a raucous boat race was a stocky, 
brown-haired South Hill farmer who seemed on the verge of tipping her boat into 
the water. It hardly mattered, since Annis wore no clothing. The sun had cooked 
her brown as a loaf of overcooked bread. Someone dumped Annis into the water and 
she came up laughing.
“There is a shadow over Karis,” Medric said. “And it lies over you as well, 
since you have bound yourself to share her fate.”
“What shadow?” Zanja asked. “Death, is that it? Madness? Neither one seems worse 
than this torture.”
Medric said, “A moment of decision is coming upon you, a time when you must see 
clearly and speak with courage. But you have lost your vision. Karis’s whole 
attention is on the water dripping from her clock, and there’s a kind of madness 
in that—one that you have come to share with her. Here, eat this.”
He had given her a piece of the Otter People’s flatbread, with some of the 
ubiquitous smoked fish rolled up inside. Zanja ate it rather as Karis would have 
done, obediently, without hunger or pleasure. Medric pushed his spectacles up 
onto the bridge of his nose and gazed rather blearily out across the water, 
blinking in the glare. “These water folk make me see how much we fire bloods are 
bound by our seriousness. Everything we do seems fraught with importance. It’s 
easy to lose perspective.” He took off his spectacles and put on the other pair. 
“Aha!”
Zanja said, “What can’t I see?”
“I have seen Karis lift a hammer and strike, and the sparks fall around her in a 
shower of gold. I see her shaping the world on her forge.”
There was a silence. Zanja said, “Will you stay here for a while and keep an eye 
on Karis? I want a bath.”
She took the cake of soap and bathed in the downriver end of the lake, washing 
even her stinking clothing and dirty hair, and when she came back with her 
dripping laundry in her arms, Medric loaned her a clean shirt to wear and combed 
her hair for her. Then, as Zanja braided her hair, he read out loud from one of 
the half dozen books that he and Emil continued to haul around with them, though 
most of the library was safely stored. He read a history of a time so ancient 
the story seemed more myth than fact, yet the tale had an eerie familiarity: a 
tale of people arriving by sea to a land inhabited by tribal folk, and how at 
first they had been conquerors until at last the land tamed them and taught them 
how to live upon it. That land had been Shaftal.
Zanja lay back, with her hair only half braided, dazed by cleanliness and 
sunshine and the easy rhythms of Mednc’s reading voice, and the ancient cycles 
of history. Medric broke off and said, “Here’s Emil, looking grumpy, and the 
water witch.”
Zanja sat up and rubbed her eyes. Two boats had landed on the beach. The water 
witch, carrying a heavy jug, went into Karis’s cave. Zanja started to get up, 
but Emil’s hand restrained her. Medric went back to his reading, and then he and 
Emil sat talking about history for hours. When at last the water witch 
reappeared, he crouched down beside Zanja and said, “Give her the water to drink 
until she has drunk dry the jug.”
“Esteemed sir, as you will,” she said, and bowed.
He got into his boat and rowed away.
“You absorb language like paper absorbs ink,” said Medric admiringly.
“Land have mercy,” Emil said, “isn’t the man tired yet? He took me on a half-day 
journey upstream until my arms were about to fall off from rowing, and then we 
had to climb the cliff to a little spring that bubbled out from a crack in the 
stone. I’m certain he explained it to me, but unlike Zanja, I don’t understand a 
word he says.”
Zanja said, “You obviously are the elder of our tribe. Therefore, you stand 
witness on our behalf.”
“Witness to what, though?” Emil said, rubbing a stiff shoulder.
Medric lifted his head and smiled suddenly. Zanja turned to look at what he was 
seeing, and leapt to her feet and ran to the doorway of the little cave, where 
Karis stood, braced between stones. Karis said thickly, “If I’m to receive 
guests now I should be more presentable.” She dropped her shirt, which she had 
been unbuttoning, and walked across the beach and into the water.
Zanja picked up the shirt, which was even more rank than hers had been, and 
stood there feeling like a parent must feel when her firstborn suddenly ceases 
to be a child.

* * *

When Karis came out of the water, Emil wrapped her in a blanket, and gave her 
the last cup of tea. She sat by the coals of the fire, watching Zanja stew her 
shirt and spice it heavily with shavings from their solitary bar of soap. “You 
never told me what a peculiar feeling it is to have someone work magic on you,” 
she said to Zanja.
“Well, I didn’t want to seem as if I were complaining.”
“What did he do?” Medric asked.
“Water magic makes no sense to me. He did something very ordinary.”
“Surely not!”
“It was ordinary, I tell you.”
Perhaps Karis was incapable of appetite, but she ate an astonishing quantity of 
bread and fish, and then pursued a lengthy argument with Medric. It was well 
past sunset by the time the tremors began, and when Zanja went into the cave 
with her, the porringer under the water clock had filled to overflowing, and was 
surrounded by a small pond of spilled water, with the water clock nearly empty.
“I guess we need a bigger bowl,” Zanja said.
Karis sat upon her pallet of woven reeds.
“Here, you’re supposed to drink dry the jug, he said.” Zanja picked up the water 
jug from the floor, but it already was empty. “What did he do to you?”
Karis said, “You know how people wish for more time.”
Zanja looked at the overflowing porringer. Another drop plunked into it. “Time 
is water?”
“For him it is. I told you it made no sense.”
“How is it ordinary that he gave you more time?”
“People give each other time fairly commonly, don’t they? You’re giving me some 
of yours right now. I tend to be miserly with mine, however. I always feel like 
I don’t have enough of it.” She lay down. “Am I tired?”
“You should be.”
The spasms, when they came, were not nearly as violent as they had been. 
Afterwards, in the few moments between smoking the pipe and going under smoke, 
Karis said, “I think I might live.”
“You’ve faced your ordeal with great courage.”
“What choice had I?” And she was gone.



Chapter Twenty-four



The night had been edged with a bit of autumn’s chill, and when Zanja awoke, she 
remembered that she had crawled into Karis’s bed in the middle of the night and 
covered them both with her blanket. She lay alone now upon the reed pallet, and 
a bowl with waves painted along its edge sat beneath the water clock, collecting 
time. She went out and found Karis beside the fire with Emil. He had unbuttoned 
and rolled up the leg of his breeches to reveal the knee that plagued him so. It 
was a wonder that he could walk at all, Zanja realized as she got a closer look 
at the scarred, distorted, swollen joint, much less run and fight the way he 
did. Karis laid her hand upon his knee and he began arguing with her.
“Just concede,” Zanja advised him. “She’s bigger and stronger than you are.”
Her clothing had dried enough to wear. She took Medric’s borrowed shirt to put 
it with his gear, and found him asleep on the reed bed he and Emil shared. He 
often slept late, for he often sat awake for half the night. When Zanja returned 
to the fire, Emil’s knee had been transformed. “I don’t know,” he said 
bemusedly. “Somehow, this seems like cheating.” He worked the new knee as he 
might work the trigger of a new pistol.
Karis said, “Five years of walking on a shattered knee seems long enough to me.”
“It’s just as well I haven’t known you all these years. How could I have kept 
from entreating you to heal my friends, who all are dead now? What a horror I 
would have made of your life, laying upon you a burden of moral quandaries, 
matters of life and death, that no one person should have to resolve by herself. 
It used to take an entire government and strength of tradition to relieve the 
G’deon from having to decide how to dole out his favor. You have no such 
protections.“
“Not even the protection of being able to pretend that I’m superior to everyone 
else. Good morning,” she added to Zanja. “Is it too early for such serious 
talk?”
“We’re out of tea,” Emil said sadly.
Karis had already eaten, but sat down with Zanja to eat again, and told her that 
Annis, who seemed to be living with the Otter People, had rowed over at dawn 
with the new bowl for the water clock, the day’s delivery of food, and a pair of 
sandals for Karis. “Have I met Annis before?” Karis asked.
“I doubt you remember. She’s a genius at blowing things up, and comes from a 
good family.”
“That’s better than I can say about myself.”
Emil took a few steps, testing his new knee. “Oh blessed day,” he said, “You’re 
a genius, anyway. You can always get a good family.”
Karis was still smiling as, after breakfast, she took Zanja’s arm and walked her 
down the beach. “You must have been cold last night.”
“I’m afraid it made me presumptuous.”
Karis had turned her face away to look over the busy waters of the lake. Now she 
looked back, and Zanja did not think she had ever seen such unhappiness. 
“Presumptuous?”
“I—”
“Let’s pretend I don’t understand why it might be presumptuous for you to share 
my bed on a cold night,” Karis said.
“All right.” The pretense was certainly preferable to any other alternative.
“But if I’m to be your torturer . . .”
“What torture? I have no false hopes.” Zanja kicked at the stones. “I thought we 
were pretending we didn’t know what we’re talking about.”
“I guess that’s not going to work.”
“Well, then let me say my speech about how I hope you won’t let this come 
between us, and how in time I’ll come to my senses—
“Come to your senses! Oh, have pity!” Karis dropped to her knees and drove her 
fists onto the stones with enough force to send them flying and clattering 
across the beach. Zanja grabbed her wrists, fearful that she would break the 
small bones of her hands without knowing it. Karis cried, “Let it me be who 
comes to her senses! Let me taste, let me feel hunger and pain and weariness and 
even pleasure! Let me know the name of the desire that drives me! If there be 
gods—”
Karis was taken by a spasm of grief as sudden and violent as the smoke 
convulsions that made her life all but unendurable. She struggled in Zanja’s 
embrace, but finally let her head rest in the cradle of her shoulder while she 
wept. At last she was still, and said hoarsely, calmly, with her head heavy 
against Zanja’s breastbone, “Zanja na’Tarwein, you’re in love with a madwoman.”
Zanja kissed the tangled mess of Karis’s hair. “I’m not entirely sane myself.”
Karis convulsed again; Zanja could only hope it was with laughter this time. And 
then they both lay still, while the sweet laughter of the Otter children echoed 
across the water, and the warm sun rose above the canyon rim. In that silence 
that came in the wake of sorrow, Zanja felt the heavy weight of the moment 
resting upon her like a door upon its hinge. She said, “Councilor Mabin has 
proven herself so ruthless, it seems that something about you must terrify her. 
I wish you would explain it.”
Karis groaned against Zanja’s chest. “Shall I explain why water runs downhill? 
Shall I name the forces that bind together and tear apart? That I can do. But 
why Councilor Mabin hates me and has always hated me, that I can’t explain. It’s 
not for anything I’ve done—I’ve done so little—so it must be for what I am.”
“Once you lived with her, you and Norina.”
“No, Norina lived with her, but I was her prisoner, for Mabin doled smoke out to 
me, one piece at a time, like a reward given a trained dog. Mabin is the one who 
taught me that no matter what else I did with my life, I had better learn a 
trade so I didn’t have to depend on anyone except myself for my smoke supply.”
Zanja stroked a hand down Karis’s unruly head, but had to stop because it was 
too much for her to endure.
“Agreeing to help me escape her cost Norina too much,” Karis said. “She became 
as bound to me as I am bound to smoke.”
“She was what, Medric’s age?”
“She was never young,” Karis said. “When she was crowning between her mother’s 
legs, her mother shouted, ‘There’s been a mistake! My baby is an old woman!’ ”
“That explains a lot,” Zanja said gravely. “But I’ve never understood exactly 
why Norina agreed to help you. If you were not to be the G’deon . . .”
Karis said wearily, “No, Zanja, she told you the truth when we were at 
Strongbridge. It is her duty to make it possible for me to survive to vest the 
next G’deon.”
“That’s all you live for? To lay upon some child a burden you could not yourself 
endure?”
Karis lifted her head then, and Zanja let go of her. Having felt the force of 
her anger before, Zanja thought it prudent to put some distance between them.
“I am not completely without hope,” Karis said, with great restraint. “I can yet 
believe that the future can be different from and better than the present. I 
even have the audacity to imagine that I might yet win some small honor for 
delivering Shaftal’s inheritance to its rightful heir.”
Zanja said, “But why are you not Shaftal’s rightful heir?”
“You have to ask? Just look at me.”
“Do you believe that Harald G’deon picked you as thoughtlessly as he would pick 
a whore, and raped you with his power merely because you were convenient? Or 
rather, is that the story Mabin wants you to believe? This same Mabin who hates 
you and controlled you first through smoke and later through your beloved 
friend, and finally, rather than have you escape her control, all but murdered 
you? You still trust that woman’s judgment?”
A long time the silence lasted. Karis rubbed her eyes as though to clear away a 
blur of tears.
“Tell me what happened when they brought you to Harald,” Zanja said.
“It was afternoon. The night before, I had managed to use smoke without Dinal 
realizing it, for we were sleeping under stars. But once we came to the House of 
Lilterwess, I began to worry, for it was such a crowded place. Dinal had been so 
kind to me, I feared to lose her regard by telling her the truth, but I thought 
that I would have to. That was the only thing on my mind as she brought me into 
Harald’s room. The room was full of silent, dignified people, who all turned in 
surprise to stare at me. Dinal’s hand was on my shoulder. She pushed me forward, 
and the dying man on the bed opened his eyes and held out his hand to me. I felt 
a surprise, a kinship—he was an earth witch like myself. I knew so little that I 
didn’t even realize this must be Harald G’deon. I thought that he might teach me 
what to do with myself, if he lives. But his life fire burned so faintly, I knew 
he would only live a few more hours at most. So I took hold of his hand, to bid 
him a safe journey. That is what I remember clearly. Norina says he died 
immediately after empowering me, without saying a word.“
“Who decided it was not Harald’s intention to name you his successor?”
“It was the Lilterwess Council. Once Dinal explained who I was, and it became 
evident I was a smoke addict, the council decided not to affirm me as G’deon.”
“But Norina was not party to that meeting, was she? And Mabin is the only 
councilor who survived the night.”
“Norina has her faults, but she has never lied to me.”
“No, but it’s possible she doesn’t know the entire truth. I’m asking because I 
don’t understand why Mabin fears you enough to kill you.”
Karis said quietly, “I have been vested with a stunning power, and nothing can 
stop me from exercising it as I choose. Don’t you find that frightening? I’m 
certain Mabin fears that I will challenge her, and claim the G’deon’s right. 
That I have no desire to do so must be unbelievable to her.”
“But what if Harald G’deon knew what you were when he sent Dinal for you? Even 
if he was out of his mind, as some say he was, he was not a fool. So let the 
G’deon’s chair remain empty if that’s what seems right to you, and wander the 
land in rags and die unknown like Mackapee did. Scholars like Emil and Medric 
will study the obscure history of your life a hundred years from now and never 
quite make sense of it. So what, so long as it makes sense to you?”
Karis uttered a short laugh.
“What I see is that your life has been decided by people who seem determined to 
keep you within boundaries and to keep you from realizing that they are 
controlling you. And I see that as a result you never have made a choice for 
yourself except one time, the time you saved my life. And it put all of your 
keepers into a panic, which surely reveals how illusory are the boundaries 
they’ve put around you, and how easy it would be for you to simply step outside 
of them. So why not set yourself free of them? If you were free to live as well 
and joyfully as you could, exercising with honor what powers have been given to 
you, what would you do? Can you even imagine?“
Karis muttered to herself, as her raven would have, “Oh, I am in dire danger.”
She laid her hands flat against the stony beach. “I know exactly what I would 
do,” she said. She got abruptly to her feet. “Excuse me.” And she was gone, 
striding quickly back the way she had come, to where Medric sat awake in his 
bed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light reflecting from his spectacles that 
made it seem as if he were staring at them across the length of the beach. Karis 
sat beside him and they had a long, sometimes agitated conversation, which ended 
only when Karis got up to go back into her cave.
Zanja looked in on her after a while, and Karis raised her head from where she 
sat in a huddle upon the floor, with her filled smoke pipe in reach, and the 
water clock plunking the occasional drop into the bowl. Zanja said, “Since you 
were kidnapped twenty-one days ago, one keeper or another has been hovering over 
you. It’s not a role I relish much myself, so I hope you’ll just tell me when 
you think you’re strong enough to need no looking after. Are you strong enough 
today?”
Karis shook her head. She looked frightened and worn out, and Zanja remembered 
that Karis had no way to judge what her limits were. “Shall I come in?” she 
asked.
“You’re very formal.”
“Well, I’m making up this dance as I go along. I can’t get it right all the 
time.”
Karis smiled. “That’s better. You know, you aren’t always the most restful of 
companions.”
“Are you admonishing me?” Zanja sat down beside her. “I’ll be boring if you 
will.”
“No,” Karis said, “and no again. But let’s not talk about the future anymore.”
So Zanja diverted Karis with tales of her lifelong friendship with Ransel, until 
the water level in the bowl had risen high enough, and Karis reached for the 
pipe. She suffered no life-threatening convulsions, and because of her rapidly 
increasing strength, she remained awake after she had smoked. Zanja supposed she 
could take her for a walk, like a pet, but the very idea was so unsettling that 
she got up and left the cave instead. It was more than disconcerting to see 
Karis go from the morning’s robust passions and willful vigor to this helpless 
passivity. The contradiction between the two Karises was not at all easy to 
encompass, and Zanja began to understand a little of why Mabin and Norina and 
even Karis herself had been unable to imagine her as anything other than a 
flawed vessel, to be patched together until it could be replaced. But if fire 
talent could not encompass a grand contradiction, what good was it?



