“Mmm. This is what you sound like when you’re being diplomatic. It’s not chewing coals anymore, it’s more like–oh, I’m no good at metaphors. You tell me one.”
Zanja tried to think of texture, for although Karis could not taste, she surely could feel enough to be able to tell soft from hard. “Those crisp cakes with chewy pieces of fruit in them,” she suggested.
“They feed those to me when I’ve forgotten too many times to eat. They must be mostly butter. What are you laughing at?”
“You don’t like those little cakes?”
“I hate being treated like I’m an invalid.”
“I apologize. It’s my own ignorance that makes me resort to indirection. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say or know. I don’t know what might hurt or offend you.”
Unlike the sun‑parched sky at which she gazed, Karis’s eyes were a bright, unfaded blue. She squinted them shut suddenly, as though sweat stung them. “When Norina takes you away, you won’t know any more than you do now.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Zanja said.
Karis turned her head. “Norina is my protector because she’s dangerous.”
“Yes, but she has more to lose than I have.”
“Are you going to make me demand that you obey her?”
“Are you going to treat me like a servant?”
“Are you going to make me choose between you?”
“Why not? Norina makes you choose.”
“She has a good reason.”
“What good reason could she possibly have?”
Karis said unsteadily, “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m bound by obligations I can’t explain to you. Why are you so cantankerous? Is it the heat?”
Zanja said, “From beginning to end, this year has been a disaster. But I’ve learned something that you and Norina both don’t know: how impossible it is to really make a choice, when the best choice of all is an option you couldn’t even imagine.”
Karis blinked up at the glaring sky. “Say that again, but fill it up with human experience and leave out the abstract words, and maybe I’ll understand it.”
“The Sainnites defined my choices for me. And before that, the Ashawala’i did the same. Because I am a katrim, and because the Sainnites are fools, I am living a life that I hate. I’m thinking I should do something else.”
“I see,” Karis said.
“In much the same way, Norina makes it possible for you to live within your cage. And so long as she helps you tolerate captivity you never will break free. You’ll have no reason to try.”
“Shaftal’s Name!” Karis sat up abruptly.
Now ends our friendship, Zanja thought.
“Oh, you are dangerous,” Karis said.
She settled back onto her elbows, and in the heated silence the accuser bugs suddenly began to shrill. After a long time, she said, “Norina has insisted that you be left in ignorance, lest you do something disastrous. But now it seems that you have done something disastrous because of your ignorance.”
“Names of the gods! What have I done?”
“I can’t tell you–that’s Norina’s business. But I think I will point out to her that to continue to leave you in ignorance seems, at best, ill‑advised,” Karis said. “And to treat you like a servant seems ridiculous, since you will not–cannot–act like one–except as a kind of play‑acting. And to send you away has proven impossible since no matter how far you go I continue to hold onto you in spite of all advice and common sense. Norina insists that I must not–cannot–simply call you my friend. I am a smoke addict, and she is a Truthken. Only an idiot would trust my judgment over hers. So tell me what I am to do, Zanja, for I am at a loss.”
Zanja said, “Why don’t you seek the advice of a seer? It just happens that I know one, and–”
She had to stop, because Karis had begun to howl with laughter. Nonplused, she waited for Karis to recover from her mirth, which had a certain bitter edge to it, for she seemed almost to be sobbing by the end, and had to wipe her tears on the tail of her shirt. “You have no idea–” she gasped.
“No idea at all,” Zanja agreed.
“I’m sorry,” Karis said. “Tell me about your seer. Tell me how you met.”
“I met Medric on Fire Night,” Zanja began. “Emil had sent me to find Annis, who had gone rogue after the Sainnites torched her family’s farmstead, and my search brought me to Wilton, where I found her. But along the way, something began to happen to me, and I began to do things that made no sense …”
But at least one thing she had done did make sense. She opened the pouch that held her glyph cards, and shook out from the bottom, where she had nearly forgotten it, the pendant of green stone and silver wire. “That day I bought this for you, though I had no reason to even imagine that I would see you again. I thought I had lost my mind. I was starting to remember things in a way that seemed insane. But perhaps it was, after all, a kind of prescience. When the veil between present and past tore apart, so also did the veil between present and future. I hadn’t lost my mind; I merely knew something I had no business knowing.”
She put the pendant into Karis’s hand. “You see, now I have given you the pendant. I look forward to someday understanding how everything I did that day makes as much sense as buying this pendant did.”
Karis seemed dumbfounded, and said not a word as Zanja resumed her tale, but lay back in the grass with the pendant in her fist, resting against her breast, until Zanja had described her last sight of Emil standing in the middle of the road, and then fell silent.
Then Karis said, “Name of Shaftal, it does make sense. Norina has been wrong–wrong from the first moment I sensed your presence in Shaftal. Zanja–” She swallowed. She was breathing as though she had run a race. “Yes, I do want to speak to Medric, very badly.”
“I can bring him to you. Unless I’ve sorely misjudged him, he would make himself easy for me to find. He wants nothing more than to do some good in Shaftal. It doesn’t bother you that he’s half Sainnite?”
As Zanja talked, Karis had gotten to her feet. Now, she gazed down at Zanja, and her face seemed very far away, and shadowed suddenly as her height blocked out the sun. “What is it exactly that you think I am?” she asked.
Zanja stared up at her. The people of the Juras tribe were yellow‑haired, blue‑eyed, extremely strong giants. But Karis’s Juras mother had been a Lalali whore. “Your father would have been a very big man,” she said.
“And a Sainnite.”
“No doubt. I suppose that would matter to some people.”
“To some people, it is the most important thing about me.”
“Well, Karis, you know some tremendous idiots.”
Karis leaned over, and took hold of Zanja with both her hands, and set her on her feet. “So long as you’re not one of them,” she said, and Zanja saw that she was smiling.
Beyond the inn‑yard and the inn, behind the kitchen, grew an undisciplined garden where climbing roses and fragrant herbs tangled into a blooming thicket, over which bees operated in a hum of industry. The beehives stood at the garden’s edge, nearly half a dozen of them. Bees bumped into Zanja and Karis as they walked across the flight path, their feet crunching in the dried bee corpses that littered the ground. Zanja followed Karis into the tangle of roses, and Karis in turn followed a path to a lathe house overgrown with rich, green vines. The door had fallen off its hinges. Within, Norina lay upon a bench in a mossy shade garden planted beside a spring. The bubbling pond was filled with sodden wooden crates that contained bottles of milk and wine, kept cool by the cold water. The shade garden seemed damp and almost chilly compared to the sun‑sodden outdoors. Norina lay on her side with her head pillowed on one arm.