It was cold, bitter cold, and would be colder still if the wind picked up. Karis waded in knee‑deep snow as she carried Zanja down the hillside to the waiting horse. Trembling had taken over her entire frame, and she stumbled in the snow like a dying animal struggling to remain afoot. Her skin, where Zanja touched it, was clammy, and the color had drained out of her face. Zanja had seen many a warrior stricken to the heart who looked no better than this: dazed and shiny‑eyed as her soul already started down the last path. Karis managed to lift Zanja to the horse’s back, and stood leaning against the beast’s broad shoulder, breathing shallowly as though she might faint, fumbling one‑handed at the buttons of her woolen shirt.
Zanja worked one hand under the cinch to hold herself steady on the horse’s unsaddled back. “Can I help?”
The raven, now perched upon the horse’s rump, said, “Leave her be.”
Zanja looked hastily away as Karis drew a smoke purse out from within her shirt. Zanja once had curiously examined such a purse in the marketplace, not realizing until later what it was for. It would contain a tin matchbox filled with expensive sulfur matches, a charred pipe of carved wood, and a supply of the drug, each small piece wrapped in a twist of waxed paper.
The raven said, “The horse will be unable to carry the two of you in such deep snow. You’ll have to ride alone, while she walks.”
“I will stay on the horse somehow,” Zanja said. She would tie herself to the cinch if she had to.
She heard the crack and sputter of a match being lit, and smelled the stink of sulfur, and then a second smell, like burning mold, the scent of dark alleyways and dilapidated doorways. Karis sighed out her breath and said, suddenly and clearly, “Zanja, the raven is only clever in certain ways. You will have to use your judgment.”
“I understand,” Zanja said, continuing to gaze out at the landscape.
“And you must instruct me–much as we both … dislike the idea. I will obey you. I will–have to.”
The raven said, “You didn’t take a second breath of smoke. Do it now.” Karis said nothing, but Zanja heard another heavy sigh. “Now pack the purse–shake the ashes out of the pipe first–and button your shirt.”
Zanja took off the sheepskin doublet and leaned down to put it on Karis. Karis allowed herself to be clothed and fastened against the cold, all the while gazing into Zanja’s face with the eyes of an infant: startlingly blue and terribly, invitingly helpless. Zanja said to her, her voice strange and rough in her ears, “Good raven, does she have no cap to wear?”
The answer, it seemed, was no, and neither could the raven reassure Zanja that Karis’s boots were well greased or her stockings warm enough to keep her feet from freezing. Karis had embarked on her cold journey no better equipped than a pauper.
Zanja would have to keep Karis moving so that she would not freeze, and perhaps in the end the horse would still have to carry them both. For now, though, Zanja wrapped herself in the heavy blanket, and hoped that their journey would not take so very long.
“It will take half the night at least,” the raven said, when they had started in the direction he told her.
Zanja sighed, dismayed anew. “Is Norina her commander? Her lover?”
The raven cawed a harsh and even bitter laugh. “Lover? Smoke deprives its users of both agency and desire. And,” he added gleeful at her shock, “Norina will happily kill you.”
Some hours had passed when the clouds parted to reveal the light‑edged blades of the stars, none of which seemed to be in quite the right place any more. Zanja gazed up at them, stunned by cold and by the beauty of the night sky, which she had never expected to see again. The relocated stars reminded her how far she was from home, and how much she was altered, and how much she had forgotten. The obedient giant trudged listlessly through the snow, breaking the way for the horse and perhaps being broken in the process. The snow cracked like ice beneath her weight. The iron chill invaded Zanja’s flesh, cutting like knife to bone.
When Karis tripped over the road stones and fell into the road, Zanja dazedly thought that it must be her fault. And then she came out of her daze enough to realize what danger they were in. “How close are we?” she cried to the raven, who had flown to Karis and flapped around her as she floundered to her feet again. There was blood, Zanja saw, in the snow. Earth blood. The spilling of it would bless this spot, and the road workers would curse the weeds that would displace the stones here with grand abandon, come spring, and only Zanja would know why, if she lived until then.
The horse had followed Karis into the road, and nosed her gently, as though she were a foundering foal. “Karis, come here,” Zanja slurred. Karis came, and stood quietly as Zanja brushed the snow from her shirt front and her hair, stopped her nosebleed with the help of some snow, and then felt her hands, which seemed even colder than her own. She slipped her fingers into the breast of Karis’s shirt. Karis gazed up at her, seemingly relaxed, with her lips parted, but suddenly breathing too quickly, and with her heart pounding against Zanja’s hand. What did Karis fear? That Zanja would embrace the temptation of that terrible, malleable innocence? Or that she would take the smoke purse and so take control of all Karis’s choices?
Zanja hastily removed her hand and said, “Karis, your heart is still warm–that sheepskin doublet will keep you alive, at least. But you’re too tired to continue, and I am too cold. Perhaps the smoke keeps you from even knowing that you’re tired. But you were tired to start with, and perhaps you didn’t know it then, either.”
The raven had been watching Zanja as if considering whether to peck her to pieces. But now, he said with great civility, “We’ve gone more than half the distance.”
“How much more than half?”
“Not much at all.”
“Then this journey is going to end badly, good raven. There is no shelter nearby?”
“No.”
Zanja’s emaciated frame had begun to shiver uncontrollably, with cold or with weakness. “Karis–should have abandoned me– she could have ridden. I should not have been so insistent. Now we both are in danger.”
The raven watched her, with inscrutable raven’s eyes.
“We will die without help,” Zanja said.
There was a weight and warmth against Zanja’s knee where Karis had leaned suddenly. Perhaps, in that long silence, she was considering Zanja’s words, in however slow or strange a way. The raven said, “Follow the road south to the third set of milestones, and then go east into the woods. Due east, until you reach a ridge, then follow the ridge to the southeast. You understand?”
“Yes.”
The raven still hesitated, as though he wanted to admonish her further, or threaten her perhaps. Then, the raven spread his wings, and flew into the darkness.
Following Zanja’s instructions, Karis struggled to mount the horse, and even using a large stone as a mounting block almost could not succeed. But when at last she rode behind Zanja, with the blanket wrapped around them both, they had a little warmth for a while, which they shared between them like two starvelings might share a piece of bread.
Only in winter did the sky seem at once so bright and so dark. The sharp‑edged lights of the night sky crowded down upon the frozen earth, but their fires were cold. When it came time to leave the road and go east among the trees, a steady shower of dislodged snow flung itself at them, like sparks falling from the stars’ bitter fires. Zanja began to shiver again, and all her many disciplines could not keep her attention from wandering down unlikely and devious paths, which more often than not brought her up short at a shattered ravine where something had happened that she could not and did not wish to remember.