It seemed strange that the nights had turned chilly, until Zanja examined the 
night sky and realized that any day now, the stars of summer would set. Karis 
took Zanja exploring up the river canyon, which required more stamina than Zanja 
would have thought Karis possessed. Karis’s energy seemed inspired by the grand 
scale of the landscape: the broken rocks as big as houses, the foaming river, 
the looming stone cliffs, the narrow strip of sky. Her fascination with the 
place worked as a camouflage, and it took some time for Zanja to realize that 
the quality of their conversation had changed, and not for the better. They 
skated across the surface of a conversation mysteriously opaque and 
impenetrable, like water turned to ice.
By the time they returned to Otter Lake, Zanja was utterly confounded. Karis had 
used herself up by then, and they stopped to rest on a rock at the edge of the 
beach. The sun had dropped below the canyon rim, but the rock retained its 
warmth, and Zanja lay back upon it and shut her eyes, only to be assailed by a 
chaos of emotion that her disciplines could hardly keep in check. So this was 
love, she thought ironically, and hoped she’d soon discover the remedy for it. 
Then, she felt a mouth touch hers, tentatively, curiously, and she opened her 
eyes to find Karis’s somber face, carved into hollows by her hard tight with 
smoke, so close that Zanja scarcely would have had to move to kiss her again. 
Zanja said desperately, “Now you are torturing me.”
“I’m torturing myself,” Karis said. She sat back, but Zanja still could scarcely 
breathe. “If my hands had been cut off I’d still be interested in picking things 
up, and I might even try it once in a while.”
Zanja said, in a voice that did not seem hers, “Please don’t try it again.”
“Then how am I to live as well and joyfully as I can? You pose me quite a 
paradox.”
Karis had given Zanja’s scarcely functioning mind a glyph of words to figure 
out. While Zanja floundered in her divination, Karis sat with her chin upon her 
fist. Sometimes, a trembling passed over her. At last, Kans spoke again. “Maybe 
you’ve been merciless for good reasons, but you’ve been merciless nonetheless.”
“It’s a wonder you can stand my company,” Zanja said stiffly. “Surely it’s not 
pleasant to be reminded constantly of what you cannot have.”
“Zanja, I could have whatever I wanted, if only I could want it. But I’m not 
like you, for even when you lay paralyzed, with your back broken, you still 
could want something. So you could imagine a life worth living, though there was 
much you might want and be unable to have. It’s not the having that matters to 
you, am I right? So you can imagine living your whole life beside me, in a state 
of unfulfilled desire, and that’s acceptable to you because it is desire itself 
that gives you joy. But I am an earth witch and no matter how rich my life of 
heart and mind become—and I am rich now, richer than I ever have been—it never 
can amount to joy. I need the earth, the flesh, the life of the skin. Without 
that, this whole thing—” she gestured at the shadowed canyon, the vivid sky, 
“—is just an intellectual exercise.”
Zanja sat up, more bewildered by herself than she was by Karis. “I can’t explain 
it, but I know that what you’ve said is only half the truth. You’re standing in 
a doorway looking in one direction and thinking that what you see is all there 
is. But if you turned around you’d see something else entirely.”
If Karis had received a classical education, then surely she would know that the 
Woman of the Doorway faces danger any way she looks. But Karis did not state 
this obvious objection, and she sighed and seemed relieved, as though this very 
peculiar conversation had served a purpose only she could comprehend. “All 
right,” she said. “I’ll try to turn around. I apologize for my behavior,” she 
added. “It seemed like you wanted to give me some comfort yesterday with all 
your talk of Ransel—a model friendship, untainted by desire. But it only made me 
realize how much I detest the compromise you’re offering. So I thought of how 
I’ve learned to feel the metal beneath my hammer, not by touch, but by knowing 
it from within. I thought I might know you that way.”
“How is that different from what you had to do in Lalali?” Zanja put her head in 
her hands. “You can know me without touching me.
“If I were a fire blood, yes.”
“I see,” Zanja said, in the grip of a deep dismay.
After a while, Karis’s big hand stroked softly down the back of Zanja’s shirt, 
and Karis said, “There’s no point agonizing. I just want you to understand.”
“I can’t understand without agonizing,” Zanja said. But she lifted her head and 
added shakily, “You’ll be wanting to get back.”
Karis stood up and they started down the beach, and after a while Karis closed 
her hand around Zanja’s. “Norina already has left her child and is traveling 
north. I had promised to send the raven before her labor began, so if I know 
Norina, she’s in a panic now.”
Zanja said, “Well, we can’t have her tearing apart the countryside looking for 
us, with no idea of what the dangers are. I’ll have to go find her, somehow, 
before Mabin does.”
Karis nodded. Zanja’s hand felt like it was pinched in a trembling vice.
“How soon do you think I’d have to leave?”
“She’s traveling very fast, and we’ll want to catch her well before 
Strongbridge. That’s what, six day’s travel from here?”
“At least.”
“At least? Then you should leave tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!”
Karis said softly, “I agree. It’s much too soon.”
“She’ll come rampaging in—”
“She will,” Karis agreed.
They had walked in silence almost to the cave before either one of them spoke 
again. Zanja said, “The last time I left you, you disappeared.”
“Well you could be the one who disappears this time. I’m sure Mabin is looking 
for you. You should take Emil with you.”
“No. Emil stays with you. Emil and Medric both.”
“With Medric and the water witch looking out for me—”
“They don’t have Emil’s knowledge and experience.”
Karis sighed. “You want Emil to stay with me for the same reason I want him to 
go with you. Well, let’s not get into an argument about whose life is most worth 
protecting. I always lose that one.”
They were standing at the entrance to the cave, and Zanja realized that this 
time Karis did not want her to go in. Karis said, “I’ll be awake long before the 
sun tomorrow.”
“Wake me up once you’re awake.”
Karis nodded. Her sorrow might have been a load of iron, yet she smiled wryly, 
as though she recognized that she was accepting the very compromise she 
detested: an arm’s length intimacy that must inevitably be corrupted by 
bitterness. After she had gone inside, Zanja sat alone upon the beach, wishing 
futilely for one easy choice, one option that did not leave her bleeding and 
bereft. The sky grew dark, and Emil and Medric came walking down the cliff path, 
hand in hand, talking earnestly, carrying a brace of rabbits and a basket of 
mushrooms for supper. Between the two of them, they were more kind to her than 
she could endure, and she went to bed early to get away from them.



After sunrise, Emil walked with Zanja to the top of the canyon path where their 
horses were picketed. Emil decided not to tell her about Medric’s restless 
night; she did not need to worry more. He promised to look after Karis. From 
Homely’s back, Zanja looked down at him and said with something of her old 
irony, “So now you’re nursemaid to two rogue elementals. Your elevation has been 
meteoric.”
“I can stand it a little longer,” he said. “Just look out after yourself.”
She did not remind him that her survival up until now had bordered on the 
miraculous. “A warrior shouldn’t have so much to lose,” she said. “Especially 
knowing as I do just what it’s like to lose it.”
“Nothing will be lost.” He took her hand and lightly kissed her knuckle. “I’ll 
look for you in twelve days. Medric and I will hunt some fowl, and we’ll have a 
feast. And then all of us will decide what we’re going to do with ourselves. Now 
go.”
Her ugly horse pranced across the pathless ground as though he thought he was on 
parade. Watching her go so lightly and yet so heavily, Emil had the odd thought 
that she did not yet know what she had to fear. Yet, knowing her way was fraught 
with unknown danger, she had set forth. And so we all are Paladins, Emil 
thought, every last one of us who sets forth so lightly upon a dangerous road.
He had this same thought again, later, when Karis came out from under smoke and 
spent the afternoon with him and Medric in a hilarious attempt to circumnavigate 
the lake. Karis feared deep or flowing water and, like all earth witches, could 
not endure setting foot in a boat. While scrambling up and down the rocks, Karis 
made herself entertaining, with a humor that was deep and subtle and utterly 
entrancing. But the charming afternoon left Emil with an aching heart, and he 
and Medric spent a strangely silent evening afterwards. That something of great 
import was at work in both of them seemed clear. But what they struggled with 
Emil could not fathom, and both of them kept their own counsel.



Six days Zanja traveled across a familiar landscape. She skirted Meartown to the 
west and forded the river north of Strongbridge, then worked her way south, 
cross-country. A day’s journey south of Strongbridge, she took lodging at a farm 
near the road she and Norina had traveled, and settled down to watch the road. 
In the afternoon of her second day of watching, Norina appeared. She traveled in 
the company of her gentle husband, riding horses so tired they dragged their 
hooves in the dirt.
Zanja greeted J’han first, who said in some bewilderment, “Zanja? I hardly can 
believe my eyes!” She clasped his hand, thinking how incredible it was that he 
had endured Norina’s company long enough to claim a husband’s right, and yet his 
wife did not trust him enough to explain where they were traveling, or why.
To Norina, Zanja said, “Some terrible things have happened, but Karis has 
survived.”
Norina subjected her to a remote examination. “You are not confident of her 
well-being, though.”
“At that farmstead over there, you can have your horses looked after, and 
perhaps even eat some supper and get a night’s rest. It will take some time for 
me to explain.”
“We’ll go to the farmstead, of course,” J’han said, and started his reluctant 
horse forward. In a moment, Norina followed. J’han laid his hand on Zanja’s 
shoulder as she walked at his stirrup. “So this is all about Karis? I should 
have known.”
Norina said, “And it’s not your business, as I’ve been telling you all along.”
“Your health and safety are not my business,” J’han said, as though agreeing. 
Norina glared, and fell back out of hearing rather than be further subjected to 
the criticisms she could not help but hear, no matter what words her husband 
chose to use.
J’han said to Zanja, “We have a hearty daughter, with a healthy set of lungs on 
her. She’s down there on the seacoast, no doubt screaming fit to raise the 
dead.” And I should be with her, his tone of voice said, so clearly that even a 
non-Truthken easily could hear it.
Zanja said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to return to your daughter.”
J’han smiled sadly. “I have every intention of doing that.”
“Without Norina?”
“Norina chooses differently from how I choose. And as you know, she is 
uncompromising. So this is how it ends.”
Later, having situated the horses and made suitable arrangements with the 
farmers for lodging, Zanja sat with Norina in the guest room and told her how 
Mabin had tried and failed to kill Karis. Norina listened in unnerving silence. 
She asked no questions, neither did she argue. For a while she lay upon the rope 
bed, then she got up to pace the room, then she sat down and picked the dried 
mud from her boots. When Zanja had finished, Norina went to the window and 
leaned out to shout for J’han to come inside.
“Have you ever heard of someone using less smoke?” she asked him when he came 
in, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Less than what?” he asked blankly.
“Karis was forced to smoke more frequently than her usual amount, much more. 
Enough to nearly kill her. And now she’s decreasing that frequency, trying to 
reduce herself back down to once a day. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“No,” he said in some astonishment. “Is she being successful?”
“Yes, apparently, though it hasn’t been easy.”
“I always have heard the smoke users inevitably increase the amount they smoke, 
until they die of the poison or else from their inability to buy as much drug as 
they need. If it’s possible for them to use less. . .” He paused, shaken and 
distressed. “Then we have abandoned them to a fate that we always assumed to be 
inevitable, when in fact we should have been trying to help them.”
“Karis is different,” Norina said.
“She is an extraordinary person of great wit and will. But she is human, and her 
body is no different from mine or yours.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Norina snapped.
J’han set his lips and visibly restrained himself from a sharp reply.
“What is wrong with you?” Zanja said to Norina later, after she had sent J’han 
away again. “I can hardly endure your company, and I don’t see how bringing you 
to Karis will do her a service.”
“Watch your words, Zanja na’Tarwein. I’m not in a tolerant mood.”
“I would never expect you to be tolerant.”
Norina sat again on the bed and dug her fingers into her short hair, which was 
stiff with dirt and stood upright like wheat stalks. “Go away.”
After a long silence she looked at Zanja, who had remained sitting where she 
was, at the table by the window. Norina said, “You tell me that Karis’s true 
enemy is my commander and a hero of the people, and that somehow I, a Truthken, 
never noticed. You tell me that when my dearest friend needed me the most 
desperately, she nearly died in my absence. And now you imply that you have the 
ability and the right to keep me from her unless I behave myself according to 
your high standards. Your very presence chides me. Go away and chide someone 
else.”
Zanja left her, and found J’han out in the kitchen, examining a collection of 
dirty and impatient children, who clearly wanted to make the best of the 
remaining daylight and saw no reason to be subjected to a healer’s scrutiny. 
J’han sent them away, reassured the gathered parents about their health, and 
took Zanja by the arm out into the privacy of the yard. They sat upon the edge 
of the well, and for some time neither of them said a word.
“The people of air are not easy to love,” Zanja said at last.
“Nor even to like sometimes,” J’han said.
“Would you at least come and have a look at Karis, before you start your own 
journey? I’m weary with caring for her.”
“Yes, of course. My child’s in good hands, and I am afraid Norina will kill 
herself with this hard traveling. It was not an easy birth.”
Zanja sighed. “I was beginning to see how being friends with a Truthken might be 
invigorating enough that I could put up with the exasperation. But now I can’t 
see it anymore.”
J’han laughed heartily, without anger for once.
“And I fear for Karis, should she be trapped between air and fire. In truth, I 
wouldn’t blame her if she decided to get rid of us both, just so she could have 
some peace.”
They talked until after dark, when one of the farmers called them in to supper. 
Norina did not appear at the supper table, and J’han slept out in the barn with 
Zanja. In the morning, their journey north began, an angry journey made even 
more grim by the weather, which turned wet and stormy only after they had 
traveled beyond the reaches of civilization and there was no shelter to be 
found. By the time they reached the canyon path they all had been wet to the 
skin for two days and nights, and the nights had been cold as well as wet. They 
had been sleeping huddled together for warmth, but relations between them had 
not thawed much.
In all, thirteen days had passed since Zanja had last traversed this rocky 
pathway down to the lake. Then the lake had glowed like a jewel; now it was 
gray, with the muted colors of tree and canyon bleeding across it like ink on a 
wet page. Halfway down the path, Zanja spotted Emil riding up to meet them. He 
also rode on horseback, with his horse muddied to the belly and rain dripping 
from its mane, and he looked as wearied and worried as Zanja ever had seen him. 
Before he even spoke she knew that something terrible had happened.
“Karis has disappeared again,” he said. “Five days we’ve been hunting for her, 
and haven’t seen a trace, not even a footprint. Zanja, listen—before you ride 
off in a panic and kill yourself on the slippery stones—I swear to you that she 
was not taken away. She has written a glyph upon the space of her cave, and the 
message, I think, is intended for you.”



