“Ha!” said the god.
“So I did not set out to cheat you. Haven’t I spent my days in pleading with the gods to allow me to die? I am tortured even in my dreams. I walk the path to my village and I see it filled with my people. Ransel is there waiting for me. How will I explain my long delay?“ The raven seemed to shrug, and Zanja was tempted to grab hold of him and twist his neck until the backbone popped, just to let him know what paralysis was like. She could no longer take deep breaths to calm herself. The god moved cautiously out of reach. Zanja spoke, her voice shaking. ”You bid me die in joy rather than in despair, but the only joy I can imagine is to walk down that path, to enter the Land of the Sun and be free of this body, this prison. Is that too much to ask?“
The god said, “You ask not for too much, but for too little.”
“What?” Zanja peered into the shadows at the black shape of the raven, who she suddenly remembered was a trickster. “I am too stupid for riddles.”
“It is no riddle, but a choice. Do you choose to die?”
She stared at him. Her heartbeat sputtered like a candle about to go out. In the silence, she thought she could hear a quiet footstep in the hall outside her door. But it was too early for the guard to make his noisy rounds. Bewildered, she whispered, “Now you mock me, Lord Death.”
“No,” said the god gently. “I am giving you the choice.”
No keys jingled in the frozen silence, but Zanja heard the lock of her cell door turn. The guard had not come m to feed her for days, but the door swung open without a creak from the rust‑caked hinges. A presence filled the doorway. Lord Death spread his wings and lifted suddenly into the darkness.
Zanja spoke to the vacancy where the god had been. “Then I choose to live.” Then, she lay stunned by her own stupidity, asking herself what she wanted to live for.
She heard Lord Death’s voice in the darkness, but he was not speaking to her. “I am your witness.”
“I heard, good raven,” rasped a voice as harsh as Lord Death’s laugh.
Zanja heard a sound like the snapping of two fingers. A red spark danced like a firefly in the darkness, then flared, and became a sputtering flame. The flame advanced until Zanja could feel its faint heat upon her frozen skin. Her heart managed another weary pulse.
An enormous, long‑fingered hand held up the burning wand. Another reached down to turn aside the decayed blanket and uncover Zanja’s ravaged remains: ulcerated skin, tightly stretched over thinly clad bones, a stick‑fingered hand still curled into a fist. The stink rose up, muted but not conquered by the cold.
The hand touched Zanja’s emaciated chest. Like a coal in a snowdrift, heat shocked into her flesh. Zanja’s heart gave a mighty thud. She grunted, as if she had been struck, and gasped burning air into her lungs. Her heart thudded again. A river of heat rushed through the conduit of her flesh, up her neck, and into the vessel of her skull. Color exploded across her vision. Bedazzled and stunned, she uttered an animal cry.
The voice spoke again, in Shaftalese. “Do not be afraid. I have come to help you.”
Zanja would not have been surprised to discover that those warm fingers had folded back skin and bone to lay bare her faltering heart. “I’m not afraid,” she lied.
“Tell me your name.”
“Zanja na’Tarwein,” said the raven, who now rode upon the woman’s broad shoulder.
“Zanja na’Tarwein, my name is Karis. My raven has traveled ahead of me, and kept you alive at my command.”
“Your raven?” Zanja said. “He is not a god?”
“You thought he was a god?” The woman dropped down beside the box of straw, never lifting her hand from Zanja’s breast. “No, he is just a raven. And I–take the light and look at me.”
The slender, insubstantial rush light was placed between Zanja’s fingers. The sputtering flame trembled in her weak grasp as she lifted it to illuminate clearwater eyes, a sun‑bleached thicket of hair, deeply drawn lines of worry, weariness, and perhaps some laughter. The woman smelled of sweat and wood smoke, and there were pine needles trapped in her hair. Her ragged shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing bulky, muscled forearms. The palms of her hands were gray with ground‑in soot. She had strolled through the locked door of this prison like a phantom, yet she was substantial, physical, powerful. The vitality coursing through Zanja’s veins gave her an eye‑aching clarity, and as she looked at Karis she could not help but know what she was made of. She said, “You are neither god nor ghost, so you must be an elemental. I think you are an earth witch.”
Karis said, “And you’ve gone from mystery to understanding without asking a single question, so you must be a fire blood.” She turned her head as though she heard something, and said, “I think the prison guards are up and about. How long until they come this way?“
“Not until after dawn.”
“It is well after dawn now. A storm rolled in before first light, which is why it seems so dark now. Good raven,” she added, “your work here is done.”
The raven lifted from her shoulder, flew to the window, and was gone.
Zanja said, “Perhaps your raven is no god, but he taught me something I did not know. Serrain, I am dying, but even crippled as I am, I’d rather live. I ask your mercy.”
Karis gazed at her as though astonished by her good manners. But it seemed that Zanja’s careful words had not struck Karis as ridiculous, for she said, “As it happens, I am a great mender of broken things. Let me see what I can do.” Karis took the rush light and wedged it in a crack between stones. “I need to touch you,” she said, as though Zanja’s heart were not still beating eagerly against the palm of her hand, and as though her callused fingers did not scratch Zanja’s bare breast every time she shifted her weight. The shock of heat again, and Karis lifted and turned Zanja as easily as if she were an infant, so that she faced the ice‑clad wall. Karis stroked a hand firmly down the weeping sores of Zanja’s back. Zanja expected pain, but she felt something else: the startling warmth of Karis’ touch, and an eerie, crawling sensation as her ruined flesh hastily knit itself together.
Then, in the place where her back had been broken, below which she had felt only dead weight for months, pain blossomed. Her entire body began to spasm. “Hold fast,” said Karis hoarsely, and pinned Zanja down with her weight.
When the fit had passed, Zanja tasted blood from her bitten tongue, and the sharp salt of sweat. The weight of Karis’ body lifted. She was gasping for breath, as though she had run a long way at a desperate pace.
Zanja had been long enough removed from the lower half of her own body that her legs felt foreign to her: ungainly contraptions of sinew and bone; but at least she felt them, and even could make them move, however reluctantly, with the lever of her will.
She breathed something in her own language, stupefied.
“Hush,” Karis said absently. She had moved the rush light, and‑so Zanja watched by its light as those big hands delicately kneaded her feet, straightening the clenched muscles and stretching and moving the flesh with her long fingers to form new, perfect toes, one by one. Karis frowned as she worked, like a potter at the wheel, with her eyes half closed, seeming to feel her way with her fingers. Her sweat shimmered in faint light as it fell, drop by drop, from her chin.
Half drowned in the tingling, burning, cramping sensations of her repaired flesh, Zanja felt the pressure of those fingers only remotely, but as new toes budded and grew upon her disfigured feet, the feeling of it was so bizarre that it was all she could do to keep from snatching her foot from the witch’s grasp.
When Karis laid Zanja’s foot down, she rested her head in her hand for a moment as though exhausted or overwhelmed by her labor.
“ Serrain,” Zanja said again. Even her voice trembled shamefully. Having given Karis this title of great respect, she could not think of what to say, or what to ask, or even what words might begin to be adequate.