The girl’s master, a thin, hard‑faced man with a grimy red ribbon tying back his greasy hair, seemed none too willing to let the girl go with Dinal, even for so little time. They dickered until the girl reappeared in the open door, fully dressed in a plain, serviceable tunic and trousers. Dinal, who had been holding the coin between her fingers where the girl’s master could see it, abruptly closed her fist and mounted her horse. “Never mind, then. I was particularly taken with your girl’s unusual appearance, but I will find someone else.”
“Lady, if you knew what it costs me to keep her!” Defeated, the girl’s master reached behind himself to grab the girl and shove her forward, but smacked her cheek when he got a good look at her. “What are you wearing? Will you shame me before the entire city?”
Dinal said, “Her plain clothing pleases me.” She held out the coin. “Come here, girl, and take your payment.”
Expressionless, the girl took the money and dutifully delivered it into her master’s hand. A handprint had appeared on her cheek. “Bring her back by sunset,” the man warned, as the girl mounted behind Dinal.
When the girl pressed against Dinal’s back, the tension in her muscles belied the calm, even indifferent expression on her face. They rode down the cluttered alley. As they turned the corner, Dinal said, “He assumed I wanted a whore, and I let him believe what he liked. But you must understand that you are free now, and it is your choice whether or not to come with me. I intend to take you to the House of Lilterwess, where you belong. Will you come with me, of your own will?”
The girl said, “Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Karis,” she said.
The girl directed Dinal safely to the main boulevard, where masked men and women now sauntered arrogantly down the rows of whorehouses, surveying the exotic beauties beckoning wearily from the steps. At the city gate, a dozen boys and girls now gathered, each more beseeching and desperate than the last. Dinal rode past them, as a bell tower counted the second hour of the afternoon, and a drunken troubadour balanced his way along the top of the wall, incoherently singing.
Then they passed through the gate, and Karis sighed, as though she had been holding her breath. Dinal never felt her turn to look back at the city, not even once.
Several days later, Harald G’deon vested Karis with the power of Shaftal, and died. It was the last night that the walls of the House of Lilterwess would remain standing.
In the twilight, Zanja spotted Karis coming toward them across the ragged plain, stumbling because her head was tilted back so she could watch the sky. Zanja stood up, unsteady from the lingering weakness of starvation. “I want to be alone with her for a while.”
“See if you can get her to sleep,” J’han suggested, offering a blanket. “She doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”
Zanja walked across the treeless heath. Karis was a tattered shadow, with fraying hair and raveled shirt. Her hand caught Zanja by the shoulder as if starlight had blinded her, and she said in a voice as rough as a hoe’s edge, “Zanja, what am I going to do?”
Zanja said, “Lie down with me and I’ll tell you the stories of the stars.”
Karis lay down where she was standing, and starlight filled her eyes as water fills a cup. Zanja had to fit herself around the sharp stones and prickly plants that Karis had not heeded. The blanket that she drew over them smelled of smoke and mildew and the detritus of a long, hard journey; a journey far from over, perhaps never over.
Karis said, “Emil fought me for Mabin’s life. And even now I wonder if it was wisdom or cowardice that I didn’t simply kill her. I could have.” She sounded both amazed and horrified. “Accept the burden of responsibility, Emil says, or become what Mabin imagines I am.”
Zanja said, “Now you will become something else.”
“Something better, or something worse?”
They lay in silence. Zanja said, “It ispossible to exercise power well.”
“You think so? Did I exercise it well when I deceived you?”
“I suppose you thought I wasn’t strong enough to let you choose to go to certain death. I admire your courage now, of course, but in the moment of decision, I would have begged you not to take the risk.”
Karis said, “I never feared that you would hold me back. I did fear that if I made you part of my decision, you would choose to die with me if I died.”
They had been quiet long enough for the crickets around them to start to chirp, when Zanja finally said, “Karis, thank you for this year.”
“What? It’s been the most lonely, miserable, forsaken year…”
“But even the gods must be amazed by it.”
“Amazed?” Karis said in a choked voice.
Her shirt smelled like plain lye soap, with a lingering scent of old sweat and coal smoke. That smell was the only ordinary thing about her. Zanja got up on one elbow and stroked the springy tangle of Karis’s hair. It pushed back against her palm, and when she raised her hand, it went back to its wild shape. Karis took a shaky breath. Perhaps Zanja had frightened her, or perhaps the tenderness had sunk through senseless flesh to some deep place where Karis could feel it.
Zanja said, “Of course you are uncertain. That’s the way it is.”
“For everybody?”
“Do you think I know what I am doing? I see a universe of possibilities, and some of them are very unpleasant. Perhaps the people of Shaftal will turn against each other. Or perhaps they will destroy the Sainnites, trading one massacre for another. Perhaps the people will claim you as G’deon and you’ll be consumed by them until nothing is left. Perhaps our little tribe will come apart like a herd with too many stallions.”
Karis uttered a hoarse, ragged gasp of laughter.
“Perhaps desire will never be fulfilled. But to live is only worth the effort if you live in hope. And living in hope is a discipline, a practice that can be learned.”
“Is that why you insist on teaching it to me? I’ll never do it as well as you do.”
“But I do it so badly. Blundering through the thickets like an ox, tripping and falling into traps of despair, bleeding and raving and starving like the refugee I am …“
“How could anyone resist the attraction of such a life?” said Karis.
Side by side, they gazed up into the close crowded constellations. At last, Karis added, “Weren’t you going to tell me the stories of the stars?”
“That’s what I have been telling you.”
A long time they lay talking, a peculiar, fragmented, spiraling conversation that Zanja filled with pieces of stories which Karis kept interrupting with stories of her own, so that none of the tales were finished. The silences grew longer, and then silence took over the entire conversation. Zanja opened her eyes, and realized she had been dozing. Karis lay prostrate, wholly surrendered to sleep. Zanja rolled her onto her side without awakening her, and cleared away some of the stones from underneath them both, then folded herself against Karis’s back. Karis’s shirt had slipped down from her shoulder, and Zanja kissed the bare skin that pressed against her cheek.
She dreamed that the kiss had been like flint on steel, and Karis had ignited like tinder.
Zanja awoke at dawn, but Karis slept well into the morning, utterly collapsed in the greensward, with the ripening seedheads bobbing over her and the sun bringing out beads of sweat on her forehead. J’han checked on her and said simply, “Let’s leave her alone unless Mabin comes after us.” So they improvised a sunshade for her, and spent the morning in aimless repairs to their gear, sorting their baggage and sharpening their knives, like soldiers awaiting orders. After eating three servings of camp porridge, Zanja found she finally could walk steadily. Emil sewed up her breeches, where they had cut open the seam to splint her leg. Norina and J’han seemed engaged in extremely complex negotiations, which no one dared interrupt. Medric was suffused with restlessness until he calmed himself by reading out loud from a book of poetry J’han carried with him. Zanja had never before heard such poetry, in which the words worked like glyphs or like doors, doors upon doors upon doors.