In the cave shelter, the water clock was not merely shattered, but pulverized to 
powder. In the middle of the cave floor lay Karis’s box of smoke, with the lid 
broken to splinters, and the interior burnt to charcoal. Of the contents, the 
half year’s supply of smoke, nothing remained but ashes.
Yes, Zanja could easily read this glyph. She dropped to her knees beside the 
incinerated box. Of course Karis could not imagine herself free from Mabin’s 
control and Nonna’s expectations if she could not also imagine herself free of 
smoke. Nearly a month of battling back the smoke must have given her an insane 
hope that she might be able to defeat it for good. That was the doorway she had 
decided to enter, the doorway where certain death lurked.
And then Norina was shouting at her: “What have you done! What did you do to 
her!” And it did not even occur to Zanja until too late that she had to defend 
herself, and Norina’s heavy boot slammed into her side—once, twice, a third 
time—before Zanja had managed to catch Norina’s foot and take her down. And then 
they were rolling, their blades of folded steel ringing like bells, a sweet, 
terrible sound. But no matter where Karis was, at the very moment that Zanja’s 
blade cut into Norina’s flesh, Karis would know.
Zanja flung her dagger away and blocked with her forearm a stroke that could 
have killed her, and felt the dagger slice through cloth and flesh and all the 
way to bone. She brought her knee up reflexively into Norina’s crotch and heard 
her shout, and then she was rolling away and rising to her feet, but Norina’s 
heavy boot cracked into her knee and Zanja heard, rather than felt, the bone 
shatter like pottery. Then Emil took Norina from behind and the fight seemed to 
be over. And then the pain came.
“Hold still,” J’han said, his voice deadly calm.
“Gods burn her to ashes—”
“Zanja, hold still. Your ribs might be broken and you could be killed yet.”
Zanja had seen the kind of death that came when a rib pierced a lung, and she 
held herself still, or as still as she could. A very bad time followed. There 
was much frantic activity around her, and sometimes J’han’s voice penetrated the 
haze of pain, always calm, measured, talking steadily to her or to someone else: 
“I know it’s bad, Zanja, but there’s no time to brew a potion. Just keep 
breathing—you know how to keep the pain from taking control of you—Now, sir, 
give me the bandages, and that grayish bottle—yes, that one. Put more pressure 
on her arm; it’s starting to leak again . . .” He faded out, and when he came 
back he was working with needle and thread like a seamster—nice of him to mend 
Zanja’s shirt—except that it was her arm he was mending—and she couldn’t take a 
deep breath for some reason. “You’re awake again?” he said. “Almost done now. 
Amazing how easy it is to do this kind of damage and how much work it takes to 
fix. You can’t breathe very well because I’ve got your ribs bound, but they’re 
just cracked.”
“What happened to my leg?” she croaked. Her entire leg seemed to be immobilized 
with a splint of some kind, but the pain was dazzling and nauseating.
“It’s not good at all—sir, can you cut that?—Your kneecap’s shattered so badly I 
don’t know if it can mend. At the very least it’ll be a long time before you can 
move about at all, even on crutches. I’ve got it in a splint, but—”
Zanja shut her eyes to understand him better, but the information seemed beyond 
comprehension. All she could think of was Karis, incinerating her entire smoke 
supply and walking away. How long would it take for her to die? Would Zanja feel 
it, when Karis died?
“What happened to Norina?” she asked.
“She went away,” J’han said distractedly.
Zanja glanced sideways and saw Emil, holding Zanja’s arm still so that J’han 
could work on it, watching J’han’s work with professional interest. There was 
blood everywhere. Feeling Zanja’s attention, Emil raised an eyebrow and said 
mildly, “Now that was the dirtiest fight I’ve seen outside of a tavern. Too bad 
you were at the receiving end.”
Zanja gasped, “I’d hurt Karis if I hurt Norina.”
“Unfortunately, Norina had no such compunctions. But this is an amazingly clean 
wound.”
J’han said, “With the right blow, a blade like that could kill you before you 
knew you were hurt. I wish my surgeon’s knives were that sharp.”
“Where’s Medric?” Zanja said.
“Now you’re starting to think,” Emil said. “Karis seems to have convinced Medric 
to keep his mouth shut. He’s refused to help look for Karis, as have the Lake 
People refused. It’s been just me and Annis, chasing around the countryside like 
a couple of wastrels. I even tried your trick with the directional glyphs, but 
it doesn’t work for me.”
“Hold still!” J’han said.
“Gods’ curses on that madwoman,” Zanja gasped as a fresh wave of pain washed 
through her. “I’m the only one who can find her!”
“You’ll have to accept that you’re not going anywhere,” J’han said.
Annis brought over a steaming bowl of dark, stinking fluid and held it out for 
J’han’s inspection. He dipped in a fingertip and tasted it, and made a face. 
“Practically undrinkable. That’s about right.”
“No one’s been able to find Medric either,” Annis said. “He’s around, but no 
matter where you are, he’s just left moments before.”
Medric said at the doorway of the cave, “I’m here now. Good gods.” He looked 
around the blood-smeared cave.
“You didn’t dream this part?” Emil said bitterly.
Pale, red-eyed with sleeplessness or sorrow, Medric dropped to one knee beside 
Zanja. “Karis promised to make it possible to find her. She said she’d go west 
along the canyon rim as far as she could go in five days travel, and then she’d 
hole up in some hollow place where she could see the sky. She asked me to beg 
your pardon, Zanja, for deceiving you, but she had to fight this battle alone.”
“She brought enough smoke to last until today?”
“Yes.”
“All three of you must go find her, then. If she can be saved—”
J’han said, with that terrible honesty that was sometimes the only gift a healer 
could give, “Zanja, there is no hope of that. Even if we can find her before she 
dies, the only thing that could save her is smoke, and we have none.“
Emil said in a low voice, “Mabin has some.”
There was silence. Zanja said, “Karis would rather die.” She made the mistake of 
moving, and for some time she could do nothing but breathe and struggle to stay 
conscious. When J’han put the bowl to her mouth she drank just a swallow of the 
bitter pain killer. “J’han, Karis is vested with the power of Shaftal,” she 
said.
He sat back sharply, nearly spilling the bowl of potion. “What!”
“Go with them to find her. If she is dying, at least she should die with 
dignity.”
“Annis can take care of Zanja,” Emil said.
Annis grumbled because her long recess with the Otter People had come to an end, 
but she did not refuse her old commander’s will. They settled Zanja onto the 
pallet with the potion beside her, and within the time it would have taken ten 
drops of water to fall from the water clock, they were gone.



Zanja took one more swallow of the bitter potion, and told Annis to leave her 
alone. After that came a merciful darkness and stillness.
As she slept, Zanja dreamed that she was an owl, flying across the face of the 
earth, with the river flowing to her right, black as blood, and rocks below, 
like scattered bones. At last, she found Karis, a broken and twisted body in a 
grassy hollow where sharp stones broke through the earth like teeth. Her body 
was cold; no breath passed her lips. Emil, Medric, J’han, and Norina knelt in a 
circle around her, digging with their bare hands to cover her with earth. Norina 
was weeping, racked with a grief made all the more terrible by the bitter 
strength her sorrow had overcome.
Zanja must have cried something in her sleep, for she opened her eyes to find 
Annis beside her, with a cool hand upon her burning forehead. Zanja’s throat 
felt scoured raw, and her voice came out a whisper. “They will find her too 
late. Is there any word?”
“Zanja, it’s much too soon.”
“But someone is here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I feel it.”
“Maybe the potion is giving you hallucinations.” But Annis went to the doorway, 
where Zanja could see a bit of star-scattered sky above, and a bit of 
star-scattered lake below. “I don’t see anything,” Annis said. Then her body 
gave a jerk and she uttered a surprised grunt and lifted a hand as if to 
investigate what had struck her, but before she could understand what had 
happened, she fell.
It happened so suddenly that the sound of the pistol’s report didn’t register 
until after Annis’s knees buckled. There was nowhere for Zanja to go, even if 
she’d had the ability and will to flee. Her blade lay within reach, but thanks 
to Norina her blade hand was useless. Her pistols were still in Homely’s 
saddlebags, and the three men had taken Homely with them. Five people came into 
the cave and made certain that Zanja was indeed helpless, and then Mabin came 
in. “Where is Karis?”
“Karis has returned to earth.”
Mabin struck her across the face. “The truth!”
Zanja tasted blood. She said thickly, “Karis has delivered herself to the 
smoke.”
Mabin sat back on her heels, rigid with frustration. “She makes no sense.”
“There’s no one else here,” one of her companions said. “We’ve searched all 
along the beach. No horses, no equipment, no nothing. Just the two of them, and 
Annis is dead.”
Mabin hissed in her breath, and then released it. “If I’d known it was 
Annis—well, there’s no help for it now. So long as we’ve got this one, we’ve as 
good as got the one I want. We’ll have to settle for that.”
“This one seems to be newly injured. Broken ribs, it looks like, and—” Zanja 
felt her injured arm lifted and examined. “She was cut defending herself, with 
healer’s stitches closing up the wound. A nice, clean job of it.”
“A healer, and someone with a nasty temper—that would be Norina and her consort. 
No doubt there’s been a disagreement and Norina has taken off with Karis.” Mabin 
fell silent a moment, and then she muttered, “Shaftal, what have I done to 
deserve this?”
Zanja was tired to the bone, and tired to the heart. She shut her eyes and did 
not open them again until her captors lifted her onto the litter they had made 
for her, and the pain began again. The Paladins had to step over Annis’s body as 
they carried Zanja out into the cold night. And Karis—Karis also would soon be 
dead.



Chapter Twenty-five



Emil, Medric, and J’han traveled through the afternoon and across the dark span 
of the night as though demons were after them. “I think we’re close now,” Medric 
said, sometime after dawn. Soon afterwards, they spotted the white flag lying 
limp in the half light: Karis’s shirt, they realized when they had drawn near, 
tied to a tree branch by the sleeves. They untied it and soon had found their 
way into a hollow of earth that was cupped like the palm of a giant hand. There 
in the center Karis lay in the wet grass. Norina, whose long intimacy with Karis 
must have helped her to find her first, lay beside her, embracing her naked body 
with her own.
“She’s too cold,” she said.
Emil lay down on Karis’s other side and they sandwiched her between them. After 
J’han had listened to Karis’s heart, he covered her with blankets, and sat upon 
a stone with his head in his hands, as though he could not bring himself to 
speak. The Truthken, though, began to weep. Having emptied herself of anger, 
Emil thought, now only grief remained. She had indeed loved Karis, however badly 
she might have done it.
Emil held Karis tightly, as though to keep her from falling. Her powerful 
muscles lay limp and cold; her heartbeat was intangible, the motion of her 
breath so weak it seemed illusory. She’d bitten her mouth, battered her hands, 
scraped her skin raw upon the stones, in a terrible, solitary agony that had 
mercifully ended now. She would die without ever opening her eyes again. The 
healer did not have to say it out loud.
Norina sat up. Her hair was plastered down with water and mud, her face pale 
with exhaustion beneath the grime of hard travel. “J’han, what can we do?”
“Only smoke could save her,” J’han said.
The Truthken shuddered, as though she’d been cut with a blade. “I have some 
smoke,” she said. “Ten years I’ve carried it with me, as a surety.”
J’han leapt to his feet. “We must improvise a pipe.”
“But this one time I will not fail her.” Norina took a pouch out of her shirt 
and emptied its contents into the palm of her hand. One by one she untwisted the 
spills of paper and crushed the contents to powder between her fingers, and 
rubbed the powder into the wet grass where it could not be reclaimed. None of 
them made any move to stop her.
J’han said, “Medric, perhaps you will start a fire and we’ll warm some water to 
bathe her. And then we’ll put her clothes on her.”
Throughout the night, Medric had traveled silently, except for an occasional 
hoarse word to direct their path, a directive which they had accepted in 
silence. From time to time, his face had seemed to come at Emil out of the 
darkness: drawn with sorrow, wet with tears, hollow with a terrible weariness, 
as though he had borne the whole weight of history upon the frail hinges of his 
vision, and could not carry that weight much longer. But now Medric stood back, 
gazing at this desperate, hopeless scene as distantly as a general gazes on a 
battle. “There’s a reason why she took off her clothes,” he said.
Norina wiped a sleeve across her eyes as though to clear a fog, and looked at 
him in that way which makes even the bravest warrior flinch back from a 
Truthken’s stare. “By the land, what are you?” she said softly.
Medric did not flinch under her gaze.
She said, as quietly as before, “Better people than I have given you their 
trust. Tell me what you see.”
“Madam Truthken, when you destroyed that smoke, I saw you close a door. And I 
saw another door open. There is no one in this land who knows Karis like you 
know her. So tell me, why did she take off her clothes?”
“Even though Karis cannot feel the wisdom of her flesh, there are times she 
knows exactly what she needs to do. I suppose it is earth logic.“
“So wouldn’t it be even more logical if she lay on soil rather than grass?”
Norina began pulling up great handfuls of grass by the roots. J’han and Medric 
helped her, and by the time the sun had risen, they had cleared a patch big 
enough to lay Karis upon with her skin pressed against the damp black earth.
“It looks like a grave,” Norina said.
“But it is a garden.” Medric’s eyes had seemed glazed with sleeplessness and 
sorrow, but he was, Emil realized suddenly, in the midst of a waking vision.
Emil said, “Medric, what should we do now?”
“Plant her,” Medric said. “Plant her so she will grow.”



Emil went creeping through the nearby brush until he managed to kill a couple of 
heavy ground birds with some lucky shots. Plucking and cleaning the birds took 
nearly as long as hunting them had, and then he dug up some roots that would 
make a poor substitute for potatoes, and picked greens. He returned with his 
heavy gathering bag to find that nothing much had changed. J’han had dosed 
Medric with a sleeping draught to stop his hallucinations, and Medric slept, 
pale and exhausted even in sleep, his face still creasing sometimes with worry 
or fear. J’han, a botanist like all healers, had collected a pile of 
strengthening herbs. Norina knelt at Karis’s side like a mud-covered statue, 
watching her breathe. Karis, except for her face, was covered with a blanket of 
soil that steamed now in the warm afternoon sun. She had not died yet, and that 
was surprising.
Emil filled his pot with the fowl and the roots and set it on the fire to stew, 
then went off again to gather wood and fill their canteens. Normally, all the 
walking and riding and worrying would have crippled him by now, but when Karis 
laid her hands upon his knee she had repaired much more than that one badly 
healed old injury. He had returned to their camp, and was stirring the pot that 
had started to simmer, when he heard Norina say in a voice destroyed by weeping, 
“Karis.”
Emil feared what he would see, but what he saw was that the soil had cracked 
over Karis’s chest, and those cracks widened and narrowed in rhythm with her 
deep breaths. Karis lay quiet, eyes open, gazing at Norina with an expression 
Emil would not have liked to have directed at him. She turned her face away and 
Norina sat back, as if she had been hit.
J’han scraped away the earth so he could listen to Karis’s heart. He said, 
“Well, Karis, it seems your heart wants to keep beating.”
He put his head near hers, for she seemed to have spoken. “Emil, she’s asking 
for you.”
Emil went to kneel beside her. Her voice was just a whisper, like a sheet of 
paper being torn. “Zanja,” she said.
“We left her in the cave by Otter Lake. She and Norina had a fight and she was 
unable to travel.”
On Karis’s other side, Norina covered her face with her hands. Zanja’s blood 
still spattered her shirt.
Karis opened her mouth again, and the tearing paper sound resolved itself into a 
word: “No,” or perhaps, “I know.” Then she said, “Where is she?”
Emil gazed at her, baffled. Norina dropped her hands and said, “Karis, I swear I 
didn’t kill her.”
Karis did not look at her or seem to have heard her.
“She is alive,” Emil said. “She was bitterly angry at Norina and desperately 
worried about you, last I saw her.”
Karis said very carefully, as though to a stupid child, “Where. Is. She.”
Silence, then Norina spoke, looking at Emil and not at Karis. “Something has 
befallen Zanja. Karis cannot perceive her presence.”
“What!” Emil leapt to his feet.
“I will accompany you. I won’t anger her any longer with my presence.”
J’han began to protest, but stopped himself and said in exasperation, “There’s 
no point in even talking to you. Emil, if I give you some powders, will you find 
a way to make her take them? Slip them into her drinking water if you have to. 
She has not even rested since giving birth, and seems determined to kill 
herself.”
“I’ll take your powders,” Norina said. She stood up and began to gather her 
gear, making the jerky, mechanical movements of a body strained beyond 
endurance.
Karis continued to gaze at Emil. Only the earth had brought her back from the 
threshold; she had no business being alive at all. Anger burned m the depth of 
her sunken eyes, and suddenly, Emil could imagine her as G’deon of Shaftal.
Emil said to her, “We’ll wait a little while for Medric to wake up, in case he 
can tell us what’s befallen her. We will find her. You have plenty of evidence 
that fire bloods do not lose what they love.“



Some time after Karis had eaten and been taken hostage by a healing sleep, 
Medric awoke, not with a start, as he usually did, but slowly; so that Emil, who 
had been doing what he could for the exhausted horses, could contrive to be 
beside him when he finally awoke, and place the correct pair of spectacles upon 
his nose. Medric said thickly, “I recognize you even as a blur.”
“I certainly should hope so,” Emil said.
Medric smiled, and so it seemed that they would survive the anger and 
disappointment of the last few days. Still, Emil said, as was right, “I feel as 
if I failed you by being angry at the choices you felt you had to make. Surely 
it was a terrible time for you, and my anger only made it worse.”
Medric said in some astonishment, “Are you trying to tell me that—”
“Karis is going to live, as far as J’han can tell. And, apparently, she’s going 
to live without smoke.”
“Oh, Shaftal,” Medric said, sitting up in a daze. “Oh, earth and sky, do you 
feel it? The door is swinging open, and the breeze is blowing through . . .”
Emil said, though he hated to dampen the young seer’s enthusiasm, “I’m so 
worried about Zanja and Annis that there’s not much else I can think about. 
Something has befallen them, Karis says, and that something can only be Mabin.”
“Karis doesn’t know what happened?”
“She can hardly talk, but Norina says that Zanja is beyond Karis’s ken.”
“Well, that puts her over water then, doesn’t it? It seems obvious enough.” He 
took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
It had not been at all obvious to Emil, but, remembering Karis’s discomfort 
around water, it began to make a kind of sense. It was said that Shaftal is the 
G’deon’s flesh and bone, and nothing happens between ocean and mountain that the 
G’deon does not feel. If Karis could not feel Zanja, alive or dead, then it 
could only mean Zanja was no longer in physical contact with the earth. He said, 
“So she’s somewhere on the river.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Medric, my dear, if Karis ever needed a seer beside her, now is the time. I’ll 
find Zanja without your help. You know I can. And I have Norina, who is the 
equivalent of an entire battalion.“
“But it’s an awfully big river.”
“You forget about our friends the Otter People. Surely the water witch will know 
what’s happened on his river.” Emil kissed Medric, not too hastily, and then he 
kissed him again. Before he could stand up, he had to disentangle himself from 
the fist gripped in his hair. For the first time in days, it was not just 
weariness that made him so dizzy.



