She sat in a chair, with Zanja huddled in her lap like a child. Karis’s hands firmly pressed the pain out of Zanja’s head; it dissipated like water, leaving her empty. Afterwards, Zanja felt sick with loneliness. She looked up, and Karis was staring bleakly away. “What have I done?” Zanja asked.

“You’ve survived what no one should have to survive,” said Karis distantly.

“What have I done to make you so angry with me ?”

Karis looked down at her then. “Is that really what you think?”

She put a hand to Zanja’s face again, a gentle touch despite her work‑rough, callused skin. “I feel you pulling away from me with all your strength,” she said. “But at the same time you’re shouting at me to hold on. And with all my strength I am holding onto you, though I know that I have to let go.”

“Unbinding‑and‑Binding,” Zanja said in dull amazement.

“Is that a glyph?” Karis asked.

She set Zanja on her feet, and stood up. Zanja looked up to see her, and a residual dizziness from the headache nearly toppled her. Karis, with an arm around her, asked, “Can you explain to me what I’ve said? Because I don’t understand what it means.”

Zanja said, “I understand that if one of us must fall, it must be me.”

In the silence, Zanja could hear a distant sound, a child’s voice piping a shrill song as she came home across the fields.

As if in reply to Zanja’s statement, Karis said, “That’s Leeba. And Emil is on his way home. Is there nothing to eat in this house?”

Emil arrived home two days later and dropped his heavy load of books with a sigh.

“You need a donkey,” Zanja commented, and poured him a cup of the tea that he always drank, no matter how hot the day.

“Oh, people are always giving me rides.” In the parlor, he sat by a propped‑open window, in one of the big, battered chairs that Karis was always intending to repair. Karis’s hammer rang rhythmically, steadily, down at the forge, a sound that carried astonishingly far and was her only, more than sufficient, advertisement. Emil took a swallow of his tea and sighed. “I’ve been missing your tea.” He glanced at her face and added hastily, “After a particularly messy fight, when the knees are wobbly from a close brush with death, there’s nothing quite so fortifying.”

She wanted to be angry at someone, but apparently it was not to be him. She found herself smiling instead, though her face was reluctant and out of the habit.

“My raven thinks you are on the verge of killing someone,” Emil said.

“I might, if you continue to compliment my housekeeping.”

“The house,” said Emil somberly, “is keeping you.”

Zanja sat on the cool stones of the hearth, folding up her limbs into a neat packet as she had learned to do when she was Leeba’s age, a child as wild and gleeful as she, but required to learn quickly how to keep from using up more than her share of allotted space in the crowded clanhouse. In silence, pummeled by memories of her proud, extinguished people, she watched Emil drink his tea. A yellow butterfly fluttered confusedly into the room, then followed the afternoon sunlight out again.

“Does your head hurt?” Emil asked.

“Not right now.” Zanja put a hand to her skull, where among the interwoven braids there grew some cross‑grained hairs in an old scar, which marked a ridge of healed bone in her skull. At midsummer the old wound seemed fresh, and she needed to touch the scar to be certain that it was in fact healed. “There’s no reason for this pain,” she said, half to herself.

“Surely memories are beyond Karis’s repair work.” Emil set down his teacup and gave her an inquiring look. His hair, as usual, was tied back with a thong, and somehow, though at this time of year he often slept in the woods, he had managed to keep his weathered face clean‑shaven. They had briefly met when she was fifteen and he was the age she was now. Even then he had seemed a deeply balanced man. Now, every year Emil arranged his travels so he could see her through the dreadful days of midsummer, and seemed prepared to continue to do so as long as he lived.

“My brother, what do you want to ask?” Zanja’s voice was husky.

“I don’t suppose,” he said hopefully, “that your owl god is carrying you across another boundary? For the claws of truth dig deep in you this time of year.”

She looked at him, puzzled at first, then with a rising awareness that her wretchedness was making her stupid. The glyph cards were already in her hands, the pouch and cord falling to the floor. Emil’s card, Solitude, or the Man on the Hill, was held between her fingertips. The light falling from the heavenly bodies pierced him with deadly arrows. “I thought I was alone,” she said.

“You think that every year,” he said, without resentment.

He got himself more tea, and came to stand by her as the cards fell from her fingertips: Solitude, followed by the Owl, the Pyre, and Unbinding‑and‑Binding. “Opposing forces trapped in stasis,” he said promptly. “But the paralysis can be broken with painful insight. The way the cards have landed seems to put you and me in a position of grave responsibility, doesn’t it?” He bent over, teacup teetering dangerously, to point a finger at the owl, who flew with a hapless captive dangling from her claw. “Take me across that boundary with you,” he said.

“Foolhardy man!”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“But I can’t make the crossing.”

There was a silence. He said, “Tell me what is the boundary that must be crossed.”

Zanja’s flare of prescience appeared to have burned itself out; no new cards found their way into her hand, and she stared at the old ones in bleak frustration. Emil set down his teacup, knelt on the floor in front of her, and took the glyph cards from her hand. “Ask the question.”

“What is the boundary that must be crossed?”

He did not lay down a new card, but pointed at the Pyre, Karis standing in the flames. “That card is reversed to Life‑and‑Death. If she moves, she will step into death, not out of it. Has she talked to you about this?”

“In the spring, when she told me she had refused Mabin’s offer, she said she couldn’t accept, and she couldn’t take any action, and she couldn’t do nothing.”

“In the spring!”

Zanja’s people had always been very formal with each other, distant and courteous, their roles and relations rigidly prescribed. Emil had learned to mimic the extreme obliqueness with which Zanja’s people addressed private matters, and she recognized that he was doing it now, inquiring without directly asking why it was that Zanja had no recent insights into her lover’s motivations.

Zanja said, “We’ve hardly even talked since then.”

“I see.” Emil frowned at the cards as though he was neither concerned nor very interested in Zanja’s statement. “Norina has told me Mabin believes that Karis’s continuing inaction is a result of bitterness and cowardice.”

Is this what’s wrong?he might have asked, were he being direct. Has your unspoken blame opened up a gulf between the two of you?

“Yes,” said Zanja. “But Mabin can only see how Karis’s very existence inconveniences her plans.”

Emil looked up at her, his expression utterly neutral.

Zanja upended the Pyre card so she was seeing it upside‑down. “Karis is brave and forgiving,” she said. And then a disorientation came over her, like a traveler feels when a lifting fog reveals she is not where she assumed. “There’s nothing Karis can do that won’t lead to disaster, so for years she has engaged in the courage of inaction. But now that Willis claims to be acting on her behalf, to continue to do nothing is also becoming impossible.”

She felt that what she had said was true, but it was also incomplete. “But why hasn’t she just said so?”

Emil said, with mild reproof, “When a rock falls, do we ask it to explain itself? Earth logic is inarticulate. We know it by what it does.” He leaned forward now, picked up the Pyre card, and held it before Zanja’s eyes, upside‑down. “What is Karis doing?”