The fifteen katrimbecame twelve, and then seven. The seven became five. With more warriors and more time, they might have eventually destroyed the entire Sainnite battalion. But now, with only five of them remaining, and only one more pass to climb before the Sainnites could safely exit the mountains, they knew their time for vengeance would soon come to an end. None of them wished to survive. They camped among stones, high above the miserable Sainnites and their disgusting horsemeat. They ate sweet trout flesh and sucked on the transparent bones. They ate tart berries and crunched the seeds with their teeth. They tallied the Sainnite dead and were satisfied.
Only Zanja had ever traveled so far east of the Asha Valley. She told about a treacherous canyon they soon would pass, and suggested that one of them might lure the Sainnites into the canyon, while the others dislodged stones to fall down on their heads. They drew lots, and Zanja chose the longest stick. That night, Ransel put his arms around her and said, “Wait for me in the Land of the Sun, my sister. I will not be far behind you.” She fell asleep with her head in the hollow of his shoulder.
She would always remember the moment when the mountain fell on her. It was her second death, and far more satisfying than the first. She would remember the Sainnites gleefully chasing her up the canyon, the four katrimlevering the rocks overhead, and the canyon wall collapsing onto the people below. Mercifully, she would not remember much else: She would not remember when the surviving Sainnites dragged her out from under a boulder with her back broken. She would not remember how they tortured her, when they realized she was still alive. She would not remember when they killed Ransel, who might have been trying to either rescue her or deliver her with a merciful blow of the dagger. She would not remember that she mistakenly thought she was already dead, and he was coming to join her. She would not realize for a long time that in fact he had left her behind among the living.
Chapter Four
In a stone cottage tucked into a hollow in the iron‑rich hills that surround Meartown, Karis, a mastersmith of Mear, sat on the stoop in the morning sunshine, fumbling with her bootstraps. From where she sat, she could see a dark cloud rising as the furnaces of Meartown were lit. She smoothed her big, sooty, callused hands across the stoop’s worn stone, testing to see if the smoke paralysis had lifted sufficiently for her to at least be able to sense the hammer as she gripped it. The light of the rising sun was blinding.
Lynton moved slowly through the lush garden, his white hair gleaming among the bean plants. Bald Dominy came out the open door of the cottage with a packet of food for Karis’s dinner. “It’s bread, dried fish, some cheese and a couple of apples,” he said. “Be sure you eat it all, whether you want it or not. A person your size has to eat.”
She nodded. Dominy or Lynton had said these words, or something like them, every morning, all the years she had lived with them. She did not reply, for if she tried to talk she would slur like a drunk, since her tongue was still half paralyzed. The old man patted her shoulder affectionately. Before she moved in, he and Lynton had added an oversized room to their house to accommodate her oversized frame. After she moved in, thanks to their incessant fretting, she had finally put on the bulk to match her height.
The sunshine chased the lingering poison from her paralyzed nerves. She said, without too much difficulty, “Something has changed.”
Dominy shouted to Lynton to be sure to pick plenty of tomatoes. “What’s that?” he asked absently.
“Something has changed,” she said again. She felt it, a shifting of the earth’s weight, as though the earth and stones were gathering up their strength for a great effort. “I feel an urgency.” She pressed her palms again upon the stoop. “What has happened?” she asked the warm granite.
Most of the time, Dominy treated her like any other metalsmith. Sometimes, she did something that astounded him, and he would remember that she was a witch. As she looked up at him now, he asked diffidently, “What does the stone say?”
“It speaks of blood and death throughout the land. That is not new. But it speaks of something else, a life.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. It pulls at me.” She looked down, as though a child were tugging at her shirt.
“You’re going to be late,” Dominy said.
She stood up. His head tilted back, and back, until it seemed he was gazing up at a mountain. He squinted fiercely in the sun. “I’m not going to the forge,” she said. “I need to think.”
“You want me to carry a message to the forgemaster, I suppose.” Grumpily, he took the food packet out of Karis’s hand. “I’ll get a satchel for this. Where will you go? Out onto the heath? Better bring a water bottle, too.”
Far from the danger and stink of the furnaces and forges, Karis walked through lands too dry and poor to interest farmers. The sun rose up in a breathless rush, the rocks shifted in their foundations, and the seedpods of summer shattered open. When the sun was high, she supposed she must be hungry and thirsty, so she sat down and ate. Afterwards, she lay on her back and listened. A life, the deep soil said to her. Pay attention!
When she came home, Lynton told her she was tired, and fed her a great bowl of vegetables from the garden. Dominy told her the forgemaster had merely nodded when he heard Karis would not be there. The sun hung low in the sky, and the only hunger Karis ever felt was consuming most of her attention: she needed smoke. Yet beneath that hunger, she still sensed the vague, irritating nagging of the earth. A life, it said. You must do something! But it never told her what she needed to do.
Often, when Karis lay awake, but still under smoke, a strange thing would happen: her spirit would break free of her insensate flesh to take residence in a particular raven. This raven traveled with Norina Truthken, far to the southeast. Norina usually contrived to be alone for the sunrise, and on this morning, she sat on a split rail fence at the edge of a harvested cornfield, waiting to see if the raven would speak to her.
Karis said through the raven, “There is a new presence in the land.”
Norina rubbed her eyes, which were still crusted with sleep. “I don’t understand.”
“A person has come into Shaftal, and the land seems to cry out to me, demanding that I pay heed.”
Norina gazed into the cornfield. “Is it an earth elemental? The one we have been waiting for?”
This possibility had not even occurred to Karis, and she cried out in surprise, “And if it is, what then?”
Norina said, quite calmly, “All this will come to an end.”
“And the end of our friendship, too.”
Norina turned sharply to the raven, then. “Is that what you think?”
“You will have more important concerns.”
“I will always be your friend,” Norina said. And, because she was a Truthken, Karis almost believed her. “So is it the one we are waiting for?” Norina asked.
“I don’t think it is an earth witch. If it were, then surely I would understand what is happening better than I do. I feel an urgency, a danger, an impulse to intervene. Perhaps this person has been broken.”
“And you want to go find this person.”
Karis didn’t have to reply. Norina knew her well enough.
“Whatever calls you,” Norina said, “You must not let it call you out of hiding, or you will find there the hand of the Sainnites, stretching out to grab you by the throat.”
Karis could not speak. Norina said, “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”