Leeba looked startled. “Karis! Zanja can’t do that, can she?”
Karis had managed to take several swallows of tea. “Zanja hates this room, too,” she reminded her.
“Why do you hate this room?” Leeba asked, diverted back to Zanja again.
“Because there’s something wrong with the floor.”
Karis said, “The entire house is wrong! Sometimes I wonder if, having fixed everything, it would still be wrong in a way that can’t be fixed.”
That Travesty was a symbol of Shaftal Zanja did not doubt, but it would not help Karis if she told her so. Karis did not understand symbols, not even the symbolism of her own obsessions.
“What’s wrong with the floor?” Leeba asked.
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t like to sit on it. I’m sitting in a chair, see?”
Leeba sat on the floor, declared that she didn’t like how it felt either, and then proceeded to move from spot to spot, testing each one in turn and telling Zanja what she learned: the floor was too crooked, too rough, too creaky, too cold, and the spaces between boards were too wide.
“You can help me fill the gaps with rope,” Karis suggested. “Not today or tomorrow, but the day after that.”
Zanja said, “Perhaps a carpet would help. An old one, with a complicated pattern. On that I could sit and be happy.”
Karis had finally tossed back the blankets and gotten out of bed. “Emil would say something insightful to you now, wouldn’t he?”
“He’d say, ‘You’ve been seeking that pattern an awfully long time, my sister.’ ”
“Fire bloods—who can possibly understand them?”
Karis snatched Leeba up from the floor and swung her to the ceiling. Leeba shrieked. The seat of her breeches had proven an efficient dust mop, and furry clots of it flew into the air with her. Karis swung her down to the floor and then up again. “Leeba bird, Leeba bird, will you fly away?”
“Come in,” Zanja called, for Emil was just stepping up to their door.
“But nobody knocked,” Leeba said, not too breathless from shrieking to protest this breach of custom.
“It’s Emil, though.” Karis put her daughter down as the door opened, and Leeba ran to Emil and wrapped herself around his leg. He obligingly walked around the room with her hanging on his leg like a squirrel on a tree trunk until she lost her grip and fell to the floor with a thud.
“This floor is too hard,” she declared.
“Is that the problem with the floor?” Zanja set the ink brush aside and hung her finished flag with the others on a laundry line by the fireplace. After a day’s work on that fireplace, a chimney doctor had managed to make it stop smoking, but now it burned coal at a tremendous rate without warming the room particularly.
Emil had been about to say something to Karis, but Zanja’s glyphs had caught his attention, and he studied them instead. Writing with glyphs was as much an art as reading them was, and Zanja supposed that in the writing she had revealed as much about herself as she had about the people she was grieving: a Paladin who not only had given her three new glyph signs, but also had drawn the illustrations on the new cards she put in her deck; a librarian who had been so unobtrusive that she walked right into him one day; a clerk with extraordinary handwriting, who had devoted much effort to teaching her how to properly trim a pen.
Emil glanced at her. “I wish we had not lost so many glyphs. I’d love to see what you would do with them.”
“I’d waste my entire life with them,” she said.
“No, no—it’s called being a scholar. How many times must I tell you?”
A year ago, Zanja had transliterated some of the poetry of the great glyphic poet Coles, and Emil had been teasingly calling her a scholar ever since. Coles had used all thousand glyphs in his great book of poems, and since they did have a copy of the book, the glyphs themselves had not actually been lost. But the meanings were lost, for neither the study of glyphology nor any glyphic lexicons had survived the first years of the war. Zanja had started her transliteration of the poetry in an effort to discover some of the lost meanings by understanding the context in which Coles was using them, but after a few months of effort had abandoned the task, not because it was grueling but because it was fruitless.
Emil turned to Karis. “You’ve slept, finally.”
“You’ve shaved, finally,” she retorted. “Speaking of scholars, what’s wrong with that husband of yours? He hasn’t emerged for three days.”
Emil said, “Leeba, J’han is looking for you. But I guess you can’t go find him by yourself.”
“I can too!”
“Oh, I don’t think so. You’re much too little to find the way by yourself. You should just stay here and wait for him to find you.”
Leeba could not resist setting forth on a mission to prove Emil wrong. When she was gone, he commented, “I’m afraid that trick won’t work much longer.”
He sat down at Zanja’s chair, took up the brush, and began painting some glyphs of his own on another strip of cloth. “Something certainly is weighing on Medric,” he said while he painted. “But I don’t know what it is. I’m sure it’s something in the future, not in the past—not even in what happened three days ago. For it may be his business to understand the past, but to be haunted by it is Zanja’s job.”
“A job, is it?” said Zanja. “Like writing letters is your job?”
Karis said, “And Medric is avoiding us so he won’t have to tell us what he knows? What exactly is the purpose of having a seer?”
