Zanja had survived without him–a bereaved twin, uncertain how to know herself without her alternate self to measure by. And then she met Emil. Now, Shaftali people, whose big, loose families accommodated every kind of coupling imaginable, occasionally referred to Emil as Zanja’s husband–which startled and embarrassed her, but inspired Emil to laugh. He’d say,

“We fire bloods are always arguing about words because they’re so inadequate. That’s a good example: husband.”

After five years with Emil as her commander, teacher, father, brother, and friend, Zanja could predict both what he would say and what he would be thinking. During their long summer separations, Zanja conversed with Emil in her imagination, and would discover, months later, that Emil remembered those talks as though they had actually occurred.

Now she plodded through thick mud in a merciless rain, with J’han suffering silently behind her, and Karis finding the way by dead reckoning through a woodland of sparse trees and dishearteningly dense thickets. Karis often resorted to simply forcing through the bushes, dragging Zanja and J’han behind her. Thorn‑pricked, twig‑scratched, rain‑soaked, mud‑coated, and unspeakably weary, the three of them were about to chase the springtime plague right out of Shaftal.

“You’re crossing the boundary,” Emil commented in Zanja’s head.

“A boundary of thorn bushes,” Zanja responded crabbily. “Another one. And another one after that.”

“No one ever promised it would be easy.”

Ahead of Zanja, Karis had paused to sense the land ahead, stretching to her full height to see over an obstacle that Zanja was too exhausted to trouble to identify.

Emil said in that quiet way of his, “She seems so ordinary.”

“In all these months, no one has paid her much heed, other than to remark on her size and strength. She goes steadily from one task to the next, until the impossible project is completed. Her persistence is what is supernatural. Her imperviousness is what’s supernatural–her imperviousness to discouragement, her strength of will.”

“These qualities are both admirable and maddening,” commented Emil. “What do you think she’ll do next?”

“I don’t know! She wants to serve the land as she is serving it. But Shaftal needs a leader, not a servant.”

“Does it?” Emil said thoughtfully.

Karis was pushing through a thicket again. Zanja pressed up against her to use her as a shield. Still, the thorns grabbed hold of her; her ragged rain cape made a ripping sound; she was snagged. Then Karis reached casually back and jerked her loose, out of the thicket into the abrupt, surprising flatness of a new land.

“How about that!” said J’han, as Karis pulled him loose in turn.

They stood at the southern edge of Shaftal. At Zanja’s back lay the woodland. Ahead lay flat, featureless sand, as far as could be seen. The rain was falling so heavily now it seemed a wonder they were not swimming. Karis pointed a wet finger at the nearly invisible horizon. “That way,” she said.

The sand seemed to last forever. Unintimidated, Karis began to cross it.

Four days later, Zanja awoke from an exhausted, uncomfortable sleep to the sound of rain falling on the oilcloth of the makeshift tent. Karis, sound asleep, clenched her arm across Zanja’s chest in a grip it would not be easy to escape. Curled against Karis’s back, J’han uttered a small snore. The three of them had slept like the dead in a makeshift tent, in wet clothing, under wet blankets, in a flat and featureless land devoid of tree or stone. It had been a dreary, disorienting journey across the sand, with no sight of the sun or stars to reassure them that they were not walking in circles.

J’han snored again, and Zanja heard another sound as well: faint and distant, but distinctly familiar. She lifted an edge of the sagging oilcloth and peered out. A low sky swallowed up the flat horizon, rain pelted the sand, and a haze of sprouting grass seedlings quivered in the watery assault. There was nothing else to see. Mumbling a complaint, Karis hauled Zanja back under the blankets.

But J’han had awakened. “Did you see something?”

“I saw an inn,” Zanja said, “with smoke rising from the chimneys and bread hot from the oven.”

J’han groaned. “No, you saw sand, grass, and water. Why do you torture me?”

“I heard a goat.”

“A goat?” J’han shook Karis roughly by the shoulder. “We’re taking this tent down!”

“Cruel healer,” Karis mumbled, “Let me sleep!”

With some effort, Zanja extricated herself from Karis’s powerful grip, and she and J’han began rolling blankets. Not until they had put on the rain capes that formed the tent, so that the downpour was falling in Karis’s face, did she get up, heavy and reluctant as an old bull. “Why don’t we just let them all die?” she suggested grumpily. But when she took a deep breath, she smiled. “I smell smoke. What do you suppose the Juras eat for breakfast?”

“Sand porridge,” said Zanja. “With bits of grass for flavor. Made with rainwater, of course.”

“So long as it’s hot!” said J’han.

They had not walked far before the sand turned quietly to stone. The clouds lay down and kissed the earth, and Karis had to grab Zanja and J’han by the capes to keep them from stepping over the edge of a cliff. Below them, beyond this dramatic step in the land, where the sand began again, lay the Juras camp at last: an unassuming cluster of circular huts with walls of rubble and roofs of skin, and smoke seeping out from holes where the radiating poles met the lodge pole in the middle. Some small piles of hay remained of the haystacks that in autumn must have garrisoned the camp, supplementing the great wind block of the cliff.

As Karis found a path and led the way down the cliff, Zanja noticed that the base of the cliff was riven with wide cracks where dun goats crowded. One of the goats spotted them, uttered a warning bleat, and soon all the goats were shouting an urgent clamor, like townspeople at a fair who all shout “thief” at once. By the time they reached the bottom of the path, a half dozen giants had come out of the huts: people in their prime, as big as Karis, though not quite so powerfully built, their hair bleached almost white by sun, and falling in locks like orderly strands of yarn, with eyes like polished chips of lapis lazuli.

One of them, at least, spoke Shaftalese. He said, “We cannot offer shelter. We have a sickness here.” His voice was deep and sweet as a pipe organ.

All six of them had glanced curiously at J’han and Zanja, but it was on Karis that their gazed lingered. Her voice, damaged by years of smoke use, was no more musical than a file on wood. “We have traveled far to cure this illness.”

J’han added, “I am a healer.”

The man spoke to the others, and the others spoke back. Zanja shut her eyes and listened. The rich, deep voices seemed to almost sing: question and answer, a harmony complex with adjectives. She said in a low voice, “This language is not conducive to quick decisions. We’ll be standing in the rain for some time.”

J’han said, “After studying their language in a book for a couple of months, you are able to understand them? You will never cease to amaze me.”

The book Medric had slipped into Zanja’s pack had proven to be a grammar of the Juras language, the life work of a long‑dead scholar who had probably never imagined his dry study being put to such serious practical use. Zanja said, “Well, an hour or two of listening would help a great deal–”

“An hour!” said J’han.

“An hour?” said Karis. “Someone is dying!” She dropped her pack, and stepped briskly past the head‑crackers. Fortunately, they proved indecisive about wielding their knob‑headed sticks until she was past them. Then, one uttered a cry that seemed intended to give courage, and they drew themselves up to attack.

Zanja said sharply, in the Juras language, “She is sham’re!”