“Now that’s a rare sight,” one of them commented. “An earth witch consulting at the fair like old times.”
“She’s a local secret,” Zanja said, though it was not exactly true any more. It had taken a couple of years for Karis to become known in the region as an earth witch, but now the word continued to spread. Some of the people here today had journeyed a good distance to seek her advice. Yet, though Karis was certainly the only earth witch in Shaftal, and though rumors of the lost G’deon had subsided but not been forgotten, it apparently had not yet occurred to any Shaftali to put the two together. The Sainnites might have instantly recognized Karis as a threat, but to the Shaftali she simply was one of them.
“Aren’t you drinking?” asked a merchant.
“I’m cursed by a dislike for ale, and there’s no cider to be had at this time of year.”
“Ah, it’s a curse indeed! In this hot weather!”
Zanja said, “I’m curious about what happened in Watfield. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”
“We’ve just come from there.”
“That’s a long journey!”
“But this fair is on the way to the big ones in the north . . .”
The complications of a traveling merchant’s schedule were already well known to Zanja, but she pretended to listen.
“So what happened in Watfield?” she was finally able to ask.
“Well, you know that it was a sneak attack, in dead of night. And the attackers used some kind of device, that flew through the air and exploded with fire. And they say the fire couldn’t be put out . . .”
As Zanja listened, she remembered the first time those devilish devices had been used on a Sainnite garrison: the hissing of the lucifer, the rockets’ garish and explosive flight. Her hand had lit the fuses. Though she smiled wryly at the memory, setting a garrison afire was not something she felt inclined to do again.
Later, she went out into the dusty yard, which was occupied by several donkeys, some chickens, and a few sickly sheep awaiting Karis’s examination. A raven flew down from the rooftop and reported on Leeba’s activities. Zanja’s daughter had skinned a knee, been yelled at by a merchant, and was now watching a puppet show.
Zanja said, “Give Emil a message for me.”
“Emil is free to speak to you,” the raven said. “He asks if you have learned anything about the attack on Watfield.”
“It certainly was a rocket attack, and it sounds to me like the rockets carried Annis’s Fire. Annis didn’t like Willis, but I suppose he might have flattered her into giving him the recipe. If it was Willis and his people who attacked Watfield, what is he trying to accomplish?”
“He’s captured the imagination of the people. He’s made it even easier to get recruits to his cause.” The raven paused. “I believe that Willis and his company are responsible for several other incidents this summer. They are moving quickly from place to place, not following a predictable pattern. They haven’t attempted something like what they did in Watfield, but everything they do seems too provocative to be laid at the door of local Paladins.”
“That stupid man is going to take over Shaftal! And in the name of a G’deon he wouldn’t like if he ever met her!”
“Actually,” said the raven in Emil’s moderate way, “His dream-G’deon suits his needs much better than the real one would.”
“His dream is more impressive, certainly,” said Zanja, thinking of Karis in the tavern, peering at the roots of a stunted plant that had been carried three days there for her inspection.
“Superficially, yes. But when people just want their immediate hurts to be soothed, they don’t look too closely at the cure that’s being offered.” The raven added, “Now the Sainnites have retaliated by snatching a cartload of young children.”
“Gods of the sky! The Sainnites are exacting their revenge on children?”
Zanja had been squatting in the dust to talk with the raven, but now she rose up sharply to survey the fair, which filled several flat fields on the edge of town. She was looking among the stalls and tents and strolling people for a glimpse of a dirty, bloody-kneed, sugar-smeared little girl, who by now was probably loudly talking back to the puppets, much to the puppeteer’s dismay. Zanja did not see Leeba, of course, but she spotted the black bird that was keeping watch on her from the top of a distant tree. Zanja said to Emil, “The Sainnites are doing everything possible to destroy themselves. They might as well be collaborating in their own demise.”
Zanja’s raven lifted off abruptly as a laughing group approached the tavern. She felt an impulse to shout at them for their intrusive merriment. And now the tavern door opened, and Karis came out with the shepherd, to take a look at his sheep. She had to hunch down to fit through the doorway, and then, as she stepped out, the hot sunlight seemed to set her cropped hair afire. The laughing people stopped dead at the sight of the giant, lips parted with surprise. Then, apparently misinterpreting the hard line of Karis’s mouth and the glitter of her eyes, they rather anxiously crowded together. But Zanja went to her, and said, “Karis, you’re worn out.”
The shepherd turned to Karis, guilt-stricken. “I thought you looked a bit thin. You’ve been ill?”
“I’ll look at your sheep,” said Karis to him. “And then I’m going home.”
She squatted down among the silly animals, who were too weak to react with their usual blind panic. The laughing people observed Karis in puzzlement, then bewilderment, and finally disappointment. A woman of her remarkable size, they seemed to think, should have given them more of a show.
Midsummer, and the sixth anniversary of the massacre of Zanja’s people, approached like a storm whose rumbling thunder and flickering lightning might be heard for hours before the rain finally fell. Once, Karis came in looking for something to eat, and found Zanja lying with her aching head pressed to the cool stones of an unlit hearth. Karis picked her up and fiercely said, “Call for me when this happens!”
