But Mabin cried, “For the land’s sake, kill her! Can’t you see what she’ll do to Shaftal?” No one moved or even seemed to have heard.

A hand touched Zanja’s shoulder. Norina and Emil had walked fearlessly into the midst of Mabin’s people. The old man seemed to know them both, and said, nearly in tears, “Take her, take her! How were we to know? Tell her–tell the lady–tell her we are not all such fools.”

He helped to haul Zanja to her feet. She could not stand on her own, but Emil braced her from behind, from foot to shoulder holding her erect, with his arms wrapped tightly around her. Norina knelt upon the stones and buckled Zanja’s belt around her waist. With her head bowed she said, “I have wronged you and don’t expect your forgiveness. But I will make amends.” She looked up then, and Zanja saw how even humility can be an act of unbending pride. Norina read her thoughts as though they were words written upon Zanja’s face, and she smiled, showing all her teeth. “You really should savor my abasement while you can, for I assure you, you will never have an opportunity like this again.”

Zanja said, “One opportunity is enough. I’ll savor this moment my whole life, and remind you of it incessantly.”

“That seems fair.” Norina rose and put her arm around Zanja’s waist, and took half her weight onto her shoulder. So she and Emil walked Zanja across the river‑washed stones, while the frightened, speechless Paladins let them go, and Mabin did not disgrace herself again by shouting commands that no one would have obeyed. Karis stood waiting, a woman of iron and stone and soil and everything that grows. At the last moment, Emil stepped away, and it was Norina alone who delivered Zanja into Karis’s arms.

Chapter Twenty‑seven

Medric would not be appeased. “I am a historian,” he insisted. “Now that you need not keep these secrets any longer, it would be criminal to refuse to tell me.”

Norina said, “Young man, you have appalling nerve to call a judge, a servant of the law, a criminal.”

Medric grinned. “You wouldn’t waste your time admonishing me if you didn’t like me.” He sat down beside her, and folded his ink‑stained hands expectantly. “I’ll trade you. You tell me the past, and I’ll tell you the future.”

The six of them had camped fearlessly upon the open plain, where grass and stone stretched to the horizon, flat as water and rippling in the wind. They drew knobby, weathered rocks up to the fire for chairs, and Emil brewed tea, using J’han’s supply, as he’d long since run out of his own. They had told Zanja what had happened, and what they had done. Like Karis, who scarcely had said a word even when she unwound the bandages and healed Zanja’s broken bones, Zanja inhabited a place of stunned silence and could not seem to find the pathway out. But Emil sat beside her, and sometimes he lay a hand upon her shoulder, or clasped her hand in his, and slowly Zanja felt herself re‑enter the world. She thought, the future: these people will be my companions as long as we are alive. And she felt the years spread before her, like a wonderful new country.

“I don’t know why I didn’t recognize your strategies until the end,“ she said to Emil. ”I should have known when I heard about the fleas that it was your kind of war.“

Emil grinned. “ ‘Drive the enemy insane and she will defeat herself.’ ”

Zanja recognized the quotation from Mabin’s Warfare, and laughed until Emil had to pound her on her back.

Emil said, “It was easy to do, with four elementals under my command. Ah, to think of the misery this little company could inflict… but no, those days are past.” He sighed with false regret.

Karis had walked away on her own and had not yet returned. At sunset she needed to be alone, J’han explained. It was a clear night, and the sky was filling with stars. There was a stillness, a vastness, pressing down upon the little tribe camped here upon the heath. They’d stepped through the door and now found themselves in this open, lonely place, a handful of people in a universe of stars. From now on, each step they took would be on a path of their own forging.

Norina said to Medric, “No, I don’t want to know the future. It’s the not knowing that gives us heart, it seems to me. But I think I will tell you a bit of history, for Dinal’s sake. And for yours, Zanja, since I must still earn your forgiveness. I witnessed very little myself: I was a child, a student, who happened to live in the House of Lilterwess, like many other students. But the night Harald G’deon died, Dinal and I sat beside Karis’s bed, where she lay unconscious from the blow of power that Harald had struck her with–brutally, out of necessity, for he was breathing his last breath. By then we had discovered the bitter truth of Karis’s smoke purse inside her shirt, and all the council knew, and had been arguing for hours what to do. Dinal took me to Karis’s bed, and asked me to bind myself to her with an oath. After I had done this, she told me this history, and I, of course, know that it was the truth. So listen, Medric.”

Medric managed to look even more expectant and alert. Norina began her tale.

Harald had been G’deon of Shaftal for thirty‑two years. He had always refused to identify a successor, and, since the G’deon owes no one an explanation, no one understood why. As word of his illness spread across the land of Shaftal, even the most ardent and loyal of his followers–already distressed due to the harrying of the Sainnites–were thrown into confusion and dismay. Some asked if the G’deon had lost his mind, to have grown old without giving any thought to those who would outlive him. Others, more cynical, declared that he had failed to choose a successor out of spite, to irritate his lifelong critic and opponent, Councilor Mabin.

During those last, terrible days of the G’deon’s life, Dinal kept vigil by his bedside. She neither wept nor slept, and would allow no one else to be his honor guard. When Dinal broke her vigil, as she occasionally did to bathe or seek out a mouthful of food, she saw that gloom and panic now reigned unchallenged in the House of Lilterwess. Meals went uncooked, children ran wild, scholars stood about in the unswept hallways, councilors hurried with an odd aimlessness from one room to the next.

On the seventh day, as Dinal returned to the G’deon’s room to resume her watch, Councilor Mabin herself, who kept vigil in her own fashion, snatched at Dinal’s sleeve as she passed. “Ask him what will become of Shaftal, when we have no G’deon. Ask him how we can keep the godless Sainnites at bay.”

Dinal eased her sleeve from Mabin’s grasp. “Excuse me, Councilor.”

“Ask him if he has forgotten his calling, and his people!”

“Councilor, Harald G’deon cannot answer your questions. Though his heart continues to beat, his spirit has departed. We both know that he would never have chosen to die with so much left incomplete. But death comes when it comes.”

“Then will he be the last G’deon of Shaftal? This is a bitter destiny.”

“His life has been bitter,” Dinal said. “Why not his death?” She turned her back, and Mabin wisely let her go.

That night, Harald G’deon uttered a sigh, and Dinal sat up sharply in the chair in which she had been dozing. The healer, who read a book at the table in the corner, came softly across the room. The G’deon sighed again, and it almost seemed as if he had said Dinal’s name. She took his hand in hers. “Harald, why do you suffer so? You need not remain in this world any longer. Your time is done, and we will find a way to live without you.”

Shadows filled the hollows of his wasted face, but within his eyes the light of the guttering candle flickered. “Go,” he said.

“Where am I to go? My place is by your side.”

“Lalali.”

“Lalali! What can there be of value in Lalali?”

Once again, he lay silent, with only the faint tremor of a heartbeat to let Dinal know he had not yet departed.