Dust gathered in their half-abandoned house; what vegetables had survived in the neglected garden went ungathered; their storerooms that should have been filling up for the long winter lay empty. Wherever Karis had gone, she had taken the household concerns with her, and had a neighbor visited their home he would have concluded that they were soon to become burdens on their community.
Karis also remained silent: present in her ravens, but speechless. She had removed herself beyond Norina’s ability to know her truths, yet that very act of removal signified to Norina a truth that the fire bloods could not perceive. They saw rejection and refusal, and perhaps even Karis herself thought that her absence meant anger. Fire bloods see in the heat of passion and imagination, and air bloods see coldly, clearly. Sometimes that dispassion was a distinct advantage.
Emil wrestled with himself in a way that was painful to watch. As commander of South Hill Company he had regularly sent friends to their deaths, but he and Zanja had an intimacy that could not be described as simple friendship, and to kill her with his own hand would kill him as well. This Norina saw, and as she watched him work his slow way to acceptance of this unacceptable, mad plan, she knew that in the end to fulfill his role would literally break his heart. Yet Norina held her tongue.
Medric, as always, was more enigmatic. Flippant and sorrowful by turns, he read his books of history frantically, looking for a fact or story that would trigger his insight and give him the broad vision that might explain their actions to themselves. So seers always spend their lives, seeking a perfect understanding that inevitably eludes them; some finally falling into madness, while others realize at last that their purpose lies not in the unachievable goal, but in the seeking of it. Medric was terribly young, still in his mid-twenties, and perhaps he was too young to bear such a personal burden for the hopes of his friends. He grew haggard from forgetting to eat and sleep, and Emil and Zanja were too preoccupied to look after him. Norina started bringing him bowls of porridge and supervising while he ate, though he complained about her miserable cooking. She watched him flounder like a fish caught in the jaws of destiny, and wondered whether he would change his shape before he was swallowed. She made no comment, though.
Zanja was changing, and this was the most remarkable thing Norina found to watch. If ever Norina, in all her skeptical life, and been tempted to believe in divine intervention, it was during those weeks of harvest as she watched Zanja’s metamorphosis. Zanja, oblivious to the changing season, appeared to be writing a book. Norina glanced at her work one day, and found that it was a collection of Leeba’s favorite stories, mixed in with other stories that Norina had never heard: more complex stories, stories that Leeba would love in a few months, or a year, or several years. One of these was an exceedingly strange tale of a woman who murdered herself to save her daughter’s life, and how her daughter never forgave her for it. Norina could imagine reading that story to Leeba one day, though she could not imagine how the world around them might have changed by then.
Except for her work on the book for Leeba, Zanja seemed—not aimless, for she was too quiet for that—but distant, waiting. Examining her, Norina saw a mindless preoccupation, like a caterpillar starting to weave a silken coffin around itself, or a bear getting ready to bury itself in a winter’s grave. But that peaceful purposefulness was always threatened by a pain as intense as Emil’s. Zanja called herself a crosser of boundaries: her gods had named her so. And every boundary crossing, she said, was a death. So she was accustomed to dying, and knew how to go about it. But she who had endured such terrible losses in her life could not endure any more, and so she kept pretending to herself that when she died, her lover, her child, and her dearest friends would not be lost to her. It was an extraordinary act of self-deception; the kind of magic that fire bloods excel at. Norina was there when that self-deception failed, and Zanja began to weep.
She wept for days. And then she took the dagger Karis had forged for her, and laid it on the bed she and Karis had shared all these years, and she roughly bound the pages of her book with a leather seam and set the book aside, and, as the apple harvest began, she started to go out walking, from before sunrise to past sunset. Every night, when Norina saw her at supper, she saw a woman who had become a little less familiar. And still Norina did not talk about what she saw, to Zanja, or to anyone.
