Karis tried to stand up, but staggered to her knees again. The horse blundered to his feet, dislodging a sudden avalanche of snow from overhead. He nosed her encouragingly. “Smoke,” Karis explained. “But never graceful. No more than you.”
With the help of a slender tree trunk, she hauled herself upright. Despair was always worst in the morning; she fended it off with curses and eventually was able to drag her ungainly body onto the horse’s back. Stung by her urgency, the horse jumped forward. She clung to him grimly, angry at her weakness, angry at the irresistible impulse which drove her out on this insane fool’s errand, angry at the bitter poverty of spirit from which her anger came. This dark and frigid morning, where dawn seemed unlikely ever to break, did not bode well at all for the day that lay ahead.
Zanja’s voice gave out. In the bitter cold, the god stood sentinel, silent long after she had ceased to weep. When she turned her head, the straw crackled where her tears had frozen. A hush had fallen, and she saw the faint shimmer of snowfall outside the window.
Zanja’s story was nearly done, and soon Lord Death would let her go free. She continued, “I don’t know why the Sainnites didn’t kill me. When they reached their garrison, it seems they were disgraced. Perhaps, in the confusion, orders were bungled, papers were mislaid. Perhaps they simply wanted to get me out of their sight. I don’t know how, but somehow I ended up here.”
“Ha!” said the god.
“So I did not set out to cheat you. Haven’t I spent my days in pleading with the gods to allow me to die? I am tortured even in my dreams. I walk the path to my village and I see it filled with my people. Ransel is there waiting for me. How will I explain my long delay?” The raven seemed to shrug, and Zanja was tempted to grab hold of him and twist his neck until the backbone popped, just to let him know what paralysis was like. She could no longer take deep breaths to calm herself. The god moved cautiously out of reach. Zanja spoke, her voice shaking. “You bid me die in joy rather than in despair, but the only joy I can imagine is to walk down that path, to enter the Land of the Sun and be free of this body, this prison. Is that too much to ask?”
The god said, “You ask not for too much, but for too little.”
“What?” Zanja peered into the shadows at the black shape of the raven, who she suddenly remembered was a trickster. “I am too stupid for riddles.”
“It is no riddle, but a choice. Do you choose to die?”
She stared at him. Her heartbeat sputtered like a candle about to go out. In the silence, she thought she could hear a quiet footstep in the hall outside her door. But it was too early for the guard to make his noisy rounds. Bewildered, she whispered, “Now you mock me, Lord Death.”
“No,” said the god gently. “I am giving you the choice.”
No keys jingled in the frozen silence, but Zanja heard the lock of her cell door turn. The guard had not come in to feed her for days, but the door swung open without a creak from the rust-caked hinges. A presence filled the doorway. Lord Death spread his wings and lifted suddenly into the darkness.
Zanja spoke to the vacancy where the god had been. “Then I choose to live.” Then, she lay stunned by her own stupidity, asking herself what she wanted to live for.
She heard Lord Death’s voice in the darkness, but he was not speaking to her. “I am your witness.”
“I heard, good raven,” rasped a voice as harsh as Lord Death’s laugh.
Zanja heard a sound like the snapping of two fingers. A red spark danced like a firefly in the darkness, then flared, and became a sputtering flame. The flame advanced until Zanja could feel its faint heat upon her frozen skin. Her heart managed another weary pulse.
An enormous, long-fingered hand held up the burning wand. Another reached down to turn aside the decayed blanket and uncover Zanja’s ravaged remains: ulcerated skin, tightly stretched over thinly clad bones, a stick-fingered hand still curled into a fist. The stink rose up, muted but not conquered by the cold.
The hand touched Zanja’s emaciated chest. Like a coal in a snowdrift, heat shocked into her flesh. Zanja’s heart gave a mighty thud. She grunted, as if she had been struck, and gasped burning air into her lungs. Her heart thudded again. A river of heat rushed through the conduit of her flesh, up her neck, and into the vessel of her skull. Color exploded across her vision. Bedazzled and stunned, she uttered an animal cry.
