The girl pointed at a corner table which was surrounded three‑deep by soot‑smudged listeners with tankards in their hands. As Zanja edged her way over, she caught sometimes the tenor of an unfamiliar voice, and spotted a wool‑clad shoulder and arm as the speaker gestured.
“What?” someone said, with an astonishment so deep and sharp that many more heads began to turn. ‘What are you saying!“
“I’m only telling you what I have heard,” the voice said, its articulation blurred by drink. “But I heard it from the people who saw it happen.”
The tavern was rapidly falling silent, like a noisy audience that realizes that the play is beginning. Zanja began to work her way back to Karis, but the hush passed her and reached Karis before she did. Karis turned around on her bench, curious, relaxed. Zanja made a glyph with her hands: Danger. Karis leaned forward and rested her chin in one hand, disguising her height, making herself momentarily invisible in a room full of muscular, soot‑stained people.
“It was a big woman that did it,” the man said, his voice reaching all the way across the crowded room now. “She came out of nowhere, and knocked Councilor Mabin down, and drove a spike into her heart. And Mabin still lives, that I can tell you for certain. At summer’s end it happened, and her heart is still beating this very day.”
“This is a wild and dangerous tale,” someone objected, and there was a murmur of agreement.
The rest of the people sat in stunned silence, however, some with their drinks half lifted, others staring at each other in disbelief. “That big woman,” someone finally said, “Who is she?”
“Well, Mabin certainly knew who she was,” the stranger said. “And perhaps only Mabin knows the whole story, a story she’s not telling. But whatis that big woman? That’s what I want to know.”
Everyone spoke then, in a cacophony of wild disagreement. Karis sat without moving, her face slightly pale in the shadows. Zanja knelt beside her and murmured, “If we try to slip out now, everyone will look at you, and at least some of them will truly see you, and put all the pieces together.”
Karis’s ragged hair frayed out into the darkness, but when she straightened up from her crouch, her eyes filled up with light. “Zanja, it’s time for the journey to begin.”
Kneeling beside her, Zanja’s thoughts began to fragment strangely. She thought of how Karis had insisted that they build Homely a paddock up at Lynton and Dominy’s house, rather than stable him in town. She thought of the money Karis had earned in these few months, quite a lot more than had been spent. She thought of the random tools that had begun to accumulate mysteriously under Karis’s table, taken home one by one from the forge. She was not surprised when Karis stood up, and faced the accumulating stares and the rising silence of the tavern.
Karis said, “I had to make do without Meartown steel, but I don’t think you’d be ashamed of the workmanship. It was a fine spike.”
She picked up her doublet from the bench, and left the tavern, with Zanja behind her. Outside, the storm clouds had begun once again to extinguish the stars. Breathing clouds of white, fastening up their buttons against the cold, they walked briskly away from the tavern. Karis said, “My accounts are all settled. I’ve hinted to the forgemaster that I’m leaving. Lynton and Dominy tell me my responsibility for them should not hold me back, for they both have lived well beyond their time already. I’m afraid we’ll have a miserable night’s journey–this storm will drop some snow before it’s done. Is Emil’s cottage big enough for the four of us?”
Zanja’s heart had filled up with fire, like a furnace. “What does one cottage matter, when we have the world?”
Karis tucked her big hand into the crook of Zanja’s arm, nearly dislodging the book she carried there. “Meartown bored you to tears, didn’t it?”
They walked out the gates, greeting Mardeth as always. Only as the gate closed and locked behind them did Karis seem to hesitate. She turned, and looked behind her. “Mardeth,” she said.
The gatekeeper had started to her cottage, but turned back. “What?”
“We’re off to see what we can make of the world,” Karis said.
The old woman smiled indulgently. “Are you, then? Good luck to you.”
“She thinks you’re joking, or drunk,” Zanja muttered.
Beside her, Karis uttered a laugh. “Maybe that’s what they all think.”
Arm in arm, they walked up the hill.
Laurie J. Marksserves on the steering committee of Broad Universe and is a member of SFFWA and the National Council of Teachers of English. She lives in Melrose, Massachusetts.