He was haggard, but grinned like a boy at her surprise. “I hear you’ve started leaving food supplies—not where the unit is encamped, but where they will be encamped soon. That’s quite a trick.”
“I’ve only done it twice.”
“It’s a pity you can’t tell us where the Sainnites will be, the way they seem to do with us.”
“It’s a pity you can’t do it either,” she said.
“Yes. But apparently I can predict where you will be. Come with me to Bowen’s Farmhold, will you? Three survivors from Rees Company are guesting there, and sent a message asking to be admitted to South Hill Company. We’ll be there in time for supper, and the Bowens always set a good table.”
It was a fine day: bright and warm, and shot through with swooping birds that dove like flame from out of the sun and swooped over the treetops, ecstatic with passion. The two of them took a high trail that Zanja had not followed before, with a slender rivulet chuckling along beside them. For half the morning, Emil thought his own thoughts, and Zanja, long accustomed to solitude, felt no need to interrupt with an attempt at conversation. They reached a high, remote meadow, where occasional fat bees shot past like pistol balls. There, they sat in the sun to rest, and the donkey promptly set to grazing. Emil took a packet wrapped in paper out of his doublet pocket and handed it to her. “This is for you. You’d have gotten it much sooner, but it took my friend in Wilton over a month to find.”
Zanja did not know what to do with a gift. “Untie the string,” he urged. “You’ll laugh when you see what it is.”
She opened the packet, and then she did laugh, for Emil had given her a pack of fortune-telling cards. “Emil, you are a desperate man.”
“Yes,” he said, suddenly serious.
“Glyphs!” she exclaimed, looking more closely at the cards.
“These cards were traditionally used to teach glyphs to schoolchildren. I’m afraid it’s a rather artless deck. I’ve seen some that were almost too beautiful to touch—but I suppose you wouldn’t want to be carrying artwork while running through the woods and rolling around in the mud.”
Zanja shuffled through the cards, looking at the woodcut illustrations, printed in brown, and the glyphs stamped on each corner in red. Most of the glyphs she had not seen before, but even those she was familiar with seemed much less ambiguous when paired with an illustration. She found a raven, who dove earthward with a message satchel round his neck. She found an owl, who flew across a chasm with a person dangling helplessly from one claw. She found a woman standing in an open doorway, and lay that card flat upon her knee.
Emil took up the card and examined it critically. “The Woman of the Doorway really should look less grim and more ambivalent.”
“Is she going out, or coming in? Or is she simply unable to make up her mind?”
“They say she stands poised between the danger without and the danger within.”
“Of course.” Zanja took the card from him and traced the shape of the glyph with a fingertip. “Uncertainty and judgment, and the dangers of decision. Possibilities and dangers and the fact of our existence here—” she tapped the woman’s head, to show which “here” she meant. “Always deciding.”
“To some fire bloods, the cards explain themselves. I suspected they might explain themselves to you.”
She surreptitiously wiped her face dry. What was wrong with her? She restlessly sought and found the owl card, and showed it to Emil. “Is the person being carried a passenger, or prey?”
“Ah, well. That is the heart of the question, isn’t it? Do we seek wisdom, or are we kidnapped by it?”
Zanja said, half to herself, “It was the owl god that chose me to serve her.”
“No wonder your way has been so hard. That glyph must be your name sign, then.”
“Which is yours? No—I will guess.” She sought through the deck, and pulled out a card: a man standing alone on a hilltop, with stars shaped like arrows falling down on him.
“Solitude,” Emil said. “Also sometimes called Contemplation. The man on the hill sees forever, and might be destroyed by what he sees. Yes, it’s my card,” he added, as she glanced at him inquiringly, “Now tell me: What is the threat to South Hill Company? Just pick a card and let me do the thinking.”
She chose a card that depicted a plain box, with the lock broken, the lid half open, and the interior hidden in shadow.
Emil said. “But what is in the box?”
She pulled out and tossed down a picture of a burning flame.
“Whose fire is it?”
She lay a third card down, and cried in disgust, “That can’t be right!” It was the Man on the Hill.
But Emil spread out the three cards in the grass. “Am I the one who threatens South Hill? Well, obviously my judgment on this matter is questionable, but I don’t see how it could be possible. Let’s consider what else it might be. The flame, of course, is the elemental fire that enlightens and destroys: love, rage, desire, revolution, creation, and destruction. The box has to do with secrets that might be revealed, so paired with the flame it suggests elemental divination or revelation. When the flame is paired with Solitude, it usually means fire talent, fire logic, the solitude that comes with being a visionary. And all three cards together…” He looked at them, frowning.
“It might be a warning that for us to practice divination like this somehow makes you the danger that threatens South Hill. Or it might be a suggestion that divination will allow us to counter a danger that is not yet revealed.”
“It might mean either or both of those things. But I see a third possibility—one that I want to reject because it seems like an impossibility.” They sat a long time in silence, with Zanja gazing down at the cards and seeing how their meanings ceaselessly shifted and yet somehow began to stabilize. Emil had looked away from the cards, and gazed out at the vista that lay before them. He said at last, “When those falling stars pierce the heart, it feels like this.”
