Her somber expression cracked away a bit. “Paladin techniques work well in the mountains.”

Emil sat back to think and sip his tea, and finally brought himself to say, reluctantly, “You will not have an easy time of it in South Hill, and perhaps you would be better off in one of the northern units, where they are more accustomed to the sight of northern tribesmen.”

“I am accustomed to being a stranger.”

Norina added, “She is too well known in the north.”

“Well, then.”

Norina took a money pouch from inside her doublet. “She has no family to support her.” She handed the pouch to Emil, who had not felt such a weight of funds in many a year. “A sponsor,” she explained, though it explained little. Where would a solitary tribal woman find herself a sponsor in such uncertain times?

“This has been a day of many surprises,” he said. The cups of the traveling porcelain tea set were very small, so he refilled them with the rare and expensive green tea. Though no one conducted hospitality rituals anymore, Zanja courteously complimented the tea’s fragrance and flavor, leaving him with the impression that she could have fulfilled her role in the entire ceremony, uncoached, without missing a step. She was not a warm woman, he thought, at least not on the surface. But oh, she was careful, and, like him, she belonged in another world. He fingered his right earlobe, where once had dangled two gold earrings that he had dropped into a well many years ago. The holes had since closed, but the scar tissue remained.

Zanja sat on the floor of the cramped attic, beside a small window that let in a gray, rain‑smeared light onto the page of her book. What with the rain and the thaw, sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was melting. The letters on the page pushed and shoved against each other like people on market day. They gave up their secrets only with much coaxing and study. Then, they offended her first by ranting at her and then by cozening her.

She leafed through the pages of Warfare. In the kitchen directly beneath her, where Emil also read while waiting for the rain to end, she heard him add a log to the fire. On a day like this, the Ashawala’i would sit around the clanhouses, mending their clothes, sharpening their tools, and telling stories. She wished Emil had told her stones, rather than handing her this battered book, with its disembodied demands and disguised angers. Mabin’s Warfare, Emil had said, was the one thing held in common by all the members of South Hill Company. It was a language, philosophy, and history all in one. She needed to know it.

Nevertheless, a rainy day called for a story. Zanja turned the pages until a particularly worn page of the book caught her eye. “The Fall of the House of Lilterwess,” she read, sounding the letters out loud. Though she had learned her letters as a child, during the year she lived with a Shaftali farm family, she had not needed to read very much since then. The book also made occasional use of glyphs, which she could not interpret at all.

She moved the book closer to the cracked windowpane and read out loud:

“When Harald G’deon died, I had been sitting at the head of the Lilterwess Council for three years. It had been considered strange, and even unheard of for a Paladin to head the council, but the majority of the council members had decided a warrior should lead in times of war.

“Unfortunately, Harald G’deon disagreed with the majority. It is commonly known that the G’deon and I, though we accorded each other a great respect, never were at peace with each other. It is still true that when my thoughts are in argument with themselves it is his implacable voice I hear. He was too great‑hearted a man, for he could not believe that the Sainnites meant to harm us. While I argued and he remained unconvinced, the council sat paralyzed and the Sainnites continued to invade our shores. While the G’deon lay dying over a period of many months, he refused to the last to name a successor. So the great succession of G’deons, who for ten generations have protected and made fertile the land of Shaftal, arbitrarily and inexplicably ended, and no one will ever understand why–least of all myself. Harald G’deon at the very least, committed a dreadful error. Some even call it a betrayal.”

As Zanja read, she realized that she was imagining Mabin, who she had only met the one time, speaking these words. On the page, they seemed neutral and harmless, but speaking them aloud revealed the concealed anger and sarcasm. Harald had betrayed Shaftal with his naive obstinacy, according to Mabin. Zanja, disinclined to be generous to a woman she had disliked on sight, suspected that Mabin might be in the habit of considering stupid the things that she merely did not understand.

She continued to read, listening closely to herself now, and hearing how skeptically and ungenerously she interpreted Mabin’s revered text. “The very night of Harald G’deon’s death, the Sainnites attacked the House of Lilterwess. Harald G’deon must have known of the Samnites’ secret encirclement of our sacred home, but he died without the least word of warning that might have spared us all the years of sorrow which have followed. That night, many of us lay wakeful, fearful for the future. The Lilterwess Council never did sleep at all, but sat with our advisors and scribes, free at last to chart a new future for Shaftal. At dawn we planned to gather the Paladins and ride forth against the invaders.

“But the night was not even half over when an alarm bell began to ring. Some wakeful soul–commonly believed to have been Harald G’deon’s companion, Dinal Paladin–must have discovered the breached gate or the assassinated guards. She was certainly the first to die that night, but not before her courage made it possible for some of us, at least, to escape by a secret way. As I stood on a far hilltop that terrible dawn and watched the smoke of destruction blur the sun, I and my companions had much cause to wonder for what purpose we had been spared, while our friends, lovers, children, and whole history were destroyed before our eyes.

“Now our hearts, first stunned by the magnitude of our defeat, then ripped apart with grief and rage, have become cold and hard as stone. The law failed us, we realize now, because it made us gentle. It relied upon a decency at the heart of every community, the willingness of each person in Shaftal to treat the next with generosity and understanding. When strangers came who were estranged from that decency, our kindness became our weakness.

“Therefore there is no longer a place in this war for acts of mercy. Lest we balk at this grim truth, let us always remember that this is a new Shaftal, a Shaftal created by the Samnites. This is the land they wanted. Why should we suffer our pains while they become rich and fat from our labors? It is they who have created this new Shaftal. Let them pay the price.”

Zanja lay down the book, and noted distantly that it had stopped raining. Oddly, Mabin’s last bitter statements had caused her to think not of the Sainnites who had killed her people and who she had and would continue to kill in return, but of Karis. Nowhere did Karis appear in Mabin’s account, except, perhaps, in the reference to unnamed companions. Yet she had been there, she and Norina, two precious talents saved from the destruction.

Zanja looked out the small window at the darkening sky, but what she saw was Karis, apparently a prisoner, possibly out of her mind with smoke, being walked by Norina to the wagon. She thought of the old suicide scars on Karis’s wrists. Was it simple dislike that made Zanja want to make Mabin the source of Karis’s misery, or was it fire logic?

Throughout the cold winter and into the harsh early spring, Zanja had scarcely thought of Karis. Karis had sent the artful blades she had promised as a poor substitute for friendship, and Zanja had accepted them. Now, she was a Paladin, and soon would wage war against the destroyers of her people. Still, thinking of Karis now, Zanja felt a restlessness, and a haunting loss. Why? she asked herself, and could not think of an answer.