Zanja said, “Somehow, it will make positive action possible. But, Emil, if I am to die–”

“No,” he said.

“You’re the only one–”

“Do not ask me!”

“–the only one I trust to do it properly.”

There was a sound of wings flapping. Somewhere nearby, the ravens roosted in the darkness. Or were they listening, silently– and did Karis sit awake, alone, by an open window in their sprawling house, also listening?

Zanja got up from the bed and took up her still unpacked traveling gear: a blanket to lie on or to cover herself with should the nights turn cool; matches; a few essential tools; spare socks; a dagger at her hip; a knife in her boot, and the glyph cards in their pouch dangling from her belt.

Medric had put on his spectacles, and now they were gleaming in the faint moonlight. “You’re leaving?”

“I can’t endure to be with anyone. And Emil can’t endure to be with me.”

“Of course not,” said Medric. “Well, you’ll know when it’s time to come back to us. Do you want some money? Karis gave me a great handful of it.”

Zanja accepted a few coins to make him feel better and kissed him good‑bye. She said nothing to Emil. She went down the stairs and out into the quiet night. The moon was obscured now by the rooftops, but she could tell by the glow of light in which direction it lay. She followed, and behind and above her there was the whisper of ravens’ wings.

Chapter Eleven

For twenty days, Zanja lived off the land or worked for meals, for farmers always welcomed more hands at this time of year. As she drew close to the borderland, that hazy edge where Shaftal ended and the western wilderness began, she met a man as wild and solitary as she, who volunteered to cook the rabbit she had snared with the mushrooms and wild vegetables he had gathered, and soon served her one of the best meals she’d ever eaten. They were in the woods, had come across each other by chance, and parted with scarcely a word having been exchanged; but nothing seemed strange to Zanja anymore, and the wandering cook never asked her a single question, so perhaps nothing seemed strange to him, either.

Eventually, Zanja walked all night, and at dawn entered again into the outskirts of the old librarian’s town. She found the rooms above the wheelwright’s shop to be vacant. She jogged down cobbled streets to the librarian’s house. A loaded freight wagon stood at the door, with four big horses in the traces, munching from feed bags. A hired driver leaned on one of the wheels with a half‑eaten bun in his hand. “You must be the one we’re waiting for,” he said.

She got into the wagon, which was packed with crates that smelled of old paper and leather: the librarian’s rescued books. She was making herself a rough bed among the crates when Emil and Medric, summoned by the driver’s call, came out of the house with the shoemaker trailing behind them. Her eyes were puffy with weeping.

Emil leaned over the edge of the wagon and offered Zanja a bun.

“When did the librarian die?” Zanja asked. The bun was warm. She clasped it between her hands.

“The day before yesterday. She was telling me how to remove a water stain. She fell silent, and I realized she had stopped breathing. Her daughter practically begged us to take the books. And that thing there–” He gestured at a large crate whose position directly over the wheels suggested it was particularly heavy. “That’s a printing press, would you believe! We’ve got paper, too, and those chests are full of type. It was all hidden away in the cellar.”

“That old woman possessed some dangerous weapons,” Zanja said.

“Well, it certainly will cost us our lives if the Sainnites catch us with this load.” Emil said these words without concern; their prescience, and the raven escort, made it unlikely they would be surprised by soldiers or any other danger.

“Have you decided to kill me?” Zanja asked.

He folded his arms on the edge of the wagon. The sun was rising, and he squinted in its light. “Have you decided to die?” he replied.

“Decided? Well, I accept that I must accept my death.”

“You’ve gotten as particular about words as Medric and I.” He turned his head; Medric was talking animatedly to the shoemaker, but she listened to him with an expression of blank bewilderment. Emil turned back to Zanja and said, “I accept that I must become able to kill you. But somehow we both must become able to actually decide.”

“That’s a problem for the gods,” said Zanja.

“Hmm. What will I do, then, since I have no gods? Shaftali supposedly worship the land itself. And if Shaftal is what’s sacred to me, then that makes Karis–” Astonishingly, he seemed unable to think of the right word, and looked as baffled as the shoemaker. “Well, Karis is certainly not going to help me decide to kill you! Just the opposite, I expect.”

“And yet we’re going home.”

“We are.” He sighed. “What else can we do? Deceive her? Hide from her?” He glanced up at the ravens, three of them, that stalked along the rooftops. “It’s tempting, actually. But it’s both immoral and impossible.”

Medric, finished with the poor shoemaker, came down the steps with the burned book tucked under his arm. “Will you talk all day?” he said with mock peevishness, and climbed into the wagon. He turned to Zanja and added, “Who was that man who cooked dinner for you in the woods?”

“What? Gods of the sky, Medric!”

“I know I’m a surprising sort of fellow,” said Medric. “But I should think you’d be used to me by now.”

“I don’t even know his name,” said Zanja. “But I’ve never in my life eaten such a meal! Should I have asked him to come with me?”

“Oh, no. He needs to find his own way. Did he seem like a Sainnite to you?”

“Not at all.”

“Well! He’s a rare man, then, if he could fool even you. I look forward to meeting him, some day.”

They journeyed home, past fields crowded with hay cutters, near ponds where naked, nut‑brown children took their last swims in the last warm days of the year, through the rising dust that glittered like gold shavings in the blinding sunlight. For entertainment, the three of them wildly re‑interpreted poems they had memorized, and the driver, mystified at first, soon took to declaiming poetry of his own. Medric spent the better part of a day giddily proposing arcane interpretations of the driver’s explicit lyrics, and Emil laughed until he wept. They came home like drunks from the fair to an empty house and a cold forge and tomatoes rotting on the vine in a garden long since gone to weeds.

“Gods of hell,” said Medric in Sainnese. He stood on the doorstep, flabbergasted, pulling tangled hair out of his face and tying it at the nape of his neck with a greasy blue ribbon. He pushed his spectacles into a better position, but appeared dissatisfied and took them off to clean them on his shirt.

Zanja searched the house, and when she came out, Emil was walking up the hill from the orchard, where he had gone to try to get the ravens to talk to him. The driver of the wagon, who had finished untying the ropes that secured the load, leaned nonchalantly on the wheel.

“Those ravens are nothing but brainless carrion eaters!” shouted Emil.

Zanja called back, “Her toolbox is gone, and Leeba’s rabbit. She left the moneybox in the middle of the kitchen table. Everything is covered with dust.”

“Gods of hell!” Medric said in bewilderment. “She’s run away!”

*

The word had spread that their house was occupied again, and yet another neighbor had come by to inquire worriedly about Karis. Zanja would have been rude and Medric unsettling, so Emil went out to stand in the yard and attempt to explain her absence. He came in looking angry and impatient, and said, “He wants me to reassure him that she’s coming back, that his good fortune at living in the purview of an earth witch will never end. I wish I had the luxury of his petty worries.”