The voice spoke again, in Shaftalese. “Do not be afraid. I have come to help you.”
Zanja would not have been surprised to discover that those warm fingers had folded back skin and bone to lay bare her faltering heart. “I’m not afraid,” she lied.
“Tell me your name.”
“Zanja na’Tarwein,” said the raven, who now rode upon the woman’s broad shoulder.
“Zanja na’Tarwein, my name is Karis. My raven has traveled ahead of me, and kept you alive at my command.”
“Your raven?” Zanja said. “He is not a god?”
“You thought he was a god?” The woman dropped down beside the box of straw, never lifting her hand from Zanja’s breast. “No, he is just a raven. And I—Take the light and look at me.”
The slender, insubstantial rush light was placed between Zanja’s fingers. The sputtering flame trembled in her weak grasp as she lifted it to illuminate clearwater eyes, a sun-bleached thicket of hair, deeply drawn lines of worry, weariness, and perhaps some laughter. The woman smelled of sweat and woodsmoke, and there were pine needles trapped in her hair. Her ragged shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing bulky, muscled forearms. The palms of her hands were gray with ground-in soot. She had strolled through the locked door of this prison like a phantom, yet she was substantial, physical, powerful. The vitality coursing through Zanja’s veins gave her an eye-aching clarity, and as she looked at Karis she could not help but know what she was made of. She said, “You are neither god nor ghost, so you must be an elemental. I think you are an earth witch.”
Karis said, “And you’ve gone from mystery to understanding without asking a single question, so you must be a fire blood.” She turned her head as though she heard something, and said, “I think the prison guards are up and about. How long until they come this way?”
“Not until after dawn.”
“It is well after dawn now. A storm rolled in before first light, which is why it seems so dark now. Good raven,” she added, “Your work here is done.”
The raven lifted from her shoulder, flew to the window, and was gone.
Zanja said, “Perhaps your raven is no god, but he taught me something I did not know. Serrain, I am dying, but even crippled as I am, I’d rather live. I ask your mercy.”
Karis gazed at her as though astonished by her good manners. But it seemed that Zanja’s careful words had not struck Karis as ridiculous, for she said, “As it happens, I am a great mender of broken things. Let me see what I can do.” Karis took the rush light and wedged it in a crack between stones. “I need to touch you,” she said, as though Zanja’s heart were not still beating eagerly against the palm of her hand, and as though her callused fingers did not scratch Zanja’s bare breast every time she shifted her weight. The shock of heat again, and Karis lifted and turned Zanja as easily as if she were an infant, so that she faced the ice-clad wall. Karis stroked a hand firmly down the weeping sores of Zanja’s back. Zanja expected pain, but she felt something else: the startling warmth of Karis’ touch, and an eerie, crawling sensation as her ruined flesh hastily knit itself together.
Then, in the place where her back had been broken, below which she had felt only dead weight for months, pain blossomed. Her entire body began to spasm. “Hold fast,” said Karis hoarsely, and pinned Zanja down with her weight.
When the fit had passed, Zanja tasted blood from her bitten tongue, and the sharp salt of sweat. The weight of Karis’ body lifted. She was gasping for breath as thou
gh she had run a long way at a desperate pace.
Zanja had been long enough removed from the lower half of her own body that her legs felt foreign to her: ungainly contraptions of sinew and bone; but at least she felt them, and even could make them move, however reluctantly, with the lever of her will.
She breathed something in her own language, stupefied.
“Hush,” Karis said absently. She had moved the rush light, and so Zanja watched by its light as those big hands delicately kneaded her feet, straightening the clenched muscles and stretching and moving the flesh with her long fingers to form new, perfect toes, one by one. Karis frowned as she worked, like a potter at the wheel, with her eyes half closed, seeming to feel her way with her fingers. Her sweat shimmered in faint light as it fell, drop by drop, from her chin.
