Zanja said softly, “No, Norina, I would never signal my intent so carelessly, and so sacrifice the advantage of surprise.”

Norina looked amused, as a wolf is amused by the antics of the rabbit she chases. “Tell me how you came to be in the Sainnite prison.”

Zanja could play the game no longer. Wearily, so that the angry woman would leave her alone and let her sleep, she answered her questions as well as she could, considering how little she could remember of the events that Norina seemed to find most interesting. With months of pain and solitude and near insanity lying between this present moment and the massacre of the Ashawala’i, it seemed a distant event in someone else’s life. She had become a ghost, and now Karis’s hand upon her heart had raised her from the dead and brought her forth into a new world, a new body, a new life. The past seemed irrelevant.

As she struggled to remember those horrible, distant events, she gradually became unnerved by the dissecting quality of Norina’s gaze and the weird accuracy of her sharply honed questions. And then, looking up impatiently as Norina asked a third question about something Zanja had twice told her she did not remember, she realized that the unnerving quality of Norina’s gaze was not wholly unfamiliar to her.

She interrupted herself, and said, “We have met before.”

“Really. How long ago?”

“How long has it been since the fall? Fifteen years?”

Norina opened her mouth, then closed it again without asking a question. Zanja had actually managed to surprise her.

Zanja said, “It was my first year to travel with the Speaker, my teacher. Do you remember, in the charterhouse, early in the morning, he was talking with Councilor Mabin? You came in to tell her you were ready to leave. You gathered her papers for her. I stood over by the tea table, watching you, unable to determine what you were. But the Speaker told me later that you are a Truthken.”

Norina said indifferently, “Mabin and the Speaker were arguing.”

“No, it was a cold but courteous conversation.”

“I had just taken my vows.”

“But you had no earring.”

“It was just a few pages of paper.”

“I remember thirty sheets, at least. I have wondered since then if she was writing her famous book– Warfare, is that its title?” Zanja added, forestalling Norina’s attempt to quiz her on further details, “You were dressed in black. There was a brisk fire in the fireplace. The sun was just rising.”

Norina said coldly, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your memory.”

Zanja had thought it might help her cause to remind Norina of their common history. Now, she realized that she only had done herself harm, though she was too stupid with exhaustion to understand how, or why.

Her bowl was empty, and she wished it full again, but with meat and potatoes this time, and some fruit and cheese besides. If not for raging hunger she would have fallen asleep where she sat.

Norina finally said, “Your history is not important. I am charged with Karis’s protection, and you have come in like a snake under the walls I’ve built around her.”

“Karis chose to walk out beyond those walls.”

“It was no choice. Fire attracts earth, and like all earth elementals Karis is particularly drawn to broken things that only she can fix. Certainly, you were sorely broken.“

Zanja looked up at the Truthken then. “If I had done this to myself just to trick her out of hiding, then you would be right to kill me, for I would be an abomination.”

“And there the puzzle lies.” Norina stood up and took the bowl, and returned in a little while with meat and roast potatoes, an apple and a piece of cheese. Little wonder some people become convinced that Truthkens can read their every thought as clearly as though they had been spoken out loud. “J’han thinks I am insane,” Norina said, “and he asked me to warn you that rich food will give you the gripe. You should tell him tomorrow that it did, even though it won’t.” She gave Zanja her eating knife, a valuable Mearish blade with an edge of startling sharpness, and sat with her booted feet stretched out to the fire while Zanja wolfed down the food.

Zanja had swallowed the last of the cheese and was struggling to keep her eyes open when Norina said quietly, “I wish I could make you my ally in protecting Karis, but we are at cross‑purposes. No–” she held up a hand to forestall a protest. “I know you are virtuous and honorable and ready to die in her defense. I know that you have given her your loyalty, and that there is no truer friend than a fire blood. But your visions and passions and moments of insight would be like poison to her. So I have no choice except to keep you away from her. I don’t expect you to be willing.”

Zanja said, “I don’t understand.”

Norina sighed, and for a moment she seemed almost troubled. “I don’t know how to explain it in a way you could accept. Karis is vulnerable and irreplaceable. You are an unpredictable visionary. With vision comes risk. Therefore, you must be kept out of her life.”

“Karis wants me.”

“Karis wants much that she cannot have. And you would do well to remember that Truthkens are executioners.”

Chapter Six

Zanja awakened to pale light filtering through window shutters, and to the hushed crackling sound of cinders cooling in the fireplace. She had fallen asleep where she sat the night before, upon the hearth, naked, with a second blanket that she did not remember being tossed over her. Karis still slept restlessly among twisted blankets, with her legs hanging out over the end of the bed, but Norina was gone. Zanja used the chamber pot and considered the clothing–Norina’s clothing, she assumed–laid out nearby for her to wear. The linen shirt and drawers would be worn next to the skin. The underclothing tied with laces, but the woolen outer clothing, both tunic and breeches, fastened with horn buttons. She then discovered buttonholes at the tops of the hose, and had to undress again, so she could button the hose to the underdrawers. She tottered across the bedroom in this warm but peculiar attire, and opened the door to the kitchen. There, in the light spilling through an unshuttered window, J’han Healer sat yawning at the scarred kitchen table with a reed pen in his hand. Bowls of dried herbs, a mortar and pestle, and a beautiful brass scale lay within his reach.

“You can walk!” he exclaimed.

“Not well.” Zanja stumbled to the hearth, where her knees gave out.

“There’s porridge already made; will you have some?” J’han tucked the pen behind his ear, and got up to serve her, following the porridge with warm milk and honey, several slices of buttered bread, and an infusion of herbs to build up her strength. He brought over a bucket of small green apples, and set it within her reach. “Have you had enough to eat?”

He had put so much effort into feeding her that it would have been cruel to tell him she was still hungry. He returned to his seat at the table, where he weighed and measured herbs into folded paper packets, and sealed them with wax. Though the healers, once renowned hospitalers, had become hunted wanderers after the fall of the House of Lilterwess, this one, at least, seemed to have found more than a home for the winter, for he and Norina had briefly awakened Zanja in the middle of the night as they made love in the kitchen.

He did not speak to Zanja again until she began to halfheartedly tear apart the mats in her hair. “Let me help–I’ll get a comb.”

So she leaned her head weakly upon his knee, and he seemed happy enough with his task, employing every trick Zanja had ever heard of to keep from resorting to the scissors, even before she explained, in response to a question, that her hair was uncut because among her people shorn hair is the mark of the outcast. She liked him all the more when he did not seem troubled that she wept as he worked, and she would even have thought he had not noticed, except that he commented later, “Someone you loved must have once combed your hair.”