And so the next day Emil and Norina found the empty cave and fresh blood 
splashed across the stones, and then the Otter People came and took them to the 
island, where they showed them Annis’s body. They had laid her in a little boat 
with her knees drawn up to her chest like an infant curled in the womb, and they 
had filled her boat with journey gifts: a net and fishing spear, tiny people of 
twisted reed to accompany her, a bottle of good spring water, a supply of dried 
fish, and many small items of great value: knives and beads and pieces of worked 
fish skin, the kind of gifts that are given to a beloved friend when bidding her 
good-bye. At sunset they all escorted Annis across the lake to the river outlet, 
and they let her boat go and watched until she’d slipped out of sight. They 
uttered encouraging shouts to send her on her journey, but many of the people 
seemed devastated with grief. They’d loved her more, and better, than her family 
ever had.
Emil had seen many a Paladin killed or maimed, but always had been able to 
explain the death as having served a cause. This death could only be explained 
as a betrayal. When he wept for Annis, he wept also for himself, for an entire 
adulthood spent serving under the command of a leader who would kill an innocent 
like Annis simply for being in the way.
Emil understood perhaps three dozen words of the Otter People’s language, which 
was not enough to ask the question he needed to ask. But the old water witch was 
dismayed by the terrible, sudden violence that had occurred on the shores of his 
lake, and told what had happened using story dolls, like the little reed poppets 
that had accompanied Annis on her last journey. The doll that had Zanja’s long 
hair was in a boat two day’s journey to the east of Otter Lake.
Emil and Norina left at dawn to journey to the Paladin garrison where all that 
remained of the old traditions of Shaftal were preserved, all except the 
traditions of honor and open-handed generosity. These traditions were not even 
mentioned in the letter of the law, but without them the law was just a mindless 
formula. Emil had dared to read a little of the Mackapee manuscript before he 
carefully put it away in a mouse-proof chest, in a dry attic, in a stone 
building unlikely to burn down. And what he’d read there was the spirit of a man 
who valued change. “The peaceful speech of strangers transforms the world,” 
Mackapee had written in his crabbed handwriting. If Emil had laid eyes on the 
manuscript fifteen years before, he’d have hurried past those words, looking for 
more subtle revelations, words to argue about in the university.
Zanja na’Tarwein had lived by and nearly died for that transformation. Mabin 
Paladin, the hero of the people, had chosen another way, the shortsighted way of 
the bitterly conquered, the vengeance by which the wronged becomes the wrongdoer 
and the whole world gives way to war. When Emil lay down in love with a son of 
the enemy, he had abandoned that vengeance, and he was only now beginning to 
realize what that meant for him. And Norina Truthken, whose devotion to the law 
had not been able to keep her from betraying her dearest friend, what was she 
going to do now?
Norina had scarcely spoken a word on this entire journey. She was far from 
recovered from childbirth, and her bandaged, milk-swollen breasts must have hurt 
her greatly. She took the powders her husband had given her: reliably, publicly, 
as though she was doing a kind of penance. In fact she was doing the only thing 
a person of honor could do in her position: accepting disgrace, humbling her 
pride, making reparations. She would put her life at risk to do these things, 
and her life wouldn’t be worth much if she could not accomplish them.
When they stopped to rest the horses and eat their dinner of cold fish and 
flatbread, Emil said, “I’m curious how the law would resolve this paradox we’re 
in.”
Norina snorted in bitter amusement and passed him the jug of water. “Everyone 
who breaks the law does it for the same reason: because her own desire, she 
believes, should take precedence. The question is, which of us is in fact the 
lawbreaker, when our governor under the law falls into the error of thinking she 
rules the law rather than being ruled by it? Are we right, for serving Karis’s 
personal interests and thus opposing Mabin? Or are Mabin’s followers right for 
serving Mabin’s personal interests and thus injuring Karis? This situation is a 
judge’s worst nightmare.“
“But if Karis is G’deon . . .”
Norina lifted her head, as though genuinely surprised at the idea. “That has 
never even been a possibility. But now that she is no longer addicted to smoke, 
perhaps everything has changed. If Karis is G’deon, that certainly resolves the 
moral difficulty. The G’deon’s role is and always has been to protect the land, 
to remember the people, even if that means going beyond the law. And we are 
required by law to serve the G’deon first. However—”
“She’s not the G’deon.”
“It’s not as if we had the power to decide such a thing.”
“So we have a paradox, a puzzle that defies resolution. But not a dilemma, for 
we both know exactly what we must do, and we intend to do it. That is what 
intrigues me, you see. It’s a purely philosophical problem.”
Norina groaned, as people often do when they hear the word “philosophy,” for the 
Truthkens are always wanting their truths to be unarguable. So she seemed to be 
curing herself with self-mockery, the only cure for the obsessiveness that is 
the bane of all Truthkens, and no doubt she was practicing it as deliberately as 
she was taking her husband’s powders. A woman of her age and experience could 
hardly expect to be re-schooled by anyone except herself. But if she had a true 
community such schooling would be the service her people provided. And if Karis 
were to lack such a community as well, who would then school her in the right 
use of her power?
Oh, but if there was one thing Karis did not lack, surely it was wise and 
strong-willed friends. And they all would be well advised to not get into the 
habit of servicing her whims, even now, when she was so desperately ill. To do 
her will without question was no service at all, but an abdication.
“What are you thinking that makes you so happy?” Norina asked.
“Just when I was thinking with despair of a dishonorable and unappealing 
retirement, I realize that I may yet have an interesting few years ahead of me. 
Madam Truthken—”
“Oh for pity’s sake, call me Norina.”
“Why don’t you lie down and rest for a while, and I’ll make a good report to 
your husband.”
She was not so humorless as she had seemed. She was still chuckling when she lay 
down on the blanket he brought her, and shut her eyes.



Before dawn the next day, the two of them stood on the canyon’s edge overlooking 
the Paladins’ Valley, and waited for sunrise. They actually had slept for most 
of the night, and awakened before first light to travel the last mile on foot, 
leaving their horses and gear hidden in a glade. If there was an additional 
watch being kept on the valley, somehow they’d managed to avoid the trap, and 
they sat peaceably upon stones overlooking the magnificent landscape of the 
canyon. As the sun lifted, pink and gentle light set the stones to glowing like 
coal. Norina took a spyglass out of her shirt—she was astonishingly well 
equipped—and scanned the valley below. Without a word she handed the spyglass to 
Emil.
The boat was anchored in a deep eddy near the walled village, which had been 
built on high ground to avoid being destroyed in the periodic flood times. The 
river still lay in shadow, and even at this distance Emil could see a spark of 
lantern light upon the deck. As he watched, the sunlight hit the river, turning 
it to glowing amethyst, and he saw the figure pacing on the boat deck, back and 
forth, like a lion in a cage.
He thought of Zanja, being hauled from a rowboat onto the deck of the riverboat. 
Considering her recently broken bones, it was an unpleasant thought. He gave 
Norina back her spyglass. “She’s on that boat,” he said, as certain as he’d ever 
been of anything.
Norina peered down at the river, muttering, “I all but gave Mabin the bait for 
this trap. What am I going to do about it now?”
“We,” Emil corrected. “It’s a boat because Karis can’t endure boats?”
“Over water she’s an ordinary mortal, and a seasick one at that. No doubt Mabin 
will demand that she come aboard, however. And she will comply, if that will 
save Zanja’s life. We’ll have a sorry time trying to stop her, for now that I’ve 
lost her regard she won’t listen to my advice.”
“I think Karis will listen to me. Certainly, Zanja would want us to prevent her 
from putting herself in Mabin’s power.”
“That’s one argument that might dissuade Karis,” Norina said wryly. “Let’s think 
up a few more on the way back, shall we? We’re going to be needing them.”

* * *

When they returned to Otter Lake, they were greeted with an astonishing sight: 
black smoke billowing from a crude chimney made of gathered stones, boatloads of 
ore and coal drawn up to the shore, a line of Otter children taking turns at 
pumping a monstrous bellows, and Karis in the middle of it, swinging a huge 
stone hammer to shatter the ore and keeping an eye on Emil’s cookpot, which had 
now become a smelting pot.
“She always was incorrigible,” Norina said.
J’han came across the beach to greet them, a harried and frustrated man. “Are 
all elementals so willful?”
“Some of us are worse than others.” Norina stopped at the edge of the beach and 
would proceed no further, but her gaze yearned to the hammer-swinging, 
half-naked giant standing spread-legged on the stones. It was a magnificent 
sight. Then, Karis turned and looked at her, and Norina turned quickly away. 
“I’m not welcome here. I’ll stay at the top of the trail with the horses.”
“No, you stay right here until I’ve talked to her.” Emil walked across the stony 
beach to the amazing cobbled-together forge and the rock-shattering woman. From 
the midst of the smutty, laughing children, Medric grinned at Emil, his face 
black with soot, his eyes afire with joy. Emil wanted nothing more than to 
embrace him, soot and all, but he went to Karis instead, and said, “By our land, 
you’re a beautiful sight.”
There probably was nothing he could have said that was more likely to stop her 
in her tracks. She all but dropped the gigantic stone hammer.
“Such beauty lifts the heart,” Emil declared, and knelt. “Dear Karis—”
“Emil—”
“Dear Karis,” Emil persisted, “your lifelong friend and I have found Zanja, but 
rescuing her will not be easy. However, we have some ideas that you might like, 
when you care to hear them. But for now let me ask you on Norina’s behalf what 
else she can do to make amends—”
Karis stepped over, took him by the shirt, and lifted him bodily until he stood 
once again on his feet. She was not particularly gentle. “Kneel to me again and 
I’ll make it so you’ll have no choice but to stand.” And then she stopped, 
breathing heavily from her exertions, and added after a moment, “I suppose you 
want me to realize that if I don’t want to be treated like a sovereign I’ll have 
to avoid acting like one.”
“I’m so glad I succeeded in getting your attention,” Emil said. “You were 
looking rather dangerously single-minded.”
Karis gazed at him, suddenly just a tired, wasted woman whose great strength 
seemed about to fail her, fueled as it was by a rage that surely could not 
sustain her much longer. “I want to hold my love in my arms,” she said. “She 
doesn’t even know—”
Emil said, “This is Zanja na’Tarwein we’re talking about, not some fool.”
“But when she gives up hope—”
“I have seen her under the most desperate of circumstances, and she does not 
surrender.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“She would want you to listen to your friends,” Emil said.
There was a silence. Karis said bitterly, “I’m listening to you. Just don’t ask 
me to insult Norina with a false forgiveness. If you want to tell her something, 
tell her I have no respect for someone who can’t cherish what I was willing to 
die for.”
“I’ll tell her,” Emil said. “But she can’t make peace with her husband when she 
feels like she has to sleep with the horses to avoid irritating you with her 
presence.”
“She doesn’t have to sleep with the horses,” Karis said. “Just tell her not to 
talk to me. I’m going to kill someone, and I’d rather it wasn’t her.”
Emil stepped back involuntarily.
“Medric already has talked me out of tearing Mabin’s precious village to pieces, 
which I could do.”
“I do not doubt it,” Emil said. “I’m glad you heeded him; I don’t think I could 
endure it if the House of Lilterwess were to fall a second time. Can I ask what 
you’re working on?”
“A hammer,” Karis said. “A hammer for working steel.”
He waited, but she explained no further. She did add after a moment, “Let me 
finish with this, and then I’ll stop and rest, which will make J’han happy, and 
we can talk about what to do.”
She turned back to her rocks, and the sound of them shattering under her hammer 
followed Emil back to the edge of the beach.
* * *
“What is she making?” Norina asked. She had sat upon the ground and was 
reorganizing her clothing, having perhaps submitted to an examination of some 
kind.
“She’s making a hammer. What she’ll make with it I can’t imagine, but she’ll 
tell me. What I want to know is where she got coal. That’s not the sort of thing 
that can be picked up off the ground.”
J’han shook his head. “The water witch and she are like hand and glove. Who 
knows how they’re doing it.”
Norina, seated among the stones, said, “By tradition, the people of the borders 
are protected by the G’deon. If the water witch recognizes her, no doubt he 
thinks he owes her a certain fealty.”
“That bodes well,” Emil said.
“Doesn’t it, though.” Norina stood up. “Well, am I an exile?”
“No, but you should not talk to her.”
“I guess that’s an improvement. Why did you kneel to her?”
“I thought she needed to be taught a lesson. She is very teachable.”
Norina smiled, though not with a lot of vigor. “I know this all too well. But 
some lessons, I fear, she will never learn.”
“Norina—” Emil hesitated to say this in front of J’han, but it would have been 
too awkward to ask him to step away. “Karis says to tell you that she has no 
respect for someone who can’t cherish what she was willing to die for.”
Norina accepted this fresh censure with surprising equanimity. “I thought as 
much,” she said. “J’han, is there any hope she’ll recover her physical 
sensations, or is that damage permanent?”
J’han said irritably, “My impulse is to say that it’s permanent, but what do I 
know? She’s still having convulsions at sunset every day—one of the strangest 
things I’ve ever seen. Maybe this is as well as she will ever get.”
Norina looked at Karis as her heavy hammer once again smashed into the ore. “She 
deserves better,” she said.
There was a silence. Emil took the reins of the horses, to unload their gear and 
take them up to graze. Norina said to J’han, “How do I keep my milk from drying 
up?”
J’han looked at her in some astonishment.
Of course there was a way, but lacking a spare child to give suck to, this 
seemed like a husband’s problem. Emil left them to work it out.
* * *
That night, he seduced his beloved Sainnite seer and did not care when their 
groans became cries that anyone trying to sleep upon the beach could hear. If 
Karis was awake, she’d know that at least two of her companions knew how to 
cherish what they had.



Chapter Twenty-six



When Zanja opened her eyes, she lay in a shallow, strangely shaped wooden room, 
which was lit by a gently swinging lamp that hung from a hook. “She’s awake,” 
said the man who sat near her upon the steeply sloping floor. He held a pistol.
Mabin came in. The ceiling was so low she had to walk crouched over. The entire 
room seemed to move. The lamp swung as if in a breeze. Zanja had never in her 
life been in a boat, and had not guessed that they might have enclosed rooms 
like this, not a place for people—it was not shaped right—but apparently for 
storage. Now, except for the pallet upon which Zanja lay, it was empty as a 
coffin.
“Give me the pistol,” Mabin said to the man. He handed it to her and went out, 
closing the door behind himself. Mabin squatted upon the floor, grunting with 
tiredness.
Knife fights often are won and lost in the first moments of battle, when in the 
first movements and first contacts of blade on blade, the fighters discover 
whether or not they’ve met their match. A good strategist learns to use those 
moments to deliberately mislead the opponent into misjudgments that there is no 
time to recognize.
Zanja hastily considered her situation. Annis was dead. Mabin had assumed that 
Karis was still alive, in the company of Norina and J’han. Although Mabin could 
not know that Karis had won back many hours from smoke, she would not be 
confident of Karis’s subjugation to the drug, because even under smoke Karis had 
been able to use her power to aid her own escape. Mabin could not know about 
Emil, and she had expressed no interest in Medric, so perhaps she assumed that 
Zanja had rescued Karis unassisted.
She expected that Karis would come for Zanja, at any cost to herself, as Karis 
had already demonstrated she would do. She did not know that there were other 
credible witnesses to the enormity of her betrayal, and she would not know about 
them unless she stumbled across them while searching for Karis. She did not know 
that Zanja had a tribe, half-formed and tiny though it was, and that she would 
protect her people. She did not know what it meant to be a katrim. Above all, 
she did not know that Karis was dying, or perhaps already dead.
Zanja said, “After the Sainnites captured me, they took symbolic vengeance upon 
me for the humiliations I and my fellow katrim had subjected them to. They 
tortured me, just as you are doing. For some reason, I always expected the 
Paladins to be different from the Sainnites.”
“Who do you think you are, to—” Mabin began, but it was too late to raise her 
defenses; the blade of accusation had cut deep into the flesh of her 
complacency.
“I know exactly who I am,” Zanja said.
“A traitor to the people—a traitor under the law!”
“The Ashawala’i are not subject to the law of Shaftal.”
“What!”
“You wrong my people in wronging me. Does not the law require that you respect 
and protect the people of the borders?”
“You have no people—”
“Where one survives, the tribe survives.”
“You fight our war, you are subject to our laws.”
“I refuse to be subject to a law that allows people like you to commit murder.”
“Murder?”
“Annis is dead,” Zanja reminded her.
“Another traitor.”
“Is that the way the law works? You kill whomever you like, then declare them 
traitors?”
“We are at war—”
“At war to save the very law you are destroying. It is you who are the traitor.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“It is not treachery to deliver the vested G’deon into a certain death by 
poisoning? What is it, then?”
“Who made you judge, Zanja na’Tarwein? You are nothing but rogues, you and Karis 
both—a couple of fools with too much power and not enough wisdom. You must be 
restrained, for the future of Shaftal. If you will not accept restraint, then 
you must be killed. I regret it, yes. But it is you who have made the choice, 
not I.”
“I have too much power?” Suddenly the entire conversation did indeed seem 
absurd, and Zanja uttered a laugh, quickly choked off by the pain of her ribs.
“You are all the more dangerous for not knowing what you are doing. Fifteen 
years ago Harald G’deon made the last and greatest error in his life of errors, 
when his courage failed him and he cursed Shaftal by filling a weak and 
inappropriate vessel with his power. For fifteen years I have managed to keep 
Karis in control. Yet the moment you came to Shaftal, before Karis ever met you, 
before she ever even knew your name, she began to break her restraints. That is 
your power, Zanja na’Tarwein: the power to attract, the power to influence, the 
power to awaken that which should be left asleep. If I allowed you to exercise 
that power, this very land would be destroyed.”
Zanja said, “You lived with her for years, and yet you do not know her. She 
would destroy nothing.”
“Your people were destroyed by the very Sainnites that Harald allowed to get a 
foothold in this land!”
“My people were destroyed,” Zanja said, “by the dream of a misguided seer. If 
the people of Shaftal had given that seer proper guidance, rather than calling 
her their enemy because her father was a Sainnite—”
Mabin leapt to her feet and struck her.
Zanja said, “You see, you are not defeating the Sainnites. You are becoming 
them.”
Mabin struck her again. Then, without a word, she left Zanja alone in the 
darkness, taking even the lamp with her.
Zanja lay still, hoping for the pain to ease, waiting for her breath to slow. 
Four witnesses there were to the true nature of Mabin’s betrayal of Shaftal, one 
from each of the four ancient orders of the Lilterwess. They would have a 
credibility that Mabin herself could not contravene. And Norina, for all her 
faults, would not rest until she’d seen justice done. Zanja lay silent in the 
dark hold of the boat, willing Medric to see her, to understand what she was 
doing, to convince Emil and J’han and Norina to flee to safety while Mabin, 
rather than pursuing them, waited for a visit from a woman who was dead.
“Accept the willing sacrifice of a katrim,” Zanja entreated them. “Don’t waste 
your lives trying to save mine. Go, and make my death and Karis’s death be of 
some significance. That’s all I ask.”