A letter came from J’han, much dirtied by its hand-to-hand journey, that told of births attended, bones mended, and lives ended, and finished with a sentence that his raven had begun to talk to him, occasionally. Norina wondered if she would ever see him, or her daughter, again. So even she lived through the harvest season in a state of loss, but she was never bewildered by it. She had never hesitated to sacrifice passion to principle; she was an air blood and she knew no more rational way to live. So, like Zanja, she was uniquely qualified for the task that lay before her.
Even as Zanja began the process of transforming herself, Medric and Emil began to discuss, painfully at first but with increasing fascination, how to make that transformation permanent. Fire logic is the logic of insight, of seeing in symbols and stories and events more meanings than an entirely sane person could see. To turn that seeing into an act of magic was rarely done, and there were no rules for how to do it. As the two scholars talked, their plans inevitably became convoluted. To enact in ritual a symbolic understanding was complicated. Soon, as Norina expected, they asked her to take a role in the ritual, and so she was able to start making plans of her own.
Zanja said that it must not happen at home, and so it must be done outside, and since they could not do fire magic without a fire, that meant it must happen before the rains began. Because the ravens no longer even offered weather reports, Norina kept an eye on the behavior of the local earth talents. Earth witches were rare, but every farmhold had people with earth talent, who, like J’han, had earned the reputation of knowing how to do things right, whose mundane advice about building and planting was often sought and always followed. When Norina noticed that the work of harvest had become frenetic, the four of them could delay their terrible act no longer.
The last day of Zanja’s life began with brilliant sunshine: a light that blinded them as they walked eastward, for the sun no longer rose quickly as it had during summer, and instead hovered along the horizon for half the morning. The four of them set forth in the dazzle of sunrise and stark, sweeping shadows that twisted away from the sideways lift of the sun. They were hailed from an apple orchard where battered baskets of red and green apples clustered under the yellowing trees, awaiting the wagon that would take them to the cider mill. Their pockets were filled with apples by the friendly, busy farmers, and later, a girl ran down from a dairy to give them a wedge of cheese and ask about the weather. Emil sighed under the burden of neighborliness, but Zanja crunched an apple as she walked, and took the slender, beautiful blade out of her boot to cut them all pieces of cheese. She was as calm and remote as Norina had ever seen her, and beneath the unruffled surface of her visage lay the drowned corpse of her vital mind.
Medric interrupted his anxious gabble to ask abruptly, “Where are the ravens?”
“Absent,” said Emil briskly, not even bothering to scan the sky, or the tops of the picked apple trees they now passed. The sound of hammers making last-minute repairs on a leaky roof was loud against the whining of the crickets.
Karis was making herself as remote in her way as Zanja was in hers, and both for the same reason. Only Norina called it heroism, and only to herself. To disturb the frail fabric of the fire bloods’ illusions would have been disastrous.
Emil showed them to the high place that he had in mind, where ancient oaks spread a vast canopy, and there was a wide, comforting vista: a long horizon, a brilliant stretch of sky. The busy, distant cider mill could be seen, tucked into the curve of a brightly shining stream. They distracted themselves with gathering wood, but once the fire was lit, distractions were no longer necessary—the momentum of the ritual took control of them.
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Zanja obediently followed Norina into the shelter of a grove of saplings. There, among the lobed leaves edged with autumn’s bronze, she looked somberly upward, into the verdant shadows of one of the ancient trees. Norina followed her gaze, and thought she saw the hunched shape of a waiting owl. “Salos’a?” she asked, and Zanja gave a nod: the god that had made her a crosser of boundaries had come for her, to escort her soul across its final border. Norina looked narrowly at the waiting owl; it looked like an ordinary bird to her.
Norina said, “Your belongings connect you to this world, so you must give everything you’ve brought with you to be burned in the fire, including your clothing. And your hair.”
