Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  Karis said wearily, “No, Zanja, she told you the truth when we were at Strongbridge. It is her duty to make it possible for me to survive to vest the next G’deon.”

  “That’s all you live for? To lay upon some child a burden you could not yourself endure?”

  Karis lifted her head then, and Zanja let go of her. Having felt the force of her anger before, Zanja thought it prudent to put some distance between them.

  “I am not completely without hope,” Karis said, with great restraint. “I can yet believe that the future can be different from and better than the present. I even have the audacity to imagine that I might yet win some small honor for delivering Shaftal’s inheritance to its rightful heir.”

  Zanja said, “But why are you not Shaftal’s rightful heir?”

  “You have to ask? Just look at me.”

  “Do you believe that Harald G’deon picked you as thoughtlessly as he would pick a whore, and raped you with his power merely because you were convenient? Or rather, is that the story Mabin wants you to believe? This same Mabin who hates you and controlled you first through smoke and later through your beloved friend, and finally, rather than have you escape her control, all but murdered you? You still trust that woman’s judgment?”

  A long time the silence lasted. Karis rubbed her eyes as though to clear away a blur of tears.

  “Tell me what happened when they brought you to Harald,” Zanja said.

  “It was afternoon. The night before, I had managed to use smoke without Dinal realizing it, for we were sleeping under stars. But once we came to the House of Lilterwess, I began to worry, for it was such a crowded place. Dinal had been so kind to me, I feared to lose her regard by telling her the truth, but I thought that I would have to. That was the only thing on my mind as she brought me into Harald’s room. The room was full of silent, dignified people, who all turned in surprise to stare at me. Dinal’s hand was on my shoulder. She pushed me forward, and the dying man on the bed opened his eyes and held out his hand to me. I felt a surprise, a kinship—he was an earth witch like myself. I knew so little that I didn’t even realize this must be Harald G’deon. I thought that he might teach me what to do with myself, if he lives. But his life fire burned so faintly, I knew he would only live a few more hours at most. So I took hold of his hand, to bid him a safe journey. That is what I remember clearly. Norina says he died immediately after empowering me, without saying a word.“

  “Who decided it was not Harald’s intention to name you his successor?”

  “It was the Lilterwess Council. Once Dinal explained who I was, and it became evident I was a smoke addict, the council decided not to affirm me as G’deon.”

  “But Norina was not party to that meeting, was she? And Mabin is the only councilor who survived the night.”

  “Norina has her faults, but she has never lied to me.”

  “No, but it’s possible she doesn’t know the entire truth. I’m asking because I don’t understand why Mabin fears you enough to kill you.”

  Karis said quietly, “I have been vested with a stunning power, and nothing can stop me from exercising it as I choose. Don’t you find that frightening? I’m certain Mabin fears that I will challenge her, and claim the G’deon’s right. That I have no desire to do so must be unbelievable to her.”

  “But what if Harald G’deon knew what you were when he sent Dinal for you? Even if he was out of his mind, as some say he was, he was not a fool. So let the G’deon’s chair remain empty if that’s what seems right to you, and wander the land in rags and die unknown like Mackapee did. Scholars like Emil and Medric will study the obscure history of your life a hundred years from now and never quite make sense of it. So what, so long as it makes sense to you?”

  Karis uttered a short laugh.

  “What I see is that your life has been decided by people who seem determined to keep you within boundaries and to keep you from realizing that they are controlling you. And I see that as a result you never have made a choice for yourself except one time, the time you saved my life. And it put all of your keepers into a panic, which surely reveals how illusory are the boundaries they’ve put around you, and how easy it would be for you to simply step outside of them. So why not set yourself free of them? If you were free to live as well and joyfully as you could, exercising with honor what powers have been given to you, what would you do? Can you even imagine?“

  Karis muttered to herself, as her raven would have, “Oh, I am in dire danger.”

