“Maybe the potion is giving you hallucinations.” But Annis went to the doorway, where Zanja could see a bit of star‑scattered sky above, and a bit of star‑scattered lake below. “I don’t see anything,” Annis said. Then her body gave a jerk and she uttered a surprised grunt and lifted a hand as if to investigate what had struck her, but before she could understand what had happened, she fell.

It happened so suddenly that the sound of the pistol’s report didn’t register until after Annis’s knees buckled. There was nowhere for Zanja to go, even if she’d had the ability and will to flee. Her blade lay within reach, but thanks to Norina her blade hand was useless. Her pistols were still in Homely’s saddlebags, and the three men had taken Homely with them. Five people came into the cave and made certain that Zanja was indeed helpless, and then Mabin came in. “Where is Karis?”

“Karis has returned to earth.”

Mabin struck her across the face. “The truth!”

Zanja tasted blood. She said thickly, “Karis has delivered herself to the smoke.”

Mabin sat back on her heels, rigid with frustration. “She makes no sense.”

“There’s no one else here,” one of her companions said. “We’ve searched all along the beach. No horses, no equipment, no nothing. Just the two of them, and Annis is dead.”

Mabin hissed in her breath, and then released it. “If I’d known it was Annis–well, there’s no help for it now. So long as we’ve got this one, we’ve as good as got the one I want. We’ll have to settle for that.”

“This one seems to be newly injured. Broken ribs, it looks like, and–” Zanja felt her injured arm lifted and examined. “She was cut defending herself, with healer’s stitches closing up the wound. A nice, clean job of it.”

“A healer, and someone with a nasty temper–that would be Norina and her consort. No doubt there’s been a disagreement and Norina has taken off with Karis.” Mabin fell silent a moment, and then she muttered, “Shaftal, what have I done to deserve this?”

Zanja was tired to the bone, and tired to the heart. She shut her eyes and did not open them again until her captors lifted her onto the litter they had made for her, and the pain began again. The Paladins had to step over Annis’s body as they carried Zanja out into the cold night. And Karis–Karis also would soon be dead.

Chapter Twenty‑five

Emil, Medric, and J’han traveled through the afternoon and across the dark span of the night as though demons were after them. “I think we’re close now,” Medric said, sometime after dawn. Soon afterwards, they spotted the white flag lying limp in the half light: Karis’s shirt, they realized when they had drawn near, tied to a tree branch by the sleeves. They untied it and soon had found their way into a hollow of earth that was cupped like the palm of a giant hand. There in the center Karis lay in the wet grass. Norina, whose long intimacy with Karis must have helped her to find her first, lay beside her, embracing her naked body with her own.

“She’s too cold,” she said.

Emil lay down on Karis’s other side and they sandwiched her between them. After J’han had listened to Karis’s heart, he covered her with blankets, and sat upon a stone with his head in his hands, as though he could not bring himself to speak. The Truthken, though, began to weep. Having emptied herself of anger, Emil thought, now only grief remained. She had indeed loved Karis, however badly she might have done it.

Emil held Karis tightly, as though to keep her from falling. Her powerful muscles lay limp and cold; her heartbeat was intangible, the motion of her breath so weak it seemed illusory. She’d bitten her mouth, battered her hands, scraped her skin raw upon the stones, in a terrible, solitary agony that had mercifully ended now. She would die without ever opening her eyes again. The healer did not have to say it out loud.

Norina sat up. Her hair was plastered down with water and mud, her face pale with exhaustion beneath the grime of hard travel. “J’han, what can we do?”

“Only smoke could save her,” J’han said.

The Truthken shuddered, as though she’d been cut with a blade. “I have some smoke,” she said. “Ten years I’ve carried it with me, as a surety.”

J’han leapt to his feet. “We must improvise a pipe.”

“But this one time I will not fail her.” Norina took a pouch out of her shirt and emptied its contents into the palm of her hand. One by one she untwisted the spills of paper and crushed the contents to powder between her fingers, and rubbed the powder into the wet grass where it could not be reclaimed. None of them made any move to stop her.

J’han said, “Medric, perhaps you will start a fire and we’ll warm some water to bathe her. And then we’ll put her clothes on her.”

Throughout the night, Medric had traveled silently, except for an occasional hoarse word to direct their path, a directive which they had accepted in silence. From time to time, his face had seemed to come at Emil out of the darkness: drawn with sorrow, wet with tears, hollow with a terrible weariness, as though he had borne the whole weight of history upon the frail hinges of his vision, and could not carry that weight much longer. But now Medric stood back, gazing at this desperate, hopeless scene as distantly as a general gazes on a battle. “There’s a reason why she took off her clothes,” he said.

Norina wiped a sleeve across her eyes as though to clear a fog, and looked at him in that way which makes even the bravest warrior flinch back from a Truthken’s stare. “By the land, what are you?” she said softly.

Medric did not flinch under her gaze.

She said, as quietly as before, “Better people than I have given you their trust. Tell me what you see.”

“Madam Truthken, when you destroyed that smoke, I saw you close a door. And I saw another door open. There is no one in this land who knows Karis like you know her. So tell me, why did she take off her clothes?”

“Even though Karis cannot feel the wisdom of her flesh, there are times she knows exactly what she needs to do. I suppose it is earth logic.“

“So wouldn’t it be even more logical if she lay on soil rather than grass?”

Norina began pulling up great handfuls of grass by the roots. J’han and Medric helped her, and by the time the sun had risen, they had cleared a patch big enough to lay Karis upon with her skin pressed against the damp black earth.

“It looks like a grave,” Norina said.

“But it is a garden.” Medric’s eyes had seemed glazed with sleeplessness and sorrow, but he was, Emil realized suddenly, in the midst of a waking vision.

Emil said, “Medric, what should we do now?”

“Plant her,” Medric said. “Plant her so she will grow.”

Emil went creeping through the nearby brush until he managed to kill a couple of heavy ground birds with some lucky shots. Plucking and cleaning the birds took nearly as long as hunting them had, and then he dug up some roots that would make a poor substitute for potatoes, and picked greens. He returned with his heavy gathering bag to find that nothing much had changed. J’han had dosed Medric with a sleeping draught to stop his hallucinations, and Medric slept, pale and exhausted even in sleep, his face still creasing sometimes with worry or fear. J’han, a botanist like all healers, had collected a pile of strengthening herbs. Norina knelt at Karis’s side like a mud‑covered statue, watching her breathe. Karis, except for her face, was covered with a blanket of soil that steamed now in the warm afternoon sun. She had not died yet, and that was surprising.

Emil filled his pot with the fowl and the roots and set it on the fire to stew, then went off again to gather wood and fill their canteens. Normally, all the walking and riding and worrying would have crippled him by now, but when Karis laid her hands upon his knee she had repaired much more than that one badly healed old injury. He had returned to their camp, and was stirring the pot that had started to simmer, when he heard Norina say in a voice destroyed by weeping, “Karis.”