Zanja went for a desperately needed walk across the flat, rocky countryside. The yellowing grasses were weighed down by seedheads, which in places had been cropped neatly off by their wandering horses. She reached the clear rivulet that had served as their camp’s water source. When she looked back, Norina sat at Karis’s side, talking earnestly. Karis listened somberly, speaking little. It seemed like old times.
Zanja walked in a wide circle around the camp. The next time she looked at the cookfire, Norina had been replaced by J’han, who seemed to be systematically giving Karis most of the contents of his healer’s pack: a brown bottle of something to soothe her throat, herbs to build her strength, and a great deal of advice. But in the end he seemed to offer some kind of reassurance, and Karis must have said something amusing, because he burst out laughing.
The next time she looked, Emil and Medric sat on either side of Karis, and all three of them were roaring with laughter. The sound of it carried far across the plain. J’han and Norina were saddling their horses. Zanja started back toward the camp. By the time she reached the fire Karis was sitting alone, with packets and bottles piled at her feet like homage. Zanja took the small fortune that the people of Meartown had collected to fund her rescue of Karis, and divided it up among them. At least none of them would go hungry or cold this winter.
Zanja first said goodbye to Norina. “Karis should never have to choose between us,” she said.
“You’ll wish a thousand times that you had never said those words.”
“I already wish I hadn’t.”
“That’s once.”
Zanja said seriously, “If you have any advice, I would hear it.”
The sardonic side of Norina’s mouth lifted at the corner. “You’re the one who threw yourself into the middle of this avalanche. Are you trying to tell me now that you’re worried about where it’s taking you?”
“Not at all,” Zanja said. “And I’ll never forgive you for trying to murder me.”
Norina said, “In all my days of seeking the truth, I’ve never met a worse liar.”
When Medric embraced Zanja in farewell, he said, “Do you ever think about that other Sainnite seer’s vision? The one that predicted that the Ashawala’i would defeat the Sainnites?”
“I try not to,” Zanja said.
“That’s good,” Medric said. “I never would have told you about it had I known who you were. But if the fate of my people is in your hands–”
“Then that puts it in your hands, doesn’t it?”
Medric looked taken aback. “It does? Oh, it does.” She left him fumbling for a different pair of spectacles.
Emil’s hug was bracing. “You know where to find me,” he said.
*
Her arms were aching and empty as she stood beside Karis and watched the four of them ride away. Homely, laden with their food and bedrolls and a book each from Medric and Emil, nibbled a few sprigs of grass and then snorted impatiently at them.
Karis said, desolate, “How I’ll explain all this to the townspeople I have no idea.”
Zanja’s patience had never been so tried by travel. Karis slept insatiably, ate ravenously, and in what daylight remained dawdled on the path, infinitely distracted by a curiosity as global and undisciplined as any child’s. The barren heath was to Karis an extraordinarily complicated living puzzle that she could not resist figuring out. But the more she understood, the more there was to understand, and they would starve to death before Karis was satisfied. The rigors of the last month had melted Karis like a candle. It had taken only a sense of taste to make her devoted to food, and when Zanja pointed out their shrinking food supply, their pace picked up substantially.
Still, Karis touched everything, meditatively, absorbedly; and often smelled and tasted it as well. She wore herself out with sensation, and Zanja wore herself out with trying to explain to her the marketplace of physical experience that she had always taken for granted. Karis could not distinguish between hunger and thirst, between tiredness and sleepiness, between softness and smoothness; and teaching her the difference was not nearly so simple as one might think.
Late one afternoon, after several days of leisurely travel, they climbed steadily up the steep road to the Meartown gate, but long before they reached the gate, people had begun to come rushing out and down the road, one or two at first, and then dozens more as the word spread of Karis’s arrival. Faster than seemed possible, the entire town turned out to welcome her home. In the heart of a celebrating crowd, Zanja clung grimly to Homely’s reins and to Karis’s elbow, tempted sometimes to beat the people back so that Karis at least could breathe. Karis, however, seemed resigned to the attention, and patiently embraced the babies born since her disappearance, and shook the hands of forge‑jacks and forgemasters and hundreds of other muscular, smoke‑begrimed people who had not even taken the time to remove their scorched leather aprons.
They sat Zanja beside Karis in a place of honor in the town’s largest tavern, into which the townspeople packed, elbow‑to‑elbow, like beans standing in the pickling jar. The tavernkeepers did not have enough tankards to go around, and a dozen toasts had to be drunk, with the tankards being passed from hand to hand until everyone in the tavern had drunk at least a swallow to Karis’s health. All this took an inordinate amount of time, and at one point Karis glanced aside at Zanja’s face and said dryly, “You endure some trials more gracefully than others.”
“We should have crept to your house under cover of darkness.”
“Sooner or later they’d have discovered I was home. We might as well get this whole thing over with.”
She disappointed the folk of Mear later, though, when they demanded that she tell what had happened. “I was kidnapped by brigands, and Zanja found me and saved my life,” she said. “So I’ve learned the value of having a hero or two among my friends. Now are you going to hold me hostage to your good will much longer? Surely you have work to finish, and the day is nearly over.”
The townsfolk dispersed reluctantly, clearly unsatisfied with the two‑sentence tale, but sunset was drawing near and they all knew that Karis had to smoke or die. Karis gravely bid her well‑wishers farewell, and only Zanja knew what the glitter in her eye was all about. At sunset Karis often was overwhelmed by desire for smoke, and by a lingering fear that somehow her miracle of liberation would prove to be illusory. After sunset came the jubilation at seeing the stars, yet again. She had gone through the cycle enough times now that she seemed to be starting to trust the jubilation and to distrust the fear.
Now they stood alone in a surprisingly empty street rimmed by soot‑gray walls. Someone had taken Homely to the common stable; others had carried their gear away. Karis hesitated in the street, as though she had abruptly lost her sense of direction. After a while, Zanja sat down upon a stoop and tightened her bootstraps. When she looked up, Karis was gazing down at her with a curious expression. Zanja looked at her curiously in return.
“You’ve been very patient,” Karis said.
“Actually, the discipline of peaceful waiting is one I never learned to do with grace. Emil is a true master of patience. You should watch him sometime. The contrast will show you how deliberately and awkwardly and unnaturally I wait. We na’Tarweins are notoriously impatient.”
Karis seemed bemused. “But I don’t want you to wait on me, well or badly. Why don’t you just stop doing it?”
Zanja stood up and took hold of Karis by the shirtfront, and dragged her, startled, to the high stone stoop. With Zanja standing on the stoop, she could kiss Karis’s mouth without having to climb her like a tree. Though Karis seemed affrighted, she did not pull away. Instead, in a moment Zanja felt a shudder run through that long frame, and Karis’s fist clenched in the cloth of Zanja’s shirt. She seemed to want to crawl inside Zanja’s very skin. The shirt cloth started to tear. It was Zanja who took a step back, unnerved by the sensation that she had not so much chosen this moment as she had been delivered to it. Karis lost her balance and sat down upon the stoop as though her knees had given out on her. The breeze, cool with the coming evening, inserted a curious finger into the hole in Zanja’s shirt. She and Karis both were breathing as though they had just sprinted up a hill.