By the time they returned to Otter Lake, Zanja was utterly confounded. Karis had used herself up by then, and they stopped to rest on a rock at the edge of the beach. The sun had dropped below the canyon rim, but the rock retained its warmth, and Zanja lay back upon it and shut her eyes, only to be assailed by a chaos of emotion that her disciplines could hardly keep in check. So this was love, she thought ironically, and hoped she’d soon discover the remedy for it. Then, she felt a mouth touch hers, tentatively, curiously, and she opened her eyes to find Karis’s somber face, carved into hollows by her hard tight with smoke, so close that Zanja scarcely would have had to move to kiss her again. Zanja said desperately, “Now you are torturing me.”
“I’m torturing myself,” Karis said. She sat back, but Zanja still could scarcely breathe. “If my hands had been cut off I’d still be interested in picking things up, and I might even try it once in a while.”
Zanja said, in a voice that did not seem hers, “Please don’t try it again.”
“Then how am I to live as well and joyfully as I can? You pose me quite a paradox.”
Karis had given Zanja’s scarcely functioning mind a glyph of words to figure out. While Zanja floundered in her divination, Karis sat with her chin upon her fist. Sometimes, a trembling passed over her. At last, Kans spoke again. “Maybe you’ve been merciless for good reasons, but you’ve been merciless nonetheless.”
“It’s a wonder you can stand my company,” Zanja said stiffly. “Surely it’s not pleasant to be reminded constantly of what you cannot have.”
“Zanja, I could have whatever I wanted, if only I couldwant it. But I’m not like you, for even when you lay paralyzed, with your back broken, you still could want something. So you could imagine a life worth living, though there was much you might want and be unable to have. It’s not the having that matters to you, am I right? So you can imagine living your whole life beside me, in a state of unfulfilled desire, and that’s acceptable to you because it is desire itself that gives you joy. But I am an earth witch and no matter how rich my life of heart and mind become–and I am rich now, richer than I ever have been–it never can amount to joy. I need the earth, the flesh, the life of the skin. Without that, this whole thing–” she gestured at the shadowed canyon, the vivid sky, “–is just an intellectual exercise.”
Zanja sat up, more bewildered by herself than she was by Karis. “I can’t explain it, but I know that what you’ve said is only half the truth. You’re standing in a doorway looking in one direction and thinking that what you see is all there is. But if you turned around you’d see something else entirely.”
If Karis had received a classical education, then surely she would know that the Woman of the Doorway faces danger any way she looks. But Karis did not state this obvious objection, and she sighed and seemed relieved, as though this very peculiar conversation had served a purpose only she could comprehend. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try to turn around. I apologize for my behavior,” she added. “It seemed like you wanted to give me some comfort yesterday with all your talk of Ransel–a model friendship, untainted by desire. But it only made me realize how much I detest the compromise you’re offering. So I thought of how I’ve learned to feel the metal beneath my hammer, not by touch, but by knowing it from within. I thought I might know you that way.”
“How is that different from what you had to do in Lalali?” Zanja put her head in her hands. “You can know me without touching me.
“If I were a fire blood, yes.”
“I see,” Zanja said, in the grip of a deep dismay.
After a while, Karis’s big hand stroked softly down the back of Zanja’s shirt, and Karis said, “There’s no point agonizing. I just want you to understand.”
“I can’t understand without agonizing,” Zanja said. But she lifted her head and added shakily, “You’ll be wanting to get back.”
Karis stood up and they started down the beach, and after a while Karis closed her hand around Zanja’s. “Norina already has left her child and is traveling north. I had promised to send the raven before her labor began, so if I know Norina, she’s in a panic now.”
Zanja said, “Well, we can’t have her tearing apart the countryside looking for us, with no idea of what the dangers are. I’ll have to go find her, somehow, before Mabin does.”
Karis nodded. Zanja’s hand felt like it was pinched in a trembling vice.
“How soon do you think I’d have to leave?”
“She’s traveling very fast, and we’ll want to catch her well before Strongbridge. That’s what, six day’s travel from here?”
“At least.”
“At least? Then you should leave tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!”
Karis said softly, “I agree. It’s much too soon.”
“She’ll come rampaging in–”
“She will,” Karis agreed.
They had walked in silence almost to the cave before either one of them spoke again. Zanja said, “The last time I left you, you disappeared.”
“Well you could be the one who disappears this time. I’m sure Mabin is looking for you. You should take Emil with you.”
“No. Emil stays with you. Emil and Medric both.”
“With Medric and the water witch looking out for me–”
“They don’t have Emil’s knowledge and experience.”
Karis sighed. “You want Emil to stay with me for the same reason I want him to go with you. Well, let’s not get into an argument about whose life is most worth protecting. I always lose that one.”
They were standing at the entrance to the cave, and Zanja realized that this time Karis did not want her to go in. Karis said, “I’ll be awake long before the sun tomorrow.”
“Wake me up once you’re awake.”
Karis nodded. Her sorrow might have been a load of iron, yet she smiled wryly, as though she recognized that she was accepting the very compromise she detested: an arm’s length intimacy that must inevitably be corrupted by bitterness. After she had gone inside, Zanja sat alone upon the beach, wishing futilely for one easy choice, one option that did not leave her bleeding and bereft. The sky grew dark, and Emil and Medric came walking down the cliff path, hand in hand, talking earnestly, carrying a brace of rabbits and a basket of mushrooms for supper. Between the two of them, they were more kind to her than she could endure, and she went to bed early to get away from them.
After sunrise, Emil walked with Zanja to the top of the canyon path where their horses were picketed. Emil decided not to tell her about Medric’s restless night; she did not need to worry more. He promised to look after Karis. From Homely’s back, Zanja looked down at him and said with something of her old irony, “So now you’re nursemaid to two rogue elementals. Your elevation has been meteoric.”
“I can stand it a little longer,” he said. “Just look out after yourself.”
She did not remind him that her survival up until now had bordered on the miraculous. “A warrior shouldn’t have so much to lose,” she said. “Especially knowing as I do just what it’s like to lose it.”
“Nothing will be lost.” He took her hand and lightly kissed her knuckle. “I’ll look for you in twelve days. Medric and I will hunt some fowl, and we’ll have a feast. And then all of us will decide what we’re going to do with ourselves. Now go.”
Her ugly horse pranced across the pathless ground as though he thought he was on parade. Watching her go so lightly and yet so heavily, Emil had the odd thought that she did not yet know what she had to fear. Yet, knowing her way was fraught with unknown danger, she had set forth. And so we all are Paladins, Emil thought, every last one of us who sets forth so lightly upon a dangerous road.
He had this same thought again, later, when Karis came out from under smoke and spent the afternoon with him and Medric in a hilarious attempt to circumnavigate the lake. Karis feared deep or flowing water and, like all earth witches, could not endure setting foot in a boat. While scrambling up and down the rocks, Karis made herself entertaining, with a humor that was deep and subtle and utterly entrancing. But the charming afternoon left Emil with an aching heart, and he and Medric spent a strangely silent evening afterwards. That something of great import was at work in both of them seemed clear. But what they struggled with Emil could not fathom, and both of them kept their own counsel.