Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  Karis snatched the spectacles from Medric’s hand and put them on his face. “Don’t you see anything?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Karis began dropping everything she carried on the ground. Seth hastily took the baby from her.

  “Wait,” Norina said.

  They argued. Then Karis stood staring at the storm as Norina spoke briefly with Kamren and the Sainnite general. “I’ll mark the trail,” Chaen heard Norina say.

  Chaen grabbed Seth by the shirttail as she passed. “Will you do something with my knapsack? And loan me your water flask?”

  Then Chaen was chasing Karis and the Truthken, running through their dust. Norina glanced at her as she drew up to them. “Do you know how to mark a trail?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll take turns, then.”

  Not another word was said for many hours.

  Karis walked straight as an arrow’s flight and never checked her bearings by looking at the sun, at the horizon, or backwards at the hilltop where she had started. She plowed through small shrubs, strode over boulders, and barged across streambeds and rough ground. Chaen followed at a dogged, plodding jog, each foot plopping to ground like a bag of rocks dangling from the unfeeling sticks of her legs. Every hundred steps or so, she and Norina stopped to mark the trail with a cairn of hastily gathered stones. Karis moved away from them so quickly that they then were forced to run full-tilt to catch up.

  The distant, gray smear of forest became a scattering of outlying trees that were dwarfed, twisted, shriveled, and even dead in that hostile borderland. As these outlying trees thickened, Norina began cutting blazes into the trunks, and Chaen wrapped her hands in the tail of her shirt, because the rock-gathering had sanded her palms raw. Norina made a very quiet sound—startling because she had been silent the entire afternoon. And then she was running, leaving the marking unfinished. When Chaen caught up, Norina was on her knees. Karis sprawled on the ground, ungainly as a fighter who has been struck dead by a devastating blow.

  The Karis lifted her face out of the dirt and spoke, her voice a scraping of fingernails on rough stone. “She has Emil. She has driven them away.”

  “Is Emil dead?” Norina’s voice seemed harsh rather than concerned: she had been terrified, and fear made her angry.

  Karis heaved herself to her knees. She wiped her face with the filthy tail of her shirt. “He’s dying, but I can keep him alive. Zanja is putting him in earth, so I can reach him.”

  “At what distance?” Norina wiped the sweat and anger from her face.

  “I expect we’ll be walking half the night.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Not much.” Karis rubbed an elbow.

  “The next time you need to be inside Zanja, sit down first.”

  Chaen helped to lift Karis to her feet.

  Karis said, “Zanja knows I hear her, but she won’t talk to me. What is she concealing?”

  ‘’She’s probably not in her right mind.”

  Norina asked Karis for her knife and gave it to Chaen. She said over her shoulder, “For marking trees. Her blades don’t get dull.”

  Karis was already three strides away, while Chaen stood flat-footed.

  The dry dirt was pockmarked. As Chaen chased Karis through the woods, the dirt became mud. Whenever a breeze shook the trees, a shower fell, and they became soaked to the skin, slipping in mud, then wading in water. Only two days ago, Chaen had lain in these woods on dry ground beneath a dusty sky, going blind without realizing it. This didn’t seem the same forest, nor did she seem the same person.

  As Chaen and Norina trotted past each other, marking the trees, Karis disappeared from sight, then from hearing. The trees threw black shadows on the vivid ground. Chaen stumbled through a litter of leaves and twigs torn from the trees by the storm wind that had now passed.

  Norina came up behind her. “It’s too dark to continue marking the trail.”

  Chaen carved a second mark across the one she had just completed, signifying the trail’s end. “Take this knife away from me—I’m falling in love with it.”

  Chaen was overwhelmed by her desire to lie down. But Norina set out after Karis, fast-moving and sure-footed, while Chaen could only stagger behind her. Perhaps Norina had been forged by earth magic, and therefore never dulled or lost her edge. Perhaps Zanja, who had scarcely slept or even rested, also was metal on the earth witch’s forge.