  She laid her hands flat against the stony beach. “I know exactly what I would do,” she said. She got abruptly to her feet. “Excuse me.” And she was gone, striding quickly back the way she had come, to where Medric sat awake in his bed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light reflecting from his spectacles that made it seem as if he were staring at them across the length of the beach. Karis sat beside him and they had a long, sometimes agitated conversation, which ended only when Karis got up to go back into her cave.

  Zanja looked in on her after a while, and Karis raised her head from where she sat in a huddle upon the floor, with her filled smoke pipe in reach, and the water clock plunking the occasional drop into the bowl. Zanja said, “Since you were kidnapped twenty-one days ago, one keeper or another has been hovering over you. It’s not a role I relish much myself, so I hope you’ll just tell me when you think you’re strong enough to need no looking after. Are you strong enough today?”

  Karis shook her head. She looked frightened and worn out, and Zanja remembered that Karis had no way to judge what her limits were. “Shall I come in?” she asked.

  “You’re very formal.”

  “Well, I’m making up this dance as I go along. I can’t get it right all the time.”

  Karis smiled. “That’s better. You know, you aren’t always the most restful of companions.”

  “Are you admonishing me?” Zanja sat down beside her. “I’ll be boring if you will.”

  “No,” Karis said, “and no again. But let’s not talk about the future anymore.”

  So Zanja diverted Karis with tales of her lifelong friendship with Ransel, until the water level in the bowl had risen high enough, and Karis reached for the pipe. She suffered no life-threatening convulsions, and because of her rapidly increasing strength, she remained awake after she had smoked. Zanja supposed she could take her for a walk, like a pet, but the very idea was so unsettling that she got up and left the cave instead. It was more than disconcerting to see Karis go from the morning’s robust passions and willful vigor to this helpless passivity. The contradiction between the two Karises was not at all easy to encompass, and Zanja began to understand a little of why Mabin and Norina and even Karis herself had been unable to imagine her as anything other than a flawed vessel, to be patched together until it could be replaced. But if fire talent could not encompass a grand contradiction, what good was it?

  It seemed strange that the nights had turned chilly, until Zanja examined the night sky and realized that any day now, the stars of summer would set. Karis took Zanja exploring up the river canyon, which required more stamina than Zanja would have thought Karis possessed. Karis’s energy seemed inspired by the grand scale of the landscape: the broken rocks as big as houses, the foaming river, the looming stone cliffs, the narrow strip of sky. Her fascination with the place worked as a camouflage, and it took some time for Zanja to realize that the quality of their conversation had changed, and not for the better. They skated across the surface of a conversation mysteriously opaque and impenetrable, like water turned to ice.

  By the time they returned to Otter Lake, Zanja was utterly confounded. Karis had used herself up by then, and they stopped to rest on a rock at the edge of the beach. The sun had dropped below the canyon rim, but the rock retained its warmth, and Zanja lay back upon it and shut her eyes, only to be assailed by a chaos of emotion that her disciplines could hardly keep in check. So this was love, she thought ironically, and hoped she’d soon discover the remedy for it. Then, she felt a
mouth touch hers, tentatively, curiously, and she opened her eyes to find Karis’s somber face, carved into hollows by her hard tight with smoke, so close that Zanja scarcely would have had to move to kiss her again. Zanja said desperately, “Now you are torturing me.”

  “I’m torturing myself,” Karis said. She sat back, but Zanja still could scarcely breathe. “If my hands had been cut off I’d still be interested in picking things up, and I might even try it once in a while.”

  Zanja said, in a voice that did not seem hers, “Please don’t try it again.”

  “Then how am I to live as well and joyfully as I can? You pose me quite a paradox.”

  Karis had given Zanja’s scarcely functioning mind a glyph of words to figure out. While Zanja floundered in her divination, Karis sat with her chin upon her fist. Sometimes, a trembling passed over her. At last, Kans spoke again. “Maybe you’ve been merciless for good reasons, but you’ve been merciless nonetheless.”

