Six days Zanja traveled across a familiar landscape. She skirted Meartown to the west and forded the river north of Strongbridge, then worked her way south, cross‑country. A day’s journey south of Strongbridge, she took lodging at a farm near the road she and Norina had traveled, and settled down to watch the road. In the afternoon of her second day of watching, Norina appeared. She traveled in the company of her gentle husband, riding horses so tired they dragged their hooves in the dirt.
Zanja greeted J’han first, who said in some bewilderment, “Zanja? I hardly can believe my eyes!” She clasped his hand, thinking how incredible it was that he had endured Norina’s company long enough to claim a husband’s right, and yet his wife did not trust him enough to explain where they were traveling, or why.
To Norina, Zanja said, “Some terrible things have happened, but Karis has survived.”
Norina subjected her to a remote examination. “You are not confident of her well‑being, though.”
“At that farmstead over there, you can have your horses looked after, and perhaps even eat some supper and get a night’s rest. It will take some time for me to explain.”
“We’ll go to the farmstead, of course,” J’han said, and started his reluctant horse forward. In a moment, Norina followed. J’han laid his hand on Zanja’s shoulder as she walked at his stirrup. “So this is all about Karis? I should have known.”
Norina said, “And it’s not your business, as I’ve been telling you all along.”
“Your health and safety are not my business,” J’han said, as though agreeing. Norina glared, and fell back out of hearing rather than be further subjected to the criticisms she could not help but hear, no matter what words her husband chose to use.
J’han said to Zanja, “We have a hearty daughter, with a healthy set of lungs on her. She’s down there on the seacoast, no doubt screaming fit to raise the dead.” And I should be with her, his tone of voice said, so clearly that even a non‑Truthken easily could hear it.
Zanja said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to return to your daughter.”
J’han smiled sadly. “I have every intention of doing that.”
“Without Norina?”
“Norina chooses differently from how I choose. And as you know, she is uncompromising. So this is how it ends.”
Later, having situated the horses and made suitable arrangements with the farmers for lodging, Zanja sat with Norina in the guest room and told her how Mabin had tried and failed to kill Karis. Norina listened in unnerving silence. She asked no questions, neither did she argue. For a while she lay upon the rope bed, then she got up to pace the room, then she sat down and picked the dried mud from her boots. When Zanja had finished, Norina went to the window and leaned out to shout for J’han to come inside.
“Have you ever heard of someone using less smoke?” she asked him when he came in, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Less than what?” he asked blankly.
“Karis was forced to smoke more frequently than her usual amount, much more. Enough to nearly kill her. And now she’s decreasing that frequency, trying to reduce herself back down to once a day. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“No,” he said in some astonishment. “Is she being successful?”
“Yes, apparently, though it hasn’t been easy.”
“I always have heard the smoke users inevitably increase the amount they smoke, until they die of the poison or else from their inability to buy as much drug as they need. If it’s possible for them to use less…” He paused, shaken and distressed. “Then we have abandoned them to a fate that we always assumed to be inevitable, when in fact we should have been trying to help them.”
“Karis is different,” Norina said.
“She is an extraordinary person of great wit and will. But she is human, and her body is no different from mine or yours.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Norina snapped.
J’han set his lips and visibly restrained himself from a sharp reply.
“What is wrong with you?” Zanja said to Norina later, after she had sent J’han away again. “I can hardly endure your company, and I don’t see how bringing you to Karis will do her a service.”
“Watch your words, Zanja na’Tarwein. I’m not in a tolerant mood.”
“I would never expect you to be tolerant.”
Norina sat again on the bed and dug her fingers into her short hair, which was stiff with dirt and stood upright like wheat stalks. “Go away.”
After a long silence she looked at Zanja, who had remained sitting where she was, at the table by the window. Norina said, “You tell me that Karis’s true enemy is my commander and a hero of the people, and that somehow I, a Truthken, never noticed. You tell me that when my dearest friend needed me the most desperately, she nearly died in my absence. And now you imply that you have the ability and the right to keep me from her unless I behave myself according to your high standards. Your very presence chides me. Go away and chide someone else.”
Zanja left her, and found J’han out in the kitchen, examining a collection of dirty and impatient children, who clearly wanted to make the best of the remaining daylight and saw no reason to be subjected to a healer’s scrutiny. J’han sent them away, reassured the gathered parents about their health, and took Zanja by the arm out into the privacy of the yard. They sat upon the edge of the well, and for some time neither of them said a word.
“The people of air are not easy to love,” Zanja said at last.
“Nor even to like sometimes,” J’han said.
“Would you at least come and have a look at Karis, before you start your own journey? I’m weary with caring for her.”
“Yes, of course. My child’s in good hands, and I am afraid Norina will kill herself with this hard traveling. It was not an easy birth.”
Zanja sighed. “I was beginning to see how being friends with a Truthken might be invigorating enough that I could put up with the exasperation. But now I can’t see it anymore.”
J’han laughed heartily, without anger for once.
“And I fear for Karis, should she be trapped between air and fire. In truth, I wouldn’t blame her if she decided to get rid of us both, just so she could have some peace.”
They talked until after dark, when one of the farmers called them in to supper. Norina did not appear at the supper table, and J’han slept out in the barn with Zanja. In the morning, their journey north began, an angry journey made even more grim by the weather, which turned wet and stormy only after they had traveled beyond the reaches of civilization and there was no shelter to be found. By the time they reached the canyon path they all had been wet to the skin for two days and nights, and the nights had been cold as well as wet. They had been sleeping huddled together for warmth, but relations between them had not thawed much.
In all, thirteen days had passed since Zanja had last traversed this rocky pathway down to the lake. Then the lake had glowed like a jewel; now it was gray, with the muted colors of tree and canyon bleeding across it like ink on a wet page. Halfway down the path, Zanja spotted Emil riding up to meet them. He also rode on horseback, with his horse muddied to the belly and rain dripping from its mane, and he looked as wearied and worried as Zanja ever had seen him. Before he even spoke she knew that something terrible had happened.
“Karis has disappeared again,” he said. “Five days we’ve been hunting for her, and haven’t seen a trace, not even a footprint. Zanja, listen–before you ride off in a panic and kill yourself on the slippery stones–I swear to you that she was not taken away. She has written a glyph upon the space of her cave, and the message, I think, is intended for you.”
In the cave shelter, the water clock was not merely shattered, but pulverized to powder. In the middle of the cave floor lay Karis’s box of smoke, with the lid broken to splinters, and the interior burnt to charcoal. Of the contents, the half year’s supply of smoke, nothing remained but ashes.