“I’m so glad I succeeded in getting your attention,” Emil said. “You were looking rather dangerously single‑minded.”

Karis gazed at him, suddenly just a tired, wasted woman whose great strength seemed about to fail her, fueled as it was by a rage that surely could not sustain her much longer. “I want to hold my love in my arms,” she said. “She doesn’t even know–”

Emil said, “This is Zanja na’Tarwein we’re talking about, not some fool.”

“But when she gives up hope–”

“I have seen her under the most desperate of circumstances, and she does not surrender.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“She would want you to listen to your friends,” Emil said.

There was a silence. Karis said bitterly, “I’m listening to you. Just don’t ask me to insult Norina with a false forgiveness. If you want to tell her something, tell her I have no respect for someone who can’t cherish what I was willing to die for.”

“I’ll tell her,” Emil said. “But she can’t make peace with her husband when she feels like she has to sleep with the horses to avoid irritating you with her presence.”

“She doesn’t have to sleep with the horses,” Karis said. “Just tell her not to talk to me. I’m going to kill someone, and I’d rather it wasn’t her.”

Emil stepped back involuntarily.

“Medric already has talked me out of tearing Mabin’s precious village to pieces, which I could do.”

“I do not doubt it,” Emil said. “I’m glad you heeded him; I don’t think I could endure it if the House of Lilterwess were to fall a second time. Can I ask what you’re working on?”

“A hammer,” Karis said. “A hammer for working steel.”

He waited, but she explained no further. She did add after a moment, “Let me finish with this, and then I’ll stop and rest, which will make J’han happy, and we can talk about what to do.”

She turned back to her rocks, and the sound of them shattering under her hammer followed Emil back to the edge of the beach.

*

“What is she making?” Norina asked. She had sat upon the ground and was reorganizing her clothing, having perhaps submitted to an examination of some kind.

“She’s making a hammer. What she’ll make with it I can’t imagine, but she’ll tell me. What I want to know is where she got coal. That’s not the sort of thing that can be picked up off the ground.”

J’han shook his head. “The water witch and she are like hand and glove. Who knows how they’re doing it.”

Norina, seated among the stones, said, “By tradition, the people of the borders are protected by the G’deon. If the water witch recognizes her, no doubt he thinks he owes her a certain fealty.”

“That bodes well,” Emil said.

“Doesn’t it, though.” Norina stood up. “Well, am I an exile?”

“No, but you should not talk to her.”

“I guess that’s an improvement. Why did you kneel to her?”

“I thought she needed to be taught a lesson. She is very teachable.”

Norina smiled, though not with a lot of vigor. “I know this all too well. But some lessons, I fear, she will never learn.”

“Norina–” Emil hesitated to say this in front of J’han, but it would have been too awkward to ask him to step away. “Karis says to tell you that she has no respect for someone who can’t cherish what she was willing to die for.”

Norina accepted this fresh censure with surprising equanimity. “I thought as much,” she said. “J’han, is there any hope she’ll recover her physical sensations, or is that damage permanent?”

J’han said irritably, “My impulse is to say that it’s permanent, but what do I know? She’s still having convulsions at sunset every day–one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Maybe this is as well as she will ever get.”

Norina looked at Karis as her heavy hammer once again smashed into the ore. “She deserves better,” she said.

There was a silence. Emil took the reins of the horses, to unload their gear and take them up to graze. Norina said to J’han, “How do I keep my milk from drying up?”

J’han looked at her in some astonishment.

Of course there was a way, but lacking a spare child to give suck to, this seemed like a husband’s problem. Emil left them to work it out.

*

That night, he seduced his beloved Sainnite seer and did not care when their groans became cries that anyone trying to sleep upon the beach could hear. If Karis was awake, she’d know that at least two of her companions knew how to cherish what they had.

Chapter Twenty‑six

When Zanja opened her eyes, she lay in a shallow, strangely shaped wooden room, which was lit by a gently swinging lamp that hung from a hook. “She’s awake,” said the man who sat near her upon the steeply sloping floor. He held a pistol.

Mabin came in. The ceiling was so low she had to walk crouched over. The entire room seemed to move. The lamp swung as if in a breeze. Zanja had never in her life been in a boat, and had not guessed that they might have enclosed rooms like this, not a place for people–it was not shaped right–but apparently for storage. Now, except for the pallet upon which Zanja lay, it was empty as a coffin.

“Give me the pistol,” Mabin said to the man. He handed it to her and went out, closing the door behind himself. Mabin squatted upon the floor, grunting with tiredness.

Knife fights often are won and lost in the first moments of battle, when in the first movements and first contacts of blade on blade, the fighters discover whether or not they’ve met their match. A good strategist learns to use those moments to deliberately mislead the opponent into misjudgments that there is no time to recognize.

Zanja hastily considered her situation. Annis was dead. Mabin had assumed that Karis was still alive, in the company of Norina and J’han. Although Mabin could not know that Karis had won back many hours from smoke, she would not be confident of Karis’s subjugation to the drug, because even under smoke Karis had been able to use her power to aid her own escape. Mabin could not know about Emil, and she had expressed no interest in Medric, so perhaps she assumed that Zanja had rescued Karis unassisted.

She expected that Karis would come for Zanja, at any cost to herself, as Karis had already demonstrated she would do. She did not know that there were other credible witnesses to the enormity of her betrayal, and she would not know about them unless she stumbled across them while searching for Karis. She did not know that Zanja had a tribe, half‑formed and tiny though it was, and that she would protect her people. She did not know what it meant to be a katrim. Above all, she did not know that Karis was dying, or perhaps already dead.

Zanja said, “After the Sainnites captured me, they took symbolic vengeance upon me for the humiliations I and my fellow katrimhad subjected them to. They tortured me, just as you are doing. For some reason, I always expected the Paladins to be different from the Sainnites.”

“Who do you think you are, to–” Mabin began, but it was too late to raise her defenses; the blade of accusation had cut deep into the flesh of her complacency.

“I know exactly who I am,” Zanja said.

“A traitor to the people–a traitor under the law!”

“The Ashawala’i are not subject to the law of Shaftal.”

“What!”

“You wrong my people in wronging me. Does not the law require that you respect and protect the people of the borders?”

“You have no people–”

“Where one survives, the tribe survives.”

“You fight our war, you are subject to our laws.”

“I refuse to be subject to a law that allows people like you to commit murder.”

“Murder?”

“Annis is dead,” Zanja reminded her.

“Another traitor.”

“Is that the way the law works? You kill whomever you like, then declare them traitors?”

“We are at war–”

“At war to save the very law you are destroying. It is you who are the traitor.”