Emil feared what he would see, but what he saw was that the soil had cracked over Karis’s chest, and those cracks widened and narrowed in rhythm with her deep breaths. Karis lay quiet, eyes open, gazing at Norina with an expression Emil would not have liked to have directed at him. She turned her face away and Norina sat back, as if she had been hit.
J’han scraped away the earth so he could listen to Karis’s heart. He said, “Well, Karis, it seems your heart wants to keep beating.”
He put his head near hers, for she seemed to have spoken. “Emil, she’s asking for you.”
Emil went to kneel beside her. Her voice was just a whisper, like a sheet of paper being torn. “Zanja,” she said.
“We left her in the cave by Otter Lake. She and Norina had a fight and she was unable to travel.”
On Karis’s other side, Norina covered her face with her hands. Zanja’s blood still spattered her shirt.
Karis opened her mouth again, and the tearing paper sound resolved itself into a word: “No,” or perhaps, “I know.” Then she said, “Where is she?”
Emil gazed at her, baffled. Norina dropped her hands and said, “Karis, I swear I didn’t kill her.”
Karis did not look at her or seem to have heard her.
“She is alive,” Emil said. “She was bitterly angry at Norina and desperately worried about you, last I saw her.”
Karis said very carefully, as though to a stupid child, “Where. Is. She.”
Silence, then Norina spoke, looking at Emil and not at Karis. “Something has befallen Zanja. Karis cannot perceive her presence.”
“What!” Emil leapt to his feet.
“I will accompany you. I won’t anger her any longer with my presence.”
J’han began to protest, but stopped himself and said in exasperation, “There’s no point in even talking to you. Emil, if I give you some powders, will you find a way to make her take them? Slip them into her drinking water if you have to. She has not even rested since giving birth, and seems determined to kill herself.”
“I’ll take your powders,” Norina said. She stood up and began to gather her gear, making the jerky, mechanical movements of a body strained beyond endurance.
Karis continued to gaze at Emil. Only the earth had brought her back from the threshold; she had no business being alive at all. Anger burned m the depth of her sunken eyes, and suddenly, Emil could imagine her as G’deon of Shaftal.
Emil said to her, “We’ll wait a little while for Medric to wake up, in case he can tell us what’s befallen her. We will find her. You have plenty of evidence that fire bloods do not lose what they love.“
Some time after Karis had eaten and been taken hostage by a healing sleep, Medric awoke, not with a start, as he usually did, but slowly; so that Emil, who had been doing what he could for the exhausted horses, could contrive to be beside him when he finally awoke, and place the correct pair of spectacles upon his nose. Medric said thickly, “I recognize you even as a blur.”
“I certainly should hope so,” Emil said.
Medric smiled, and so it seemed that they would survive the anger and disappointment of the last few days. Still, Emil said, as was right, “I feel as if I failed you by being angry at the choices you felt you had to make. Surely it was a terrible time for you, and my anger only made it worse.”
Medric said in some astonishment, “Are you trying to tell me that–”
“Karis is going to live, as far as J’han can tell. And, apparently, she’s going to live without smoke.”
“Oh, Shaftal,” Medric said, sitting up in a daze. “Oh, earth and sky, do you feel it? The door is swinging open, and the breeze is blowing through …”
Emil said, though he hated to dampen the young seer’s enthusiasm, “I’m so worried about Zanja and Annis that there’s not much else I can think about. Something has befallen them, Karis says, and that something can only be Mabin.”
“Karis doesn’t know what happened?”
“She can hardly talk, but Norina says that Zanja is beyond Karis’s ken.”
“Well, that puts her over water then, doesn’t it? It seems obvious enough.” He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
It had not been at all obvious to Emil, but, remembering Karis’s discomfort around water, it began to make a kind of sense. It was said that Shaftal is the G’deon’s flesh and bone, and nothing happens between ocean and mountain that the G’deon does not feel. If Karis could not feel Zanja, alive or dead, then it could only mean Zanja was no longer in physical contact with the earth. He said, “So she’s somewhere on the river.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Medric, my dear, if Karis ever needed a seer beside her, now is the time. I’ll find Zanja without your help. You know I can. And I have Norina, who is the equivalent of an entire battalion.“
“But it’s an awfully big river.”
“You forget about our friends the Otter People. Surely the water witch will know what’s happened on his river.” Emil kissed Medric, not too hastily, and then he kissed him again. Before he could stand up, he had to disentangle himself from the fist gripped in his hair. For the first time in days, it was not just weariness that made him so dizzy.
And so the next day Emil and Norina found the empty cave and fresh blood splashed across the stones, and then the Otter People came and took them to the island, where they showed them Annis’s body. They had laid her in a little boat with her knees drawn up to her chest like an infant curled in the womb, and they had filled her boat with journey gifts: a net and fishing spear, tiny people of twisted reed to accompany her, a bottle of good spring water, a supply of dried fish, and many small items of great value: knives and beads and pieces of worked fish skin, the kind of gifts that are given to a beloved friend when bidding her goodbye. At sunset they all escorted Annis across the lake to the river outlet, and they let her boat go and watched until she’d slipped out of sight. They uttered encouraging shouts to send her on her journey, but many of the people seemed devastated with grief. They’d loved her more, and better, than her family ever had.
Emil had seen many a Paladin killed or maimed, but always had been able to explain the death as having served a cause. This death could only be explained as a betrayal. When he wept for Annis, he wept also for himself, for an entire adulthood spent serving under the command of a leader who would kill an innocent like Annis simply for being in the way.
Emil understood perhaps three dozen words of the Otter People’s language, which was not enough to ask the question he needed to ask. But the old water witch was dismayed by the terrible, sudden violence that had occurred on the shores of his lake, and told what had happened using story dolls, like the little reed poppets that had accompanied Annis on her last journey. The doll that had Zanja’s long hair was in a boat two day’s journey to the east of Otter Lake.
Emil and Norina left at dawn to journey to the Paladin garrison where all that remained of the old traditions of Shaftal were preserved, all except the traditions of honor and open‑handed generosity. These traditions were not even mentioned in the letter of the law, but without them the law was just a mindless formula. Emil had dared to read a little of the Mackapee manuscript before he carefully put it away in a mouse‑proof chest, in a dry attic, in a stone building unlikely to burn down. And what he’d read there was the spirit of a man who valued change. “The peaceful speech of strangers transforms the world,” Mackapee had written in his crabbed handwriting. If Emil had laid eyes on the manuscript fifteen years before, he’d have hurried past those words, looking for more subtle revelations, words to argue about in the university.
Zanja na’Tarwein had lived by and nearly died for that transformation. Mabin Paladin, the hero of the people, had chosen another way, the shortsighted way of the bitterly conquered, the vengeance by which the wronged becomes the wrongdoer and the whole world gives way to war. When Emil lay down in love with a son of the enemy, he had abandoned that vengeance, and he was only now beginning to realize what that meant for him. And Norina Truthken, whose devotion to the law had not been able to keep her from betraying her dearest friend, what was she going to do now?