Along with the pieces of her clothing, Zanja silently handed Norina the little knife from her boot, and the battered pack of glyph cards that she carried in a pouch hung from her belt. Her fingers struggled with buttons as her gaze kept returning to the shadowy owl; she picked ineffectually at a knot; Norina finally knelt to undo her bootstraps for her. Zanja stood quiet among the leaves, that twitched a bit in a passing breeze. Now, stripped of her Shaftali clothing, she had never looked so alien: thin and wild as a ferret, her dark skin covered with a patchwork of scars, with some of her warrior’s braids coming undone and her coarse black hair brushing the backs of her thighs. Norina gave her clothing that Emil had acquired somewhere: a rough, woolen tunic and baggy trousers, simple shoes, and leggings of goatskin with the hair still attached. But then Norina had to dress her, for Zanja simply stood like an addle-pate, with the clothing falling from her hands.
Norina had done much planning, but that planning proved all but unnecessary. It was easy to hide Zanja’s discarded cards and knife in the leggings as she tied them around Zanja’s calves, and it was just as easy to tie a red tassel onto one of the braids and then tuck it down into the loose neck of the tunic. And it was easy to turn her back on Zanja, and fill the empty card pouch with oak leaves, and lay onto the tangle of discarded clothes the knife Norina always carried, a fraternal but not identical twin to Zanja’s, though Emil and Medric would not know the difference. In a lifetime shaped by truth and lies, rarely had Norina’s deceptions been so simple.
Norina gathered up Zanja’s clothing and the substitute belongings, and took the hand of the vacant alien who for a while had been her bitter rival and for a long time had been her friend, and led her out to the fire where Emil and Medric were waiting.
Earlier, Norina had noted the muffled sound of Emil weeping, but now he was again the battle-hardened soldier. Norina sat Zanja down beside the fire, and, rather agitatedly, Medric began to speak of Zanja’s’ life: he spoke of her birth as though he had been there, and of how the old men and women of her clan had noticed her, and how Salos’a had claimed her, and how she had traveled Shaftal with her first mentor, and how she served the Sainnites as a stable-hand one summer, to learn their language. Then Emil spoke of how she had begun to fear for her people’s safety, but her warnings had gone unheeded, and he spoke in detail of the night her people were massacred, which he called Zanja’s first death. He and Medric took turns speaking of the revenge the surviving warriors wreaked on the Sainnites; of Zanja’s second death, when she was paralyzed in an avalanche, the third death in a Sainnite prison, and of Karis’s abrupt, timely, and utterly unexpected intervention. They spoke of the single summer during which Zanja had, directly or indirectly, intentionally or inadvertently, disrupted and changed the direction of all their lives; the summer when Medric deserted the Sainnites, Emil resigned from the Paladins, Norina shifted her alliances, Mabin kidnapped and nearly killed Karis, Karis broke her addiction to smoke, their family was formed and their love affairs began.
The last five years had been more quiet, and Emil was able to speak of them quickly: so, after hours of talking, they finished telling the story of Zanja’s extraordinary, appallingly eventful thirty-five years.
The men were hoarse with talking and with breathing smoke. Zanja had listened, if such passivity could be called listening, in blank speechlessness. Now Norina rose up from her long, weary watch, and built up the fire. Medric gathered himself up and said, clearly and firmly, “And now, Zanja na’ Tarwein, your life has ended, as all lives end, and with love and sorrow your family now consigns your body to the pyre and your spirit to the care of the gods.”
Norina put Zanja’s good boots onto the fire, and followed them with the rest of Zanja’s clothing, and, finally, the worn leather pouch stuffed with leaves—Emil, who had given Zanja the glyph cards, wretchedly watched it burn—and Norina’s own knife, which she knew would later emerge from the ashes unscathed. Then, with a pair of scissors she had brought with her, Norina began cutting off and burning Zanja’s hair. One handful at a time, she laid the slender braids onto the flames, where they flared and became ash all in a moment. But one braid remained, hidden for now.
It was an execution. Zanja’s hair had never been cut, not since the day of her birth, and it was her life that flared upon the fire and turned to ash. Norina did it briskly. When she had finished, Zanja’s hair hung not quite to her shoulders, and the tight braids unplaited raggedly. Even the shape of her face seemed changed.
Norina said softly, “It is done.” She looked up at Emil, hoping she would find him resolute. One last act remained, and Medric had dreamed that Emil would commit that act alone. Emil rose up stiffly, and shouldered his satchel and bedroll. His battered old dagger, which he often did not bother to carry, hung on his hip.
