It was a fine day: bright and warm, and shot through with swooping birds that dove like flame from out of the sun and swooped over the treetops, ecstatic with passion. The two of them took a high trail that Zanja had not followed before, with a slender rivulet chuckling along beside them. For half the morning, Emil thought his own thoughts, and Zanja, long accustomed to solitude, felt no need to interrupt with an attempt at conversation. They reached a high, remote meadow, where occasional fat bees shot past like pistol balls. There, they sat in the sun to rest, and the donkey promptly set to grazing. Emil took a packet wrapped in paper out of his doublet pocket and handed it to her. “This is for you. You’d have gotten it much sooner, but it took my friend in Wilton over a month to find.”
Zanja did not know what to do with a gift. “Untie the string,” he urged. “You’ll laugh when you see what it is.”
She opened the packet, and then she did laugh, for Emil had given her a pack of fortune‑telling cards. “Emil, you are a desperate man.”
“Yes,” he said, suddenly serious.
“Glyphs!” she exclaimed, looking more closely at the cards.
“These cards were traditionally used to teach glyphs to schoolchildren. I’m afraid it’s a rather artless deck. I’ve seen some that were almost too beautiful to touch–but I suppose you wouldn’t want to be carrying artwork while running through the woods and rolling around in the mud.”
Zanja shuffled through the cards, looking at the woodcut illustrations, printed in brown, and the glyphs stamped on each corner in red. Most of the glyphs she had not seen before, but even those she was familiar with seemed much less ambiguous when paired with an illustration. She found a raven, who dove earthward with a message satchel round his neck. She found an owl, who flew across a chasm with a person dangling helplessly from one claw. She found a woman standing in an open doorway, and lay that card flat upon her knee.
Emil took up the card and examined it critically. “The Woman of the Doorway really should look less grim and more ambivalent.”
“Is she going out, or coming in? Or is she simply unable to make up her mind?”
“They say she stands poised between the danger without and the danger within.”
“Of course.” Zanja took the card from him and traced the shape of the glyph with a fingertip. “Uncertainty and judgment, and the dangers of decision. Possibilities and dangers and the fact of our existence here–” she tapped the woman’s head, to show which “here” she meant. “Always deciding.”
“To some fire bloods, the cards explain themselves. I suspected they might explain themselves to you.”
She surreptitiously wiped her face dry. What was wrong with her? She restlessly sought and found the owl card, and showed it to Emil. “Is the person being carried a passenger, or prey?”
“Ah, well. That is the heart of the question, isn’t it? Do we seek wisdom, or are we kidnapped by it?”
Zanja said, half to herself, “It was the owl god that chose me to serve her.”
“No wonder your way has been so hard. That glyph must be your name sign, then.”
“Which is yours? No–I will guess.” She sought through the deck, and pulled out a card: a man standing alone on a hilltop, with stars shaped like arrows falling down on him.
“Solitude,” Emil said. “Also sometimes called Contemplation. The man on the hill sees forever, and might be destroyed by what he sees. Yes, it’s my card,” he added, as she glanced at him inquiringly, “Now tell me: What is the threat to South Hill Company? Just pick a card and let me do the thinking.”
She chose a card that depicted a plain box, with the lock broken, the lid half open, and the interior hidden in shadow.
Emil said. “But what is in the box?”
She pulled out and tossed down a picture of a burning flame.
“Whose fire is it?”
She lay a third card down, and cried in disgust, “That can’t be right!” It was the Man on the Hill.
But Emil spread out the three cards in the grass. “Am I the one who threatens South Hill? Well, obviously my judgment on this matter is questionable, but I don’t see how it could be possible. Let’s consider what else it might be. The flame, of course, is the elemental fire that enlightens and destroys: love, rage, desire, revolution, creation, and destruction. The box has to do with secrets that might be revealed, so paired with the flame it suggests elemental divination or revelation. When the flame is paired with Solitude, it usually means fire talent, fire logic, the solitude that comes with being a visionary. And all three cards together…” He looked at them, frowning.
“It might be a warning that for us to practice divination like this somehow makes you the danger that threatens South Hill. Or it might be a suggestion that divination will allow us to counter a danger that is not yet revealed.”
“It might mean either or both of those things. But I see a third possibility–one that I want to reject because it seems like an impossibility.” They sat a long time in silence, with Zanja gazing down at the cards and seeing how their meanings ceaselessly shifted and yet somehow began to stabilize. Emil had looked away from the cards, and gazed out at the vista that lay before them. He said at last, “When those falling stars pierce the heart, it feels like this.”
“It feels like an owl’s claw,” Zanja said.
He turned to her with a warm, wry smile, his squint lines all furrowed against the sun. “Well, what do you now see in the cards?”
“I see that the Sainnites have a seer.”
“If that’s true, then he must be a madman. To nurture a seer takes great care and deliberation, and the Sainnites seem incapable of both.”
“He may be a madman,” Zanja said, “but what he’s done to us so far, and to Rees before us, seems more like genius.”
“Yet–however difficult and exhausting the process–we continue to evade his insight. That may be the best we can hope to do against such an enemy.” Emil stretched out his stiff leg, preparatory to standing up. She stood and offered him a hand, which he clasped in his so gently that she found herself again bewildered. The Ashawala’i were never so demonstrative, except perhaps with their closet kin. “To hell with protocol,” Emil said. “Between the two of us, we can see through the tricks of an inexperienced seer– but not if I have to chase you across half the region every time I want to talk to you. These volunteers from Rees don’t know it yet, but one of them–” he grunted as she helped him up, “–is going to be our new bread runner. Maybe more than one of them, since I suspect you won’t be easy to replace.”
Chapter Eleven
The three units rotated positions again: Daye’s unit occupied high ground within spyglass sight of Wilton; Perry’s unit retreated into the highlands for a few days of rest, and Willis’s unit camped in between, in the thick woods west of the rich farmlands that surrounded Wilton. Since being promoted to runner, Zanja had traveled several times between Emil and Daye. It was never too difficult to find Daye’s unit: it did not take a seer to know that they would be on one or another hilltop near the edge of the flood plain that surrounded Wilton. But to find Willis’s unit would be tricky, even though, as far as Zanja knew, they had not decamped recently. She had been walking through the woods since sunrise, merely hopeful that she was following the right path.
Sweating in the warm morning, Zanja slipped through a thicket and emerged onto clear ground again. She paused to listen, and heard only faint bird song. Then a shot rang out, and a pistol ball smacked into a tree not a hand’s breadth from her shoulder. A second ball whizzed past, singing in a high, thin whine, but by then she had dived into the thicket again. She paused to load a pistol and then crawled further into the thick woods, then lay down in the dirt and waited with her heartbeat thrumming in her ears.
The woods lay dead silent. The birds began to sing again. Her heartbeat slowed; her instincts told her that whoever had shot at her was gone. Still, she did not continue her journey until midday filled the forest with dull sunlight. It was afternoon when a watchful picket outside the encampment noticed her cautious passage through the woods, and challenged her. “Why are you lurking?” he asked, when he recognized her. “Do you want to get yourself killed?”