Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “You know perfectly well that I won’t send an assassin.”

  “In five days you might come to your senses.”

  Zanja had gotten dazedly to her feet and picked up the satchel of explosives. Annis was waiting in the garden, and surely would not wait much longer. When the seer held out his hand she clasped it and then wondered why she hadn’t even hesitated. “Won’t you tell me your name?” he said.

  “Zanja.”

  He smiled again, less tentatively this time. “Zanja, I dreamed that we were friends.”

  “That would be some other world you dreamed of.”

  “Yes. But you are the one who travels between the worlds, are you not?”

  He was not much taller than she, and when she found herself caught within his gaze, it meant neither capture nor dominance, but a stare between befuddled equals. At last Zanja spoke, and not exactly to him: “The gods have quite a sense of humor.” So she left him, and went down the stairs and out into the garden, where the air was choked with ashes and the brays of terrified horses and the raw shouts of voices scoured by smoke. But now she could not remember exactly what she was doing here, or even who she was or why she had wanted to burn down the garrison. She had crossed a border. And now she was lost.

  She found Annis pacing the garden. She was exalted with fire, and once she began talking could not stop until Zanja shook her sharply by the shoulder. They climbed the wall, and this time left the ladder rather than carry it home, but they had to make their way without being noticed through a roused city. The balconies were crowded with onlookers fascinated with watching the fires or fretful with the possibility that the fires might spread beyond the garrison. They passed below, unmarked, and avoided all contact with anyone, lest the smell of smoke and gunpowder that suffused their clothing betray them. By dawn, they were far outside the city, having buried the remains of their explosives, and having bathed with soap and washed their clothing as well. At sunrise they stood on a hilltop on the north end of the river valley. A pall of smoke lay over Wilton, and Sainnite soldiers moved like locusts across the lush farmland of the river valley.

  “Emil will kill us for this night’s work,” Annis said placidly. “But not until he hears how we did it, so he can get the word to other companies. And actually, since I’m the only one who knows how to make those rockets, I guess he’ll have to let me live. You’re the one who’s going to be in trouble.”

  “Yes, I am in trouble.”

  They had neither food nor drink, except for water dipped out of a stream and a couple of handfuls of watercress. Annis was still eating her watercress one leaf at a time, and wrinkling her nose at the peppery taste. Zanja could not remember tasting hers.

  “I have an idea,” Annis said suddenly. “We’ll lie.”

  Zanja put her head in her hands. “Of course.” Annis never even noticed that she was laughing bitterly to herself. “Why not?” she said. “What have I got to lose?”

  It took more than a day for them to find South Hill Company, encamped at the Fens Overlook, a rise of land on the northern tip of the river plain, that was protected from armed incursion by a marsh on one side and a particularly tangled woodland on the other. The company was too far from Wilton to have seen the rockets explode, but not too far to see the smoke that still lay in a haze across the river valley. Emil, having already received a report from his spies in Wilton of the garrison fire and the wonderful explosions that preceded it, was in a quiet fury. His spies had told him it was wizardry, but Emil had not doubted that it was Annis. He did not question Zanja’s explanation that she had been seeking Annis in Wilton when the explosions at the garrison brought her to the garrison wall, when she had intercepted Annis during her escape.

  Normally, Emil was not one to vent his anger in public, but he berated Annis before the entire company, a disgrace she endured with rare dignity, perhaps because she could not help but recognize that it was not contempt that made the rest of the company stare at her so, but awe. When Emil had finished chastising her for taking matters into her own hands, the company members welcomed her with suppressed glee. Emil turned his back on the lot of them and stalked away.

  Zanja could not sleep, though she was so tired her thoughts kept blanking out, like candles snuffed in a gale. She wandered restlessly until she found herself at the very edge of the fen, which bubbled and stank in the afternoon heat, while a flock of geese uttered shouts of outrage at an outsider that had intruded on their peaceful foraging.

  Zanja spread her glyph cards out and stared at them. The Woman in the Doorway: unmade decisions or ambivalence or even lack of courage left her standing there upon the doorsill. Paired with the Raven, it was Karis. Paired with the Owl, it was Zanja. The Man on the Mountain: solitude, contemplation, far-seeing. By itself, it was Emil, Zanja’s commander and friend. Joined with the Box and the Flame, it was Medric: dreamer, destroyer, bespectacled book-hauling boy with a blue ribbon in his hair. Zanja realized vaguely that she had a headache. The cards swam before her vision as if they were swirling in a whirlpool. She could not see the pattern; pieces of it were missing. She shuffled frantically through the deck, tossing down cards at random: Sorrow, the Book, the Sword, the Guardian, the Cave, the Lover, and at last the Madwoman.

  She turned to find Ransel sitting on his heels beside her. His goatswool tunic was ragged and bloodstained; the woven pattern that marked him as a na’Tarwein was obscured by dirt. Upon his back he carried three different bows, and a half dozen quivers of arrows. Just as he had been when he died, he was thin from hard travel, hollow-eyed with hunger, anger, and sorrow.