  With the light failing, it had become nearly impossible to distinguish the traces of Karis’s passage in the debris. But then Norina spotted some footprints in mud, and they lurched into a run. Karis had continued to crash through bushes and over boulders, but at least she walked around the trees. As twilight became darkness, Norina took a cunning lantern from a pocket and lit it with a match. When she dangled this little light from her hand by its chain, its flame cast just enough light to throw Karis’s deep footprints into relief.

  Abruptly, they caught up with her. Braced against a tree, she was saying, “Please stay with him. I’ll be there by midnight. Stay with him.” Then, she was saying, “Return to him. Zanja, I beg you.”

  Chaen waited with her back against a tree trunk, not daring to sit down lest she be unable to get up, not even daring to shut her eyes lest she doze off. Norina blew out her flame, waited for the tiny lantern to cool, and put it in a pocket.

  “She won’t heed me,” Karis said. “She won’t explain herself. She has gone into the woods again.”

  Chaen asked, “Is she still chasing my son, Maxew? Is he injured also?”

  “Maxew and his companion are able to travel. They’re going west, and Zanja is going southwest.”

  Chaen said drearily, “I wanted to be there when Norina caught up to him.”

  “Well, obviously,” said the Truthken.

  Chaen had not expected to conceal her motives from Norina. She did wonder why the Truthken had allowed her to accompany them, but now it didn’t matter. She said, “I can’t go any farther. You’ll have to leave me here.”

  Karis came out of the shadows. Her big, hot, sticky hand clasped Chaen’s forearm. Cold water dripped from her hair onto Chaen’s face. When Karis drew away, Chaen felt like she could follow her to the end of the earth.

  A wind small enough to fit in a bottle had leveled the forest.

  They stood staring into the moonlit tangle of fallen trees.

  Karis said, with scathing bitterness, “I’m glad that old woman is dead.” She stepped forward.

  The moon set. Surely the night was half over. Karis continued, inexorable, breaking through the tangle by brute force. Chaen struggled behind her, not weary any longer, but dazed by sleeplessness, so it began to seem as if Karis was not going forward by her own will, and instead was being pulled, like a fish with a hook in its gut. Finally she was landed, in a serene pavilion roofed by varnished silk, walled by damp blankets, warmed by a smoldering fire, and decorated by a laundry line: it even smelled like a cottage on washday. A meal had been laid upon a flattened canvas bag: hard biscuits, potted meat, jam, pickles, a tin of tea, and a pot of water to go on the fire. But there was no smiling host greeting her long-expected visitors.

  Zanja might not have been in her right mind, but this haven was a creation of love, not madness.

  That message had not been left for Chaen, but only she heeded it. Karis and Norina both rushed to the naked man who slept there in a bed of leaves and twigs. Karis fell to her knees, swept back the leafy blanket, and covered his chest with her hand.

  When Chaen had her sketchbook again, she would draw this scene from memory: the dying Paladin, clean shaven, his hair combed back and tied in a tail, his face gaunt and somber but marked by deep lines of joy. She would draw the G’deon, hunched over with her hand upon his heart. She would draw the Truthken kneeling at his other side covering her face with her hand, although she would never flinch fro
m the ugliest of secrets. That drawing could one day be an etching in a book of history, but the readers of the book would only remember the murderer, Maxew of the Midlands, and not the artist.

  Karis said, “He has been beaten. Some ribs are broken. He is burned. He has had nothing to eat or drink for days—probably not since Hanishport.”

  “All this you can heal,” said the Truthken. “And yet . . .” Norina took a breath, composed herself, and said, “And yet he’s dying.”

  “I can’t even awaken him. I don’t know why.”

  “Karis, if I have any hope of repairing what Maxew did to him, Emil must be aware enough to respond to my voice.”

  In the heavy darkness Karis was silent, on her knees, holding Emil’s heart.