“Comedy and aggravation,” Emil said. Karis folded her arms. “Don’t glare at me,” he added, without glancing up. “Whatever I do and say at tomorrow’s meeting of the Council of Shaftal will be criticized by everyone in Shaftal for the next hundred years. During these final days it was my intention to do nothing but think about how to make that meeting work. Now I’d gladly kill another assassin if doing so would give me back even one of the days I have lost.”
Even Karis treated the pending meeting with due seriousness, though without much enthusiasm. “Send Mabin to the funeral instead of you,” she said. “That’ll give you a free day.”
“But Clement’s visiting commanders will be attending.”
“I promise I’ll try to impress them enough for us both.”
Emil set aside the brush, having finished his flag. “Then you’ll have to try to look impressive—and without looking too miserable about it.”
Karis didn’t reply, and there was a long silence. Months ago, after fifteen years in the nondescript clothing that made him look no different from everyone else, Emil had begun wearing Paladin’s black again. Zanja had found his new appearance surprisingly difficult to get used to: in her mind’s eye he had always been a shabby traveler, climbing wearily to a hilltop, never expecting that spears of starlight would fly from the heavens and pierce his heart. Now he no longer seemed like the Man on the Hill in the glyph illustration, and she didn’t know what he might be instead.
Karis finally spoke, but on an entirely different subject. “I’m having nightmares about this rogue air witch,” she said. “I keep imagining a person like Norina, but not restrained by law or custom, and not loyal.”
“It’s a terrifying prospect,” said Emil. “But it’s not today’s problem.”
“I’m going to talk to that prisoner this morning.”
“It won’t accomplish anything.” Emil stood up. Zanja took his flag from him to hang it with the others, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Don’t let him hurt her,” he murmured.
“If you must worry, worry about likely things,” Zanja said. For the prisoner was refusing food, his unset broken arm also was slowly killing him, and even had he been healthy and fully a
rmed he couldn’t have harmed Karis.
“I am.” Emil left, dressed in pristine black, his ponytail wrapped in black-dyed leather, his three earrings glittering in his ear. Zanja looked at the funeral flag he had written and saw there what she had also read in her own flags: Fear.
Karis had gone to the clothes chest to study its contents with loathing. Zanja went back to the table and picked up the ink brush. Perhaps if she wrote enough flags she would write herself beyond fear, into insight. But she did not know enough glyphs.
When Zanja had gone to the kitchen earlier, Garland had been feeding egg pie, fruitcake, hot bread, and a vat of tea to the weary but still exhilarated volunteer guard force. Seth had been there, discussing weaving, gardening, roofing, and a dozen other commonplace subjects with them. Zanja had made a short speech. Now the guests all had departed, leaving a mess of dishes to be washed. Zanja set to work drying a mountain of mismatched cups and saucers, and was nearly finished when Seth arrived, glancing bemusedly at Karis, who was putting a shine on a soot-black pan.
“You’ll always find her doing the dirtiest job,” Zanja explained. “Will you help me put away these teacups?”
Travesty was not a uniformly horrible house. Garland loved the kitchen. And one of the rooms in his domain, the crockery room, which was tucked behind the kitchen chimney, was a warm and secret place. On one wall a bank of windows looked out onto the frozen garden. The other walls were nothing but shelves on which were stacked an enormous quantity of dishes. The only furniture was a small table with two chairs, and a ladder with which to reach the highest shelves.
“Whoever built this house was not entirely stupid,” said Seth, spinning slowly to view the cozy room.
“It’s a good place to escape to.”
They put teacups on shelves in companionable silence. Zanja went out to fetch another tray of cups. When she returned, Seth said, “The best watchdogs come from a farm to the east, on the south bank. So long as the river stays frozen, it’s a short day’s journey there and back. If the ice breaks it will take us two days at least.”
Zanja thought about walking across the countryside, about being able to see across the land and not merely across the square. Her entire body came alive at the prospect of leaving Watfield for the first time in many long months. “I don’t know anything about dogs, but I could probably convince the farmer to give one to the G’deon.”
“I know dogs.”
“We should go soon—the ice could break up any day. The day after tomorrow?”
“There’s another storm coming, but I think we’ll be able to travel.”
“Oh, you have the talent for weather prediction.”
Seth’s head tilted as though she noticed a change in the noise in the kitchen. “Are they cooking already? I promised Garland I would peel turnips.”
Soon after Seth went out, Karis came in. “You washed everything but yourself,” Zanja said, and gave her a dishtowel.
Looking out the windows, Karis rubbed the grease from her face. Outside, the leafless vines that climbed the stone wall had trapped snow in an ornate pattern of white lines on gray. “Green,” Karis said. It was the color of one of the outfits Zanja had commissioned for her, which she had until now refused to wear. Green was a good color for a funeral.
Zanja looked at her wife’s preoccupied face, thinking how much younger she had looked once. She thought of how far they had come together—how surprising it had been that they had and could love each other—and how near they had come to abandoning each other. “Do you blame me?” she asked.
Karis looked at her. “For what? Oh, I’m worrying you, is that it? You’re thinking I’m angry at having become what I am, and that I’m blaming you because you finally made it happen.”