She sat in a chair, with Zanja huddled in her lap like a child. Karis’s hands firmly pressed the pain out of Zanja’s head; it dissipated like water, leaving her empty. Afterwards, Zanja felt sick with loneliness. She looked up, and Karis was staring bleakly away. “What have I done?” Zanja asked.
“You’ve survived what no one should have to survive,” said Karis distantly.
“What have I done to make you so angry with me?”
Karis looked down at her, then. “Is that really what you think?” She put a hand to Zanja’s face again, a gentle touch despite her work-rough, callused skin. “I feel you pulling away from me with all your strength,” she said, “But at the same time you’re shouting at me to hold on. And with all my strength I am holding onto you, though I know that I have to let go.”
“Unbinding-and-Binding,” Zanja said in dull amazement.
“Is that a glyph?” Karis asked.
She set Zanja on her feet, and stood up. Zanja looked up to see her, and a residual dizziness from the headache nearly toppled her. Karis, with an arm around her, asked, “Can you explain to me what I’ve said? Because I don’t understand what it means.”
Zanja said, “I understand that if one of us must fall, it must be me.”
In the silence, Zanja could hear a distant sound, a child’s voice piping a shrill song as she came home across the fields.
As if in reply to Zanja’s statement, Karis said, “That’s Leeba. And Emil is on his way home. Is there nothing to eat in this house?”
Emil arrived home two days later, and dropped his heavy load of books with a sigh.
“You need a donkey,” Zanja commented, and poured him a cup of the tea that he always drank, no matter how hot the day.
“Oh, people are always giving me rides.” In the parlor, he sat by a propped-open window, in one of the big, battered chairs that Karis was always intending to repair. Karis’s hammer rang rhythmically, steadily, down at the forge, a sound that carried astonishingly far, and was her only, more than sufficient, adv
ertisement. Emil took a swallow of his tea, and sighed. “I’ve been missing your tea.” He glanced at her face, and added hastily, “After a particularly messy fight, when the knees are wobbly from a close brush with death, there’s nothing quite so fortifying.”
She wanted to be angry at someone, but apparently it was not to be him. She found herself smiling instead, though her face was reluctant and out of the habit.
“My raven thinks you are on the verge of killing someone,” Emil said.
“I might, if you continue to compliment my housekeeping.”
“The house,” said Emil somberly, “Is keeping you.”
Zanja sat on the cool stones of the hearth, folding up her limbs into a neat packet, as she had learned to do when she was Leeba’s age, a child as wild and gleeful as she, but required to learn quickly how to keep from using up more than her share of allotted space in the crowded clanhouse. In silence, pummeled by memories of her proud, extinguished people, she watched Emil drink his tea. A yellow butterfly fluttered confusedly into the room, then followed the afternoon sunlight out again.
“Does your head hurt?” Emil asked.
“Not right now.” Zanja put a hand to her skull, where among the interwoven braids there grew some cross-grained hairs in an old scar, which marked a ridge of healed bone in her skull. At midsummer the old wound seemed fresh, and she needed to touch the scar to be certain that it was in fact healed. “There’s no reason for this pain,” she said, half to herself.
“Surely memories are beyond Karis’s repair work.” Emil set down his tea cup, and gave her an inquiring look. His hair, as usual, was tied back with a thong, and somehow, though at this time of year he often slept in the woods, he managed to keep his weathered face clean-shaven. They had briefly met when she was fifteen and he was the age she was now. Even then he had seemed a deeply balanced man. Now, every year Emil arranged his travels so he could see her through the dreadful days of mid-summer, and seemed prepared to continue to do so as long as he lived.
“My brother, what do you want to ask?” Zanja’s voice was husky.
“I don’t suppose,” he said hopefully, “That your owl god is carrying you across another boundary? For the claws of truth dig deep in you this time of year.”
She looked at him, puzzled at first, then with a rising awareness that her wretchedness was making her stupid. The glyph cards were already in her hands, the pouch and cord falling to the floor. Emil’s card, Solitude, or the Man on the Hill, was held between her fingertips. The light falling from the heavenly bodies pierced him with deadly arrows. “I thought I was alone,” she said.
“You think that every year,” he said, without resentment.
He got himself more tea, and came to stand by her as the cards fell from her fingertips: Solitude, followed by the Owl, the Pyre, and Unbinding-and-Binding. “Opposing forces trapped in stasis,” he said promptly. “But the paralysis can be broken with painful insight. The way the cards have landed seems to put you and me in a position of grave responsibility, doesn’t it?” He bent over, teacup teetering dangerously, to point a finger at the owl, who flew with a hapless captive dangling from her claw. “Take me across that boundary with you,” he said.
“Foolhardy man!”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”
“But I can’t make the crossing.”
There was a silence. He said, “Tell me what is the boundary that must be crossed.”
Zanja’s flare of prescience appeared to have burned itself out; no new cards found their way into her hand, and she stared at the old ones in bleak frustration. Emil set down his teacup, knelt on the floor in front of her, and took the glyph cards from her hand. “Ask the question.”
“What is the boundary that must be crossed?”