Half drowned in the tingling, burning, cramping sensations of her repaired flesh, Zanja felt the pressure of those fingers only remotely, but as new toes budded and grew upon her disfigured feet, the feeling of it was so bizarre that it was all she could do to keep from snatching her foot from the witch’s grasp.
When Karis laid Zanja’s foot down, she rested her head in her hand for a moment as though exhausted or overwhelmed by her labor.
“Serrain,” Zanja said again. Even her voice trembled shamefully. Having given Karis this title of great respect, she could not think of what to say, or what to ask, or even what words might begin be adequate.
Karis lumbered to her feet, a great, graceless woman who seemed suddenly weary to the bone. She did not speak, but dressed Zanja in gigantic clothing, and then tied her onto her back with rope, where she could neither aid nor impede her.
The fugitive journey felt like a fever dream. Karis strode rapidly down dark ways where dawn’s faint light had not yet penetrated, bent over in a crouch to avoid the rough-hewn beams of the low ceiling. From behind the steel-clad doors where other prisoners stared or froze in terrible solitude, there was no sound. Karis turned, and turned again, unhesitating. And then they were mounting a narrow, twisting stairway which pressed in on both sides and clawed at Zanja’s knees. They climbed into light that wormed its way through narrow slits of windows and dispersed like dust through the darkness. Karis stopped short, and her rapid, shallow breaths swelled and receded within Zanja’s tightly bound embrace.
“...this cursed country!” said a voice harshly in Sainnese. Boots rasped upon stone.
“Remember the grape arbors of Sainna. In winter they dropped their leaves, that was how we knew the season. And the wind came in from the north, bringing rain.” The speaker paused, perhaps overcome by his own poetry.
“And we sat indoors drinking warm wine.” The guard spat. “I’d rather almost have been killed than be exiled in this barbaric country.”
“Our hearts are turned to stone in this land of stone,” said the poet.
The angry man snorted. “A land of ice, more like.”
“Have another swig.”
Zanja smelled the harsh fumes of distilled liquor. The echoes of stone made the sound tricky, but by the smell she realized that the two men stood very close by. She took a deep breath and smelled the rancid tallow with which they had waterproofed their cuirasses. All Sainnite soldiers smell the same because of that tallow; she had sometimes been able to track them through the woods by smell alone.
“Well, it’s not getting warmer,” said the angry man. “I might as well go feed the beasts. They’ll whine like dogs today.”
The poet only grunted. His poetry he reserved for speaking of his native country. Like Zanja, it seemed he was a refugee. The two men separated, and for a moment, a shadow blocked the dim light at the top of the stairs, then passed. Zanja felt Karis begin to breathe again. “I wonder what they were talking about,” she murmured.
“The weather,” said Zanja.
“Do you speak their language, or are you just guessing?”
“I do speak it, though with a terrible accent.”
“You speak this language with an accent too, though I’d not call it terrible.” Karis stepped out into the wide corridor, into which opened double doors wide enough to admit a wagon such as the one that had carried Zanja to this place. Karis ignored these massive doors, and went out through a nearby postern door, around which mud and slush brought in by the guards’ boots puddled.
At first, all Zanja could see was snow. Then the walls took shape, a solid gray against the white sky. The low stone buildings to the right looked like stables; those to the left the guards’ quarters. One set of buildings looked no different from the other except that one had chimneys and smaller doors. The wind picked up and for a moment the entire scene disappeared behind blowing snow. Karis started boldly across the yard. The snow on Zanja’s face felt like sparks from a fire.
They reached the wall. Karis lifted a hand to the rough stone, and for a giddy moment Zanja thought she would simply push her way through, like a mole through earth. But she was testing a gray, snow-speckled rope that lay nearly invisible against the stone.
Already shivering, Zanja felt as though she were drowning in snow. The prison building was nearly invisible. Karis took hold of the rope, dug her toes into the thin cracks between the stones, and began to climb. She did it gracelessly, hastily, almost carelessly. Zanja hung upon her back, helpless as a bundle of laundry. When she turned her head, she could see portions of the compound, made ghostly and distant by the gray light and the falling snow.