Several times a day, they came in to lift her up over the bucket that served as 
her toilet. Often, they also left her a meal and fresh water. Usually, Zanja 
scarcely even noticed the food, except as a means for measuring the time. She 
felt no hunger, and even to drink water required more effort than it was worth. 
Though the worst of her pain began to ease after a few days, she hardly got up 
from her pallet, for her splinted leg and bandaged ribs made movement nearly 
impossible in that cramped space. She heard Mabin pacing up and down the length 
of the boat’s deck, for hours at a time, like a wild animal in a cage. Zanja lay 
starving in the darkness below where she walked.
Twenty-one meals had been served when Zanja’s door opened and Mabin stepped into 
the cargo hold once again. “We will force you to eat if we have to,” she said.
Zanja had been expecting and preparing for this visit all morning, for her 
prescience seemed enhanced by hunger, just as a seer’s ability to envision the 
future might sometimes be enhanced by fasting. “I cannot stop you from doing 
what you like,” she said.
“Such despair is unbecoming in a warrior.”
“Despair is what makes my confinement endurable. I would give you some as a gift 
if I could, then perhaps you would be less restless. The sound of your pacing 
interrupts my thoughts.”
“Your thoughts will be even more interrupted if my Paladins have to pour cold 
gruel down your throat and force you to swallow it or drown in it.” Mabin hung 
the lamp from the lamp hook. She held a pistol, and despite Zanja’s apparent 
weakness took care not to turn her back on her. “I expected Karis would come for 
you by now.”
“No doubt,” Zanja said.
“Tell me what you think she is doing.”
Zanja closed her eyes, and there she saw Karis, as she had never seen her in 
life, lifting and swinging a great hammer, with the molten metal flying at each 
blow. Sweat polished the great muscles of her back and shoulders, and sunlight 
caught on her skin, and in her hair, as if she were made of gold. “She is 
working at the forge,” Zanja said. “All these years you knew her, and you never 
knew how strong she is.”
“Nonsense,” Mabin said. “If she had returned to Meartown, I would know.”
But Zanja felt a little peace. Karis seemed so intent on her work, surely that 
meant she had found contentment at last.



Now the time Zanja had bought for her friends’ escape was indeed running out, 
and she could only hope that Medric’s dreams had brought them all to a place of 
safety. She began to eat a little— enough to placate Mabin, she hoped, but not 
so much that it would dull her heightened senses. Mabin came into the cargo hold 
and talked to her for hours at a time, and Zanja devoted all her energies toward 
making the experience more unpleasant for Mabin than it was for her.
She was aided in this endeavor by an astonishing run of bad luck that began to 
plague her captors and to harry Mabin in particular, as only small annoyances 
can. Zanja learned firsthand about the mice and maggots fouling the food supply, 
but she also heard hints of other irritants as well: an infestation of fleas, 
broken ropes and fouled lines, unseasonably cold and wet weather which forced 
her captors into close quarters, and an unpredictable tendency for the boat to 
slip its anchor. Already tormented by these unremitting vexations, Mabin could 
not endure with any grace Zanja’s deliberate attempts to infuriate her.
By the end of another two days of questioning, Zanja knew she had put herself in 
grave danger. This battle of wills between the two of them operated with its own 
logic, and had long since become far more than a mere delaying tactic. Though 
she lay awake that night, she fell into a restless sleep at last. Night upon the 
river was a silent time, and Zanja slept with her ear against the wood that 
separated her from the water. Sometimes, in her dreams, it seemed she could hear 
the water sliding past, but tonight she heard something else: a faint, rhythmic 
tapping, sometimes close and sometimes far away, almost as though someone were 
swimming up and down the length of the boat, drumming lightly upon its hull.
Near dawn, Zanja awakened abruptly. She was cold—and wet.
Her pallet and blankets were soaked with cold water. The water was collecting in 
the lowest point of the hold, where it stood in a puddle a hand’s width deep, 
but she could not figure out its source. Every part of the hull seemed wet, as 
though the wood was weeping. She dragged herself up the slope of the hull and 
waited to see what would happen next.
By the time the door was opened for her morning meal, the water was knee deep, 
and the man who had opened the door uttered a surprised yelp at the little river 
that flowed over his feet when he forced open the door. Soon the boat echoed 
with pounding footsteps, and Mabin came with three guards behind her to search 
the cargo hold for the puncture that they assumed Zanja had somehow put through 
the hull. “After we repair the leak you’ll sleep in water,” Mabin said. “You’ll 
have only hurt yourself.” But they had scarcely begun their search when someone 
came to the door with the news that the aft hold was half full of water as well.
“Mabin,” Zanja said, as the councilor turned away to investigate this new 
disaster.
“What?” she snapped.
“Karis is dead.”
Mabin stood very still in the doorway, with the lamp beyond her, silhouetting 
her. A hard, pitiless woman, it seemed the only thing that could stop her in her 
tracks was the thing she most wanted to hear.
Zanja said, “The smoke did kill Karis. She endured so much, but in the end she 
decided to die rather than use smoke any longer.”
“Why have you kept this from me?” Mabin asked. Her voice was nearly a whisper.
“You have murdered the G’deon of Shaftal. While I’ve been playing games with you 
here, witnesses to that murder have gotten safely away. Now, there will be an 
accounting.”
Mabin turned away without a word, and closed and locked the door behind her. 
Alone in the darkness, sitting upon the weeping boards, with the collected water 
slopping gently in the silence, the vast wilderness of loss opened up within 
Zanja, and for a long time she wept, as the water level rose higher and people 
rushed back and forth across the length of the boat, their voices edged with 
disbelief and dismay. Soon they would abandon the boat and leave Zanja here to 
drown in the rising water. It seemed a lonely and cold death, but it was as good 
as any, she supposed.
But Mabin came back with two others, and fought open the door, and had her men 
haul Zanja out of the hold and up into a misty, cold early morning where the sun 
was nothing more than a haze of light. There they bound her hands and put her 
into a row-boat, along with so many other people that the little boat also 
seemed in danger of sinking. It was so crowded the rowers could scarcely move to 
row it to shore. Mabin sat beside Zanja, glowering at her.
Zanja could not imagine why Mabin had come back for her. Perhaps she was haunted 
by Zanja’s declaration that she was no better than the Sainnites. Perhaps she 
wanted the satisfaction of killing Zanja with her own hands, rather than letting 
her drown. The hazy light was almost too bright to endure after Zanja’s days of 
darkness. As the rowboat lurched toward shore, the riverboat settled deeply into 
the water behind them, like a hen settling onto her nest. Soon it would be 
sitting on the river bottom.
The muffling silence of the fog crept across the rowboat. The grumblers fell 
quiet and Mabin stared bleakly across the water, where the shore now came hazily 
into view, as stony as any other bank of this harsh river, with boulders that 
huddled in the mist like bodies upon a battlefield. Beyond the shore, the fog 
loomed like a wall. Something lay within the mist: a universe of possibilities, 
thousands of routes through the wilderness, thousands of days yet to dawn.
It seemed very strange that a perfectly sound boat had suddenly begun to leak, 
and not just from one place, but from everywhere at once. Fingertips had drummed 
on the boat’s hull in the dark of night, as if slender swimmers, playing like 
otters, had swum up and down, sometimes coming up for air, laughing gleefully, 
with their faces in the water to muffle the sound. What a fine game it would 
have been. And to repeatedly slip loose the boat’s anchor, to make deliveries of 
fleas. . . this was guerrilla warfare indeed.
The rowboat ground into the stony shore, and the rowers shipped their oars. 
Grumbling again, some of the people in the boat got out and hauled the boat into 
the shallows. The boat tilted and its occupants got out. Two men dragged Zanja 
from the boat, and hauled her through the knee-deep water onto dry land, holding 
her by the elbows. They lay her down upon the shore and she immediately began, 
quietly, to drag herself away.
“I don’t like this fog,” Mabin said. “I don’t like anything about this day. 
Let’s get to town, and quickly.” She looked at Zanja. “Where do you think you’re 
going?”
Zanja uttered a cry of longing and anger, and struggled under the knee that 
dropped onto her back. It took two men to get her under control. When she hung 
like baggage from their iron grips, she noticed Mabin, standing several body 
lengths away, with her pistol drawn. “That was stupid of you,” Mabin said. “I 
don’t know why I didn’t simply shoot you. You have little value for me anymore.”
“Why don’t you let me go?” Zanja said. “What harm can I do now?”
Weather magic is water magic. The wall of fog was dissolving now, and the 
wretched, flood-distorted trees that grew along the shore seemed to step 
forward, one tree at a time. And then one of the trees lifted its head like a 
horse catching a familiar scent, and the tree beside it was a person holding its 
reins. The fog rolled back like a curtain folding away from a bright window. 
More people. More horses. A gaunt scarecrow leaned upon one of the gnarled trees 
as though upon a cane. And then the sun washed across her and she drew herself 
erect.
Karis.
“Councilor Mabin,” she said, in a voice heavy with irony, “this time you have 
brought your fate upon yourself.”
The pistol hammer clicked as Mabin pulled its trigger. The powder pan did not 
ignite, for gunpowder is earth, nothing more than earth.
Karis stepped towards her. Those among the trees remained at a distance: a 
Healer, a Truthken, a Paladin, a Seer; witnesses from each of the four ancient 
orders of the Lilterwess. There was laughter in the river. Mabin seemed unable 
to look away from the giant woman who confronted her. “Councilor Mabin,” Karis 
said again, softly. “One way or another, you will let her go.”
Mabin cried, “Kill the captive!”
Zanja threw herself forward, breaking the grip of her captors and collapsing 
again onto stones. Then they had her again, but they paid her little attention. 
A rag-dressed collection of muscle and bone, Karis took another step forward, 
and Mabin toppled backward at her touch, as though she had been pummeled. She 
sprawled upon her back, and Karis took her by the shirt and tore open the heavy 
fabric as though it was gauze. She lifted a fist as though striking a hammer 
upon the forge. But she held a glittering needle of steel in her fist, bright 
and terrible in the sudden sunshine, and she drove it without hesitation into 
Mabin’s heart.
Mabin uttered an awful cry. Blood gushed, vivid scarlet in the bright sunshine. 
Karis pressed her palm to Mabin’s breast. Mabin clawed empty air as though to 
pluck the cold steel from her heart. The Paladins stood transfixed.
“Before Shaftal,” breathed the man who knelt upon Zanja’s back, “she’s spiked 
her heart. Shaftal, what have we done?” He got up hastily and made as if to 
offer Zanja a hand, but she did not even look at him.
Mabin lay still. Karis stood up, breathing heavily, her hand painted scarlet. 
Mabin lifted a trembling hand to touch the blunt end of the steel spike embedded 
in her flesh. Karis said, “Mabin Paladin, Councilor of the Lilterwess, you live 
now at my tolerance. My advisors have convinced me to let you live, for the sake 
of the people who honor their old oaths. It is for them, and them alone, that I 
give you your life. See that you give me reason to continue to tolerate you.”
Mabin gasped bitterly, “I know the law. You need not instruct me.”
The old man who had tried to help Zanja to her feet cried out, “Lady, we didn’t 
know! We thought it was our duty to serve the councilor! How were we to know who 
you were? Mabin, you can yet ask for pardon—”
“Pardon?” Mabin said, and sat up, though she clutched an agonized hand across 
the spike. “Shaftal will not come into the hands of a Sainnite pretender, the 
smoke-addicted daughter of a whore! I will tell the people what you are.”
Karis’s bloodied hand clenched into a fist. A horrified silence fell, so 
profound that Zanja, with her ear to the stones, could hear rocks grinding in 
the bottom of the nearby river. Then Karis said, “I always thought that you 
hated me for what I am. But if I am Shaftal, then Shaftal is what you hate. 
Isn’t that true, Mabin Councilor? Don’t you hate Shaftal, the land and the 
people both, because we are half Sainnite? Don’t you hate Shaftal because this 
land is, now, the child of violence and rape? Don’t you hate the land because of 
its subjection and paralysis? And isn’t it true that your hatred is killing the 
land, just as it nearly killed me?”
But Mabin cried, “For the land’s sake, kill her! Can’t you see what she’ll do to 
Shaftal?” No one moved or even seemed to have heard. 
A hand touched Zanja’s shoulder. Norina and Emil had walked fearlessly into the 
midst of Mabin’s people. The old man seemed to know them both, and said, nearly 
in tears, “Take her, take her! How were we to know? Tell her—tell the lady—tell 
her we are not all such fools.”
He helped to haul Zanja to her feet. She could not stand on her own, but Emil 
braced her from behind, from foot to shoulder holding her erect, with his arms 
wrapped tightly around her. Norina knelt upon the stones and buckled Zanja’s 
belt around her waist. With her head bowed she said, “I have wronged you and 
don’t expect your forgiveness. But I will make amends.” She looked up then, and 
Zanja saw how even humility can be an act of unbending pride. Norina read her 
thoughts as though they were words written upon Zanja’s face, and she smiled, 
showing all her teeth. “You really should savor my abasement while you can, for 
I assure you, you will never have an opportunity like this again.”
Zanja said, “One opportunity is enough. I’ll savor this moment my whole life, 
and remind you of it incessantly.”
“That seems fair.” Norina rose and put her arm around Zanja’s waist, and took 
half her weight onto her shoulder. So she and Emil walked Zanja across the 
river-washed stones, while the frightened, speechless Paladins let them go, and 
Mabin did not disgrace herself again by shouting commands that no one would have 
obeyed. Karis stood waiting, a woman of iron and stone and soil and everything 
that grows. At the last moment, Emil stepped away, and it was Norina alone who 
delivered Zanja into Karis’s arms.



Chapter Twenty-seven



Medric would not be appeased. “I am a historian,” he insisted. “Now that you 
need not keep these secrets any longer, it would be criminal to refuse to tell 
me.”
Norina said, “Young man, you have appalling nerve to call a judge, a servant of 
the law, a criminal.”
Medric grinned. “You wouldn’t waste your time admonishing me if you didn’t like 
me.” He sat down beside her, and folded his ink-stained hands expectantly. “I’ll 
trade you. You tell me the past, and I’ll tell you the future.”
The six of them had camped fearlessly upon the open plain, where grass and stone 
stretched to the horizon, flat as water and rippling in the wind. They drew 
knobby, weathered rocks up to the fire for chairs, and Emil brewed tea, using 
J’han’s supply, as he’d long since run out of his own. They had told Zanja what 
had happened, and what they had done. Like Karis, who scarcely had said a word 
even when she unwound the bandages and healed Zanja’s broken bones, Zanja 
inhabited a place of stunned silence and could not seem to find the pathway out. 
But Emil sat beside her, and sometimes he lay a hand upon her shoulder, or 
clasped her hand in his, and slowly Zanja felt herself re-enter the world. She 
thought, the future: these people will be my companions as long as we are alive. 
And she felt the years spread before her, like a wonderful new country.
“I don’t know why I didn’t recognize your strategies until the end,“ she said to 
Emil. ”I should have known when I heard about the fleas that it was your kind of 
war.“
Emil grinned. “ ‘Drive the enemy insane and she will defeat herself.’ ”
Zanja recognized the quotation from Mabin’s Warfare, and laughed until Emil had 
to pound her on her back.
Emil said, “It was easy to do, with four elementals under my command. Ah, to 
think of the misery this little company could inflict. . . but no, those days 
are past.” He sighed with false regret.
Karis had walked away on her own and had not yet returned. At sunset she needed 
to be alone, J’han explained. It was a clear night, and the sky was filling with 
stars. There was a stillness, a vastness, pressing down upon the little tribe 
camped here upon the heath. They’d stepped through the door and now found 
themselves in this open, lonely place, a handful of people in a universe of 
stars. From now on, each step they took would be on a path of their own forging.
Norina said to Medric, “No, I don’t want to know the future. It’s the not 
knowing that gives us heart, it seems to me. But I think I will tell you a bit 
of history, for Dinal’s sake. And for yours, Zanja, since I must still earn your 
forgiveness. I witnessed very little myself: I was a child, a student, who 
happened to live in the House of Lilterwess, like many other students. But the 
night Harald G’deon died, Dinal and I sat beside Karis’s bed, where she lay 
unconscious from the blow of power that Harald had struck her with—brutally, out 
of necessity, for he was breathing his last breath. By then we had discovered 
the bitter truth of Karis’s smoke purse inside her shirt, and all the council 
knew, and had been arguing for hours what to do. Dinal took me to Karis’s bed, 
and asked me to bind myself to her with an oath. After I had done this, she told 
me this history, and I, of course, know that it was the truth. So listen, 
Medric.”
Medric managed to look even more expectant and alert. Norina began her tale.