  He gestured a hand toward the mess of cards. “What does it mean?”

  “A Sainnite has asked me to be his friend. Now nothing makes sense.”

  Astonished, Ransel leaned towards her. “Why are you listening to the words of a Sainnite?”

  “Because he reminds me of you, my brother.”

  “Am I to be glad of this? Shall I say, ‘Oh praise the gods—my sister will betray our people for memory of me’?”

  “How can I betray a people who are all dead?”

  “We watch you,” he said. “In The Land of the Dead, we wait for vengeance. When we saw you take the hand of the enemy, we cried out in dismay.”

  “You are dead,” she said softly. “To you it must seem simple.”

  “Do you remember how our people were betrayed? It was a Sainnite, who came into our territory. Tarin na’Tarwein called the enemy his friend, and revealed to him all our secrets. Will you not learn from our clan brother’s mistakes?”

  Zanja could think of no reply. She looked away from him, and when she turned back, Ransel had disappeared. In his place sat Salos’a, with a mouse clasped in her claw. “The madwoman in the middle,” said Salos’a, “Does she think she can hold all these powers in a circle around her? Does she not know that each one pulling her in a separate direction will tear her apart?”

  “The madwoman in the middle is too bewildered to think,” said Zanja. “No matter what she chooses, something is betrayed.”

  “Then choose to cross the boundary. That way, you will not betray yourself.”

  Salos’a spread her gray wings and the cards lifted up and swirled in the air, and Zanja realized that she had not understood the pattern before because it had been static. She had nor realized that it was only through movement, through an endless alignment and realignment, a pattern that was never stable but always changing, that the glyph pattern had meaning. Only by seeing it in motion could it be understood.

  When Zanja truly woke up, the sun was just setting, the cards lay in the dirt, and whatever she had understood about their pattern in the course of her vision had been lost as she crossed the border from vision to wakefulness. Once again, she understood nothing.

  Chapter 15

  That same afternoon, while Zanja was sleepin
g beside her scattered cards, the volunteers began to arrive. They came because the burning of the garrison had excited their imaginations: young, vigorous men and women whose labor would be sorely missed on their home farms. Some had been sent by their families, but most had simply come of their own desire, convinced that this was the beginning of the end, and the Sainnites would soon be entirely evicted from South Hill.

  Emil, preoccupied with the hasty decisions that had to be made, noticed Zanja only in the way he noticed all the members of his company, as a presence or an absence, as one preoccupied with accomplishing a worthy task, or as one currently available for such a task. Zanja looked haggard, and he remembered to ask Jerrell to check on her. Linde had suggested that Zanja be given the task of teaching bladework to the hot-headed young farmers, few of whom actually owned any fighting weapons. The farmers under her tutelage were much cowed, he reported later, and some complained bitterly after two days of drills, that farming was easier work than what they were being subjected to. A few of them went back to their farms, and the rest of them were learning how to fight: nothing fancy, Linde added, but the kind of things that might enable them to survive a fight long enough to get out of it.

  Two more days passed, and Emil began to feel like a shipping merchant. Wagonloads of arms and other supplies had mysteriously begun to arrive, more than the company could use or store. He made plans to again divide the company into units, each with a separate supply line. He slept little, and had to devise charts in order to keep track of things.

  Meanwhile, couriers reported that the Sainnites seemed gripped by an odd aimlessness, and that the people of Wilton had gotten together a committee to protest some of the punishments that had been visited on them in retaliation for Fire Night. Buried in a welter of detail, Emil began to feel harried. At the same time, he found he had become too tired and preoccupied to think much about strategy.

  When he saw Zanja again, she was walking through the camp with three or four of the new company members trailing behind her admiringly. Annis, who seemed to be thriving on the attention showered on her since Fire Night, was talking excitedly as she walked beside her, making broad, sweeping gestures as if she were about to fly like a bird. By contrast, Zanja seemed still as a cat, remote, almost uninterested. She still looked haggard.

  Emil jammed his papers heedlessly into his lap desk and set out after her. Her trail of followers dropped away when they saw him coming, and then Annis abruptly ended the conversation and ducked away. He could hardly blame her for deciding to avoid him. Zanja turned to him, and for a moment there was something disturbing in her face, something too vague and fleeting to name. Her foreign manners took over and she bowed stiffly. “Commander.”

  “Don’t do that. Soon the whole camp will be bowing and sir-ing me and I won’t be able to endure it. Come and have some tea with me.”

  She followed him silently to the fire, and silently watched as he fussed over the teapot, and silently sipped from the delicate cup balanced between her fingers, and silently accepted more tea. The camp turned around them like a wheel rolling down a road, but here at the camp’s center all was still. Emil waited for her to tell him what was wrong; she had retreated beyond his reading.

  She spoke at last, when he had served her a third cup of tea. “Soon it will be midsummer.”

  He nodded. “We have accomplished little this season, and lost much.” He considered again what she had said. “And soon a year will have passed since your tribe was destroyed.”

