“Feather bed?” she said, incredulous.

“Oh, my dear, you can’t imagine how soft–”

She began to laugh, and was still laughing as he pulled her to her feet and tugged her back into that overpowering hallway. He gave her a ragged handkerchief to mop up her tears. Her diaphragm hurt, but she felt relieved, as though she had in fact been weeping.

“Can I make a bargain with you?” he asked. “That you’ll never ask me to kill you again?”

“In exchange for what?” she gasped, still out of breath.

“Well, what do you want?”

Eventually, sobered, she said, “I don’t know how to answer you.”

Emil’s hand rested on the small of her back; she put her arm around him and they walked silently, apparently aimlessly, past clutters of dusty, grotesque furniture. The monstrous house seemed to have swallowed everyone into its echoing maze of rooms and hallways.

Emil finally said, “You are a hero of Shaftal, you know. You deserve to have whatever you want.”

He turned down another hallway–their path was so complicated Zanja doubted she could find her way back to the front door– entered a self‑important anteroom, and went through that, into a bedroom full of gleaming furniture, thick carpet, and rich draperies. This room, at least, seemed recently cleaned.

Karis sat near the hearth on a cushioned stool, taking tools out of her tool box, unwrapping them, examining them, testing their sharp edges, rubbing them with an oily rag to protect them against rust. She said grumpily, as Emil came in, “But I’m not going to sleep in that awful bed.”

“You can stand out in the snow all night–I don’t care,” he replied.

Zanja found herself paralyzed in the doorway, unable to cross the threshold. Emil said to Karis, “What are you doing, anyway?”

Karis gently extricated a small plane from the box. Zanja could remember when Karis had shaped that plane’s body and forged its blade, but she could not remember what this particular plane was designed for. When Karis invented a tool, she also invented the need for it, and Emil went about the country showing the new tool to carpenters, who became better at their work by buying it.

The hand that does the work creates the tool; the tool creates the work done by the hand. By earth logic, action and understanding are inseparable.

Zanja said, “The tools remind Karis who she is.”

Karis looked at her. “Do yourtools remind you of who youare?” Her eyes had a deep, rather dangerous brightness to them. She reached again into her toolbox, and although the tool she had removed was swathed in leather, Zanja recognized it. Karis held up the little knife that had been her first gift to Zanja.

Zanja had come into the room somehow, had dropped to her knees on the lush carpet.

Karis said, “Clement confiscated this blade from you–from the storyteller. But then she gave it to a raven, to bring to me. That one gesture made everything possible.” She pressed the leather‑wrapped blade into Zanja’s hand.

In a moment, Zanja said, “When they took the blade from me– from the storyteller–she felt a terrible loss. She knew that she had always carried the blade with her, though she couldn’t remember where it had come from or what it represented to her. But she treasured it anyway. It allowed her to keep believing that she had a past, that she was someone, and not merely a container of stories. But after they had taken the blade and the cards, she had nothing of her own.”

She looked up at Emil, who had given Zanja the cards, who now wearily leaned against a chair back but seemed unwilling to sit down. “She loved the glyph cards too,” she said, “for the same reason.” She added, “The storyteller’s memories are very strange.”

He signaled with his eyes, telling her to look again at Karis. She had taken Zanja’s dagger out of her toolbox and was holding it out to her.

“I left it lying on our bed,” Zanja said.

“Did you? When Norina brought it to me, she didn’t say where you had left it.” Karis paused, and added apologetically, “I’m as stupid as ever about symbolism.”

“I don’t remember feeling angry, but to leave the knife in the bed we had shared for five years, that was an angry gesture. I can’t believe I did such a thing.”

“I do remember being angry with you,” Karis said. “With you– and with our family–and with Harald. But it’s gone now.”

There was a long silence, during which the faint sound of Emil shifting his weight seemed awfully loud.

Zanja said, “The storyteller thought she had murdered her wife.”

“Will you take the blade,” Karis said impatiently. “Or not?”

“Of course I will!” Zanja took the dagger out of her hand.

Emil straightened up rather stiffly. “I’m going to bed. My only wish is that no one bother me before breakfast. Everyone else will eventually end up in the kitchen this evening, I expect, sitting on the floor and drinking beer like the rustics we are, and eating with our fingers whatever amazing thing Garland cooks up next. Oh, Karis, I suppose I should warn you that Garland has fallen in love with the kitchen.”

“What? No! Emil!”

But he was gone, the relieved liveliness of his voice already swallowed by the house’s maw.

“Now it’s inevitable that we’ll live in this ugly travesty,” said Karis gloomily. “This building is an affront–a waste of good land and good stone. How shall I endure calling it my home?”

Zanja put her head on Karis’s knee. In a moment, Karis’s hand stroked her head, and Zanja’s skin came alive, like dry tinder catching fire. Karis gave a gentle tug to her solitary braid. Zanja murmured, “You practically pulled it out by the roots already.”

“Ungrateful–”

“I am not at all ungrateful. Do you know, someone has mentioned to me that it’s the thirteenth day of the first year of Karis G’deon? How did that become possible?”

After a silence, Karis said, “Thirteen days? Surely it’s been thirteen years.”

Zanja raised her head, for Karis’s voice had been harsh in its center and ragged at its edges. “What’s so awful about that bed? Why can’t you bear to lie down in it?”

“Those bedposts are overbearing. The carving is grotesque. The whole thing is an ostentatious monstrosity.”

Zanja looked at the bed. It truly was an awful thing; she herself couldn’t imagine lying in it. “So take a chisel to it,” she said.

Karis blinked at her. “By Shaftal, I’ve missed you.” Eyes glittering, she reached for a chisel in its protective wrappings and a wooden mallet that lay nearby. Then she chose a crosscut saw, its handle darkened by oil and age. “This won’t take long,” she said.

Not much later, they made love on the feather bed, amid wood chips and sawdust, as the ornate bedposts burned briskly in the fireplace.

A new age in Shaftal had begun.

Laurie J. Markslives in Melrose, Massachusetts, where she gardens and corrects papers when she’s not writing in the Melrose Starbucks.