Harald had been G’deon of Shaftal for thirty-two years. He had always refused to 
identify a successor, and, since the G’deon owes no one an explanation, no one 
understood why. As word of his illness spread across the land of Shaftal, even 
the most ardent and loyal of his followers—already distressed due to the 
harrying of the Sainnites—were thrown into confusion and dismay. Some asked if 
the G’deon had lost his mind, to have grown old without giving any thought to 
those who would outlive him. Others, more cynical, declared that he had failed 
to choose a successor out of spite, to irritate his lifelong critic and 
opponent, Councilor Mabin.
During those last, terrible days of the G’deon’s life, Dinal kept vigil by his 
bedside. She neither wept nor slept, and would allow no one else to be his honor 
guard. When Dinal broke her vigil, as she occasionally did to bathe or seek out 
a mouthful of food, she saw that gloom and panic now reigned unchallenged in the 
House of Lilterwess. Meals went uncooked, children ran wild, scholars stood 
about in the unswept hallways, councilors hurried with an odd aimlessness from 
one room to the next.
On the seventh day, as Dinal returned to the G’deon’s room to resume her watch, 
Councilor Mabin herself, who kept vigil in her own fashion, snatched at Dinal’s 
sleeve as she passed. “Ask him what will become of Shaftal, when we have no 
G’deon. Ask him how we can keep the godless Sainnites at bay.”
Dinal eased her sleeve from Mabin’s grasp. “Excuse me, Councilor.”
“Ask him if he has forgotten his calling, and his people!”
“Councilor, Harald G’deon cannot answer your questions. Though his heart 
continues to beat, his spirit has departed. We both know that he would never 
have chosen to die with so much left incomplete. But death comes when it comes.”
“Then will he be the last G’deon of Shaftal? This is a bitter destiny.”
“His life has been bitter,” Dinal said. “Why not his death?” She turned her 
back, and Mabin wisely let her go.
That night, Harald G’deon uttered a sigh, and Dinal sat up sharply in the chair 
in which she had been dozing. The healer, who read a book at the table in the 
corner, came softly across the room. The G’deon sighed again, and it almost 
seemed as if he had said Dinal’s name. She took his hand in hers. “Harald, why 
do you suffer so? You need not remain in this world any longer. Your time is 
done, and we will find a way to live without you.”
Shadows filled the hollows of his wasted face, but within his eyes the light of 
the guttering candle flickered. “Go,” he said.
“Where am I to go? My place is by your side.”
“Lalali.”
“Lalali! What can there be of value in Lalali?”
Once again, he lay silent, with only the faint tremor of a heartbeat to let 
Dinal know he had not yet departed.
She kissed his hand and laid it down upon the coverlet. She stood up, bones 
aching with weariness, and went out into the corridor, where some of the 
councilors slept upon benches. In her own rooms, she made no noise as she rolled 
up some blankets and tossed a few things into a bag. Yet, despite her quiet, her 
foster daughter awakened and came to stand, sleepy and disapproving, at the 
bedroom door in her night shift. Norina said, “Did you intend to leave without 
bidding me good-bye? Where are you going?”
“Lalali.”
“Lalali! Surely not alone! Let me come with you.”
“The only thing that could make this journey more burdensome would be having to 
worry about your well-being as well as my own. You will remain in the House of 
Lilterwess.”
There was a silence, then Norina said quietly, “I’m afraid I won’t see you 
again.”
Dinal slung her sword belt over one shoulder, her bag over the other, and kissed 
Norina farewell. “Know I love you.” She left her standing in the darkness.
She took a loaf of bread from one of the kitchens, and, out in the yard, saddled 
the first horse to come at her whistle. A weary, bent, aging woman wrapped in a 
black cloak, she rode out of the House of Lilterwess. Hoping to avoid the plague 
of violence that made the main roads unsafe to travel any longer, Dinal took the 
mountain road from Shimasal to the coast. This isolated and windblown track took 
her through the tablelands, along ridges which overlooked the rich Aerin River 
Valley. She traveled from before dawn to long after nightfall. She made her bed 
on hard ground, under cold stars, and she lay awake, counting the years of 
sorrow and naming the dead. She spoke the name of Harald G’deon himself in that 
grieving litany. Perhaps even now he breathed his last breath, as the mother of 
his sons dutifully followed his last whim on this lonely road to the sea.
Long before sunrise, she rose from her cold bed. She tied her hair back to 
boldly reveal the three earrings of Right, Regard, and Rank, and called her 
horse to the saddle. She rode in darkness down the steep track from the 
highlands to the coast. As the sky lightened, dawn winds carried to her the 
scent of the sea.
The sun had just risen when she rode into Lalali. The city gates stood open, 
guarded only by a pretty-faced boy dressed in purple silk. He ran up, boldly 
clasped the heel of her boot, and gazed winsomely up into her face as he invited 
her to have her way with him. When he suggested what they might do, she jerked 
her foot away in disgust. Undiscouraged, he latched onto the empty stirrup. 
“Speak your secret desire, and it shall be yours. Is it a girl you’d prefer? Is 
it not power you seek, but rather to be overpowered?”
“Stand away, boy! I travel on the G’deon’s business!”
She threatened him with her lifted foot. He stepped away from the horse, crowing 
with amusement. “The G’deon’s business? Tell the G’deon there is only one 
business in Lalali!”
Dinal’s horse jumped forward at a kick of the heel, and left the young man to 
enjoy his hilarity in private. His laughter swooped and howled through sunrise’s 
silence. “The boy seems half mad,” Dinal muttered.
On horseback, she wandered the streets of Lalali as the sun gradually chased 
away autumn’s chill and cast a shimmer of light across the copper-tipped towers. 
Sunlight glared on walls of white sandstone. It gilded three nude marble figures 
in the center of a fountain, engaged in a complicated sexual act.
Dinal passed a crew of blank-eyed, starved and sore-riddled street sweepers, who 
were so numbed by smoke that they did not even flinch when the foreman laid into 
them with a switch. Other than these, Dinal did not see another living soul 
until noon approached. Then, a few early-rising whores came out to sit naked in 
the sun. Their pierced and bejeweled nipples glittered; last night’s golden 
paint peeled away in patches to reveal bruises, scars, scabs, and bloody wounds. 
Lounging in chairs dragged out into the middle of the road, they cushioned 
certain parts of their bodies with pillows, and watched Dinal pass with the same 
stunned and incurious gaze they turned upon each other. A street doctor made her 
rounds, dispensing poultices and headache remedies.
They smoked to dull the pain, Dinal supposed. But a whore under smoke was 
helpless to defend herself against injury. So the trap closed, and there was no 
escape.
Dinal’s horse stopped dead in the middle of a deserted square and looked at her 
over his shoulder. Dinal could offer him neither explanation nor purpose for 
their continued wandering. It was her lot and joy to serve at the beck of the 
G’deon. She would have to remain in this cursed town, and await either the 
bidding of her heart or the long-expected word that the G’deon had finally 
breathed his last.
She allowed the horse to drink from one of the pornographic fountains, then she 
turned him toward the eastern end of town. Here, the nearby ocean scented the 
air with a sweet reek of seaweed and salt. In the debris of narrow alleys, 
rag-dressed people huddled against moldy stone. When the sun suddenly came 
blazing over the edge of the rooftops, they began to awaken, in a mutter of 
groans and curses.
The narrow street led Dinal to a plaza, where a broken-wheeled carriage stood 
with the horse still in the traces, and the driver, asleep or dead, slumped to 
one side with the reins in his hands. A few newly risen drunks had gathered to 
dunk their heads in the fountain. Two shouted at each other, and seemed on the 
verge of blows. One vomited onto bare stone, as another looked specula-tively at 
the carriage. Others still lay like soldiers mowed down in a desperate rout and 
left behind to rot. Dinal’s horse picked his way squeamishly among the fallen.
Not much liking the look of this plaza or its occupants, Dinal turned her horse 
toward the nearest alley. Directly across from her, in a windowless wall 
scabrous with the remains of a decaying mosaic, a door opened. Out came a 
barefoot girl, dressed only in a night shift, with a water jug balanced upon her 
hip. She was extraordinarily tall and thin. The invading sunlight passed across 
her face as she stepped through the human debris. At Dinal’s hail, the girl 
neither stepped forward nor stepped away.
Dinal held out a hand, with a silver coin in the palm. “I have lost my way. Will 
you take me back to the main road?”
The girl examined Dinal from toe to head, her gaze lingering longest on the 
telltale gold earrings: three of them, marking her high rank. “All roads lead to 
the main road. No one will ever believe you are lost. Who are you?” Her body was 
all arms and legs; she had been growing with astonishing speed and her breasts 
had started to form. And she had come into her power, and had only just begun to 
realize what she was. This Dinal saw, imprinted in the girl’s very flesh. She 
was earth.
“I’m Dinal Paladin. I’ve come here to find you.”
“Now there’s a story,” the girl said. Yet her body had shivered, as with 
yearning, before she spoke with such quick cynicism. Perhaps she had half 
expected someone to come and find her, thinking that surely someone, somehow, 
would realize that an earth witch had emerged in the back streets of Lalali.
“I was sent by the G’deon,” Dinal said. “I am the mother of his children.”
After a moment, the girl said, “You must speak to my master and hire my 
services. Do you have a kerchief or a length of cloth, something to cover your 
face? And let loose your hair.”
Dinal untied the thong that bound her hair, so that it fell forward and covered 
her earrings. She took a black scarf out of her baggage, and the girl helped her 
to tie it so it covered her entire face, except for her eyes. “Now, stand so, 
holding the reins.” The girl demonstrated an attitude of impatience and boredom. 
“You must seem eager, but do not agree to pay more than you have there in your 
hand.”
The girl’s master, a thin, hard-faced man with a grimy red ribbon tying back his 
greasy hair, seemed none too willing to let the girl go with Dinal, even for so 
little time. They dickered until the girl reappeared in the open door, fully 
dressed in a plain, serviceable tunic and trousers. Dinal, who had been holding 
the coin between her fingers where the girl’s master could see it, abruptly 
closed her fist and mounted her horse. “Never mind, then. I was particularly 
taken with your girl’s unusual appearance, but I will find someone else.”
“Lady, if you knew what it costs me to keep her!” Defeated, the girl’s master 
reached behind himself to grab the girl and shove her forward, but smacked her 
cheek when he got a good look at her. “What are you wearing? Will you shame me 
before the entire city?”
Dinal said, “Her plain clothing pleases me.” She held out the coin. “Come here, 
girl, and take your payment.”
Expressionless, the girl took the money and dutifully delivered it into her 
master’s hand. A handprint had appeared on her cheek. “Bring her back by 
sunset,” the man warned, as the girl mounted behind Dinal.
When the girl pressed against Dinal’s back, the tension in her muscles belied 
the calm, even indifferent expression on her face. They rode down the cluttered 
alley. As they turned the corner, Dinal said, “He assumed I wanted a whore, and 
I let him believe what he liked. But you must understand that you are free now, 
and it is your choice whether or not to come with me. I intend to take you to 
the House of Lilterwess, where you belong. Will you come with me, of your own 
will?”
The girl said, “Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Karis,” she said.
The girl directed Dinal safely to the main boulevard, where masked men and women 
now sauntered arrogantly down the rows of whorehouses, surveying the exotic 
beauties beckoning wearily from the steps. At the city gate, a dozen boys and 
girls now gathered, each more beseeching and desperate than the last. Dinal rode 
past them, as a bell tower counted the second hour of the afternoon, and a 
drunken troubadour balanced his way along the top of the wall, incoherently 
singing.
Then they passed through the gate, and Karis sighed, as though she had been 
holding her breath. Dinal never felt her turn to look back at the city, not even 
once.
Several days later, Harald G’deon vested Karis with the power of Shaftal, and 
died. It was the last night that the walls of the House of Lilterwess would 
remain standing.



In the twilight, Zanja spotted Karis coming toward them across the ragged plain, 
stumbling because her head was tilted back so she could watch the sky. Zanja 
stood up, unsteady from the lingering weakness of starvation. “I want to be 
alone with her for a while.”
“See if you can get her to sleep,” J’han suggested, offering a blanket. “She 
doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”
Zanja walked across the treeless heath. Karis was a tattered shadow, with 
fraying hair and raveled shirt. Her hand caught Zanja by the shoulder as if 
starlight had blinded her, and she said in a voice as rough as a hoe’s edge, 
“Zanja, what am I going to do?”
Zanja said, “Lie down with me and I’ll tell you the stories of the stars.”
Karis lay down where she was standing, and starlight filled her eyes as water 
fills a cup. Zanja had to fit herself around the sharp stones and prickly plants 
that Karis had not heeded. The blanket that she drew over them smelled of smoke 
and mildew and the detritus of a long, hard journey; a journey far from over, 
perhaps never over.
Karis said, “Emil fought me for Mabin’s life. And even now I wonder if it was 
wisdom or cowardice that I didn’t simply kill her. I could have.” She sounded 
both amazed and horrified. “Accept the burden of responsibility, Emil says, or 
become what Mabin imagines I am.”
Zanja said, “Now you will become something else.”
“Something better, or something worse?”
They lay in silence. Zanja said, “It is possible to exercise power well.”
“You think so? Did I exercise it well when I deceived you?”
“I suppose you thought I wasn’t strong enough to let you choose to go to certain 
death. I admire your courage now, of course, but in the moment of decision, I 
would have begged you not to take the risk.”
Karis said, “I never feared that you would hold me back. I did fear that if I 
made you part of my decision, you would choose to die with me if I died.”
They had been quiet long enough for the crickets around them to start to chirp, 
when Zanja finally said, “Karis, thank you for this year.”
“What? It’s been the most lonely, miserable, forsaken year. . .”
“But even the gods must be amazed by it.”
“Amazed?” Karis said in a choked voice.
Her shirt smelled like plain lye soap, with a lingering scent of old sweat and 
coal smoke. That smell was the only ordinary thing about her. Zanja got up on 
one elbow and stroked the springy tangle of Karis’s hair. It pushed back against 
her palm, and when she raised her hand, it went back to its wild shape. Karis 
took a shaky breath. Perhaps Zanja had frightened her, or perhaps the tenderness 
had sunk through senseless flesh to some deep place where Karis could feel it.
Zanja said, “Of course you are uncertain. That’s the way it is.”
“For everybody?”
“Do you think I know what I am doing? I see a universe of possibilities, and 
some of them are very unpleasant. Perhaps the people of Shaftal will turn 
against each other. Or perhaps they will destroy the Sainnites, trading one 
massacre for another. Perhaps the people will claim you as G’deon and you’ll be 
consumed by them until nothing is left. Perhaps our little tribe will come apart 
like a herd with too many stallions.”
Karis uttered a hoarse, ragged gasp of laughter.
“Perhaps desire will never be fulfilled. But to live is only worth the effort if 
you live in hope. And living in hope is a discipline, a practice that can be 
learned.”
“Is that why you insist on teaching it to me? I’ll never do it as well as you 
do.”
“But I do it so badly. Blundering through the thickets like an ox, tripping and 
falling into traps of despair, bleeding and raving and starving like the refugee 
I am . . .“
“How could anyone resist the attraction of such a life?” said Karis.
Side by side, they gazed up into the close crowded constellations. At last, 
Karis added, “Weren’t you going to tell me the stories of the stars?”
“That’s what I have been telling you.”
A long time they lay talking, a peculiar, fragmented, spiraling conversation 
that Zanja filled with pieces of stories which Karis kept interrupting with 
stories of her own, so that none of the tales were finished. The silences grew 
longer, and then silence took over the entire conversation. Zanja opened her 
eyes, and realized she had been dozing. Karis lay prostrate, wholly surrendered 
to sleep. Zanja rolled her onto her side without awakening her, and cleared away 
some of the stones from underneath them both, then folded herself against 
Karis’s back. Karis’s shirt had slipped down from her shoulder, and Zanja kissed 
the bare skin that pressed against her cheek.
She dreamed that the kiss had been like flint on steel, and Karis had ignited 
like tinder.



