Emil walked ahead with Saleen, and Karis spent most of the journey in the very front, doing the hard work of trampling a path in the fresh snow. Eventually both of them fell back. The dogs pushed up to be near Karis and she rested her big hands on their heads. The dogs grinned up at her, seeming very pleased by her approval.
“I like that captain of yours,” Emil said to Clement. “His name is Herme? Can he read and write? Does he speak Shaftalese?”
“No, no, and no. And you can’t recruit him to the Paladins. He’s going west with me, to be a new garrison commander’s lieutenant. It will break his company’s heart to lose him, though.”
Seth looked at Clement sharply. “You’re going west?” she said.
“I must. I have a problem there that only I can resolve.”
Emil said, “The Paladin irregulars have always avoided direct attacks on the garrisons because it would take too many people and too much heavy artillery. What will it take for you to break into a garrison by force?”
“You Paladins were wise with your resources,” said Clement. “It would require a battalion, at least, and a great deal more time than I have.”
“And I don’t want armed battalions marching the countryside again.”
“I’ll bring only thirty people—a commander and five lieutenants for each garrison. And no weapons.”
“But the mutineers won’t open the gates and let you in,” Emil said, “no more than our own rebels will open their own gates to Karis. To do so would be an admission they were wrong, and it’s both too late and too early for that.”
“You think you know Heras, Emil, but you only know her as an enemy. You don’t realize Heras is my superior in every way: more subtle, more determined, more ruthless. My promotions were gained by patronage, while hers were gained by worth. So she has told me, more than once.”
“She’s a stupid woman, whoever she is,” Seth muttered beside her.
“You don’t have to convince me she’s ruthless,” Emil said quietly. When Emil became quiet, he was forcing people to put effort into listening, which meant he was angry. “But that woman’s subtlety and determination were greatly reduced when a certain rogue Paladin tempted her dimwitted twit of a seer into turning traitor. When Medric abandoned her, so also did her greatness.”
“Greatness by whose standards?” said Clement. “And is that a prediction or an opinion?”
“You can keep trying to throw me off track all the way to Watfield if you like, though it seems a pointless and exhausting way to spend a morning.”
“What do you want me to say, Emil? That third choice you believe in? I have no idea what it might be.”
“But I can think of an easy way for you to resolve this entire matter.”
“If you let me have a weapon I can kill myself,” Clement said. “That would be easy.”
Seth said, “It would be easier to let that stupid person be general instead of you.”
Clement stumbled over her own feet.
Seth glanced at Emil, as though she feared she had spoken out of turn. But Emil said, “And that’s what you want to do, isn’t it Clement? If Zanja were here, she’d tell you the story of the demon in the wildwood, who terrified all passersby until one of them called it by name.”
“The demon’s name was ‘Fear,’ ” Clement said. “I heard her tell that story in the garrison.”
“Well, then,” Emil said. Whatever target he had been aiming at, he seemed to think he had hit it.
Clement said, “I’ll leave for the west as soon as my people can be ready. A few days.”
Seth said, “You can’t. The weather has changed. Don’t you feel it?”
Clement raised her gaze to survey the landscape. There was snow and more snow as far as could be seen. Her feet and hands were numb, and even when walking in sunlight she felt disinclined to unbutton her coat. But surely the sun’s climb into the sky was surprisingly steep. And where the patches of sunlight lingered long enough, water drops began to fall from the snow-covered tree limbs.
“Mud season,” Karis said. “In just a few days it will start to rain.”
“How long will the rain last?” Emil asked.
“Fifteen days,” Karis said. “More or less.”
“Thirteen,” said Seth.
They conferred, but Clement, engaged in her own calculations, didn’t care about the exact number. She said, “It’s not so difficult, is it, to find someone to predict the weather?”
“Not at all,” said Emil. “A person with a strong earth talent can predict a good twenty days ahead with certainty, and beyond that with less certainty.”
“Are there people like that in South Hill?”
“Three or four of them, at least. Do you think Heras has become able to make weather her ally? Perhaps a prisoner, or a younger soldier has the gift of weather-wisdom? Still, if she did plan to use spring mud in her favor, it will just delay you, and what’s the benefit of delay?”
“The delay could be as long as forty-five or fifty days if I were to send emissaries first. And then I couldn’t travel to Wilton at all, because I’d have to stay here for the confirmation. With all that time, Heras could consolidate her support among the other commanders.”
Neither angry nor desperate, but weighed down by the heaviness of what lay before her, Clement continued, “But the weather can work in my favor, also. We’ll simply travel in the rain, and I’ll arrive in Wilton while Heras is still assuming I’m too cautious and sensible to take her by surprise.”
“I’ll go with you,” Karis said.
“You will not!” Clement cried. “Don’t you think I have burdens enough?”
“Karis has somehow forgotten again that an air witch is trying to assassinate her,” Emil said. “But now that I’ve reminded her, she will offer you a raven instead, while she remains where she can be protected by these noble dogs, these Paladins, and our Truthken. But I’ll put Mabin, Saleen, and as many Paladins as I can spare under your command, Clement. With Mabin and the Paladins able to demand food and shelter in the G’deon’s name, that’ll mean you can travel light.”