“Come with me,” he said to Zanja.
She obediently rose up, and followed him.
Part Three: The Walk Around
In the middle of the country, there is a valley so big it takes six days to walk across it, and that valley is a wasteland. The people of the region say that once the valley was a fertile farmland, and this is the story they tell to explain how it became a wasteland. In the middle of that valley there used to be a forest known as the Walk-Around, because everyone with any sense walked around it, even though that added two days to the journey and forced them to ford the river twice, and in the spring the river was too deep to cross at all. What with waiting for the flood to ease and various other difficulties, that six-day journey might take twenty, if your luck was bad. But it was worse luck still to walk through the forest.
Sometimes a stranger or fool might walk into the forest and come right out on the other side, whistling a merry tune and talking about how nice it was in there, with the coolness and the gentle springs and the birds so tame they practically hopped onto the spit to be cooked for dinner, and the nuts in neat piles just waiting for a passer-by to pick them up and eat them. And sometimes the traveler would never be seen again. And sometimes an enterprising farmer might plow a field going right up to the forest’s edge, and plant corn and watch it sprout, only to go out one day and find the field, the farm, the cattle, and even the family gone, and nothing but forest to be seen, and then the house collapsing into the ground. That’s the kind of forest it was, and that’s why people kept away from it.
One day a stranger arrived in the village that was closest to the forest, though some days it was closer than others, and said that he was going to the town on the far side of the forest. And the people there warned him, like they warned everybody, to stay away from the forest because nobody ever knew what the forest was going to do. But this stranger called them a name I can’t repeat here, and said boldly that he had never yet met the forest that could defeat him. For he could walk up to a deer in his stocking feet and put a knife into its heart, and he could tell north from south by the way the grass lay on the ground, and he could start a fire in wet wood, and he even could predict bad weather a week in advance, though he wouldn’t say how. He even, he swore, was unaffected by the bites of poisonous snakes, and at that point everyone knew he was a fool and said to him, “Go into the forest, then, for it’s obvious that even your mother won’t miss you.”
So the bold man went into the forest, and he took his direction from the gras
s, and he snared the wild birds and ate the nuts and drank the cold water and had a cozy campfire, and the next day he started planning how he would come whistling out of the woods and send a message back to those faint-hearts out in the village, telling them what cowards they were. But the shadows grew long, and the crickets started to sing and he never reached the edge of the forest. The next day it was the same, and the day after that, though every day the forest seemed a bit darker and the birds were scarcer and the nuts were fewer, until the bold man began to starve, because all his boldness couldn’t fill the woods with plenty.
But still he walked, for what else could he do, until one day he came to a clearing that was a perfect circle, and in its center lay a perfectly round pool, and there at last the bold man saw that the grass lay first in one direction and then another, so that it made a perfect spiral, and that perfect pool was the spiral’s center. And drinking from the pool was a big black sow with tusks like knives and hair like wire and hooves like iron. And she looked up at that bold man and didn’t even blink.
Now that bold man wasn’t so bold anymore, for he knew that the forest had tricked him into walking in circles these many days. But he certainly was hungry. So he picked up his spear and he charged that pig, because he was thinking that a nice pork dinner would be a fine thing after all his miseries, and mighty well deserved. But that black sow, she stood her ground and tossed him in the air like a bull, goring him with her tusks so that when he landed he was bleeding from a great gash in his leg. But he managed to hold onto his spear, so when that big pig charged him, he braced the spear on the ground and held it so the sow would impale herself on it. But that sow was a smart one, and she dodged the spear and took a swipe at the bold man’s other leg, and opened up his thigh from knee to hip. Now he knew that he was dead, for he would never find the way out of the forest when he couldn’t even walk, so he put his arms around that sow and held on tight, and she dragged him around and around that clearing, until at last he managed to take his spear, that he had hung on to all the while, and jab it between her ribs and into her heart. And then he fainted dead away.
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