Zanja awoke at dawn, but Karis slept well into the morning, utterly collapsed in 
the greensward, with the ripening seedheads bobbing over her and the sun 
bringing out beads of sweat on her forehead. J’han checked on her and said 
simply, “Let’s leave her alone unless Mabin comes after us.” So they improvised 
a sunshade for her, and spent the morning in aimless repairs to their gear, 
sorting their baggage and sharpening their knives, like soldiers awaiting 
orders. After eating three servings of camp porridge, Zanja found she finally 
could walk steadily. Emil sewed up her breeches, where they had cut open the 
seam to splint her leg. Norina and J’han seemed engaged in extremely complex 
negotiations, which no one dared interrupt. Medric was suffused with 
restlessness until he calmed himself by reading out loud from a book of poetry 
J’han carried with him. Zanja had never before heard such poetry, in which the 
words worked like glyphs or like doors, doors upon doors upon doors.
In the middle of a poem, Karis came stumbling groggily over to the smoldering 
cookfire and half sat and half fell onto the stone chair that Emil vacated for 
her. Medric finished the poem and looked up from J’han’s book.
“I think I had a dream,” Karis said uncertainly. Had she never dreamed before? 
She rubbed her face with her hands. “Dreams are like poetry, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Medric said.
“Well, I’m no good at metaphors. I dreamed I was naked and so I started to put 
on my clothes, but then I looked down and realized that I was putting on my own 
skin. What does that mean?”
“Oh, my.” Medric closed the book and hastily put on his other spectacles.
Emil, squatting by the coals to pour water into a fresh teapot, set the pot of 
water down suddenly. “Karis, I’ve been thinking that perhaps the best gift we 
might give you is a season of solitude.”
Karis looked at him, and finally said in a voice gone blank with shock, “What?”
J’han had been examining her from across the cookfire. Now he said, “Certainly, 
it doesn’t look like you need me anymore, and Norina and I have already agreed 
to return to our daughter, to raise her together through winter, anyway. The 
spring is still an open question, of course, but the sooner we leave the 
better.”
Karis glanced at Norina, who neither spoke nor looked away. In fact, Zanja 
realized, Norina had yet to speak a word in Karis’s presence, which surely 
required an inhuman discipline on her part. “Of course you don’t know what to do 
in the spring,” Karis said, as though she had not realized before now exactly 
how much her friends’ decisions depended on hers. She accepted a steaming 
porringer from Zanja, along with the spoon from her belt, and obediently stuck 
the spoon into it.
Emil said, “Medric and I can go to my winter home, perhaps. It’s distant, but 
not so far that we couldn’t visit you if we needed to, or you us. Medric, what 
do you think? It’s a lonely and wild enough place. Will we get sick of each 
other?”
“We’d better not. You’re going to help me write my book—”
“I am?”
“—and there’s that library to build.”
“Hmm. Not this year, I don’t think.”
“That’s what I mean,” Medric said. “You are I are in it for some years at least. 
Karis—”
She looked at him, sullen as though she were the youth and he the elder telling 
her what to do. “Go back to Meartown,” Medric said.
“Why?”
“Because the most important journeys all begin at home.”
Karis opened her mouth, but said nothing.
Zanja said, “Then we all should come to Meartown. The tribe should stay 
together.”
They all looked at her in some surprise. Then Medric said, “Tribe? A community, 
maybe, after Mackapee.”
“No, a company,” said Emil.
And J’han said, “Or a family, perhaps.”
Norina put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from speaking. Perhaps she 
would have demanded that they found a new order.
“But not yet,” said Emil. “The last thing you need, Karis, is to be surrounded 
by people who are slavishly waiting for you to tell them what to do with their 
lives. You must answer your own questions first.”
Karis said mutinously, “So you’re all going to abandon me out here in the 
wilderness instead?”
Emil said, “Why, yes, I believe we are.”
Medric added irrelevantly, “Slavish? That’s a bit of a hyperbole, isn’t it?”
They argued amicably and finally settled on “obsequious.” Norina seemed to be 
trying to tear her hair out of her head. Karis glanced at her and said 
irritably, “What?”
“Eat your porridge,” Norina said.
Karis seemed flabbergasted. “The first words you’ve said to me in ten days—”
“Eat your blasted porridge,” Norina amended.
“You’ll be a rotten mother,” Karis muttered. She put a spoonful of porridge into 
her mouth.
There is a stillness that comes across the earth sometimes, at dawn, or just 
before a storm, a stillness as if the entire world lies stunned by possibility. 
So Karis became still, and so the agitated, half-hilarious talk of her friends 
fell silent, and so the breeze itself seemed to take its breath. Karis looked at 
the bowl of porridge as though she had never seen food before.
“Porridge is pretty dull, as food goes,” Norina said.
“Dull?” Karis took another taste. “This is dull?”
Comprehension struck Zanja like a stinging slap in the face. “Dear gods,” she 
whispered.
“Oh, my,” said J’han.
But Medric grinned complacently and gave J’han his book, and Emil calmly poured 
out onto the ground the pot of tea he had just made, and packed his tea set 
away. Zanja caught a glimpse of how irritating fire bloods could be when they 
have realized a truth before anyone else. J’han got up and began fussing in his 
saddlebags, taking things out and putting them in again. Norina laced her 
fingers across her knees and in silence watched Karis eat another astounded 
spoonful of porridge. Of course, to a Truthken there is no such thing as 
privacy, but Zanja felt it proper to look away, if only to hide her own 
expression. She would have found something to do, like Medric and Emil, who were 
fretting now over how to distribute the weight of books and food between their 
two horses, but it just would have made her feel as foolish as they looked.
Karis scraped the porringer clean. Zanja took it from her and filled it up again 
with oats and dry fruit, and set it in the coals. Norina stood up without a 
word, and went to help with the packing. Karis wiped her face with the ragged 
tail of her shirt. “I think I’m hungry,” she said, as though there were nothing 
extraordinary about her hunger. Then she looked at the cloth of her shirt, and 
touched it to her face again. “What—”
Zanja felt the shirtcloth. “It’s soft, the way old shirts get.”
Karis alternately felt her face and the cloth. Then she looked at her callused, 
soot black hands. “I am alive,” she said. “It feels very odd.”
The flat heath spread out before Zanja, oddly out of kilter. When Zanja looked 
at Karis, she hardly could endure the sight, and had to look away again. The 
silence became awkward, and at last Karis said in a strained voice, “Well, I 
must ask you, since you haven’t volunteered. Where are you going to go?”
Zanja turned, startled, pained that Karis would even think of sending her away.
“Because I’m going with you,” Karis continued.
“I think I’ll go to Meartown.”
“Well.”
“Karis—”
“Be careful,” she said hoarsely. Her attention seemed intensely concentrated, as 
if she had been rescued from deep water and needed to breathe.
“With your permission,” Zanja said, very carefully, “I’d like to court you.”
Karis uttered a sharp laugh, but even her laughter had no peace in it. “And up 
until now, what have you been doing?”
“Well, if this whole year has been a courtship . . .” Zanja paused, and said, 
“Perhaps it has.”
“I don’t think the earth sent me out to rescue you on a whim.”
“It seemed whimsical enough at the time.”
Karis was smiling, her panic passed for now. But Zanja knew, quite clearly, how 
uncertain was the path on which she trod.
Zanja said, “I would like to make a suggestion. Take Norina into your good 
graces again.”
“Have you forgiven her?”
“I will, before I bid her good-bye. She makes amends the same way she goes into 
battle. Gods help the fool who gets in her way. If you forgive her, we all will 
be the safer for it.”
Karis uttered a snort of laughter and unfolded herself a bit. “Well, since 
you’ve gotten in her way before, you know what you’re talking about. Nori!”
Norina came over with J’han’s book of poetry and gave it to Zanja without a 
word. Without a word, Zanja stood up and gave Norina her seat, and pointed out 
to her the porridge cooking in the ashes.
Karis said to Norina, “You must be bored with penitence by now.”
“My boredom is only just beginning,” said Norina morosely. “But J’han is never 
bored. Why couldn’t he be the one with the breasts? That’s what I want to know.”



Zanja went for a desperately needed walk across the flat, rocky countryside. The 
yellowing grasses were weighed down by seedheads, which in places had been 
cropped neatly off by their wandering horses. She reached the clear rivulet that 
had served as their camp’s water source. When she looked back, Norina sat at 
Karis’s side, talking earnestly. Karis listened somberly, speaking little. It 
seemed like old times.
Zanja walked in a wide circle around the camp. The next time she looked at the 
cookfire, Norina had been replaced by J’han, who seemed to be systematically 
giving Karis most of the contents of his healer’s pack: a brown bottle of 
something to soothe her throat, herbs to build her strength, and a great deal of 
advice. But in the end he seemed to offer some kind of reassurance, and Karis 
must have said something amusing, because he burst out laughing.
The next time she looked, Emil and Medric sat on either side of Karis, and all 
three of them were roaring with laughter. The sound of it carried far across the 
plain. J’han and Norina were saddling their horses. Zanja started back toward 
the camp. By the time she reached the fire Karis was sitting alone, with packets 
and bottles piled at her feet like homage. Zanja took the small fortune that the 
people of Meartown had collected to fund her rescue of Karis, and divided it up 
among them. At least none of them would go hungry or cold this winter.



Zanja first said good-bye to Norina. “Karis should never have to choose between 
us,” she said.
“You’ll wish a thousand times that you had never said those words.”
“I already wish I hadn’t.”
“That’s once.”
Zanja said seriously, “If you have any advice, I would hear it.”
The sardonic side of Norina’s mouth lifted at the corner. “You’re the one who 
threw yourself into the middle of this avalanche. Are you trying to tell me now 
that you’re worried about where it’s taking you?”
“Not at all,” Zanja said. “And I’ll never forgive you for trying to murder me.”
Norina said, “In all my days of seeking the truth, I’ve never met a worse liar.”



When Medric embraced Zanja in farewell, he said, “Do you ever think about that 
other Sainnite seer’s vision? The one that predicted that the Ashawala’i would 
defeat the Sainnites?”
“I try not to,” Zanja said.
“That’s good,” Medric said. “I never would have told you about it had I known 
who you were. But if the fate of my people is in your hands—”
“Then that puts it in your hands, doesn’t it?”
Medric looked taken aback. “It does? Oh, it does.” She left him fumbling for a 
different pair of spectacles.
Emil’s hug was bracing. “You know where to find me,” he said.
* * *
Her arms were aching and empty as she stood beside Karis and watched the four of 
them ride away. Homely, laden with their food and bedrolls and a book each from 
Medric and Emil, nibbled a few sprigs of grass and then snorted impatiently at 
them.
Karis said, desolate, “How I’ll explain all this to the townspeople I have no 
idea.”



Zanja’s patience had never been so tried by travel. Karis slept insatiably, ate 
ravenously, and in what daylight remained dawdled on the path, infinitely 
distracted by a curiosity as global and undisciplined as any child’s. The barren 
heath was to Karis an extraordinarily complicated living puzzle that she could 
not resist figuring out. But the more she understood, the more there was to 
understand, and they would starve to death before Karis was satisfied. The 
rigors of the last month had melted Karis like a candle. It had taken only a 
sense of taste to make her devoted to food, and when Zanja pointed out their 
shrinking food supply, their pace picked up substantially.
Still, Karis touched everything, meditatively, absorbedly; and often smelled and 
tasted it as well. She wore herself out with sensation, and Zanja wore herself 
out with trying to explain to her the marketplace of physical experience that 
she had always taken for granted. Karis could not distinguish between hunger and 
thirst, between tiredness and sleepiness, between softness and smoothness; and 
teaching her the difference was not nearly so simple as one might think.
Late one afternoon, after several days of leisurely travel, they climbed 
steadily up the steep road to the Meartown gate, but long before they reached 
the gate, people had begun to come rushing out and down the road, one or two at 
first, and then dozens more as the word spread of Karis’s arrival. Faster than 
seemed possible, the entire town turned out to welcome her home. In the heart of 
a celebrating crowd, Zanja clung grimly to Homely’s reins and to Karis’s elbow, 
tempted sometimes to beat the people back so that Karis at least could breathe. 
Karis, however, seemed resigned to the attention, and patiently embraced the 
babies born since her disappearance, and shook the hands of forge-jacks and 
forge-masters and hundreds of other muscular, smoke-begrimed people who had not 
even taken the time to remove their scorched leather aprons.
They sat Zanja beside Karis in a place of honor in the town’s largest tavern, 
into which the townspeople packed, elbow-to-elbow, like beans standing in the 
pickling jar. The tavernkeepers did not have enough tankards to go around, and a 
dozen toasts had to be drunk, with the tankards being passed from hand to hand 
until everyone in the tavern had drunk at least a swallow to Karis’s health. All 
this took an inordinate amount of time, and at one point Karis glanced aside at 
Zanja’s face and said dryly, “You endure some trials more gracefully than 
others.”
“We should have crept to your house under cover of darkness.”
“Sooner or later they’d have discovered I was home. We might as well get this 
whole thing over with.”
She disappointed the folk of Mear later, though, when they demanded that she 
tell what had happened. “I was kidnapped by brigands, and Zanja found me and 
saved my life,” she said. “So I’ve learned the value of having a hero or two 
among my friends. Now are you going to hold me hostage to your good will much 
longer? Surely you have work to finish, and the day is nearly over.”
The townsfolk dispersed reluctantly, clearly unsatisfied with the two-sentence 
tale, but sunset was drawing near and they all knew that Karis had to smoke or 
die. Karis gravely bid her well-wishers farewell, and only Zanja knew what the 
glitter in her eye was all about. At sunset Karis often was overwhelmed by 
desire for smoke, and by a lingering fear that somehow her miracle of liberation 
would prove to be illusory. After sunset came the jubilation at seeing the 
stars, yet again. She had gone through the cycle enough times now that she 
seemed to be starting to trust the jubilation and to distrust the fear.
Now they stood alone in a surprisingly empty street rimmed by soot-gray walls. 
Someone had taken Homely to the common stable; others had carried their gear 
away. Karis hesitated in the street, as though she had abruptly lost her sense 
of direction. After a while, Zanja sat down upon a stoop and tightened her 
bootstraps. When she looked up, Karis was gazing down at her with a curious 
expression. Zanja looked at her curiously in return.
“You’ve been very patient,” Karis said.
“Actually, the discipline of peaceful waiting is one I never learned to do with 
grace. Emil is a true master of patience. You should watch him sometime. The 
contrast will show you how deliberately and awkwardly and unnaturally I wait. We 
na’Tarweins are notoriously impatient.”
Karis seemed bemused. “But I don’t want you to wait on me, well or badly. Why 
don’t you just stop doing it?”
Zanja stood up and took hold of Karis by the shirtfront, and dragged her, 
startled, to the high stone stoop. With Zanja standing on the stoop, she could 
kiss Karis’s mouth without having to climb her like a tree. Though Karis seemed 
affrighted, she did not pull away. Instead, in a moment Zanja felt a shudder run 
through that long frame, and Karis’s fist clenched in the cloth of Zanja’s 
shirt. She seemed to want to crawl inside Zanja’s very skin. The shirt cloth 
started to tear. It was Zanja who took a step back, unnerved by the sensation 
that she had not so much chosen this moment as she had been delivered to it. 
Karis lost her balance and sat down upon the stoop as though her knees had given 
out on her. The breeze, cool with the coming evening, inserted a curious finger 
into the hole in Zanja’s shirt. She and Karis both were breathing as though they 
had just sprinted up a hill.
“Blessed day,” Karis gasped.
Zanja knelt at her feet and said with mock seriousness, “The Ashawala’i call 
that feeling ‘being struck by lightning.’ Shall I explain the sensation to you?”
Karis said shakily, “I understand enough.”
Zanja felt the entirety of Karis’s attention focus upon her. She thought of 
Karis exploring the landscape of her body the way she had been exploring the 
heath, and her heart began to wobble in her chest. “Would you rather I go back 
to being awkwardly and unnaturally patient?” she said.
“Could you?” Karis asked, then answered her own question. “No. And if you could, 
I’d be offended.”
Zanja grinned. “Well then, it’s completely impossible.”
Karis looked away. Her hands clenched each other like shy children before a 
stranger. “Zanja, it’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s my ghosts.”
“I have my ghosts too. So what?”
“So maybe lovemaking will be an embarrassing, disastrous farce.”
“We’ve survived so much worse than that already.”
Karis looked back at her, stricken.
Zanja said, “Karis, I can always find a way across. It’s my gift.” She gave her 
a hand, and helped her to her feet. They walked all the way to Lynton and 
Dominy’s house without saying another word, and without letting go of each 
other.
* * *