The river, which had veered away, came into sight again, its ice glittering white with new snow except where people and horses worked to plow and smooth the riverbed. Sunshine glared on the south shore. With her eyes shaded, Clement could barely make out the gray haze of a distant, leafless woodland. The docks of Watfield became visible on the north shore, hemmed in by tilting plateaus of river ice. A haze of smoke floated above the city’s slate rooftops, and now a small crowd appeared at the city’s edge: Paladin’s black, soldier’s gray, the patchwork of many colors worn by citizens. Gilly was not as easy to spot as he used to be, but still he was the only one among soldiers without a uniform. Clement heard Gabian’s joyous cry and felt a clenching in her dry breasts. Some children came flying towards them, a red-coated girl at the lead, who rushed directly to Karis, who caught her and swung her into the air.
Leeba flapped her arms. “I’m flying!”
Karis swung her up into the sky again, a yodeling red bird swooping over the heads of the weary travelers. “Mama!” the red bird cried. “Is Zanja dead again?”
“No, my love, she’s having an adventure while we stay home and do the dull work of putting this country together.”
“If you consider it an adventure to eat bugs,” said the squinting man in spectacles who had worked his way through the crowd to wedge himself under Emil’s arm.
“Bugs?” cried the Leeba bird. “I want to eat bugs, too!”
Garland and his helpers had been busily distributing pastries. With his basket already empty, the cook drew near to be kissed in greeting by Emil. “Nobody eats bugs,” he said disapprovingly. “There are no recipes.” Behind him came Norina and J’han, while on the other side Gilly and Ellid approach
ed, and at last Clement could embrace her little boy again, with his flailing limbs, grasping hands, and wide, wise eyes. “Eeee!” he shrilled.
Clement greeted Ellid Shaftali-style, with a handclasp and a kiss, which so astounded the Watfield commander that she neglected to offer a report.
They walked in an unmilitary straggle through the streets of Watfield. Emil was surrounded by Paladins now, and Mabin was arguing with him, as usual. Leeba, grown weary of flying, had run off with her friends. Seth walked alone, looking forlorn. Clement told Ellid and Gilly that the apparent loss of Zanja seemed to be something else entirely, and promised to explain more when she was able. Then, she jogged ahead to Karis, who plucked Gabian out of her arms and kissed him noisily.
It was possible that Cadmar had fathered Gabian in his old age, just as he had fathered Karis in his youth. Yet Clement had never asked if Karis knew whether Gabian was her half brother. She feared Karis’s claim on the baby could be stronger than her own. But now she almost hoped her suspicions were correct, for it had begun to seem all too likely that Gabian would soon be motherless. “I meant to ask you this earlier, Karis, but we were never alone. Will you take Gabian into your care until I come home from the west?”
Karis gave her a concerned look. Clement continued hastily, “In the garrison only Gilly knows what to do with him, and Ellid will be needing Gilly while I’m gone. But you Shaftali can hand a baby from one person to the next and be confident that he’ll be looked after. To not know what to do with a baby is unheard of.”
“I’ll take care of your son,” Karis said. “Let that be one thing you need not worry about.”
Chapter 10
In early spring even a land-wise person could starve. By luck or intuition Zanja might have found a squirrel cache or a bee tree, but both luck and intuition had abandoned her. She discovered in the spongy wood of a decaying tree stump some finger-long accuser bug larvae, which she speared on a willow wand and roasted over a little fire of dry twigs. On a sloping hillside, uprooted saplings suspended over a wedge of boulders gave her a rough shelter. There she built a nest of twigs in which she curled under her coat as the stars began to come out.
It was early spring, the stars told her. She had traveled generally westward all day. Despite these assurances, she dreamed she was lost in a wilderness.
Long before sunrise, cold made further sleep impossible. She walked through darkness, stumbling over invisible obstacles of stone and wood, until the rising light of dawn showed her the way up a knoll of bare stone. The snowmelt-flooded river began to glow a pale pink as the half-light brightened to sunrise. Her fingers were so cold she used her teeth to untie her card pack’s leather binding.
“What has happened to me?” she asked.
She cast one of the four elements: a joyful, dancing woman who flung over her head an arc of water from a shell. The second card, the artisan, she lay over the first. The two cards together suggested elemental craft, or magic.
The river shone now like polished brass. The domains of the water element were music, mathematics, humor, weather, and time. Could time bend like a river, so that it might seem to flow backward, as the Corber had seemed to be flowing yesterday? Could Zanja have been captured in a backward-flowing current, so the Corber deposited her far in the past?
“Why?” she asked, a question so undirected she certainly deserved the vague reply the cards offered: the owl, the crosser of boundaries, which signified herself. Perhaps she had been brought into the past because of who or what she was. Perhaps she was required to cross the boundary between present and past for a purpose she did not yet know. Or perhaps the cards were as useless to her as all her other faculties seemed to have become. She rose stiffly up and continued her journey westward.
Two days later Zanja finally reached the bridge. Three days’ hard travel, on an empty stomach, under the open sky, had wearied her so she could scarcely climb the slope to the highway. The sky had been threatening since dawn, and now rain began to fall. She crossed over the swollen river.
