“It is?” Puzzled, Zanja examined their droppings‑strewn shelter: the raven, who ate oats greedily, the plain round loaf of bread and the jug and eggs that waited beside it on the ground, and Karis again, who gazed at her steadily, as though waiting for something. Zanja remembered how the day had begun, but she remembered nothing else. Now, a green and raw energy pulsed in her wasted body, like sap rising in winter’s skeletal trees, and Karis, who that morning had seemed gigantic in spirit as well as body, now seemed diminished, exhausted, worn to the bone. It was as though she had poured herself into the wreck of Zanja’s flesh until all her reserves were exhausted.
Zanja said, “ Serrain, I don’t understand you.”
Karis slid into the cleft and crouched close to Zanja, so close that drops of melting snow from her hair stung the skin of Zanja’s hand. “Why do you call me ‘Serrain’? What does it mean?”
“I–honor you. I don’t know how it’s proper to address a Shaf‘ tali elemental…”
“So you’re making me a stranger.”
“No, my people value formality–”
Karis looked away, the line of her body a cipher of frustration. “But if you were being impetuous, even foolhardy?”
“Karis.” It did seem foolhardy, even to call her by name like this. “You could have my servitude, for surely I owe you whatever you demand. So why demand a friendship, which requires an obligation in return?”
“How else could my behavior possibly be explained, except as fulfilling an obligation? Well, madness, I suppose.”
“It does seem like madness,” Zanja said.
“Do you think so?” In body and in spirit Karis filled a great deal of space, and Zanja was fighting with herself to keep from backing away. There was something of the raven in Karis’s way of waiting for Zanja to speak: intent, expectant, almost apprehensive. Unlike the fire bloods, earth bloods normally were stable as stone, but it appeared that Karis doubted her own sanity.
Zanja said, “Perhaps it only seems like madness since you are a complete stranger and have no reason to be obligated to me. But–” The inexplicable certainty of insight rose up in her and she said in astonishment, “but in the future, I will serve you, and you will indeed be obligated–”
Karis let out her breath as though someone had suddenly slammed a fist into her back.
Zanja reached for Karis’s hand. It was surprisingly warm, and had a fluttering tremor, like a palsy. Karis’s other hand rested upon her thigh. When Zanja touched it to turn it over, it flexed involuntarily but did not pull away. Upon this wrist, as upon the other, was inscribed in faded scars an old despair. There had been a time, years ago, when Karis had tried to kill herself.
And then she remembered: the gangly, extraordinarily tall young woman, a refugee from the fall of the House of Lilterwess, being escorted like a prisoner to the waiting wagon. She remembered how she had watched her being carried away, and how the sight had laid a horror upon her heart.
She looked up into Karis’s shadowed face. That despairing prisoner certainly had been she, though she hardly seemed helpless any longer. Karis broke the silence with a voice that strained to seem indifferent, “If I simply sat here in silence long enough, would you discover all my secrets?”
“I’m beginning to think I might.”
She still held Karis’s trembling hand. In the silence, she could hear how unsteadily Karis breathed. Zanja didn’t say anything, fearing that she had already been too presumptuous. Then Karis said, “There was a time that I could not endure my life. I wish it were my worst dishonor or my greatest shame. But the truth is that I dishonor myself every day, and will do so again today.”
She had spoken these terrible words with a bleak hopelessness that defied response. Zanja groped her way out of that silence with uncertain words. “Surely … if it were true that you have no honor, then there would be no reason for you to be so tortured.”
“I have no honor,” Karis said heavily. “I would–and can–do anything for smoke.”
Three months ago, Zanja would have dropped Karis’s drug palsied hand and pulled away in involuntary disgust. But she had seen repugnance in the eyes of her Sainnite guards every day since then, as they recoiled from her crippled body. Karis, though, had touched her without hesitation or disgust. So now Zanja held onto Karis’s hand. “You consider yourself responsible,” she said. “Call it what you will, it seems honorable to me.”
A long time Karis gazed at her, until the raven said harshly, “You are in dire danger!”
“Oh, shut up.” But Karis gently eased her hand from Zanja’s grasp.
Zanja said, “What kind of danger?”
“More kinds of danger than I can begin to name,” Karis said briskly, and served without ceremony the scavenged meal of bread as hard as stone, milk fresh from the cow, eggs raw in the shell. Zanja ate like the starved soul she was; Karis ate as though she were doing the food a favor. While Zanja ate, she considered whether she might demand to be told what Karis had to fear. If she had been caught up in this strange woman’s destiny and was somehow to do her a great service, then surely she might be in a position to insist upon the truth.
When the last dry crumb was gone and the raven had pecked apart the emptied eggshells, Karis said suddenly, “Well, there’s a farmstead not far from here, where I imagine they would take you in, and even marry you into the family. Isolated places like this get hungry for new blood, and it’s a prosperous little farm. I could give you a bit of a dowry, to ease your way.”
Zanja said, bewildered, “Wherever you go, I am going with you.”
“No, you are not.” Karis busied herself with getting ready to go.
The day had succumbed to a cold twilight. Zanja looked down at her wasted limbs. “But I am no threat to you. Even in my full strength–”
Karis looked up sharply, and Zanja saw how distressed she was. “Under smoke I am utterly defenseless.”
“After you saved my life and took such risks, I couldn’t even think of harming you.”
Karis slung the horse blanket over her shoulder.
“But still, you dare not trust me? I’ll swear you an oath. My word is my honor–your raven, who knows my entire life, can tell you as much.”
Trembling, glassy‑eyed, Karis said, “An oath would make no difference. I can’t take you with me.”
Zanja said, “Then leave me where I am.”
“You’ll freeze to death this very night!”
“I do not want a life that has no purpose.”
Karis said angrily, “I’ll carry you to the farm against your will, if I must.”
Zanja waited. Ransel always said there was something uncanny about her ability to distinguish a true threat from a bluff. Karis sat back on her heels. “What oath?”
“Before my god Salos’a, She Who Travels Between the Worlds, I swear I will value your life as my own, protect you from harm when you are injured, serve your interests when you are absent, guard your back in every battle, love your friends and hate your enemies, and honor your name in life and in death.” It was the oath Zanja and Ransel had sworn to each other when they were scarcely more than children.
Karis said, “Now you are being foolhardy.”
“You think I would choose to sit warm and dry in some farmer’s cottage, while you go forth alone into the bitter night? That I would be content to live out my days bearing children and hoeing corn when I could have embraced a perilous destiny instead? You do not know me, Karis.”
“I know Norina, to whose house we are going. She will blame you that I put myself at your mercy. And you will indeed be in peril.” Karis crawled out of the burrow and whistled shrilly for the horse.
The snow lay deep upon the barren hills, which swelled like a lovely woman’s breasts under a gray silk sky. In the cleft between them clustered groves of leafless trees, and far away in the lower country Zanja thought she spotted a speck of light, perhaps a window of that farm where a warm fire burned behind thick windowpanes.