  “It’s a wonder you can stand my company,” Zanja said stiffly. “Surely it’s not pleasant to be reminded constantly of what you cannot have.”

  “Zanja, I could have whatever I wanted, if only I couldwant it. But I’m not like you, for even when you lay paralyzed, with your back broken, you still could want something. So you could imagine a life worth living, though there was much you might want and be unable to have. It’s not the having that matters to you, am I right? So you can imagine living your whole life beside me, in a state of unfulfilled desire, and that’s acceptable to you because it is desire itself that gives you joy. But I am an earth witch and no matter how rich my life of heart and mind become—and I am rich now, richer than I ever have been—it never can amount to joy. I need the earth, the flesh, the life of the skin. Without that, this whole thing—” she gestured at the shadowed canyon, the vivid sky, “—is just an intellectual exercise.”

  Zanja sat up, more bewildered by herself than she was by Karis. “I can’t explain it, but I know that what you’ve said is only half the truth. You’re standing in a doorway looking in one direction and thinking that what you see is all there is. But if you turned around you’d see something else entirely.”

  If Karis had received a classical education, then surely she would know that the Woman of the Doorway faces danger any way she looks. But Karis did not state this obvious objection, and she sighed and seemed relieved, as though this very peculiar conversation had served a purpose only she could comprehend. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try to turn around. I apologize for my behavior,” she added. “It seemed like you wanted to give me some comfort yesterday with all your talk of Ransel—a model friendship, untainted by desire. But it only made me realize how much I detest the compromise you’re offering. So I thought of how I’ve learned to feel the metal beneath my hammer, not by touch, but by knowing it from within. I thought I might know you that way.”

  “How is that different from what you had to do in Lalali?” Zanja put her head in her hands. “You can know me without touching me.

  “If I were a fire blood, yes.”

  “I see,” Zanja said, in the grip of a deep dismay.

  After a while, Karis’s big hand stroked softly down the back of Zanja’s shirt, and Karis said, “There’s no point agonizing. I just want you to understand.”

  “I can’t understand without agonizing,” Zanja said. But she lifted her head and added shakily, “You’ll be wanting to get back.”

  Karis stood up and they started down the beach, and after a while Karis closed her hand around Zanja’s. “Norina already has left her child and is traveling north. I had promised to send the raven before her labor began, so if I know Norina, she’s in a panic now.”

  Zanja said, “Well, we can’t have her tearing apart the countryside looking for us, with no idea of what the dangers are. I’ll have to go find her, somehow, before Mabin does.”

  Karis nodded. Zanja’s hand felt like it was pinched in a trembling vice.

  “How soon do you think I’d have to leave?”

  “She’s traveling very fast, and we’ll want to catch her well before Strongbridge. That’s what, six day’s travel from here?”

  “At least.”

  “At least? Then you should leave tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!”

  Karis said softly, “I agree. It’s much too soon.”

  “She’ll come rampaging in—”

  “She will,” Karis agreed.

  They had walked in silence almost to the cave before either one of them spoke again. Zanja said, “The last time I left you, you disappeared.”

  “Well you could be the one who disappears this time. I’m sure Mabin is looking for you. You should take Emil with you.”

  “No. Emil stays with you. Emil and Medric both.”

  “With Medric and the water witch looking out for me—”

  “They don’t have Emil’s knowledge and experience.”

  Karis sighed. “You want Emil to stay with me for the same reason I want him to go with you. Well, let’s not get into an argument about whose life is most worth protecting. I always lose that one.”

  They were standing at the entrance to the cave, and Zanja realized that this time Karis did not want her to go in. Karis said, “I’ll be awake long before the sun tomorrow.”

  “Wake me up once you’re awake.”

