“I’ll just leave the basket here,” Clement said. Feeling truly battered, she gathered herself to rise, but simply could not do it.

“General, you’re hurt! Let me help you,” said the man.

Zanja said, “No, J’han.”

“It is not right–”

“Brother healer, heed me!”

Apparently perceiving something that Clement could not, the man sat back on his heels, restraining his reflexive kindness with an obvious effort. Less than a year ago, a person of his generosity and knowledge had taught the Sainnites how to save themselves from the plague. Perhaps it had in fact been this very man. Unfortunately, not all Shaftali were like him.

When Clement looked at the silent warrior, she looked into the other face of Shaftal: unbowed, unforgiving. Every attempt to overcome the people had not merely increased their resentment, but also their ability to resist. Clement’s acts, and the actions of all the soldiers like her, had created this unrelenting enemy and all the enemies like her. With a great deal of effort they could be killed, but they could not be eliminated.

“What do you want from me?” Clement asked in Sainnese.

The warrior replied in the same language. “You took no risk when you put yourself at the G’deon’s mercy. Karis is so fearful of doing harm that she has repeatedly refused to act at all. You had good reason to expect only generosity.”

Clement protested, “My desire for peace is sincere! Ask that Truthken–”

“If you misrepresented your intentions in her presence you would not be alive now. But sincerity is not enough.” Zanja na’Tarwein was speaking with an effort, yet her words were like the storyteller’s: precise and devastating.

Clement urgently wished that she could get away from her. But she could not. “What wouldbe enough?” she asked. “If I offered you as many soldiers to kill as we killed in your village–”

“It would not be enough.”

“If I had the power to undo the past–”

“You could not help but undo the marvelous along with the despicable.”

The weight of those words, the horror of them, felt unendurable. Clement’s eyes were burning–a general does not weep! Yet she spoke, inadequately, words that broke even as she uttered them. “What my people did to yours wasdespicable. I am sorry–desperately sorry.”

There was a silence. The warrior took a breath and looked away, as though she also were fighting tears. Suddenly, she did not seem terrible at all. She said, “The valley of my people is populated by nothing but bones. The memories of their deaths will haunt me until the day of my own death. But your sorrow–like my sorrow–is not enough.”

“Then nothing can be enough.”

The katrimlooked at her. “If that is true, then lasting peace is impossible. Nothing has been gained today.”

Dread replaced the last remains of Clement’s relief as she realized how truly Zanja na’Tarwein had spoken. So many people had been wronged, over so many years! Somehow, reparations mustbe made, or the peace of words would never become a peace of fact. Yet Clement had nothing to offer Shaftal. Nothing.

Surely seven thousand Sainnite soldiers was not nothing!

As sometimes happens in extreme exhaustion, Clement felt a hallucinatory clarity. She understood exactly what must be done.

She said, “If my people become Shaftali, would that be enough?”

The last survivor of the Ashawala’i people turned her harshly beautiful, starkly alien face to her. “You will offer them to Shaftal?”

Every stupidity of the last thirty‑five years had come from the Sainnites’ unwillingness and inability to change. Certainly they had not been welcomed, permitted, or encouraged to belong in Shaftal. But neither had they tried to be anything other than conquerors. To attempt it now might be so difficult it verged on the impossible, and might take the rest of Clement’s life to achieve. But wasn’t her only other option to take Cadmar’s well‑trodden road, a coward’s way of self‑induced oblivion and obstinacy, to delude her people with visions of heroism as she marched them to destruction?

Clement said, half to herself, “I must do better than merely preserve the past. For I have a son.” She looked up at Zanja. “So even if I fail at everything else, I will offer myself to Shaftal. And though I fear I won’t live long enough to see this promise fulfilled, I’ll do all I can to transform my seven thousand soldiers as well.”

And then Clement felt sick with disorientation–giddy, grief‑struck, light‑headed–and the man had leapt up to steady her, to help her get securely seated on the floor, to bow her head between her knees until the nauseating dizziness had lifted. When her ears had stopped roaring and the cloud of her vision had cleared, Clement cautiously lifted her head.

“I am satisfied,” said Zanja. Her spasms of shivering had eased. The little girl was saying to her irritably, “You talk funny! Why are you doing that?” The man spoke soothingly to the child as he returned to his examination of Zanja’s feet. “You Ashawala’i are a sturdy folk,” he commented.

Zanja reached for one of the loaves of bread and tore it in half. She said to the child in Shaftalese, “I have been speaking with General Clement in the soldiers’ language, Little Hurricane. Look– here is some jam in this basket. Do you want some on your bread?”

With the restless child successfully distracted by bread and jam, Zanja gave Clement a serious look. “I will eat with you now,” she said, and handed Clement the remains of the loaf. With the crisp crunching softly in her teeth she added, “I am a crosser of boundaries …”

It sounded so like the storyteller’s opening ritual words, I am a collector of tales,that Clement rubbed her face in bafflement.

“To cross is my calling–my curse–”

“Your gift!” protested the healer.

Zanja smiled wryly. “That also. And my joy.”

“I thought your curse was telling stories,” said Clement.

“The storyteller is gone,” said the healer. “Zanja doesn’t even remember her.”

“Medric says the storyteller was killed–that she had asked to be killed. She must have known that she had completed her task.” Zanja brushed breadcrumbs from her fine wool clothing. Clement watched her knife‑scarred hand in dazed fascination. Did this woman not remember doing up those silver buttons? Did she not know how she came to be in Watfield garrison? Did she remember none of the stories she had been told? She seemed remarkably composed for a person who had awakened to find the walls falling down around her.

A crosser of boundaries, Clement thought, might be accustomed to such abrupt and inexplicable transitions–accustomed enough that she could mask her disorientation as effectively as Clement could mask her fear.

Zanja glanced at Clement, still smiling wryly. “Even to my kinfolk I always seemed peculiar,” she said. “But I might be a useful friend to you, General.”

“Gods of my mother!”

The little girl, jam‑smeared, looked worriedly at Clement.

“Zanja surprised me,” Clement explained to her. “Your mother is a very surprising person.”

The girl said, “But she just wants to be your friend. Why, Zanja?”

Zanja stroked a hand affectionately down the child’s tangled hair. “She needs a friend to teach her how to be Shaftali.”

“She won’t be a soldier any more?”

“Maybe she’ll be a different kind of soldier.”

“I do need your help,” Clement began.

Zanja interrupted her. “In Shaftal, no one’s judgment overrules the judgment of a Truthken–except the G’deon’s, of course–for a Truthken represents the law. Therefore, General–”

“Won’t you be one of the people who calls me Clement?”

“Yes, Clement. I advise you to do whatever Norina tells you to do.”

Clement turned her head and found the Truthken standing beside her. The woman gave Zanja a keen look, then, in a swift glance at the healer, seemed to ask and receive an answer to a question. She turned to Clement and said, “General, Karis has asked to speak to you.”