With every casualty Emil seemed another year older. Willis’s unit alone aged him by ten years, and Willis’s gloating reports of thirty or more Sainnites injured and killed did not make Emil less grim. He sent Zanja with a brusque message that she delivered, word for word: “We are not engaged in a contest to determine who can kill the greatest number of Sainnites. And the people of South Hill will not thank us for burdening them with an overwhelming number of crippled fighters. You are to have no more casualties, even if that means that you conduct no more raids.”
Willis heard this message with amazing equanimity. “No more casualties,” he said. “Well, I suppose he thinks I have his prescience, eh? Oh, but you do have it, don’t you?” He turned to his cronies, for, unlike Emil, he took his strength from numbers, not solitude. “It seems a worthy experiment, doesn’t it, to see if prescience can protect us from casualties?”
“Oh, yes,” they murmured, and Zanja did not need prescience to know that this conversation had been long planned.
“You want me to go out on a hide‑and‑seek raid?” she asked.
“We’re going out on one today.”
Zanja looked around that circle of hostile, grinning faces, and felt very tired. What was the price she would have to pay to be a full member of this company? They cared only about Sainnite corpses, it seemed. Well then, she would give them some, though she doubted it would be possible to give them enough.
So she found herself, in the company of some ten others, creeping through the corn plants towards one of the few valley farmsteads left standing. An earlier check with the spyglass had told them that the Sainnites were out in force, but once the Paladins had slipped into the valley they could no longer see how the enemy was deployed, and could not even be certain where they themselves were, in relation to the farmstead. The corn rows were as straight as a planting plow could make them, but still Zanja could not see more than a few feet ahead, and at times could scarcely see her own companions. Surely the Sainnites are expecting us to come down the corn rows, she thought, and turned to suggest to the Paladin closest to her that it might make more sense to approach from the drainage ditch. But her companions had all disappeared.
She turned as a breeze parted the corn leaves to reveal the soldier keeping watch at the end of the row. She dove crossways into the corn. Something like a hot poker punched her in the thigh. She turned and jumped the other direction, like a rabbit evading a wolf. Perhaps the fickle wind would not betray her again. Another gunshot. Someone shouted in Sainnese that she had gone towards the corncrib, whichever direction that might be. She headed away from the voice, cross‑row. She fell, and was puzzled that she could no longer walk. She crawled instead, until she tumbled out of corn plants into mossy water. She lay among the rushes, her pistols under water, thinking how nice and cool it was there in the ditch. It seemed impossible that she would be found. She rested her head in the crook of her arm and thought she might sleep for a while, she was feeling so tired.
The pain inserted itself slowly into her unwarranted peacefulness, irritating as a voice telling her to get up and do some more work. She ignored it–she had felt worse pain and lived. But it grew worse, much worse, and finally she sat up, and noticed with surprise that the water she lay in had turned a bright scarlet. She found a neat hole scorched into the canvas of her breeches, and pulled them down to reveal another neat, blood‑weeping hole in her thigh. Such a small wound, she thought, pretending that she did not know that a pistol ball’s worst damage was usually below the skin. She could not make a bandage–her clothing was muddy and soaking wet–and so she buttoned up her breeches and lay down again in the water, and forced herself to listen to what the world would tell her.
She heard a rapid volley of gunfire. After a long silence, she heard a second volley. The Paladins had circled around, she thought sleepily, after using her as an uninformed, unwilling decoy. She heard the sound of flames, and for a while she lay wounded in a different valley, listening to the sound of Sainnites burning a different village. I must get up, she thought, and woke to find that she already was crawling down the drainage ditch, though not until she saw the smoke and saw the soldiers did she realize she had gone the wrong direction. She watched them curiously, these angry soldiers stranded far from home in a hostile land, and understood too well what it was that made them want to burn everything to the ground.
She turned away from the burning farm, and began dragging herself down the drainage ditch again.
From the bottom of the ditch, she watched the shadows move and the sun set. Despite the summer warmth, the water’s cold set into her bones. She hauled herself out of the ditch and into the road, where she lay shivering. She heard the faraway bells of Wilton ringing the hours. Until it was too dark to see, she watched her blood seep into the dirt. At last, the search party that she knew Willis would have to send for her, if only for the sake of appearance, found her and carried her back to camp.
“I’m not going to die,” she told Jerrell, “and you’re not going to cut off my leg.”
Jerrell argued, but Zanja was adamant. Jerrell removed the pistol ball instead, which was bad enough, since it took some cutting to even find the ball, which was embedded in the thick muscles above the knee. When Zanja awoke in the afternoon, Emil was sitting beside her, with his legs stretched out before him and his back against a tree, gazing with a strained expression toward the smoking ruin that had once been one of the richest farmlands in Shaftal.
“What’s wrong with that seer?” he asked.
She began to sit up, and he turned to her. “I’ll get whatever you need. Jerrell says you are to lie still.”
“What I need can’t be gotten.”
He smiled wryly, and set himself to fetching and carrying the small comforts that he could provide: a cup of water, a bag of beans for a pillow. He checked on her clothing that hung in the sunshine, declared it not dry yet, and settled once more against the tree. “So,” he said, “in famine the Sainnites also go hungry, and famine is exactly what will happen in South Hill this winter. What seer would be so shortsighted? These Sainnites don’t behave like people with insight at all. In fact, they act like mindless brutes, as they always have. Could the seer be dead, or gone?”
“Maybe he’s lost his mind,” she said.
“Maybe he’s stopped dreaming. It happens.”
“Maybe he had a bad love affair.”
“Maybe he’s fallen ill.”
“Maybe,” Zanja said, “he’s had a change of heart.”
Emil looked out at the smoke‑hazed valley, then back at Zanja. “Surely not. We fire bloods are cursed with loyalty. To turn traitor against the people we call our own–it’s not in us.”
“Sometimes insight overrides loyalty,” Zanja said, too bitterly.
They sat in silence for a while. So long as Zanja didn’t move, the pain in her leg was not unendurable.
Emil said softly, “Every time I close my eyes, I dream the same dream. A man sits before me, with a wooden box in his lap. He holds it up to me, as if proffering a gift, and opens the lid. I can’t see what’s in the box, but I know that I want it desperately.”
“What does he look like?”
“The man? Oh, I don’t know. It’s all in shadow: a big, dark room with a single lamp flame. Why does it matter?”