Early twilight arrived on the back of the storm clouds. She walked in shadows and then in darkness, feet aching in wet boots, head hanging to keep the cold rain from striking her face, glancing up from time to time to look for a farmstead’s telltales: light, a side road, a fence. Yet she had been walking beside a stone wall for some time before she recognized it and realized that the trees beyond it were too orderly to be a woodland. She retraced her steps to a waterlogged wagon track and followed this muddy lane through the leafless apple orchard to the quagmire of a farmyard, around which houses and barns huddled in a dark mass. She was hard put to find a door on which to knock.
“Take shelter in the barn,” said the man who finally responded, and he shut the door again.
A cow lowed as Zanja entered the barn, then a lamb bleated. She spotted chickens in the rafters, vague shapes that disappeared entirely in shadow as she wrestled the big door shut. No one arrived with a light to help her get settled, and she had to feel around for a good long time in the darkness before she located the traditional shelf and pauper’s loaf, which was hard as stone and dry as sawdust. She found a tin cup also, hanging on a hook, so she made a cold porridge of bread soaked in rain water, and slept in a cold bed, in wet clothing, on damp straw. She awoke weary, ravenous, and aching with cold as the farmers arrived to feed the animals and milk the cow.
“Leave now,” said a burly man. He glowered to intimidate her.
“I’d gladly work for breakfast,” she said.
“Go back to your own kind.”
She donned her sodden coat and went out into the rain. But she did not trudge back to the road, and instead slogged through the muck to the door on which she had knocked the night before. This time she let herself in, found the way to the warm kitchen, and sat at the table. The people who were kneading bread, stirring porridge, and dressing children, stopped work in startlement. Zanja drew her dagger and lay it in front of her. “I will leave quietly after breakfast,” she said.
After the children had been hustled away and the burly man had been fetched from the barn, they eventually decided it would be easier to give her a bowl of porridge than it would be to fight her. A man who limped on a twisted leg wrapped some bread and ham in a rag with a couple of wizened apples and boiled turnips. The burly man kept his eyes on Zanja’s dagger as she wolfed down the porridge, accepted the stingy packet of food, and left. “We worked hard for that food!” someone muttered behind her.
The burly man followed her to the door. Out in the rain again, with the packet of food in her shirt to keep it from getting too wet, Zanja wanted to say something angry and bitter, but instead asked, “Isn’t Shaftal’s first law to treat all strangers as friends?”
His hostile expression became blank. “You think the law applies to you?”
“You think it doesn’t?” Getting no answer but the man’s unreadable expression, she asked, “How far to the crossroad of Hanishport Road? I’m going to the House of Lilterwess.”
“The House of Lilterwess!”
“The border tribes are under the G’deon’s protection, are they not?”
“Such things are not my concern.” He made as if to shut the door, but, possibly fearing she would not leave until her questions had been answered, added, “If you travel hard you’ll reach the crossroads today. But it’s another six days from there to the Shimasal Road.”
And it would rain without ceasing, he might have added, if he had intended to change his mind and offer her shelter after all, for people died in cold rain as easily as they died in snow. However, the man shut the door.
During the entire journey from the River Corber to the crossroads, and eastward along the Hanishport highway toward the next crossroads, Zanja was never invited to dry out by a fire, never offered a hot meal, and never given more than a sliver of meat. Sometimes there was no
t even a pauper’s loaf to eat, or clean straw to sleep on.
Arguing only increased people’s hostility, and Zanja could not bring herself to beg. She would have been more willing to steal, but these people kept as close an eye on their food stores as they did on their children. That some might never become comfortable with Zanja’s alien appearance was a fact she had long ago accepted. But this general lack of common courtesy affronted her. Seething, she trudged doggedly from one unfriendly kitchen to the next, through showers, downpours, and occasional sleet storms. This alien Shaftal was a land of closed doors and shuttered windows, through which she could force her way only by intimidation.
The first crossroad had been marked by a piece of hewn granite. But the second had a square pillar intricately decorated with stone leaves and flowers. It was inscribed with glyphs Zanja could scarcely identify, so ornately were they carved. The road south would return her to the River Corber, where if she were more desperate she might fling herself in the water in hope of being returned home. On the northern side of the pillar were inscribed the glyphs of the three elements that also signify the three orders—the Truthkens, the seers, and the healers—along with a fourth glyph that signified the Order of Paladins. Above this collection of symbols was carved Death-and-Life, the G’deon’s glyph.
It would soon be dark, and the air had turned chilly. Zanja had passed an inn not long ago. Possibly, the keepers of a highway inn would be better accustomed to strange-looking people than the farmers had been. But she felt an excitement as she ran her fingertips across the symbols carved in the pillar, an eagerness that was all the more intoxicating after ten days of anger, bewilderment, and misery. The House of Lilterwess had once been a gathering place for the powers of Shaftal, a place of excitement, ferment, and contention, to which the farm families proudly dispatched their most talented children to be raised by one of the orders. Zanja herself had been destined to serve there—but had never set eyes on the place.
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