“It feels like an owl’s claw,” Zanja said.
He turned to her with a warm, wry smile, his squint lines all furrowed against the sun. “Well, what do you now see in the cards?”
“I see that the Sainnites have a seer.”
“If that’s true, then he must be a madman. To nurture a seer takes great care and deliberation, and the Sainnites seem incapable of both.”
“He may be a madman,” Zanja said, “but what he’s done to us so far, and to Rees before us, seems more like genius.”
“Yet—however difficult and exhausting the process—we continue to evade his insight. That may be the best we can hope to do against such an enemy.” Emil stretched out his stiff leg, preparatory to standing up. She stood and offered him a hand, which he clasped in his so gently that she found herself again bewildered. The Ashawala’i were never so demonstrative, except perhaps with their closet kin. “To hell with protocol,” Emil said. “Between the two of us, we can see through the tricks of an inexperienced seer— but not if I have to chase you across half the region every time I want to talk to you. These volunteers from Rees don’t know it yet, but one of them—” he grunted as she helped him up, “—is going to be our new bread runner. Maybe more than one of them, since I suspect you won’t be easy to replace.”
Chapter Eleven
The three units rotated positions again: Daye’s unit occupied high ground within spyglass sight of Wilton; Perry’s unit retreated into the highlands for a few days of rest, and Willis’s unit camped in between, in the thick woods west of the rich farmlands that surrounded Wilton. Since being promoted to runner, Zanja had traveled several times between Emil and Daye. It was never too difficult to find Daye’s unit: it did not take a seer to know that they would be on one or another hilltop near the edge of the flood plain that surrounded Wilton. But to find Willis’s unit would be tricky, even though, as far as Zanja knew, they had not decamped recently. She had been walking through the woods since sunrise, merely hopeful that she was following the right
path.
Sweating in the warm morning, Zanja slipped through a thicket and emerged onto clear ground again. She paused to listen, and heard only faint bird song. Then a shot rang out, and a pistol ball smacked into a tree not a hand’s breadth from her shoulder. A second ball whizzed past, singing in a high, thin whine, but by then she had dived into the thicket again. She paused to load a pistol and then crawled further into the thick woods, then lay down in the dirt and waited with her heartbeat thrumming in her ears.
The woods lay dead silent. The birds began to sing again. Her heartbeat slowed; her instincts told her that whoever had shot at her was gone. Still, she did not continue her journey until midday filled the forest with dull sunlight. It was afternoon when a watchful picket outside the encampment noticed her cautious passage through the woods, and challenged her. “Why are you lurking?” he asked, when he recognized her. “Do you want to get yourself killed?”
Willis kept his camps in exacting order, with all the gear packed away, so it could be easily snatched up should it become necessary to flee or fight. Lately, through, the Sainnites no longer chased the Paladins into the woods, and seemed satisfied to simply disrupt their sleep, night after night. It was a policy of persecution that did not subject their own soldiers to much danger, while continuing to wear out the Paladins. Willis had sent Emil an impatient message that next time the Sainnites approached his camp, he intended to attack rather than retreat. Emil had dispatched Zanja to find out his plans in more detail.
Willis sat talking with a sharpshooter who was said to be his lover, several other opinionated and incautious people, and a couple of his brothers, who tended to repeat whatever he said as though they had thought of it themselves. Whatever Zanja’s assessment of their characters, these were seasoned and courageous fighters, and she supposed she might learn something about the value of aggression from them.
Willis spotted her and said with extraordinary joviality, “Well, well! Unfortunately, you have missed the midday meal.”
“I was delayed by being shot at in the woods.”
“That’s strange. Perhaps a lone Sainnite is out there today. Either that, or it was that spy we’ve been watching out for.”
Zanja said, “Well, I never saw who it was, but it makes no sense that someone who wants to avoid notice would have shot unnecessarily. Are you certain that it wasn’t a member of your company taking a shot at me?”
“Well, if you didn’t answer the hail—”
“No one hailed me.”
“Then it was no Paladin. We don’t shoot at our own.”
“Of course not,” Zanja said, and perhaps she might have left it at that, but the memory of the wasted afternoon rankled. “But how can I be confident that everyone in South Hill Company recognizes me as one of their own?” she asked.
She had said it quietly enough, but Willis reacted as she might have expected, with a roar calculated to make her regret having even mentioned such a possibility. “No one questions the truthfulness and honor of my people! If my man says no one answered his hail, then that is what happened!”
“No one hailed me,” she said again.
“So it wasn’t one of my people!”
“Then you have a sniper lurking in the woods, and had better beware. A solitary person could easily slip past your pickets.”
“My pickets are always watchful,” Willis said dismissively.
Mechanically, bitterly, Zanja gave him Emil’s message, and then tried to listen closely as Willis and the others explained their plan to her. She had intended to ask Willis to show her the site of his intended ambush, but now could not convince herself to remain any longer than strictly necessary. If she left now, she could reach Daye’s unit before dark.