“That is what I’m asking you.”
“I admit it was much easier when I was the G’deon no one wanted. Now that some want me and some don’t, the complications are intolerably stupid and aggravating. What do people think, that there’s another choice, a second G’deon hiding somewhere?” Karis sighed. “I guess some people do think that.”
That’s not today’s problem, Emil would have said, had he been there. Zanja said, “You’re not suited to the duties before you.”
“I’m not. Not at all.” Karis gazed out the window again, perhaps seeing what only she could: the waiting spring coiled beneath the ice, poised to break forth. “None of us are,” she added. “You, for example: your great accomplishment of the day is that you’ve convinced your stubborn wife to wipe grease off her face and change her clothes.”
Zanja laughed. “I’ve done other things. I told all those volunteers that you were grateful for them staying up all night, and that you’d tell them yourself except that you were still asleep. And I have arranged to get you some watchdogs. Or rather, I allowed Seth to arrange it.”
“Watchdogs?” said Karis. “That seems too simple. But—” She didn’t finish, but slowly began to smile.
“I like Seth,” Zanja said.
“I like her, too—she’s like me, only sane.”
Zanja leaned lightly against Karis, which was like leaning against a tree that happened to be warm, if not particularly soft, and Karis put an arm around her. “I do blame you,” Karis said.
“I know you do.”
“Loving you is an incredibly complicated and dangerous business.”
“You may be up to the task, though.”
The visit to the imprisoned assassin gained nothing, as Emil had predicted. Karis healed his broken arm, and he cursed her, calling her a pretender and an impostor even as she used the power of Shaftal to snap his shattered bones back into place.
Karis said to him, “Without my permission Harald G’deon vested me with the power of Shaftal. Then I did not exercise that power for twenty years, until councilor Mabin accorded me the right to do so. So in what way am I a pretender? Or are you blaming me for the fact that my mother was an innocent who fell into harm, and my father was a Sainnite who lay on her without caring to learn her name? Is it possible you think I’m at fault for my parents’ actions, though I never knew either one of them? Or do you think you blame me for having been forced to do sexual service to my father’s people when I was just a child? Or that I somehow chose to become addicted when they insisted I take their drugs? I’m just trying to understand why you are cursing me like this.”
The man offered no answers. Perhaps in his mind the foulness and contamination of the Sainnites was a real thing, like the murky mess below the hole of a privy, or the stinking putrefaction of a wound, which must be cut out before healing became possible. To convince the man that his belief was merely a metaphor, and a false one at that, was the work of the Truthken he had forbidden from his presence. Karis did not attempt it.
“You seem determined to die,” she said. “What would you have us say at your funeral?”
“Say that the people of Shaftal are sheep,” he said. “You have promised them healthy children and good harvests, and so they are following you. The destruction of Shaftal’s heritage, the thousands of dead, the widowed husbands and wives, the parentless children—they’re willing to forget these crimes. But we are not.”
“What justice do you have in mind, imposed on whom? And what difference would it make in the end?”
“Shaftal would be cleansed!”
“By killing all of us? Those like me, begotten by indifference or rape? The Shaftali-born Sainnites who have done nothing but help the cause of Shaftal? The people raised to be soldiers who were never given a chance to learn another way? The children of half Sainnites? The babies in arms?” Karis paused. “It seems like a lot of killing. But when we are all dead, you’d still be unsatisfied with what is left, and because you would be so accustomed to killing anyone who displeases you, you’d start killing each other. What a hell you’d make f
or yourselves—I’m half-tempted to let you have it!”
After they left him, they walked back to their bedroom, as sound of the city’s clocks tolling the hour sounded faintly and then were echoed loudly by the clock in Norina’s law school. When they were alone and Karis was changing her clothes, Zanja said, “I was wrong: you are suited for your duties.”
Karis did not reply, but she looked distinctly unhappy.
Chapter 4
Six years ago, when Clement was a garrison commander, she had not seen Gilly for a long time, for she had finally been promoted out from Cadmar’s shadow. When the old general died, it had not even occurred to Clement that Cadmar might be chosen to replace him, but when the commanders gathered and she saw Gilly again, he had been certain Cadmar would be chosen. “And he’ll ask you to be his lieutenant, and you’ll refuse. Before you do that, think what will happen if that man gets all the power he wants, and doesn’t have you to talk him out of his stupid decisions.”
“If he has any hope of being general, it’s because you and I made him look smarter than he is for all those years.”
“What else could we have done?” Gilly asked. “And what will become of you, Clem, should you become subject to his idiotic commands?”
Cadmar was chosen general, and Clement had abandoned forever a position she was good at and accepted one she hated even more than she feared she would. Now she again offered herself for a position she did not want, and the garrison commanders did not want to give it to her, either. Wearisome day after wearisome day, she had explained her decisions to them, and they had rejected her justifications. They refused to be convinced—because they refused to forgive her.
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