  Chaen scarcely knew anything about Emil, yet she had observed the reverence that others held for him. Disguised as a shabby man, he had stood near her, gazing the other way as she prepared to shoot the G’deon with a poisoned arrow. What steadiness that must have taken, to let her commit that crime so he could capture her in the net of the law. And with what insouciance he had bowed to her, like a player upon a stage, when she realized she had been tricked.

  An outsider sees from a distance, and sometimes distance is a gift. Chaen said, “Emil must have an injury that prevents him from awakening.”

  Karis said, “So I thought. But his head isn’t injured.”

  Chaen saw the Truthken grip Karis by the forearm, as if she also could reinvigorate a person by a touch. “J’han has seen people who survived smothering or drowning, but never opened their eyes. They were alive without living. Sometimes their families let them lie in that state for many days rather than permit a healer to deliver to the stricken person a merciful death. They couldn’t believe that the person would not awaken.”

  A tree fell in the distance. There was a startled outcry of birds, and confused small creatures squeaked with alarm and scuttled through the debris. Silence gradually settled in once again.

  Karis moved her left hand to Emil’s chest and lay her right upon his forehead. “Emil.” Her voice caught and tore like a bramble dragging across cloth. “Emil, speak to me. Tell me what to do.”

  Emil did not answer.

  Chaen slept on bare ground. When she awoke, the fire had become ashes, and the stars had disappeared. Toward the east, through the devastated forest, she could see the pink light of dawn. She leapt to her feet, staggered, caught her balance, then heard again the voice she had thought was commanding her to awaken. The voice had been summoning Emil, not her.

  Karis lay beside him now, shirtless, skin against skin, with her arm wrapped around him and her face against his shoulder. Every muscle in her powerful back and shoulders was knotted with effort. Norina crouched over the dying man, though her puffy eyes and the black dirt smeared on her cheek suggested she had slept, however briefly. “Remember!” she said, in a voice like the clang of a gong. “Remember the apple orchard, that first spring, when the trees were still in bloom, how you used to take Leeba there and sit with her while you studied philosophy. You said the sound of the bees and the weight of the baby helped you to finally understand Temil’s argument about social balance. Remember that, Emil.”

  Chaen noticed then that Emil’s eyes were open, but his empty stare and slack expression only made him seem less alive.

  Norina said, “Karis, he is unaware of me.”

  Karis murmured something, and Norina spoke again. “Remember the night you and Medric made love upon a bed of books, in a storehouse by the river. Remember what you thought, that none of your old friends would understand how you could love a Sainnite.”

  Norina called Emil again and again, reminding him of something he had done, said, or written. Chaen began to perceive his life: insignificant moments, like when Zanja taught him a word of her native language, significant moments like the night Karis named him head of the council of Shaftal, when that council did not even exist. He had lived a remarkable life, a life of sharp turnings and reverses, of new hopes invented in the cold ashes of old, a life of purpose and understanding, of unsought love and unexpected joy. Yet he had remained true, not by refusing to change but by continually rediscovering his balance. He had lived as a true Paladin. Now the spirit of that joyful, intelligent man was gone—gone beyond reach or recovery.

  The rising sun spread a carpet of light and shadow across the pavilion. Karis rose up and stood swaying, and her head pushed the ceiling of stiff silk, and water began to pour over the edge, several arm’s lengths away. Chaen put the pot on the fire she had relit. Karis staggered into the tangle, then returned, buttoning her trousers, to sit awkwardly beside the fire.

  Her hair had half the forest in it—twigs, leaves, broken bits of dirt and debris, even a spider that made a leap for her shoulder, crawled down her arm, and escaped. Her big hand, injured as she forced a passage through the fallen forest, had begun to drip blood. Chaen made a pot of tea and gave her some. Scarlet drops of blood formed and fell as Karis sat in a sort of daze Chaen recognized, having seen it before. After battle, people were stunned by a fatigue that was like this, a draining of the resources, leaving emptiness. It mattered not at all whether a victory had been won. It felt like defeat.

