“Blessed day,” Karis gasped.

Zanja knelt at her feet and said with mock seriousness, “The Ashawala’i call that feeling ‘being struck by lightning.’ Shall I explain the sensation to you?”

Karis said shakily, “I understand enough.”

Zanja felt the entirety of Karis’s attention focus upon her. She thought of Karis exploring the landscape of her body the way she had been exploring the heath, and her heart began to wobble in her chest. “Would you rather I go back to being awkwardly and unnaturally patient?” she said.

“Could you?” Karis asked, then answered her own question. “No. And if you could, I’d be offended.”

Zanja grinned. “Well then, it’s completely impossible.”

Karis looked away. Her hands clenched each other like shy children before a stranger. “Zanja, it’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s my ghosts.”

“I have my ghosts too. So what?”

“So maybe lovemaking will be an embarrassing, disastrous farce.”

“We’ve survived so much worse than that already.”

Karis looked back at her, stricken.

Zanja said, “Karis, I can always find a way across. It’s my gift.” She gave her a hand, and helped her to her feet. They walked all the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house without saying another word, and without letting go of each other.

*

The delivery of their gear had prematurely announced their homecoming to Lynton and Dominy, and they arrived to find everything in chaos as the two men frantically tried to make Karis’s bed with fresh linens, cook a celebratory dinner, and heat the bathwater, all before sunset. Karis left Zanja to sort things out while she walked off by herself toward the green trees that clustered around a small pond. The sun was nearly down.

Zanja repeatedly explained to the two men that Karis no longer used smoke and there was no rush, but nothing she said seemed likely to overcome their disbelief. Finally, to calm them down she took over some of the work. She had never made a bed in her life; but it proved, as she suspected, to be largely a matter of common sense. She took out Karis’s two cleanest shirts and hung one to warm by the fire. The second she took with her to the bathhouse, where the washkettle had come to a boil. Buckets of cold water stood waiting to mix in the tub with the hot. There was a crock of herbs and flowers to sprinkle in the water, a crock of soft lye soap, and a bath brush worn soft with use.

Clean, dressed only in Karis’s shirt, which hung to her calves, carrying her knife belt, she walked back to the house and let herself quietly into Karis’s room by way of the garden. It was full dark by then, and she could hear Karis’s voice in the kitchen. Zanja built up the fire in the fireplace and combed her hair with her fingers as it dried. She supposed she was missing dinner.

She fell asleep in the warmth of the fire, and when she awoke, Karis stood nearby, buttoning her clean shirt. She had set a burning candle into the chimney nook, and gazed down at Zanja with her eyes set into dark hollows by the angle of the light.

Ordinary and commonplace words could have filled the silence, but Zanja did not move or speak.

Karis knelt beside the settle and lifted a hand to awkwardly brush the loose hair out of Zanja’s eyes. Her fingers were steady, but her agitated breathing revealed how close her ghosts hovered. She smelled unlike herself: of soap and herbs rather than of smoke and old sweat. She abruptly leaned over and kissed Zanja’s mouth. Then she tried to pull away but Zanja couldn’t seem to release her. Karis easily could have broken free but she held herself still, trembling like a wild horse trapped into the traces. Carefully, Zanja let go of her. She told herself she could wait as long as she needed to, and she could do it gracefully, without resentment. She was a katrim. She could sleep on the hearth in the kitchen and she wouldn’t blame Karis, and she wouldn’t complain.

She sat up, rubbing her face. Karis sat down beside her on the settle and said miserably, “You deserve–”

Zanja crawled into Karis’s lap. Though startled, Karis moved instinctively to embrace her, to accommodate the weight of her. Zanja was so much smaller than she, a tribeless mountain woman lost here in the plains, ready to die of loneliness. Holding her like this, would Karis remember the bitter winter day she rescued her? There had been no coercion when Karis gave her back her life, just generosity: unearned, unsought, utterly unexpected. Zanja felt Karis’s hand in her hair, and shut her eyes and thought of Karis stroking the heath’s soft grasses. She willed herself to be as passive, and as vital, as the heath had been.

She shuddered alert when she heard Karis’s breathing change. Karis’s big, gentle hand had found its way to Zanja’s face and now she began kissing her, and Zanja made her hands lie still. Time carried them upon a quiet river. The fire died down and the candle guttered in its socket. The moon rose and cast a modest light through the garden door’s glass windows. Zanja tasted salt.

She lifted a hand to Karis’s face and found her gasping with surprise, awash in astonished tears. Zanja straddled Karis on her knees and the river took them again and the moonlight faded away. Karis stood up and carried Zanja to the bed. Zanja’s exquisite restraints snapped, and in a matter of moments she ruined both their shirts.

They’d have nothing to wear in the morning. But between now and then lay an infinity of time.

Though Karis floundered in an agitated ocean of sensation, Zanja’s hands anchored her within her skin. Fragmented flesh knitted itself together, shocking her with each new joining: another recognition, another homecoming. Zanja’s sculptured face moved across her breast: perspiring, ecstatic, entangling them both in a mess of unbound hair, moaning sometimes like the lion upon her hill. Who’d have thought those knife‑scarred hands could be so appallingly gentle, or that a woman of such iron will could suddenly turn so soft? With one touch Karis could collapse her. She tried it, stroking the soft inside of a lean thigh, and Zanja fell prostrate and incoherent, as helpless as Karis had ever seen her. For a moment, Karis didn’t know what to do. And then she did know.

A strange, irresistible time followed. With Zanja shouting and sobbing and flailing under her touch, Karis felt the shock of her lover’s ravishment right through skin and muscle and bone. And then Zanja lay shuddering, gasping for breath in Karis’s arms, and beginning to shake with dizzy laughter. “Oh gods of the sky,” she said in abject gratitude, and laughed and cried, and Karis held her more closely than she had ever held anything, and could not imagine letting go.

Then Zanja tied her hair up in a knot and said, “Now I will follow the fire.”

Zanja lay across her, and Karis saw the callused bottoms of her well‑traveled feet. She took one in her hand. It was warm, and rough. The tendons tightened and the ball of Zanja’s foot pressed gently against her palm. Karis felt Zanja’s hands, and her tongue– unhurried, coaxing. Under that touch, her thighs gave way, and the rest of her gave way as well. Oh, it was fire, but it was also earth: a monolithic presence, waiting, wounded, for healing. Shaftal. She could not refuse.

The earth claimed her.

In the dead of night, Zanja awoke to find herself alone, with the blankets tucked carefully around her and the garden doors standing ajar. She walked out into a chilly breeze, and saw frost sparkle in the starlight. A year ago she had never thought she’d see stars again. Now the cold night felt huge around her, cupped within the folded hollow of the hills, but expanding out into the bright universe. The garden lay breathless and silent, the accuser bugs silenced at last, the frog song long since ended. It would be a sudden winter.

Karis lay naked on her back in a bed of thyme, staring up at the stars. Zanja paused. She knew there had been a mystery at the end of their lovemaking, when with the moment of consummation upon her, it was not to Zanja, but to the land itself that Karis cried out. Perhaps Karis had not slept at all since then, and all their lovemaking had been for her the opening of another door. Perhaps everything they did would ripple outward in the vast future: every breath, every word.