“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” said Daye, when Zanja had found the encampment, shortly before sunset. They were dousing the cookfires to make it harder for the Sainnites to find them in the darkness, but the stew was still hot. The evening watch was already in position; the night watch slept; the day watch played cards or dice by the fading light. Daye claimed she had nothing important to do, and sat and chatted with Zanja while she ate.
“Is Annis away?” Zanja asked.
“She’s conducting experiments again, now that she’s got more gunpowder. That child is rather excited about something, but won’t tell me what.”
Zanja ate a few mouthfuls. “I need some advice,” she finally said.
She had come to trust Daye during the months that she served under her command. Daye had been the first to congratulate her on her promotion, and to point out that now Zanja’s swift mind would prove even more important than her swift feet. Now, Daye paused in plaiting her gray hair, and looked at Zanja inquiringly.
“I think someone in Willis’s unit tried to shoot me today,” Zanja said. “And I think that Willis commanded it.”
“That man,” Daye said, apparently not much surprised, “is an ass. I’ve known him his whole life, and he has always been an ass. It’s hopeless.” In silence, she finished plaiting her hair, and Zanja cleaned out her porringer with a bit of bread.
“I’m just a stranger—” she finally began.
Daye cut her off. “You’re a smart fighter and that prescience is an asset to the company. I’ll talk to Emil.”
“I can talk to him myself.”
“No, Emil and I have a long history. I am the one who tells him the truths that are so bitter no one else dares tell them to him, and he has to listen because I’m his elder. The older I get, the blunter I get. You young people waste so much time on niceties.”
Zanja said, “I don’t want Emil to think I’ll run to him every time I have a problem rather than solving it myself.”
“Well, this is the kind of problem he needs to know about. He’s always had one good reason or another to put up with Willis, but he truly can’t endure the man. So he ties himself in knots trying to be fair, and ends up looking the other way when he shouldn’t.”
Zanja said, rather astonished, “Should you be telling me all this about my superiors?”
“What!” Daye laughed. “South Hill thrives on gossip. Fertilizer, we call it, to make the crops grow.” She added, more seriously, “When Emil told me about his decision to promote you, I could see there was more to it than simple admiration for your good sense. You and him, you seem like kinfolk to me.”
Zanja awoke from troubled sleep to the sound of a pistol shot. Her unreliable prescience had once again failed her. Shouting, she leapt out of her blankets and snatched up her dagger. Gunpowder flashed all around the encampment. She ran through a chaos of confused Paladins at the closest gunpowder flash, following the distinctive oily stink of a Sainnite cuirass. The soldier was still blinded by the flare of his own gunshot, and, before Zanja was even full awake, she had dispatched him. She did not know where she had cut him, but the smell told the tale of her sloppy work. If she survived the night, it would be in clothing as foul as a butcher’s.
Barefoot, half blind, she attacked another opponent. The two of them had come too close to killing each other before they realized they were allies. The guns flashed around them, deafening. She and her fellow Paladin screamed at each other, asking each other what to do. Then he collapsed at her feet and she stared at him stupidly. Pistol balls buzzed through the clearing.
Move or die. She dodged through the darkness and the billowing gunsmoke. How could the Sainnites keep shooting so long? In their zealousness they would surely soon be shooting each other.
She heard a metallic whistle, and the guns fell silent. By some devil’s luck—too little luck, too late—she had broken through the ring of soldiers, and now as they tightened their noose upon the trapped Paladins, she was outside of it, as helpless to save them as they were helpless to escape.
With only a dagger in her hand, she followed the tightening circle of soldiers inward. She heard a scream, and bit her own tongue. The clearing seemed filled with soldiers. She might kill one more before she herself was
killed, then no one would survive to light the signal beacon, or carry a message to Emil.
She got herself under command and slipped back into the dark wood.
She had scarcely gotten her bearings when she heard a tentative bird call. The racket of battle was already falling silent and she dared not whistle back, but stumbled about until she had found a handful of others: some survivors of the evening watch, who were booted and armed and frantic with guilt; some barefoot like her, with or without weapons; several of them injured, one certain to die before the night ended.
Knowing that Zanja reported to Emil, the people who had been on watch gave her a garbled account of not having seen a bit of movement in the valley all night, until suddenly the firefight erupted. “They must have slipped out of Wilton last night. Somehow, our spies there didn’t notice. And they worked their way towards us from the north, along the rim of the valley where we couldn’t see them. That’s what we think happened.”
Zanja paid no heed, for how this horror had happened seemed irrelevant. “We need to light the beacon,” she said.
“There’s three people up there already, like always.”
“They would have lit the signal fire by now if they were still alive.”
“Shaftal’s Name!” someone said, raw voiced. “These Sainnites are devils!”
But they were too experienced to waste precious time cursing the enemies. The five that were still in condition to fight set out for the beacon hill, which pressed itself like a blunt knucklebone against the stars. But, as Zanja more than half expected, the hill crawled with Sainnites, with more arriving even as Zanja and her companions watched. It had been a well-planned attack, the Paladins bitterly told each other. The Sainnites must have attacked the beacon, the watchposts, and the encampment simultaneously, and now two-thirds of Daye’s unit was almost certainly dead.
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