She left the cobblestones behind and wandered through the icy mud of the wagon ruts, weaving like a drunk on her trembling legs. Will I even make it home? she asked herself, for the hill seemed to go up forever. And then home stood before her, a thatched cottage with a lamp flame in the window. A black thing dropped down from the treetops and struck her shoulder like a blow. She uttered a cry, then caught her breath. “So you’re home.”
Crisp feathers rasped on her ear as the raven folded his wings. She fumbled in her pocket for something to feed him–a bread end or a bit of grain–but today her pockets were full of stones. She could not remember why she had picked them up, or where. “I have to smoke,” she said.
The raven spoke in a voice no more harsh than hers. “Then smoke.”
“Come inside. I think Lynton and Dominy are already in bed.”
In her room, she opened the window so the raven could come and go. While she filled her pipe with shaking hands, he ate the bread and bacon ends she had snatched up in the pantry. Now came a quiet, for with the pipe in hand, her panic eased. She could wait a little longer. In the fireplace, the coals caught in new wood and flames began to flicker. The raven drank from a bowl. “What did Norina find out?” Kans asked.
“Norina found nothing. Nothing to find, nothing to be done. There is a place shut up like a strongbox, which stinks of death. The Sainnites imprison people there–unfortunates who might have secrets to trade for a merciful death. People avoid the place, or stop up their ears so they won’t hear the screams or be cursed by the ghosts.”
“Is that all?” Karis cried, when the raven fell silent. “That cannot be all there is to know!” Karis paced back and forth across the room until she banged into the settle and felt a faraway pain in her shin. She forced herself to stop, to breathe deeply, to listen to the silence. For months the person who had been broken had endured in that place of horror while she and Norina argued. But now that bright spirit was a candleflame guttering in its socket.
“This person’s life has become important to me. Much more important than my own life.”
“And what does that mean?” the raven said, as Norina would. “Your life is not your own. You will not be foolish with it.”
Karis looked at the pipe in her trembling hand. If she didn’t smoke, she would die, and if she did smoke, that flame in the darkness might go out while she dreamed and drooled, drug giddy. “You must fly to that place of imprisonment, and find that person.“ The raven drank more water, and shook out his dry feathers.
“Tonight?” he said.
“Now.” Karis took up a small pouch and emptied it onto a tabletop. She put in a dry crust of bread and hung the pouch around the raven’s neck. “Go quickly, good raven. Or we will be too late.”
As Karis, having smoked her pipe at last, sprawled upon her bed and watched the shadows dance, the raven flew over his kingdom, with darkness above and below. The lamplights below had all been blown out, and an impending storm had blotted out the lights of the sky. The raven flew on until morning, when the snow began to fall. He waited out the storm in the rafters of a barn, which he shared with an owl and some bats and an anxious flock of chickens whose eggs he ate surreptitiously, hiding the broken shells so the farmers would not know. When the snowfall ceased, he flew on, with the sun setting behind him. Below, a company of Sainnite soldiers trampled a path through the snow. Then they were gone, and night fell again.
The ruins of the House of Lilterwess passed beneath him, a great stone cairn for the martyrs of the defeat.
Once again, Karis lay under smoke. Sometimes smoke made her able to see through the raven’s eyes. So she now saw the cairn swoop past, and she tried to make the raven circle it again, to examine the ruin of the bell tower by the front gate, where on the night after Harald G’deon’s death Dinal had stood bravely ringing the alarm bell as the Sainnites broke through the gates. Dinal had been an old woman, the mother of four grown sons, a lieutenant of the Paladins, the beloved friend and lover of Harald G’deon. Karis had only known her as a kind stranger who appeared suddenly in the mad carnival of Lalali and offered Karis a way out the gates.
Harald, the last G’deon of Shaftal, also lay beneath the fallen walls of the building. Sometimes his bones spoke to Karis, but not tonight. After fifteen years of delay, watching the encroachments of these invaders and refusing to do anything about it, he had died before the final carnage began. The Sainnites, still fearing his power though they knew that he was dying, waited for him to die, and then attacked.
At this turning point of history, Norina came to show Karis the Way to safety, and found her lying vacantly in bed while cannonballs smashed into the building. Sometimes, the memory still made Karis desperate with self‑loathing. She should have saved the House of Lilterwess, but smoke made her incapable of even saving herself. Sometimes, it seemed impossible that Norina had been able to forgive her.
The ruins had passed, and now there was only darkness to be seen. Karis slipped deeper into sleep.
When Zanja opened her eyes to the bitter darkness of the wintry night, she was surprised to find herself still entrapped in flesh. It scarcely seemed possible her spirit could hold on for so many months when she had seen so many die so easily. A blow or two of the blade usually was all it took to sever soul from body, a moment of agony and then the soul was translated.
She had been dreaming of all the people of her village, gathered beside their summer fires in the Land of the Sun, chasing children, strutting before their rivals, stirring pots of fragrant kich. But just as the path Zanja followed seemed about to deposit her in their midst, it turned her mysteriously away, back into the wilderness, and she was lost again, trapped once more in a stinking box of straw, where she had been laid some months earlier like a side of meat being cellared for the winter.
She heard a dry, rasping sound, and turned her head. The moon shone through the barred window, as it briefly did sometimes, and faint light shimmered on the ice‑encased walls of her cell. The floor by the window was white with drifted snow. Silhouetted against the white, a raven stood on the edge of her box, near her head. He preened his wing feathers, just like any other bird after a long flight, but she knew him: the Messenger, He Who Decides. At last.
She tilted up her chin so that his blunt beak could better reach her throat. “I have been waiting for you a long time, Lord Death.” Her voice whispered like dry wind.
“It is not yet time for you to die,” said Death. His voice was harsh, and echoed of the deep canyons where he made his home.
“How could it not be time? I have no home, no kin, no clan, no companions. I am broken, paralyzed. That smell–do you smell it?–that is my flesh rotting from my bones as I lie in my own shit. What more can the gods expect me to accomplish? What is left for me except death?”
“You are still bound.”
“Bound to what? The gods?”
“To earth,” the raven said, implacably. In the silence, he paced the length of the box, perhaps inspecting her in the darkness. The blanket covered some parts of her ravaged frame, but to cover her feet required that she lever herself up with her arms to toss the blanket, and she had not been strong enough to do this in quite some time. Surely the sight of her feet, spastically curled and with half the toes hacked off, would convince even a god that her usefulness in this world was at an end. But Death paced back to her head again, unperturbed, and fed her a crust of bread, dry and stale and hard as stone, as if she were his fledgling. Her mouth was dry; she could not chew. He brought her a beakful of snow from the drift by the window, and she managed to swallow the dry crumbs. They burned within her like coals in a hearth, and warmed the parts of Zanja’s body where she could still feel the warmth: her torso, her arms, the shattered places of her heart. But the physical agonies that had only recently been numbed at last by cold were not renewed. For a while, she dozed, and awakened to find that her strength had gathered and concentrated around the center of that warmth in her belly. No, she would not step across the threshold just yet.