  Emil followed the direction of her gaze. She was staring into the few flames that flickered red in the hot ashes of the cookfire. He was tempted suddenly to douse them. Much had burned lately in South Hill: Farmsteads, the garrison, and too many funeral pyres. When Emil thought about it too long he too would despair, as though he saw the whole of South Hill and even all of Shaftal in ashes.

  When he looked up, Zanja was holding out the teacup. He took it from her and absently packed it away.

  “Emil, with your permission I’d like to spend the day by myself tomorrow.”

  He felt an overwhelming envy. “Of course. For what, may I ask?”

  “I’m trapped in the past and must cross over into the future. The gods demand it of me.”

  Emil rubbed his face, feeling harassed again. So quickly did his peace fray away lately. “When you know how to get there, take me across with you,” he said.

  She looked bleakly amused, as though he had asked, like a naive child, for something no one in their right mind would want. She took her leave without replying.

  Zanja arrived early at the grove, and hid herself in the bushes to wait. Medric also arrived early, carrying a basket in one hand and a book under his arm. He looked like a Sainnite today, in leather riding breeches and a shirt of bleached linen, though he wore no cuirass and carried no weapons that Zanja could see. His hair lay loose upon his shoulders and kept falling into his eyes as he studied the book in his lap. Before he started to read, he exchanged his spectacles for a second pair that he kept in a pouch around his neck. When Zanja at last decided to come out of hiding and approach him, he peered at her over the top of his lenses. “Zanja, is that you?” Considering that he was a seer, he could not see very well.

  She squatted beside him, and he gave a start when she felt the front of his shirt, but he did not pull away from her. His boots concealed no blade; even the basket contained only food. Zanja said, “How were you going to cut the cheese without a knife?”

  Medric shrugged, in the middle of exchanging spectacles again, with one pair in each hand. “You have one, don’t you? The Way of the Seer forbids me to eat cheese—I brought it for you.”

  He put on the other spectacles and smiled suddenly, as though she had only just arrived. “But you’re no longer a fey creature bristling with marvelous rockets. So daylight pares away the nights illusions, eh? You decided not to kill me, I hope, during all that time you were studying me from those bushes over there.”

  Zanja drew one of her pistols and showed him that it was not loaded.

  “Then what were you watching me for?”

  “To make certain you were alone. And when it became apparent that you were, I began to wonder why your people might allow you to go forth unescorted. Surely you are valuable to them.”

  “They wouldn’t allow me to do it, I’m sure, had I asked anyone for permission. You’re older than I thought you were.”

  “My years feel very heavy lately. You look like a little boy to me.”

  “I’m almost twenty,” he said, sounding as young as he looked. “My years feel heavy also.”

  To bear a seer’s burden alone could rapidly turn a boy into an old man. Certainly, though Medric’s face was young, his eyes were old. “In this world,” he said, “This world in which it is possible for us to be friends, perhaps you might share a meal with me. When we go out of this place, what we do here need not matter any more.”

  “You are young if you still can believe that. Whether I eat with you or not, it will change nothing. So I say we might as well eat.”

  Besides bread and fruit, the basket also contained cheese and butter and sweetmeats. Medric tasted all of these things, as if to show Zanja that they were not poisoned, but then he ate only bread and fruit: the brown bread, not the white. Where he had gotten fresh fruit so early in the season Zanja could not imagine, and she had never seen anything quite like this fruit. He called them grapes, and said that they had just arrived by wagon from the south, where summer came early. They grew on vines, and, unlike most tree fruits, could travel long distances without bruising.

  “We use it to make wine, and everybody complains that it’s not half as good as the wine from the old country. I used to drink a great deal of it.” Medric offered Zanja the bottle in his hand, which contained not wine, but spring water flavored with mint.

  “But spirits are
anathema to seers,” she said.

  “So I learned.” Medric looked, for a moment, rather haunted. “I seem destined to learn to survive by nearly killing myself first.” Indeed, Zanja thought, he must have come desperately close to being claimed by the madness which always is the dark shadow of insight, and that madness still seemed terribly near to him, as though he could reach out at any time and put it on like a hat.

  “A seer should have a mentor,” she said, as though he were a young man of her clan who had come to her for advice.

  “The Sainnite community treats elemental blood like a contamination, not a thing to be nurtured. When it became clear that I might be useful to my people after all, they found me a Shaftali tutor, and then had to kill him within the year for spying. I rather think he encouraged me to become a drunk, and who could blame him? But if he had helped me instead, and if I hadn’t spent all last summer in a drunken stupor, perhaps I would have come to my senses before all those people in Rees had been killed. No, I had no mentor,” he added bitterly. “Even now, all I have is this, and I haven’t had it long.” He tapped the book, which lay beside him upon its cloth wrapping. Zanja was curious enough to spell out the title, The Way of the Seer. The book looked as though it had been read to pieces.

  Zanja ate more of the sweet grapes. For sanity’s sake Medric had embraced asceticism, but for her it was only deprivation, which was to be endured like grief and solitude and tedious hard work. Right now, there was food to be enjoyed, and she enjoyed it. For all she knew, she might have only bread and water tomorrow.