  Wasn’t it hard enough, thought Chaen, to merely get a harvest from Shaftal’s cold, black soil in time to close the doors on winter and survive until spring came again? Why do we also struggle with each other, over what matters and what things mean, over ideas, for land’s sake? Karis lifted her hand as if to rub her face and looked at the blood with surprise.

  Chaen said, “You must have hurt yourself when you broke through the tangle.”

  “Seth will bandage it. She’s almost here.”

  “Shall I pull out the splinters?”

  Chaen went to Norina, and the Truthken traded the tweezers from her pocket for Chaen’s porringer of tea. The scar that slashed across the Truthken’s face made her look cruel and sardonic, but if Chaen avoided looking at that part of her face, she saw instead an unflagging devotion, and inhuman discipline. She saw what her son could have been.

  She put a fresh pot on the fire for the people who would soon arrive and sat with Karis’s hands spread palm up on her knee, picking out the splinters. After a while, she began to feel a grim amusement. Like Emil, she also seemed to be doomed or destined to a life of reverses, a life that was like a drawing erased and redrawn over and over, until the surface became furry and full of holes. Every time it was erased, there was unbearable sorrow, and yet she drew her life again.

  “Are you all right,” said Karis, her voice clotted and hollow.

  “I’ve survived worse.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Less than ten days ago, I was about to kill you. And now, to know how my son has injured you is breaking my heart.”

  Norina’s voice spoke at a distance. “That guilt is not yours to carry. No one could have raised Maxew better than you did. You pursued the way of least harm, with all your resources and resolve. You found Saugus, and you thought he was like a Truthken. That is a mistake he helped you to make.”

  And then Chaen remembered a boy who was her son, tense with excitement: “Mother, he is an air witch!” That was all, just a flash of memory, but she could hold it in her mind, and it awakened her heart, so she felt the impatience and terror and hopelessness of her life as the mother of an air child. And she also remembered that she had loved him.

  Karis said, “Nori, after Medric has seen Emil, I will let him die.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Norina said. She rested her hand on Emil’s shoulder. Time passed, and then a distant crackling and crashing announced that others were struggling toward them. The dogs arrived first and danced around Karis, so by the time the people came her tears had been licked away. One by one, the Paladins fought into the clearing, wet and filthy, scratched and ragged, red-eyed and resolved. Eac
h one looked at Emil, and each one’s face fell. All of them stood aside until Medric entered, holding on to Kamren’s shirttail, supported from behind by Garland and closely followed by Seth.

  Medric stopped still, his face and gaze nearly as blank as Emil’s. Then he shook his keepers loose, stepped over the fire and firewood, as sure-footed as a deer in a meadow, and crossed the pavilion to Emil. Norina offered her hand, but he knelt without assistance and only then took the spectacles from his pocket and put them on.

  “Well, Emil,” he said, as though they had just sat down for a chat. “What shall the historians say about you? That you died with your life still unfinished? That a boy whom you could have killed one-handed shot you down with his voice? Or will they say that you stood in ecstasy upon your hilltop while a star translated your flesh to light?” He put his bony, ink-stained hand to Emil’s face. He stroked his husband’s cheek. “Or will they say that Zanja na’Tarwein secretly tutored you in how to find your way back from the land of the dead?”

  Emil looked at the seer. His forehead creased. His lips moved.

  “I suppose you’re calling me a ninny,” Medric said.

  Emil’s much-used laugh lines deepened. “Yes,” he said.

  Norina uttered a sharp exclamation.

  Karis blundered to her feet, turned her ankle stepping on a piece of wood, and caught her balance by grabbing Chaen’s shoulder.

  “He’s lost his syntax,” said the seer to the Truthken.

  Norina gazed into the silly man’s eyes for a moment. She looked down at Emil. “Is that all?” she said.

  Emil gazed up at her: serious, thoughtful, and no longer absent. “Surprise,” he said. His friends all rushed upon him.