He did not lay down a new card, but pointed at the Pyre, Karis standing in the flames. “That card is reversed to Life-and-Death. If she moves, she will step into death, not out of it. Has she talked to you about this?”
“In the spring, when she told me she had refused Mabin’s offer, she said she couldn’t accept, and she couldn’t take any action, and she couldn’t do nothing.”
“In the spring?”
Zanja’s people had always been very formal with each other, distant and courteous, their roles and relations rigidly prescribed. Emil had learned to mimic the extreme obliqueness with which Zanja’s people addressed private matters, and she recognized that he was doing it now, inquiring without directly asking why it was that Zanja had no recent insights into her lover’s motivations.
Zanja said, “We’ve hardly even talked since then.”
“I see.” Emil frowned at the cards as though he was neither concerned nor very interested in Zanja’s statement. “Norina has told me Mabin believes that Karis’s continuing inaction is a result of bitterness and cowardice.”
Is this what’s wrong? he might have asked were he being direct. Has your unspoken blame opened up a gulf between the two of you?
“Yes,” said Zanja. “But Mabin can only see how Karis’s very existence inconveniences her plans.”
Emil looked up at her, his expression utterly neutral.
Zanja upended the Pyre card so she was seeing it upside-down. “Karis is brave and forgiving,” she said. And then a disorientation came over her, like a traveler feels when a lifting fog reveals she is not where she assumed. “There’s nothing Karis can do that won’t lead to disaster, so for years she has engaged in the courage of inaction. But now that Willis claims to be acting on her behalf, to continue to do nothing is also becoming impossible.”
She felt that what she said was true, but it was also incomplete. “But why hasn’t she just said so?”
Emil said, with mild reproof, “When a rock falls, do we ask it to explain itself? Earth logic is inarticulate. We know it by what it does.” He leaned forward now, picked up the Pyre card, and held it before Zanja’s eyes, upside-down. “What is Karis doing?”
The answer now seemed obvious. “She’s waiting in agony for action to become possible.”
Emil said grimly, “Well, that’s why you and I are responsible. Making action possible is fire blood’s business.”
Over the glyph card he met her stricken stare. Then, without speaking, he put down the Pyre, and picked up Unbinding-and-Binding. He held it up, reversed. “What must we do to make action possible?”
There was a swirling in the room, like an unfelt wind. Nothing stirred, and yet it was not still. Zanja’s voice spoke, flat and distant. “Cut me free so I can fall.”
“If you are cut free, then you can cross the boundary?” He pointed at the upside-down owl.
The woman, arms and legs spread wide, was flying. The owl, wings dangling, clung desperately; a helpless passenger. “Will must precede insight,” Zanja’s voice said.
He picked up the card and looked at it himself, upside-down. His expressive eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Must we act without knowing what we’re doing, or why?”
“We must! Action must become possible! Disaster must not be my fault again!”
It was death, that was the smell. And the smoke of the village burning. Zanja, stumbling among the bodies of the massacred katrim. The dawn mist glimmered now with the rising sun. Her foot crushed an outstretched hand, stuck in bloody mud. A buzzing sound of converging blowflies. Over the roar of flames, a baby cried for a rescue that would never come.
“What is the connection between the past and the present?” Emil asked.
His even voice revealed only his carefully moderated curiosity. But his arms were gripped around her, and he rocked with her, and Zanja’s throat felt like she had been breathing smoke, or screaming. Glyph cards were scattered around and crushed between them. “What,” she said.
“Why do you feel that our present moment is similar to that day six years ago?”
“I feel our doom. I am doing my duty too dutifully.”
“Is Karis like the elders, in your mind? Refusing to exercise power to save her people?
”
Emil’s steady questions, Zanja realized, were forcing her forward, out of the grip of memory, into the present moment, into the relief of considering her past from the distance of the present.
“Is it your duty to Karis that you are doing too dutifully?”
She lifted her head from his shoulder, and he released his tight embrace, though he did not entirely let go of her. “I’ve become trapped along with her.”
“Well then, if will precedes insight, what do you think you should do?”
“I have to leave.”
He sat back. “I’ll just unpack these books I’ve managed to collect, and maybe say a word or two to Medric. Shall I talk to Karis also?”
“No. I will.” She took a breath. “I must.”
He helped her up, and steadied her until the dizziness passed. Then, she walked out of the house alone, into the heartless dazzle of the hot afternoon.
Their comfortable, though much neglected house was surrounded by fallow fields, where wildflowers bloomed in a tangled riot, and at night the light-bugs swarmed. The outbuildings were falling down, but the apple orchard, hoed, pruned and picked by industrious neighbors, provided an orderly front to their otherwise disorderly household. Zanja walked through the orchard in a daze, taking her sense of direction from the clangor of iron on iron, and so reached the forge, where Karis and the two local youths she was teaching to be smiths stepped back and forth between hammer and flame in an intricate, violent dance. Karis wore a sleeveless linen shirt under her leather apron. The muscles of her powerful right arm shone with sweat as she swung the hammer. Three deafening blows and the iron bent itself to her will. The apprentices exchanged awestruck glances. She tossed the draw-knife she was making into a bucket of water, and the bucket boiled over.
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