“Now you are afraid,” Karis said from the thyme bed. Her voice was hushed.
“I should be afraid.”
“Yes,” Karis said peacefully. “Anyone should fear to possess such powers as we possess.” Then: “Do you remember when I healed you?”
“I’ll never forget that day.” Zanja knelt down in the thyme. “You restored me to myself.”
Karis said, “Now you’ve done the same to me. So it was the land that sent me forth, to make whole the one who would make me whole. I’ll never again question the logic of my life.”
Chapter Twenty‑eight
At mid‑autumn, when the ground began to freeze, South Hill Company disbanded. The malaise that had affected the Sainnites seemed also to have affected the Paladins, like a plague jumping across the battle lines. By then, half the people of the company had no homes to go to, and only food delivered from outside would keep the people of the region, including the Sainnites, alive until spring. Even Willis had succumbed to the bitterness of that year. He was gone from South Hill; no one knew where. One of Emil’s friends had gotten a brief and inexplicable letter: I am released. I wish you the same. Though she shook her head in pity that so fine a commander had fallen victim to the silliness of middle age, she lay awake that night, thinking of the ways that her own service to the war had imprisoned her over the years.
Emil and Medric, on their second trip for supplies to the nearest town, outran the storm by less than an hour. They had scarcely finished unloading the wagon when the rain began to fall. Medric, who had insisted that they augment their already substantial supply of food and lamp oil, took on the project of cramming their purchases into the already packed storeroom of the little cottage. Emil went up to the attic to check for leaks, and wound up sitting for quite some time on one of the trunks of precious books, listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and peering out the one small window at the gray landscape below. When he climbed down the ladder, he found Medric curled in an armchair by the kitchen fire, with a book in his lap and a pen in his teeth, and the ink pot precariously balanced on a pile of papers on the arm of his chair. He looked up, took the pen out of his mouth, and said, “Why has no one ever written about Harald G’deon?”
“Chaotic times have brought us a dearth of historians,” Emil said. “And so many have blamed Harald for the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, I suppose that there is an impulse to erase him from history.”
“But some day people will wish they could know more about him,” Medric said. “And another thing: the House of Lilterwess came into being around Lilter, the second G’deon, largely to keep her powers regulated. So once Mabin made it clear she would not confirm Karis as G’deon, at that point, it could be argued, the House of Lilterwess lost its reason for existence.”
“Now that’s hardly true,” Emil began. He chopped some vegetables for a bean soup while he explained as well as he could how the Orders of Lilterwess had gradually become the unifying heart of Shaftal’s government and culture. As he put the pot onto the fire he caught sight of Medric’s smile, and leaned over to kiss the top of his head. “Do you hear?” he said. “The rain has turned to sleet, just like in your dream. What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking that ‘The House of Karis’ just doesn’t sound very impressive.”
“That’s because it’s impossible to imagine her as an institution.”
“That’s probably what they said about that woman Lilter, and look at what happened.”
Medric wrote for a while in his weird mix of languages and alphabets. Emil did not feel like doing anything, and made himself a pot of tea. Although it had been a long day, Medric still would sit up with his books and papers for half the night. Emil would go to bed, and wake up before dawn with Medric curled against him like a friendly cat. In the kitchen, Emil would find both the lamp reservoir and the wood box empty. He would go out on a solitary walk to watch the sunrise, and when he came back he’d start some bread and write a letter to Zanja, though he could not imagine how to arrange for its delivery.
Emil got up to stir the beans. The wind flung sleet at the shuttered windows. By now it was full dark, and the storm would rattle the shutters all night long. Within the cottage, here in the bright kitchen, it was easy to forget about the storm.
Zanja looked up from the uncertain text she was deciphering as someone came into the tavern, and she saw as the door closed that it was past sunset. The people clustered nearest the door shouted in good‑natured protest against the bitter wind that came blowing in. The tavern’s convivial cheer grew noisier by the moment, as miners and smelters came in to celebrate another day’s survival at their inevitably dangerous jobs. Zanja closed her book. Her tutor had gone home some time ago.
The door opened again, and Karis came in, accompanied by a half dozen other metalsmiths from her forge. The other smiths lined up to get tankards of ale, but Karis took cider instead, and a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese. She set her burdens onto a nearby table and then mounted Zanja’s table to engage her in a startling kiss, while the people in the vicinity burst into laughter, and the tavernkeeper shouted good‑naturedly across the room, “Hey, now, that’s no way to treat fine furniture!”
Karis grinned wickedly. “Greetings, wife.”
“Whatever that means,” Zanja said.
Karis sat down decorously on the bench across from Zanja, and retrieved her cup and plate from the other table. “It means whatever I want it to mean.”
“Well, that’s convenient. What does it mean tonight?”
“Tonight, it means you can share my bread and cheese without asking. I’ve been daydreaming about supper ever since dinner, haven’t you?”
“No, since breakfast. I missed dinner.” Zanja took some bread and cheese.
Karis tasted the cheese, and shut her eyes. “Oh, my.”
Throughout the short months of autumn, Karis had immersed herself in the ordinary, which to her was not ordinary at all. Meartown was a busy, everyday kind of place, and Karis seemed steadied by the straightforward effort of labor. Zanja gathered that she had never worked so hard or so brilliantly, and some of the more perceptive townsfolk had already come to Zanja to ask plaintively whether Karis needed help in setting up her own forge, as though they hazily recognized that Karis’s talent could not be contained much longer in the narrow patterns of her earlier life.
To be the speaker for a single person was a role Zanja did not much savor. She advised these people to talk to Karis, but none of them did. Instead, everyone participated in Karis’s pretense that nothing of significance had been changed. They accepted Zanja as Karis’s lover and apparent dependent, they were puzzled by Karis’s recovery from her addiction, and their labored lives continued unaltered. The mysteries of Karis’s late summer disappearance lay in the past, and now the preoccupations of winter distracted everyone’s attention. Karis seemed to prefer it that way. Zanja alone knew that Karis’s senses had developed far beyond the limits of Zanja’s experience or vocabulary, and that sometimes she could only understand Karis in the same way she understood glyphs or poetry, through the faith and vision and intellectual recklessness that Emil would have called fire logic.
It had been a preoccupied autumn. Love had not so bedazzled Zanja that she did not regret its cost. She had finally ceased to be a katrim. What she was becoming instead she did not know, but she found Karis’s joking use of the undefinable word “wife” to be deeply unnerving.
Something in the tavern distracted her: a strange quality to the sound, perhaps. Someone from the forge had come over to engage Karis in a technical conversation that Zanja ignored. She got up to refill her cider cup, listening closely as she worked her way through the crowd. Ale and good cheer had made everyone a storyteller tonight, and although not all the stories she overheard had to do with the metal crafts, she heard nothing extraordinary. “Are there any strangers here tonight?” she asked the girl who poured the cider.