The delivery of their gear had prematurely announced their homecoming to Lynton 
and Dominy, and they arrived to find everything in chaos as the two men 
frantically tried to make Karis’s bed with fresh linens, cook a celebratory 
dinner, and heat the bathwater, all before sunset. Karis left Zanja to sort 
things out while she walked off by herself toward the green trees that clustered 
around a small pond. The sun was nearly down.
Zanja repeatedly explained to the two men that Karis no longer used smoke and 
there was no rush, but nothing she said seemed likely to overcome their 
disbelief. Finally, to calm them down she took over some of the work. She had 
never made a bed in her life; but it proved, as she suspected, to be largely a 
matter of common sense. She took out Karis’s two cleanest shirts and hung one to 
warm by the fire. The second she took with her to the bathhouse, where the 
washkettle had come to a boil. Buckets of cold water stood waiting to mix in the 
tub with the hot. There was a crock of herbs and flowers to sprinkle in the 
water, a crock of soft lye soap, and a bath brush worn soft with use.
Clean, dressed only in Karis’s shirt, which hung to her calves, carrying her 
knife belt, she walked back to the house and let herself quietly into Karis’s 
room by way of the garden. It was full dark by then, and she could hear Karis’s 
voice in the kitchen. Zanja built up the fire in the fireplace and combed her 
hair with her fingers as it dried. She supposed she was missing dinner.
She fell asleep in the warmth of the fire, and when she awoke, Karis stood 
nearby, buttoning her clean shirt. She had set a burning candle into the chimney 
nook, and gazed down at Zanja with her eyes set into dark hollows by the angle 
of the light.
Ordinary and commonplace words could have filled the silence, but Zanja did not 
move or speak.
Karis knelt beside the settle and lifted a hand to awkwardly brush the loose 
hair out of Zanja’s eyes. Her fingers were steady, but her agitated breathing 
revealed how close her ghosts hovered. She smelled unlike herself: of soap and 
herbs rather than of smoke and old sweat. She abruptly leaned over and kissed 
Zanja’s mouth. Then she tried to pull away but Zanja couldn’t seem to release 
her. Karis easily could have broken free but she held herself still, trembling 
like a wild horse trapped into the traces. Carefully, Zanja let go of her. She 
told herself she could wait as long as she needed to, and she could do it 
gracefully, without resentment. She was a katrim. She could sleep on the hearth 
in the kitchen and she wouldn’t blame Karis, and she wouldn’t complain.
She sat up, rubbing her face. Karis sat down beside her on the settle and said 
miserably, “You deserve—”
Zanja crawled into Karis’s lap. Though startled, Karis moved instinctively to 
embrace her, to accommodate the weight of her. Zanja was so much smaller than 
she, a tribeless mountain woman lost here in the plains, ready to die of 
loneliness. Holding her like this, would Karis remember the bitter winter day 
she rescued her? There had been no coercion when Karis gave her back her life, 
just generosity: unearned, unsought, utterly unexpected. Zanja felt Karis’s hand 
in her hair, and shut her eyes and thought of Karis stroking the heath’s soft 
grasses. She willed herself to be as passive, and as vital, as the heath had 
been.
She shuddered alert when she heard Karis’s breathing change. Karis’s big, gentle 
hand had found its way to Zanja’s face and now she began kissing her, and Zanja 
made her hands lie still. Time carried them upon a quiet river. The fire died 
down and the candle guttered in its socket. The moon rose and cast a modest 
light through the garden door’s glass windows. Zanja tasted salt.
She lifted a hand to Karis’s face and found her gasping with surprise, awash in 
astonished tears. Zanja straddled Karis on her knees and the river took them 
again and the moonlight faded away. Karis stood up and carried Zanja to the bed. 
Zanja’s exquisite restraints snapped, and in a matter of moments she ruined both 
their shirts.
They’d have nothing to wear in the morning. But between now and then lay an 
infinity of time.



Though Karis floundered in an agitated ocean of sensation, Zanja’s hands 
anchored her within her skin. Fragmented flesh knitted itself together, shocking 
her with each new joining: another recognition, another homecoming. Zanja’s 
sculptured face moved across her breast: perspiring, ecstatic, entangling them 
both in a mess of unbound hair, moaning sometimes like the lion upon her hill. 
Who’d have thought those knife-scarred hands could be so appallingly gentle, or 
that a woman of such iron will could suddenly turn so soft? With one touch Karis 
could collapse her. She tried it, stroking the soft inside of a lean thigh, and 
Zanja fell prostrate and incoherent, as helpless as Karis had ever seen her. For 
a moment, Karis didn’t know what to do. And then she did know.
A strange, irresistible time followed. With Zanja shouting and sobbing and 
flailing under her touch, Karis felt the shock of her lover’s ravishment right 
through skin and muscle and bone. And then Zanja lay shuddering, gasping for 
breath in Karis’s arms, and beginning to shake with dizzy laughter. “Oh gods of 
the sky,” she said in abject gratitude, and laughed and cried, and Karis held 
her more closely than she had ever held anything, and could not imagine letting 
go.
Then Zanja tied her hair up in a knot and said, “Now I will follow the fire.”
Zanja lay across her, and Karis saw the callused bottoms of her well-traveled 
feet. She took one in her hand. It was warm, and rough. The tendons tightened 
and the ball of Zanja’s foot pressed gently against her palm. Karis felt Zanja’s 
hands, and her tongue— unhurried, coaxing. Under that touch, her thighs gave 
way, and the rest of her gave way as well. Oh, it was fire, but it was also 
earth: a monolithic presence, waiting, wounded, for healing. Shaftal. She could 
not refuse.
The earth claimed her.



In the dead of night, Zanja awoke to find herself alone, with the blankets 
tucked carefully around her and the garden doors standing ajar. She walked out 
into a chilly breeze, and saw frost sparkle in the starlight. A year ago she had 
never thought she’d see stars again. Now the cold night felt huge around her, 
cupped within the folded hollow of the hills, but expanding out into the bright 
universe. The garden lay breathless and silent, the accuser bugs silenced at 
last, the frog song long since ended. It would be a sudden winter.
Karis lay naked on her back in a bed of thyme, staring up at the stars. Zanja 
paused. She knew there had been a mystery at the end of their lovemaking, when 
with the moment of consummation upon her, it was not to Zanja, but to the land 
itself that Karis cried out. Perhaps Karis had not slept at all since then, and 
all their lovemaking had been for her the opening of another door. Perhaps 
everything they did would ripple outward in the vast future: every breath, every 
word.
“Now you are afraid,” Karis said from the thyme bed. Her voice was hushed.
“I should be afraid.”
“Yes,” Karis said peacefully. “Anyone should fear to possess such powers as we 
possess.” Then: “Do you remember when I healed you?”
“I’ll never forget that day.” Zanja knelt down in the thyme. “You restored me to 
myself.”
Karis said, “Now you’ve done the same to me. So it was the land that sent me 
forth, to make whole the one who would make me whole. I’ll never again question 
the logic of my life.”



Chapter Twenty-eight



At mid-autumn, when the ground began to freeze, South Hill Company disbanded. 
The malaise that had affected the Sainnites seemed also to have affected the 
Paladins, like a plague jumping across the battle lines. By then, half the 
people of the company had no homes to go to, and only food delivered from 
outside would keep the people of the region, including the Sainnites, alive 
until spring. Even Willis had succumbed to the bitterness of that year. He was 
gone from South Hill; no one knew where. One of Emil’s friends had gotten a 
brief and inexplicable letter: I am released. I wish you the same. Though she 
shook her head in pity that so fine a commander had fallen victim to the 
silliness of middle age, she lay awake that night, thinking of the ways that her 
own service to the war had imprisoned her over the years.



Emil and Medric, on their second trip for supplies to the nearest town, outran 
the storm by less than an hour. They had scarcely finished unloading the wagon 
when the rain began to fall. Medric, who had insisted that they augment their 
already substantial supply of food and lamp oil, took on the project of cramming 
their purchases into the already packed storeroom of the little cottage. Emil 
went up to the attic to check for leaks, and wound up sitting for quite some 
time on one of the trunks of precious books, listening to the rain pounding on 
the roof, and peering out the one small window at the gray landscape below. When 
he climbed down the ladder, he found Medric curled in an armchair by the kitchen 
fire, with a book in his lap and a pen in his teeth, and the ink pot 
precariously balanced on a pile of papers on the arm of his chair. He looked up, 
took the pen out of his mouth, and said, “Why has no one ever written about 
Harald G’deon?”
“Chaotic times have brought us a dearth of historians,” Emil said. “And so many 
have blamed Harald for the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, I suppose that there 
is an impulse to erase him from history.”
“But some day people will wish they could know more about him,” Medric said. 
“And another thing: the House of Lilterwess came into being around Lilter, the 
second G’deon, largely to keep her powers regulated. So once Mabin made it clear 
she would not confirm Karis as G’deon, at that point, it could be argued, the 
House of Lilterwess lost its reason for existence.”
“Now that’s hardly true,” Emil began. He chopped some vegetables for a bean soup 
while he explained as well as he could how the Orders of Lilterwess had 
gradually become the unifying heart of Shaftal’s government and culture. As he 
put the pot onto the fire he caught sight of Medric’s smile, and leaned over to 
kiss the top of his head. “Do you hear?” he said. “The rain has turned to sleet, 
just like in your dream. What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking that ‘The House of Karis’ just doesn’t sound very impressive.”
“That’s because it’s impossible to imagine her as an institution.”
“That’s probably what they said about that woman Lilter, and look at what 
happened.”
Medric wrote for a while in his weird mix of languages and alphabets. Emil did 
not feel like doing anything, and made himself a pot of tea. Although it had 
been a long day, Medric still would sit up with his books and papers for half 
the night. Emil would go to bed, and wake up before dawn with Medric curled 
against him like a friendly cat. In the kitchen, Emil would find both the lamp 
reservoir and the wood box empty. He would go out on a solitary walk to watch 
the sunrise, and when he came back he’d start some bread and write a letter to 
Zanja, though he could not imagine how to arrange for its delivery.
Emil got up to stir the beans. The wind flung sleet at the shuttered windows. By 
now it was full dark, and the storm would rattle the shutters all night long. 
Within the cottage, here in the bright kitchen, it was easy to forget about the 
storm.



Zanja looked up from the uncertain text she was deciphering as someone came into 
the tavern, and she saw as the door closed that it was past sunset. The people 
clustered nearest the door shouted in good-natured protest against the bitter 
wind that came blowing in. The tavern’s convivial cheer grew noisier by the 
moment, as miners and smelters came in to celebrate another day’s survival at 
their inevitably dangerous jobs. Zanja closed her book. Her tutor had gone home 
some time ago.
The door opened again, and Karis came in, accompanied by a half dozen other 
metalsmiths from her forge. The other smiths lined up to get tankards of ale, 
but Karis took cider instead, and a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese. She set 
her burdens onto a nearby table and then mounted Zanja’s table to engage her in 
a startling kiss, while the people in the vicinity burst into laughter, and the 
tavernkeeper shouted good-naturedly across the room, “Hey, now, that’s no way to 
treat fine furniture!”
Karis grinned wickedly. “Greetings, wife.”
“Whatever that means,” Zanja said.
Karis sat down decorously on the bench across from Zanja, and retrieved her cup 
and plate from the other table. “It means whatever I want it to mean.”
“Well, that’s convenient. What does it mean tonight?”
“Tonight, it means you can share my bread and cheese without asking. I’ve been 
daydreaming about supper ever since dinner, haven’t you?”
“No, since breakfast. I missed dinner.” Zanja took some bread and cheese.
Karis tasted the cheese, and shut her eyes. “Oh, my.”
Throughout the short months of autumn, Karis had immersed herself in the 
ordinary, which to her was not ordinary at all. Meartown was a busy, everyday 
kind of place, and Karis seemed steadied by the straightforward effort of labor. 
Zanja gathered that she had never worked so hard or so brilliantly, and some of 
the more perceptive townsfolk had already come to Zanja to ask plaintively 
whether Karis needed help in setting up her own forge, as though they hazily 
recognized that Karis’s talent could not be contained much longer in the narrow 
patterns of her earlier life.
To be the speaker for a single person was a role Zanja did not much savor. She 
advised these people to talk to Karis, but none of them did. Instead, everyone 
participated in Karis’s pretense that nothing of significance had been changed. 
They accepted Zanja as Karis’s lover and apparent dependent, they were puzzled 
by Karis’s recovery from her addiction, and their labored lives continued 
unaltered. The mysteries of Karis’s late summer disappearance lay in the past, 
and now the preoccupations of winter distracted everyone’s attention. Karis 
seemed to prefer it that way. Zanja alone knew that Karis’s senses had developed 
far beyond the limits of Zanja’s experience or vocabulary, and that sometimes 
she could only understand Karis in the same way she understood glyphs or poetry, 
through the faith and vision and intellectual recklessness that Emil would have 
called fire logic.
It had been a preoccupied autumn. Love had not so bedazzled Zanja that she did 
not regret its cost. She had finally ceased to be a katrim. What she was 
becoming instead she did not know, but she found Karis’s joking use of the 
undefinable word “wife” to be deeply unnerving.
Something in the tavern distracted her: a strange quality to the sound, perhaps. 
Someone from the forge had come over to engage Karis in a technical conversation 
that Zanja ignored. She got up to refill her cider cup, listening closely as she 
worked her way through the crowd. Ale and good cheer had made everyone a 
storyteller tonight, and although not all the stories she overheard had to do 
with the metal crafts, she heard nothing extraordinary. “Are there any strangers 
here tonight?” she asked the girl who poured the cider.
The girl pointed at a corner table which was surrounded three-deep by 
soot-smudged listeners with tankards in their hands. As Zanja edged her way 
over, she caught sometimes the tenor of an unfamiliar voice, and spotted a 
wool-clad shoulder and arm as the speaker gestured.
“What?” someone said, with an astonishment so deep and sharp that many more 
heads began to turn. ‘What are you saying!“
“I’m only telling you what I have heard,” the voice said, its articulation 
blurred by drink. “But I heard it from the people who saw it happen.”
The tavern was rapidly falling silent, like a noisy audience that realizes that 
the play is beginning. Zanja began to work her way back to Karis, but the hush 
passed her and reached Karis before she did. Karis turned around on her bench, 
curious, relaxed. Zanja made a glyph with her hands: Danger. Karis leaned 
forward and rested her chin in one hand, disguising her height, making herself 
momentarily invisible in a room full of muscular, soot-stained people.
“It was a big woman that did it,” the man said, his voice reaching all the way 
across the crowded room now. “She came out of nowhere, and knocked Councilor 
Mabin down, and drove a spike into her heart. And Mabin still lives, that I can 
tell you for certain. At summer’s end it happened, and her heart is still 
beating this very day.”
“This is a wild and dangerous tale,” someone objected, and there was a murmur of 
agreement.
The rest of the people sat in stunned silence, however, some with their drinks 
half lifted, others staring at each other in disbelief. “That big woman,” 
someone finally said, “Who is she?”
“Well, Mabin certainly knew who she was,” the stranger said. “And perhaps only 
Mabin knows the whole story, a story she’s not telling. But what is that big 
woman? That’s what I want to know.”
Everyone spoke then, in a cacophony of wild disagreement. Karis sat without 
moving, her face slightly pale in the shadows. Zanja knelt beside her and 
murmured, “If we try to slip out now, everyone will look at you, and at least 
some of them will truly see you, and put all the pieces together.”
Karis’s ragged hair frayed out into the darkness, but when she straightened up 
from her crouch, her eyes filled up with light. “Zanja, it’s time for the 
journey to begin.”
Kneeling beside her, Zanja’s thoughts began to fragment strangely. She thought 
of how Karis had insisted that they build Homely a paddock up at Lynton and 
Dominy’s house, rather than stable him in town. She thought of the money Karis 
had earned in these few months, quite a lot more than had been spent. She 
thought of the random tools that had begun to accumulate mysteriously under 
Karis’s table, taken home one by one from the forge. She was not surprised when 
Karis stood up, and faced the accumulating stares and the rising silence of the 
tavern.
Karis said, “I had to make do without Meartown steel, but I don’t think you’d be 
ashamed of the workmanship. It was a fine spike.”
She picked up her doublet from the bench, and left the tavern, with Zanja behind 
her. Outside, the storm clouds had begun once again to extinguish the stars. 
Breathing clouds of white, fastening up their buttons against the cold, they 
walked briskly away from the tavern. Karis said, “My accounts are all settled. 
I’ve hinted to the forgemaster that I’m leaving. Lynton and Dominy tell me my 
responsibility for them should not hold me back, for they both have lived well 
beyond their time already. I’m afraid we’ll have a miserable night’s 
journey—this storm will drop some snow before it’s done. Is Emil’s cottage big 
enough for the four of us?”
Zanja’s heart had filled up with fire, like a furnace. “What does one cottage 
matter, when we have the world?”
Karis tucked her big hand into the crook of Zanja’s arm, nearly dislodging the 
book she carried there. “Meartown bored you to tears, didn’t it?”
They walked out the gates, greeting Mardeth as always. Only as the gate closed 
and locked behind them did Karis seem to hesitate. She turned, and looked behind 
her. “Mardeth,” she said.
The gatekeeper had started to her cottage, but turned back. “What?”
“We’re off to see what we can make of the world,” Karis said.
The old woman smiled indulgently. “Are you, then? Good luck to you.”
“She thinks you’re joking, or drunk,” Zanja muttered.
Beside her, Karis uttered a laugh. “Maybe that’s what they all think.”
Arm in arm, they walked up the hill.




Laurie J. Marks serves on the steering committee of Broad Universe and is a 
member of SFFWA and the National Council of Teachers of English. She lives in 
Melrose, Massachusetts.