The snow cleared suddenly, and the central building appeared, squatting sullenly under its dusting of snow. On each corner of the square enclosure stood a guard tower, whose guards surely could see Zanja as clearly as she saw them. Then the snow began to fall again, but not soon enough. She heard the distinct, echoing report of a musket shot.
Karis muttered a curse, and hauled herself up to the top of the wall. There was a blare of alarm horns. Zanja imagined what she could not see: the doors of the guards’ quarters bursting open, and soldiers in their uniforms rushing for the stables and for the gates.
The sky swirled as Karis swung down the other side of the wall and swarmed down the rope to where a huge horse waited with stolid patience. And then she stood in snow, breathing heavily, holding Zanja by the wrist as she cut the rope with a sharp knife, until Zanja dangled loose across her back, feet dragging in the snow. The rank sheepskin doublet that Karis wore kept Zanja from feeling the muscle of that back, but after these demonstrations of strength she was not at all surprised when Karis simply picked her up and set her upon the horse’s back, then dragged herself up behind her.
The horse jumped as if she had flicked him with a whip, and lunged headlong into the woods and down the hill, spraying clots of snow around him. No horse could keep up such a pace for long in snow so deep, but by the time he slowed, Karis seemed satisfied. “They already are turning back,” she said. “They have no stomach for this foul weather.”
Zanja lay slumped against Karis’s shoulder, too weak to sit up on her own, hardly able to even hold up her head or lift a hand to brush the snow from her face. “This has been a very strange day,” she murmured. And then sleep overwhelmed her.
Chapter 5
Snow still was falling when Karis hid Zanja and the horse in the hills, and went on foot to let herself into the barn of a fine farmstead near the edge of the forest that hems in West Hart. Like everything in this part of Shaftal, the barn was built of stone and mortar within a sheltered hollow, with a roof so low the beasts sheltered there could scarcely lift their heads. Two cows this farmstead owned, and two horses, and a dozen or more sheep. This farmstead was far off the beaten track, far enough that perhaps it had never been raided by Sainnites, who had been known to butcher the milk cows and strip the cellars to the walls. The dark day and shuttered windows had fooled the chickens, who had gone to roost in the low rafters though the sun would not set for some time yet. No doub
t the numbers of this substantial flock would be sadly diminished come spring.
These people were not wholly hostile to strangers, for a loaf of pauper’s bread, wrapped in wax cloth, rested upon a shelf just inside the door. A wide-mouthed jar with a stopper hung there as well. Karis milked a cow into the jug. She found some hen’s eggs in the hay and tied them up with the bread. She could find nothing to carry oats in, and finally took off one of her shirts and made a bag out of it by tying the sleeves together and pulling tight the neck string. She left some coins in compensation for having taken more than was customary, and returned the way she had come, walking in her own footprints.
In a goat’s burrow hidden in the nearby hills, Zanja lay as Karis had left her, wrapped in the horse blanket, watched over by the raven. She still slept like a child, her skin flushed as with fever, her hair a matted tangle, her hands limply open against the earth. Her fingers were thin as sticks, and every bone stood out harshly in her sharply angled face. Karis lay down the fistful of oats she had reserved for the raven, and sat in the opening of the burrow, just out of reach of the falling snow. She heard faintly the horse crunching dry oats with his big teeth. He needed to be stabled and fed properly, but a good bit of grueling travel still lay ahead of them this night.
Zanja had slept the entire day through, collapsed in Karis’s arms like a jointed puppet with the strings cut loose. While she slept, Karis nourished her, and felt herself slowly emptied, and knew the giddiness that comes from too much generosity. When the raven rejoined them, he crept inside the shelter of the blanket which wrapped them both, and he muttered in Karis’s ear all he knew, every word Zanja had spoken during that strange night. It had been genius to send the raven, Karis supposed, but now there seemed something diabolical in his masquerade. She had created him intelligent, but he was also without compunction.
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