Normally, Emil was not one to vent his anger in public, but he berated Annis before the entire company, a disgrace she endured with rare dignity, perhaps because she could not help but recognize that it was not contempt that made the rest of the company stare at her so, but awe. When Emil had finished chastising her for taking matters into her own hands, the company members welcomed her with suppressed glee. Emil turned his back on the lot of them and stalked away.
Zanja could not sleep, though she was so tired her thoughts kept blanking out, like candles snuffed in a gale. She wandered restlessly until she found herself at the very edge of the fen, which bubbled and stank in the afternoon heat, while a flock of geese uttered shouts of outrage at an outsider that had intruded on their peaceful foraging.
Zanja spread her glyph cards out and stared at them. The Woman in the Doorway: unmade decisions or ambivalence or even lack of courage left her standing there upon the doorsill. Paired with the Raven, it was Karis. Paired with the Owl, it was Zanja. The Man on the Mountain: solitude, contemplation, far‑seeing. By itself, it was Emil, Zanja’s commander and friend. Joined with the Box and the Flame, it was Medric: dreamer, destroyer, bespectacled book‑hauling boy with a blue ribbon in his hair. Zanja realized vaguely that she had a headache. The cards swam before her vision as if they were swirling in a whirlpool. She could not see the pattern; pieces of it were missing. She shuffled frantically through the deck, tossing down cards at random: Sorrow, the Book, the Sword, the Guardian, the Cave, the Lover, and at last the Madwoman.
She turned to find Ransel sitting on his heels beside her. His goat’s wool tunic was ragged and bloodstained; the woven pattern that marked him as a na’Tarwein was obscured by dirt. Upon his back he carried three different bows, and a half dozen quivers of arrows. Just as he had been when he died, he was thin from hard travel, hollow‑eyed with hunger, anger, and sorrow.
He gestured a hand toward the mess of cards. “What does it mean?”
“A Sainnite has asked me to be his friend. Now nothing makes sense.”
Astonished, Ransel leaned towards her. “Why are you listening to the words of a Sainnite?”
“Because he reminds me of you, my brother.”
“Am I to be glad of this? Shall I say, ‘Oh praise the gods–my sister will betray our people for memory of me’?”
“How can I betray a people who are all dead?”
“We watch you,” he said. “In the Land of the Dead, we wait for vengeance. When we saw you take the hand of the enemy, we cried out in dismay.”
“You are dead,” she said softly. “To you it must seem simple.”
“Do you remember how our people were betrayed? It was a Sainnite, who came into our territory. Tain na’Tarwein called the enemy his friend, and revealed to him all our secrets. Will you not learn from our clan brother’s mistakes?”
Zanja could think of no reply. She looked away from him, and when she turned back, Ransel had disappeared. In his place sat Salos’a, with a mouse clasped in her claw. “The madwoman in the middle,” said Salos’a, “does she think she can hold all these powers in a circle around her? Does she not know that each one pulling her in a separate direction will tear her apart?”
“The madwoman in the middle is too bewildered to think,” said Zanja. “No matter what she chooses, something is betrayed.”
“Then choose to cross the boundary. That way, you will not betray yourself.”
Salos’a spread her gray wings and the cards lifted up and swirled in the air, and Zanja realized that she had not understood the pattern before because it had been static. She had not realized that it was only through movement, through an endless alignment and realignment, a pattern that was never stable but always changing, that the glyph pattern had meaning. Only by seeing it in motion could it be understood.
When Zanja truly woke up, the sun was just setting, the cards lay in the dirt, and whatever she had understood about their pattern in the course of her vision had been lost as she crossed the border from vision to wakefulness. Once again, she understood nothing.
Chapter Fifteen
That same afternoon, while Zanja was sleeping beside her scattered cards, the volunteers began to arrive. They came because the burning of the garrison had excited their imaginations: young, vigorous men and women whose labor would be sorely missed on their home farms. Some had been sent by their families, but most had simply come of their own desire, convinced that this was the beginning of the end, and the Sainnites would soon be entirely evicted from South Hill.
Emil, preoccupied with the hasty decisions that had to be made, noticed Zanja only in the way he noticed all the members of his company, as a presence or an absence, as one preoccupied with accomplishing a worthy task, or as one currently available for such a task. Zanja looked haggard, and he remembered to ask Jerrell to check on her. Linde had suggested that Zanja be given the task of teaching bladework to the hotheaded young farmers, few of whom actually owned any fighting weapons. The farmers under her tutelage were much cowed, he reported later, and some complained bitterly after two days of drills, that farming was easier work than what they were being subjected to. A few of them went back to their farms, and the rest of them were learning how to fight: nothing fancy, Linde added, but the kind of things that might enable them to survive a fight long enough to get out of it.
Two more days passed, and Emil began to feel like a shipping merchant. Wagonloads of arms and other supplies had mysteriously begun to arrive, more than the company could use or store. He made plans to again divide the company into units, each with a separate supply line. He slept little, and had to devise charts in order to keep track of things.
Meanwhile, couriers reported that the Sainnites seemed gripped by an odd aimlessness, and that the people of Wilton had gotten together a committee to protest some of the punishments that had been visited on them in retaliation for Fire Night. Buried in a welter of detail, Emil began to feel harried. At the same time, he found he had become too tired and preoccupied to think much about strategy.
When he saw Zanja again, she was walking through the camp with three or four of the new company members trailing behind her admiringly. Annis, who seemed to be thriving on the attention showered on her since Fire Night, was talking excitedly as she walked beside her, making broad, sweeping gestures as if she were about to fly like a bird. By contrast, Zanja seemed still as a cat, remote, almost uninterested. She still looked haggard.
Emil jammed his papers heedlessly into his lap desk and set out after her. Her trail of followers dropped away when they saw him coming, and then Annis abruptly ended the conversation and ducked away. He could hardly blame her for deciding to avoid him. Zanja turned to him, and for a moment there was something disturbing in her face, something too vague and fleeting to name. Her foreign manners took over and she bowed stiffly. “Commander.”
“Don’t do that. Soon the whole camp will be bowing and siring me and I won’t be able to endure it. Come and have some tea with me.”
She followed him silently to the fire, and silently watched as he fussed over the teapot, and silently sipped from the delicate cup balanced between her fingers, and silently accepted more tea. The camp turned around them like a wheel rolling down a road, but here at the camp’s center all was still. Emil waited for her to tell him what was wrong; she had retreated beyond his reading.
She spoke at last, when he had served her a third cup of tea. “Soon it will be midsummer.”