Zanja said shakily, “It is–an artwork. I’ve never seen its like.” She returned the magnificent blade to Norina, who sheathed it absently, seeming preoccupied with a Truthken’s arcane calculation.

Karis said, “Perhaps you’ll accept a blade like it, as a poor substitute for the friendship we’ll never have.”

Only then did Zanja realize whose vision the beautiful blade embodied, and whose hand had held the hammer that folded that bright molten blade into its final form. “I’ll send it to you by midwinter,” Karis said. “Have you had enough sunshine? I think I might be feeling cold.”

Norina’s bundle contained bread and ham and a pair of new boots that fit Zanja as though they were made for her, though in fact they had been made for Norina. Norina sent J’han away to attend a difficult birth she had heard about while in Leston, and the three of them had a surprisingly peaceable day. Zanja slept and ate for most of it, and once when she awakened upon the kitchen hearth she found herself covered by the sheepskin jerkin, which smelled, she realized now, of coal smoke and the forge. Karis and Norina were chopping vegetables for a ham stew and discussing a book of political philosophy. Norina said something that Zanja could not understand, and Karis burst out laughing and put her arm around her. They stood so for a while, leaning against each other, silent, mysteriously united by ideas, knowledge, and experiences that Zanja did not, and could not share.

The na’Tarweins were infamous for their jealousies, but Zanja had so far managed to avoid that well‑worn path. It seemed intolerable that Karis would leave, that Zanja would spend the winter here with this admirable but unlikeable woman, that these few hours she’d spent with Karis were all she would ever have. Norina was the barrier that stood between them. Unfortunately, thanks to the oath that Zanja had sworn to Karis, that barrier was permanent.

Zanja would have to make a life for herself alone, on the other side of this barren winter. But now she might steal a few more moments with Karis before sunset and smoke took her away, and so she sat up and asked Karis to explain what philosophy was, and what it was good for. That question took the rest of the day for Karis to answer. The sun set too soon.

Thus ended their brief and strange two‑day friendship, for the next morning’s brief and inarticulate goodbyes hardly counted as anything more than empty ritual.

Part 2

Fire Night

Without courage, there would be no will to know.

Without the will to know, there would be no knowledge.

Without knowledge, there would be no language.

Without language, there would be no community.

–MACKAPEE’S Principles

for Community

Who is seen to speak to the enemy must be silenced. Who

sympathizes with the enemy must lose their heart. Who dreams of

peace must dream no more. Those who ravaged the land will be

eliminated: without compromise, without mercy.

–

MABIN’S

Warfare

When I first met my enemy, she was a glyph, and it was I who

chose to read her as my friend. When my enemy first met me, I was

a glyph, and it was she who chose to read me as her friend. So all

people are glyphs, and every understanding comes from choice.

– MEDRIC’S

History of My Fathers People

Chapter Seven

Emil habitually wintered in a shepherd’s cottage in the highlands, a place so solitary and forbidding that he rarely saw another living being, animal or human, between first snow and spring thaw. The cold became tiring, but he never grew weary of the solitude or the silence. When weather permitted, he would walk on snowshoes from one end of the highland to the other, and the austere and terrible beauty of that wild land would take root, and create in him a serenity all the more precious because he knew from experience how ephemeral and fleeting it would prove, come spring. When the wind howled and the falling snow made of the vast expanses a small and restless blank, he stayed indoors and read yet again by candlelight the words of the great Shaftali philosophers until whole passages became as palpable to him as a single word, a single thought. Every moment, every breath of frigid air, every flicker of candle and crackle of ice became precious. For most of the year his life belonged to the law, but in winter, his life was his.

Inevitable spring allowed him one last walk across the frozen water of the Finger Lakes, where he cleared the snow to watch the fish through ice as clear as glass. But as he stood on a rise of land about to turn toward home, he heard the sharp report of cracking ice. So the muddy thaw began.

Some twenty days later, during a break in the rain, he was planting flowering peas along the fence when something, a faint sound or a tingling of the skin, made him turn sharply, to see a pair of riders coming down the narrow from the direction of Gariston. In nearly thirty years as a Paladin he had come to trust his small talent for prescience, which never told him very much, but told it dependably. Knowing he had no reason for concern, he turned back to his pea planting until the travelers had ridden close enough to talk to. The horses were tired and muddy to the belly, for the roads surely had scarcely been passable. One rider looked cross; the other’s face was a closed door.

“Emil Paladin?” said the cross one. “I am Norina Truthken.”

He bowed to her in the old fashion, though he was not happy that the solitude of his last precious days had been disturbed.

The riders dismounted, and it was the silent one that Emil watched. Plain farmer’s clothing could not obscure her exotic appearance: the dark coloring and the sharp angles of her face. She moved with the fluidity and precision of a blade fighter, who had learned her skills in a place where pistols and gunpowder had not yet eliminated all the beauty and skill from combat. She looked up to meet his gaze with her own: eyes black as night, with a flame in their centers.

“By Shaftal!” Emil reached to clasp hand. “I think I remember your name. Zanja, am I right? When I heard about the Ashawala’i, I wondered what had become of you.”

“I guess they did make you a commander,” she said.

“I’m afraid they did. And all these years I have been making the best of it.” He gazed at her, feeling the distance from which she observed him, remembering the reserved but talented young woman she had been. She would be over thirty now, and for fifteen years her intelligence had been sharpened by bitter experience. He said, “I hope you have come to join my company.”

“Yes, sir,” she said impassively. Her face held back everything. Emil invited them to settle their horses and come in for tea.

Once they were all seated in the kitchen, with the Truthken choosing a chair and the tribal woman sitting on her heels, he poured tea from his small porcelain teapot and sliced bread fresh from the oven, on which they melted slices of midlands cheese produced from Norina’s saddlebag. Though the two women had certainly been traveling together for days, they exchanged not a word with each other. A silent journey it must have been.

Norina said, “Well, Commander, I see I need not explain who Zanja is. I have been charged with finding a place for her among the Paladins, and your company was suggested.“

“They say that a few survivors of the initial attack all but wiped out a battalion,” Emil said to Zanja.

“No, but seventeen of us did kill some sixty Sainnites.”

“It is more than my company has killed in six years.”