Zanja said, “So now you must become accustomed to being treated with affection and respect by three fire bloods. Why is it terrible to be so richly perceived now?”
Karis flinched as a particularly strong tremor shook her frame. “If I live–then I will fail your hopes. Shaftal–I am so tired.”
“Our hopes for what?”
Karis shuddered again. Sweat beaded her forehead as if she endured an intense pain. “Whatever you want. Deliverance. The healing of the world. All things I cannot do.”
Zanja said softly, “Even the gods could not save my people from destruction. So if Shaftal is to be saved, it seems it must happen in a more ordinary way. Karis, how can I give you peace? Shall I tell you that I’m simply fulfilling my long overdue obligation in a trade agreement? You broke into a Sainnite prison and saved my life and rescued me; now I have broken into a Paladin prison and saved your life and rescued you. It’s a simple exchange. Or would it make you feel better if I tell you that once I’ve made you indebted to me I have every intention of abusing your sense of obligation? That wouldmake you feel better.”
Karis began to laugh, but it was painful to watch.
Zanja said, “But the truth is that I dare not let you die, nor dare I release your secret to the world, for Norina will hunt me down and skewer me.”
“That’s true,” Karis said. “But it’s not the whole truth.”
“Well, of course, I am devoted to you. So why can you accept devotion from Norina and not from me?”
Karis’s hand clenched convulsively in Zanja’s, her palm sticky with sweat. “I accept Norina’s duty,” she said. “But you have no excuse.”
The convulsions began.
Even the worst of battles has an end, but for Karis the siege never seemed to lift. Three times between each sunrise, Zanja sat beside her as she fought her tedious, horrifying struggle, only to give in, over and over again. With slowness that seemed unendurable, Karis won back her life from smoke, gaining ground so slowly that many a time it seemed as though she won nothing at all. It was a wearying, desperate, grinding labor of will that yielded too little reward. Days of sudden fevers and devastating fits of nausea gave way to days of dispirited exhaustion and irritable boredom. Then, Karis made a water clock by piercing a hole in an empty pot and hanging it to drip water into a container. This clock became her enemy, and the changing containers Zanja put down to catch the water defined the progress of the combat. For seven days the time Karis called her own could not fill one of Emil’s tiny porcelain teacups. But then the teacup overflowed and Zanja’s battered tin porringer replaced it.
Ten more drops of water today than yesterday, and tomorrow it would be ten more. Medric timed the water drops with Emil’s watch, then worked a cipher on the stone floor with a piece of charcoal. At this rate, a year would pass before Karis was smoking only once a day again. Zanja made him erase it before Karis could see the grim numbers.
One afternoon, when Zanja came out of the shadowed cave into the rich warmth of the late summer sunshine, Medric was waiting for her. Karis had just smoked, and had fallen into an exhausted sleep. This was not the first time either Medric or Emil lay in wait for Zanja, but only now did she realize that it was no accident. The two of you are taking turns,“ she said.
Medric grinned. “It’s a measure of how preoccupied you are that it took so long for you to realize it. Here, sit down. I want to talk to you.”
She sat on one of the large stones that served them as furniture. The entire population of the Otter People’s village seemed to be out on the lake this warm afternoon. One of the young people engaged in a raucous boat race was a stocky, brown‑haired South Hill farmer who seemed on the verge of tipping her boat into the water. It hardly mattered, since Annis wore no clothing. The sun had cooked her brown as a loaf of overcooked bread. Someone dumped Annis into the water and she came up laughing.
“There is a shadow over Karis,” Medric said. “And it lies over you as well, since you have bound yourself to share her fate.”
“What shadow?” Zanja asked. “Death, is that it? Madness? Neither one seems worse than this torture.”
Medric said, “A moment of decision is coming upon you, a time when you must see clearly and speak with courage. But you have lost your vision. Karis’s whole attention is on the water dripping from her clock, and there’s a kind of madness in that–one that you have come to share with her. Here, eat this.”
He had given her a piece of the Otter People’s flatbread, with some of the ubiquitous smoked fish rolled up inside. Zanja ate it rather as Karis would have done, obediently, without hunger or pleasure. Medric pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose and gazed rather blearily out across the water, blinking in the glare. “These water folk make me see how much we fire bloods are bound by our seriousness. Everything we do seems fraught with importance. It’s easy to lose perspective.” He took off his spectacles and put on the other pair. “Aha!”
Zanja said, “What can’t I see?”
“I have seen Karis lift a hammer and strike, and the sparks fall around her in a shower of gold. I see her shaping the world on her forge.”
There was a silence. Zanja said, “Will you stay here for a while and keep an eye on Karis? I want a bath.”
She took the cake of soap and bathed in the downriver end of the lake, washing even her stinking clothing and dirty hair, and when she came back with her dripping laundry in her arms, Medric loaned her a clean shirt to wear and combed her hair for her. Then, as Zanja braided her hair, he read out loud from one of the half dozen books that he and Emil continued to haul around with them, though most of the library was safely stored. He read a history of a time so ancient the story seemed more myth than fact, yet the tale had an eerie familiarity: a tale of people arriving by sea to a land inhabited by tribal folk, and how at first they had been conquerors until at last the land tamed them and taught them how to live upon it. That land had been Shaftal.
Zanja lay back, with her hair only half braided, dazed by cleanliness and sunshine and the easy rhythms of Mednc’s reading voice, and the ancient cycles of history. Medric broke off and said, “Here’s Emil, looking grumpy, and the water witch.”
Zanja sat up and rubbed her eyes. Two boats had landed on the beach. The water witch, carrying a heavy jug, went into Karis’s cave. Zanja started to get up, but Emil’s hand restrained her. Medric went back to his reading, and then he and Emil sat talking about history for hours. When at last the water witch reappeared, he crouched down beside Zanja and said, “Give her the water to drink until she has drunk dry the jug.”
“Esteemed sir, as you will,” she said, and bowed.
He got into his boat and rowed away.
“You absorb language like paper absorbs ink,” said Medric admiringly.
“Land have mercy,” Emil said, “isn’t the man tired yet? He took me on a half‑day journey upstream until my arms were about to fall off from rowing, and then we had to climb the cliff to a little spring that bubbled out from a crack in the stone. I’m certain he explained it to me, but unlike Zanja, I don’t understand a word he says.”
Zanja said, “You obviously are the elder of our tribe. Therefore, you stand witness on our behalf.”
“Witness to what, though?” Emil said, rubbing a stiff shoulder.
Medric lifted his head and smiled suddenly. Zanja turned to look at what he was seeing, and leapt to her feet and ran to the doorway of the little cave, where Karis stood, braced between stones. Karis said thickly, “If I’m to receive guests now I should be more presentable.” She dropped her shirt, which she had been unbuttoning, and walked across the beach and into the water.