“You’ll accept my help?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Oh.” Emil began to laugh. “That’s right; you’re the enemy.”
It seemed to also strike Medric as terribly funny, and his hilarity didn’t run dry until his spectacles fell off and he had to retrieve them by feel.
Emil said, “A few days after Fire Night, when Zanja was on her way to meet you–though I didn’t know it then–she said she was trapped in the past and needed to cross over into the future. I foolishly asked her to take me with her. So here I am, bewildered mainly by my lack of regret.“
Medric smiled. “I crossed over also, knowingly and willingly. But what became of her?”
“I managed to get her safely out of South Hill. That’s all I know. But let me thank you now, while I’m thinking of it, for your letter. It helped me to do what was right, and I needed that help desperately.”
“Well, I’m glad I’ve done some good for once.”
“Have you eaten? May I buy your supper?”
Medric gathered himself up and rose to his feet. “I confess, I haven’t eaten in a day or two, and not because I’m fasting for a vision.”
“You’re penniless, of course, which is why you’re sleeping with your books.”
“ Yourbooks.”
“My books, if you insist. Yet it seems that you accompany them.”
“Sir, the books are not a bribe. Ever since I began to collect them, I knew that I would have to deliver them to a proper caretaker. I simply could not bear to leave them unguarded.” Medric offered his hand to help Emil rise.
Emil took Medric’s hand and let himself be helped. Medric was slightly built and had a soft hand, but he was not without muscle. Only a fool would underestimate him: no accident had brought them to this place, but the active, determined intervention of a gifted seer. His air of uncertainty was merely an affectation.
Emil said, still holding his hand, “My name is Emil. If you call me ‘sir’ again, I’ll start calling you ‘Master Seer’.”
Medric looked appalled. “Please don’t, Emil.”
“Let’s get some food in you.”
Emil could not bear to leave the manuscript unattended, so they took it with them. At the inn, Medric asked for bread and vegetables, causing the cook to look at him askance, but Emil accepted roast capon and a pie of fresh peaches. Over food, their conversation turned from somber to hilarious, and Emil laughed until his ribs hurt, wondering if that lightness in his chest could possibly be his heart. If it was his heart, it was on holiday.
After supper, he purchased a wagon and a sturdy dray horse, using almost all the money he had taken with him. Haprin had a ferry that would take him across the river; from there he would go to the western border where he could store the books with his friend the shepherd. After that; well, he supposed some plan would come to him.
It was nearly dark when they returned to the storehouse. Medric showed Emil the other rare books in his collection. He had found them one by one through dreams, he said, stored at the bottom of one or another soldier’s footlocker. He had collected a couple of hundred books by the time he finally got the one he was looking for, The Way of the Seer, and each book had its own adventure story of unlikely survival in a hostile world. They talked about the books until the lamp oil ran out and left them sitting shoulder to shoulder in a sudden darkness.
Medric said, “Sometimes this summer I have envisioned myself in another place: a stone cottage in a lonely land, with sleet tapping on the shutters and a warm fire burning. And I’m not alone there. I ask a question, and you come and sit down next to me. You tell me how the past became the present. You get a book down from the shelf and read it to me.”
Emil said, “It’s still a long time before sleet taps on the shutters, but tomorrow is close by. I hope you’ll be traveling with me.”
“I will,” Medric said. “Don’t go.”
Emil could feel Medric’s warm breath stirring the air between them. He found Medric’s face by feel and carefully took off his spectacles and put them safely atop the trunk. Then, in a bed that was made of as much book as blanket, he made love to a son of the enemy. It occurred to him later that even his oldest and most loyal friends would not forgive him this transgression, or even worse, they’d misunderstand and pity him. He lay in the rustling darkness of the warehouse with Medric asleep in his arms, and could not bring himself to care what anyone thought of him. He had broken with the past, and the future was a book he could hardly wait to read.
Chapter Twenty
After a day or two of travel, Zanja stopped expecting the upbraiding she deserved. In fact, Norina accorded Zanja a certain kindness, though from outside it might have looked more like indifference. She had looked after Zanja’s injuries, patiently soaking loose the bandage from the wound, and rebandaging it every day after that with an expertise that she must have acquired from J’han. She insisted that Zanja rest even though she could not sleep, and hounded her into eating. She and the man took turns riding, while Zanja rode all the time, and she would not permit Zanja to do any of the work at all, except small things she could do while sitting down. It was easier to acquiesce to her iron will than it was to resist, and so, in spite of the circumstances, Zanja’s injuries began to heal.
Other than insisting brusquely that Zanja obey her, Norina left her alone. Zanja rode blindly behind her companions, carried forward only by the momentum of the journey. She did not know where she was, or in what direction she traveled. She did not care that she lived, and took no interest in what might happen to her next. Days passed, and she did not even speak. She wept without noticing her own tears.
One morning, she raised her head and noted that they were traveling northward. They followed a rutted, unmarked track through rugged, mountainous country. Some time passed, and she looked down and noticed Norina walking at her stirrup, breathless, putting a hand occasionally to the horse’s side for balance. “You’ll miscarry,” Zanja said.
“I’m as likely to miscarry as you are to die from sepsis,” Norina said.
Some time later, Zanja said, “I feel I could die from sorrow first.”
But Norina said, quite sensibly and with surprising kindness, “You’ll start feeling better soon. The first year is over.”
A long time later, Zanja asked, “Will Willis get control of South Hill Company?”
Norina laughed. “That man? Not even in his dreams.”
That night, Zanja plunged into a deep and restful sleep, from which she woke as if rousing from a summer fever. She bathed in a cold stream, washed and mended her shirt, and took out her blades to check and clean them. The small knife in her boot was blood‑encrusted. She fingered the scab on her neck, remembering what she had done, amazed that her crazed logic had brought aid after all.
“The raven is gone?” she asked Norina, as they ate camp porridge by the fire. The man‑at‑arms was already saddling the horses.
“Naturally, I sent him with a message to Karis that you are all right.”
“I want to send Karis an apology. I must have startled her when I wrote that message on the knife blade.”
Norina ate a few mouthfuls of her porridge before commenting, rather wryly, “I have to say, your methods are ingenious.”
One night they were kindly welcomed and generously fed in a woodcutter’s camp, where the people were desperate for news and stories of any kind at all. Zanja lay gazing at the stars, which had not been so close since she left the mountains of her people.
Soon, they climbed down out of the mountains and followed a river to the northwest, and slept one night at a farmstead, in the hay. The farmers fed them even though they were respectively too injured, tired, and pregnant to work; they would not hear of a pregnant woman going hungry; and they nearly convinced her to sleep in a bed instead of the barn. Norina was not tireless, and when Zanja turned to look at her that night she caught her off guard, and just for a moment could see how worried she was. Then Norina turned her head, and her face was stone again.