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 wood smoke, 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 though 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 to 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 that 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.”