“Your family?” The farmer said. “Are you from Rees?”
“I’m from the northern borderlands. We have Sainnites there, too.” Zanja dried her face with a corner of her headcloth. “What are you and your brother going to do?”
“Well, as for me, I can’t endure to see this good crop go to waste. But my brother wants to cry for justice at the gates of the garrison.”
“Justice? Does he think this crime was done by a civilized people?”
The brother said angrily, “The Paladins are much too busy to occupy themselves with something so trivial as justice. So there is no law left in South Hill, except the law of the Sainnites.”
“Law? You are at war!”
Zanja parted from the farmers with cold civility, and traveled through the woods towards the powder cave. Her anger at the man’s stupidity burned itself out, and ashes remained: a fire‑gutted village, a corpse‑scattered, charred cornfield, the coarse laughter of the Sainnite butchers halfway across the valley. Zanja, weaving through the mists, falling over the bodies of her friends, seeking Ransel among the dead, so that she could lie down beside him, and cut loose her soul from its bindings.
The Ashawala’i also had never realized they were at war.
Chapter Fourteen
At least one keg of gunpowder was missing from the powder cave. Zanja waited there until a summer downpour had lightened to a mist, then she traveled east in dead of night and slipped into the river valley under cover of darkness. She lay in a copse until dawn. Every time she closed her eyes, pain blossomed in her healed skull, her heart began to pound, and she saw flames.
With her weapons and gear tied in a bundle on her shoulder, Zanja joined a group of farmers headed for Wilton Market. They tolerated her presence as a herd of horses tolerates a donkey in their midst.
In Wilton, Sainnite soldiers lounged in the sun like lizards on rocks. Zanja concealed her alien face behind the bundle on her shoulder. The tide carried her into and out of a crush of market stalls, where baskets of beans in a dozen different colors, and round, flat, and finger‑shaped potatoes crowded up against caged chickens, squalling babies, vendors of steamed dumplings and roast nuts and honey candy, and the occasional seller of fine goods: silken scarves and ribbons, handmade lace, silver jewelry. A couple of Sainnite officers rode down the crowded street on their jumpy war horses, and Zanja found herself crushed up against one of these rickety stalls, along with a man carrying a basket of mewing kittens and a woman with a sack of potatoes. Unable to move, close enough to the stall’s baubles that she could have stolen one in her mouth if she had wanted, she had no choice but to examine them closely, while the stall man shored up the fragile structure by bracing it with his own body. The Sainnites passed and the pressure eased, but before Zanja moved on she bought one of the baubles, a simple pendant like a miniature plumb bob made of deep green stone. What would Emil think of how she was spending the money he’d given her? The thought sank like a rock into still water. She moved on until she saw a sign depicting a flame rising out of stone.
Transformation, of course, is the business of chemists, but the flame‑and‑stone also was a traditional call to revolution. Nevertheless, no one except her stood in the street outside the chemist’s shop, mesmerized by the audacity of the weather‑worn sign. Someone bumped into her and snapped at her for blocking the way. She stepped into the dim shop, and bowed briefly to the chemist, the shop’s only occupant, who used a pestle to grind a mess of odd ingredients into a fine powder. A thin, vigorous woman with her gray hair braided and tied with a red ribbon, the chemist nodded but didn’t leave off her work until the grinding was completed. Then she came over to the counter, wiping her hands upon her apron.
“Yes,” she said, “do you have a receipt for me to fill?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Good, then. I hate to see healthy people dose themselves. So you need a potion for someone else?”
“For a friend. She needs something to calm her heart. She’s wild with grief, and it’s making her ill.”
The chemist tutted absently. “Lost a child?”
“Her whole family is gone. The Sainnites burned her farm. Haven’t you heard about it? Her name is Annis.”
The chemist seemed to hesitate just a moment, then she shrugged. “That’s country news,” she said dismissively. “So, she’s maddened by grief and you want to … what? Make her sane again? Make her family come back? What?”
“I want to give her some peace so she can think,” Zanja said. “I’m afraid she’ll do something foolish. Is there some drug that will make her talk to me?”
The chemist wrote a few glyphs in chalk on a piece of slate. “I’ll have it done tonight. Where should I send it?”
Zanja named an inn she had noticed just a few streets over. The chemist jotted down the inn’s glyphs on her slate. Perhaps she had studied in a Lilterwess school, and might even have been a healer once. A lot of the old healers were chemists now, according to J’han, and practiced their art on the sly.
“And your name?” said the chemist.
Zanja took the slate from her and drew upon it the Snake glyph, for betrayal, and crossed it out, then wrote out her name, and gave the slate back to the chemist, who accepted it without a word.
She used what remained of her funds to bespeak a private room at the inn. The room overlooked the street, which became only more crowded after sunset. Perhaps it was a holiday, or perhaps the giddy laughter and music on the street below was a symptom of something else: a relentless tide, a surge of rage threatening to break through. Zanja sat in the window and felt her own tide surging. She drank water; the people below drank ale.
There was a tap on the door. “Chemist’s delivery.”
Zanja opened the door and let Annis in. “It’s good to see you. Have you eaten? I can have supper sent up for you.”
“I ate.” Annis seemed perplexed and even peeved that Zanja had not been more surprised to see her. She paced the room agitatedly. “How did you find me? You can just tell Emil to leave me alone.”
Zanja sat in the window again, leaving Annis an unimpeded route to the door, if she decided to take flight. She had no intention of bringing her back to Emil against her will. When she had decided this she could not remember. “I found you by luck and good sense, and Emil has no idea where you are. Tell me what you’re up to,” she said.
“It’s none of your business.”
“Then why did you come here to see me? You didn’t have to.”
Annis glared at her. “Why did youcome here?”
“I thought you might want some help.”
Annis stopped dead in the middle of the room.
Zanja said, “You searched for your family’s bodies, didn’t you? Like I did.”
“They’re alive, as far as I know. I suppose the Sainnites figured I’d come begging for their lives, offer myself in their place, tell everything I know about South Hill Company.” Annis spat in the general direction of the garrison. “Bunch of idiots.”
“On the other hand, you can hardly hope to rescue them.”
“I don’t even know where they are.” For a moment, she looked exhausted. “But even if I could rescue them, my home would still be gone. I have nowhere to go, nowhere to rest.”
She began pacing the room. “The Sainnites build with wood, did you know that? Even though everyone knows how dangerous it is to build with wood in a city. Stone is too cold and damp for them.”
“My people built with wood also,” Zanja said. “And the Sammies burned the entire village to the ground.” They looked at each other. “Tomorrow is the dark moon,” Zanja added. “And it’s about time the Sainnites lost a village of their own.”