  Karis nodded. Her sorrow might have been a load of iron, yet she smiled wryly, as though she recognized that she was accepting the very compromise she detested: an arm’s length intimacy that must inevitably be corrupted by bitterness. After she had gone inside, Zanja sat alone upon the beach, wishing futilely for one easy choice, one option that did not leave her bleeding and bereft. The sky grew dark, and Emil and Medric came walking down the cliff path, hand in hand, talking earnestly, carrying a brace of rabbits and a basket of mushrooms for supper. Between the two of them, they were more kind to her than she could endure, and she went to bed early to get away from them.

  After sunrise, Emil walked with Zanja to the top of the canyon path where their horses were picketed. Emil decided not to tell her about Medric’s restless night; she did not need to worry more. He promised to look after Karis. From Homely’s back, Zanja looked down at him and said with something of her old irony, “So now you’re nursemaid to two rogue elementals. Your elevation has been meteoric.”

  “I can stand it a little longer,” he said. “Just look out after yourself.”

  She did not remind him that her survival up until now had bordered on the miraculous. “A warrior shouldn’t have so much to lose,” she said. “Especially knowing as I do just what it’s like to lose it.”

  “Nothing will be lost.” He took her hand and lightly kissed her knuckle. “I’ll look for you in twelve days. Medric and I will hunt some fowl, and we’ll have a feast. And then all of us will decide what we’re going to do with ourselves. Now go.”

  Her ugly horse pranced across the pathless ground as though he thought he was on parade. Watching her go so lightly and yet so heavily, Emil had the odd thought that she did not yet know what she had to fear. Yet, knowing her way was fraught with unknown danger, she had set forth. And so we all are Paladins, Emil thought, every last one of us who sets forth so lightly upon a dangerous road.

  He had this same thought again, later, when Karis came out from under smoke and spent the afternoon with him and Medric in a hilarious attempt to circumnavigate the lake. Karis feared deep or flowing water and, like all earth witches, could not endure setting foot in a boat. While scrambling up and down the rocks, Karis made herself entertaining, with a humor that was deep and subtle and utterly entrancing. But the charming afternoon left Emil with an aching heart, and he and Medric spent a strangely silent evening afterwards. That something of great import was at work in both of them seemed clear. But what they struggled with Emil could not fathom, and both of them kept their own counsel.

  Six days Zanja traveled across a familiar landscape. She skirted Meartown to the west and forded the
river north of Strongbridge, then worked her way south, cross-country. A day’s journey south of Strongbridge, she took lodging at a farm near the road she and Norina had traveled, and settled down to watch the road. In the afternoon of her second day of watching, Norina appeared. She traveled in the company of her gentle husband, riding horses so tired they dragged their hooves in the dirt.

  Zanja greeted J’han first, who said in some bewilderment, “Zanja? I hardly can believe my eyes!” She clasped his hand, thinking how incredible it was that he had endured Norina’s company long enough to claim a husband’s right, and yet his wife did not trust him enough to explain where they were traveling, or why.

  To Norina, Zanja said, “Some terrible things have happened, but Karis has survived.”

  Norina subjected her to a remote examination. “You are not confident of her well-being, though.”

  “At that farmstead over there, you can have your horses looked after, and perhaps even eat some supper and get a night’s rest. It will take some time for me to explain.”

  “We’ll go to the farmstead, of course,” J’han said, and started his reluctant horse forward. In a moment, Norina followed. J’han laid his hand on Zanja’s shoulder as she walked at his stirrup. “So this is all about Karis? I should have known.”

  Norina said, “And it’s not your business, as I’ve been telling you all along.”

  “Your health and safety are not my business,” J’han said, as though agreeing. Norina glared, and fell back out of hearing rather than be further subjected to the criticisms she could not help but hear, no matter what words her husband chose to use.

  J’han said to Zanja, “We have a hearty daughter, with a healthy set of lungs on her. She’s down there on the seacoast, no doubt screaming fit to raise the dead.” And I should be with her, his tone of voice said, so clearly that even a non-Truthken easily could hear it.

  Zanja said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to return to your daughter.”