“My brother Ransel,” she said. “He was killed near summer’s end.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. My brother used to comb my hair too. It’s been years since I saw him last.”

The healer had gotten up once to tend the fire, when the bedroom door opened suddenly, and Karis crouched through into the kitchen, red‑eyed as a crapulous drunk. She dazedly examined the room as she fumbled with shirt buttons. Her wandering gaze chanced across Zanja’s face, and paused.

“Try a swallow of this,” the healer said. He had leapt to his feet, and offered Karis an earthenware flask.

“J’han,” Karis rasped in her smoke‑ruined voice.

J’han looked startled, as though he had not expected her to know his name.

She sipped from the flask, and lifted a hand to her throat.

“Those with Juras blood have such beautiful voices,” the healer said.

Zanja looked at Karis, startled, as if she had not seen her before. She had heard of the Juras, a tribe of giants that were said to dwell far to the south of Shaftal, at the edge of a great waterless wasteland. It was said that the sound of their singing could cause the stars to tremble in the sky. Perhaps Karis’s voice could not be fully mended, but the ghost of its lost richness echoed now behind the hoarseness as she thanked him and then sat down heavily in a chair that was too small for her long frame. With a crease between her brows, she reached down to brush a thumb across Zanja’s tear‑stained cheekbone. The gesture left Zanja speechless.

“Can you eat yet?” J’han asked Karis.

“Chew tongue,” she slurred.

J’han seemed scarcely able to restrain his curiosity, and the corner of Karis’s mouth quirked a bit. “Angry Norina?”

“She is on one of her rampages,” he admitted.

“My fault.” Karis’s big, work‑hardened hands folded together, finger by finger, and she rested her forehead upon this support as though she had much to think about. “Where is she?” she asked after a while.

“She needed to go to Leston.”

Karis raised her head. “Did she sleep last night?”

J’han opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“No,” Karis said for him. “Shaftal protect us.”

Apparently having decided that Karis’s mouth had been released from its paralysis, J’han distractedly served her some breakfast. She ate carefully, dutifully, without apparent appetite. Watching her, Zanja remembered something she had heard once about smoke addicts, but had not heeded because it seemed absurd: that they lived in lack of pain, and die for lack of pleasure. Karis ate as though she had been trained to do it; smoke surely had destroyed her sense of taste, just as it had her sense of touch. And so, Zanja realized with a shock, Karis would indeed be deprived of both desire and agency, since the earth bloods understand through physical sensation. It must have taken an enormous talent indeed for Karis to have healed and rescued Zanja with so little apparent difficulty.

“Is there a place where I can sit in the sun?” Zanja asked.

J‘han had returned to his labors at the table. He said with some surprise, “It’s bitter cold out there.”

“I’ve been in the dark for months.”

“Well, there’s a bench out by the barn. I’ll let you use my shoes, but I doubt you can walk in snow, considering the trouble you had with walking on a solid floor.”

“I’ll go out with you.” Karis fastened her bootstraps, and Zanja put on J’han’s shoes and his doublet of quilted wool that he had worn the night before. On the way out the door, Karis asked for a slice of bread, which she held in the air as soon as the door was closed, and the raven swooped down to snatch it out of her hand.

Supported on Karis’s arm, Zanja made it to the frost‑encrusted bench without falling. The light reflected from the snow was bright enough to make her eyes tear up. She said, “I don’t know how much you remember. But last night I frightened you, and I owe you an apology.”

Karis frowned as if she were trying to remember a dream. “That’s right, you did.”

“I should have explained first what I was doing. It didn’t occur to me.”

Karis sat down beside her. “Smoke and rape go together,” she said, “like bread and butter. It’s a lesson hard to forget, once learned.”

Zanja felt a searing shame, for she understood far better than she should have the attraction of that helplessness. “You never should have taken me with you, and I never should have forced you into it.”

Karis said, “But your oath was good.”

“Of course my oath was good. But how could you have known that? And still, we nearly died of cold.”

Karis closed her eyes to the bright sun, and murmured, “You sound so like Norina, it’s almost funny. And you’re even wearing her clothes.”

Zanja did not find it funny at all, for she might admire Norina’s genius and yet have no desire to imitate it. “She and I know the truth in different ways,” she said. “My way is much more messy: confused and hazardous. I’ll never have Norina’s certainty, but I’ll never want it, either.”

Karis began to laugh, and seemed to find it hard to stop. “Blessed day,” she said at last, wiping her eyes upon her sleeve, “You dismay me. What did Norina do to you last night, to leave you so bitter in the morning? Not that I can’t imagine it, mind you, since I’ve known her half my life.” When Zanja did not–could not–speak, Karis looked over at her and said more gently, “You must have put her in a panic. I wish I could have seen such a rarity.”

“You flatter me.”

“I dared hope that once she’d seen beneath your skin you might become friends somehow. A fond hope, I know; but still, Norina can be a fine friend. She does it in her own way, but she’s appallingly reliable.”

“Did you wonder if we might be adversaries instead?”

There was a silence. Karis said in a muted voice, “I confess, that is a novelty that hadn’t even occurred to me. I want to ask, adversaries over what? But that makes me sound naive.” She leaned her head back and shut her eyes again, wearing her sadness like an old and familiar shirt. “But if you had wanted to try to control a wild power–” her voice was heavy with irony “–you missed your opportunity when you had my smoke purse in your hand and didn’t take it. So it’s not power you and Norina are adversaries over, and what else is there?”

Sitting beside Karis, with the warmth from her powerful left arm soaking into the wasted flesh of Zanja’s right shoulder, Zanja abruptly found herself unable to answer; unwilling, in fact, to continue down this path of conversation that she had embarked on so boldly. She said, knowing that she had intended to say something quite different, “I have sworn you an oath of friendship, and I have foreseen that I am destined to serve you. But Norina says that my visions and passions would be poison to you, and she threatened to kill me if I don’t stay away from you.”

She felt Karis’s muscles twitch, but when Karis spoke, Zanja heard nothing in her voice to explain that spasm of shock or pain. Without emotion, she said, “Norina often takes it upon herself to teach people their duty.”

So, Zanja thought, I am to lead an empty life.

But Karis continued after a moment, her voice straining, “When I was young, not twelve years old, my master thought that smoke would make me a better whore. He’d gone through great expense to raise me from infancy, because he knew that my mother’s size and strength had made her popular with the Sainnites. But I was such a disappointment to him: willful, disobedient, tearful, rude to the clients. And perhaps, as he realized how large I would grow, he also began to fear my eventual strength. So he made me into a smoke addict, to ensure my compliance.”

Zanja felt Karis’s weight shift, and she turned to find her peering into her face. “What would it take to shock you?”

Zanja said steadily enough, “You found me paralyzed and mutilated and lying in my own shit, yet you never shamed me for it. Surely I owe you the same courtesy.”