In Strongbridge, Karis had bought Zanja an ugly, hammer‑headed, evil tempered horse. With one touch, Karis had won the willful horse’s abject devotion. The horse, who she named Homely, proved himself a sturdy mount, with an easy, light gait and an eagerness to run that Zanja did not always rein in. She had left with most of Norina’s equipment: her saddle, her spare shirt, her cooking gear, and her maps. Zanja had never seen such beautifully drawn and detailed maps, though many of the details made no sense to her. They were judicial maps, Norina said, copied from an original that still survived in a secret archive. But Norina had overwritten the maps with her own notations, which had been incorporated when the map was re‑drawn by an artist who could not resist ornamenting what blank space remained with drawings of boats, trees, castles, and the like. The maps had been re‑drawn perhaps a dozen times since Norina first began carrying them, and now she admitted that even she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing the roads from the welter of detail.
Following obscure but direct routes, along byways and cowpaths that are usually known only to locals, Zanja traveled east and then south, and in six days hardly saw a single soul. Not until she drew close to Haprin and camped for a few days just over the hill from the main road did she even have a conversation–with an enterprising farm girl who visited every day to sell her eggs, bread, and milk. With nothing to do but wait and think, Zanja found herself sorting through the events of her life as though they were glyph cards, picking and choosing which ones had significance, and deciding what that significance would be. She had not spent such a peaceful time since she could remember.
At last, she roused herself to go into Haprin and make inquiries. A watch woman at one of the warehouses was much taken with her, and for the price of a dinner told of a bespectacled young man who had slept beside his shipment for some days before he was joined by an older man, and they left with the trunks, by wagon, headed for the ferry. Yes, a man with hair going gray, his face creased by wind and sun, but definitely not a farmer. “A Paladin,” said the watchwoman, who by the end of the meal was speculatively stroking Zanja’s knife‑scarred hand.
“I don’t suppose he had a limp.”
“Yes, he did. But a night with that young fellow did him a world of good.”
“You amaze me,” Zanja murmured, more amazed, in fact, than she let on. Though the friendly watchwoman was appealing enough, Zanja disappointed her hopes, and went back to her solitary camp, to gaze up at the brilliant stars and think of Karis.
In Strongbndge, after Karis had gone to her room to smoke and then sleep under the watchful guard of Norina’s tireless assistant, Norina and Zanja had shared a fine supper. As was inevitable, Norina commented on how well Zanja was comporting herself, and particularly complimented her efforts to keep secret the fact that she was in love with Karis. The Truthken was not as unsympathetic as Zanja had feared she would be, but neither had she held back the facts, both about how Karis had been brutalized in Lalali, and about how smoke irrecoverably destroys sensation. The unpleasant conversation certainly had helped to cool Zanja’s ardor.
But she lay now, thinking of Karis’s big, gentle hands stroking her injured thigh. That touch had ruined her, she thought wryly, for now she wanted nothing else. She could only hope, as she had promised Norina, that she would recover quickly.
The next day, as she rode down the main road to the ferry, Karis’s raven dropped out of the sky onto her shoulder. “Something is wrong!”
A startled farm family that shared the road with her drew back, staring fearfully.
“What do you mean?” she asked the raven. “Did Karis send you to me? Did you see something from the air that I should know about?”
The raven uttered a strangled caw, as though he had half forgotten how to talk. “It is Karis,” he managed to say. “Something is wrong with Karis.”
Zanja never got on the ferry.
Seven days later, in an evening that had turned suddenly cool after sunset, Zanja rode up to the Meartown gates. The stars had come out, and the gate was closed: a gate of iron forged in the form of ivy climbing a trellis, with spear‑shaped leaves tipping the gate’s top, edged, no doubt, with sharpened steel. Though Zanja had allowed Homely regular rest, she had scarcely slept, and now she saw the beautiful, deadly gate with a terrible clarity of exhaustion and panic. Not since the night of the frogs had she been forced to function in spite of such horror. “Something is wrong!” she shouted at the cranky old woman who came too slowly out the metal‑hinged door of her stone house. The town stank of dust and coal.
“Stop ringing the cursed bell,” the woman said, holding her ears. “The town’s children are asleep.”
Zanja made her hand stop pulling the bell rope. Her exhausted horse had not even jumped at the noise of the ringing.
“And come back in the morning,” the woman said. “You can sleep by the road there. There’s a pump so you can water your horse.”
“I’ll climb the gate if I have to, and come pounding at your cottage door.”
The woman said dryly, “This is Meartown. We know how to make a gate here.”
She started to turn away, and Zanja shouted at her back, “Do you know Karis? Do you know her best work? Look here!“ She thrust her dagger through the gate’s bars. ”She doesn’t give these blades to many people, does she? For pity’s sake, look at me, look at the raven on my shoulder. I am her friend!“
The woman took the dagger from Zanja’s hand, scrutinized it, and gave it back. “You do have a fine blade,” she said doubtfully. She peered through the gate at the bird on Zanja’s shoulder. “And a strange pet.”
“Mardeth,” the raven said, the first word he’d spoken in many days. “Help her.”
“Shaftal’s Name!” The woman snatched up the key at her waist and unlocked the gate. Zanja all but fell through as it swung open. “You’re not the one I expected,” Mardeth said.
“I’m Zanja. Norina’s pregnant.”
“Well, blessings upon her,” Mardeth said automatically. She examined Zanja, then stepped forward to take Homely’s reins. “You’ve had a bad time of it. Come in and take a bite to eat, before I show you the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house. You’ll be needing your strength, won’t you.”
Zanja followed her, too dazed with hunger and weariness to protest or demand an explanation. It wasn’t until she sat in the woman’s kitchen with the teakettle starting to hiss and some bread and cold meat before her that she thought to wonder why the gatekeeper might have been expecting Norina to come frantically ringing the gate bell in the middle of the night. She nearly leapt up and ran out to the yard, where the woman was watering the horse and giving him some hay, but she made herself eat instead. She’d be needing her strength, Mardeth had said.
Mardeth came in, and cut her a piece of pie. “Your horse isn’t in too bad shape. Leave him with me tonight, and I’ll have him shod in the morning. Looks like you’ve been keeping him in oats but not feeding yourself. Are you out of money?”
“I’ve got enough for the shoeing.”
“As if the blacksmith would accept a single coin from you. I’ll send around to the other mastersmiths and take a collection to help you on your way. We were getting ready to send out some people ourselves. It’s taken us this long to figure out that she’s not somewhere nearby, off her head or injured somewhere. Six days we’ve been scouring the countryside. What’s the matter with you?”
Zanja had knocked the pie into her lap and sent the plate spinning to the hearth, where it clanged on the stones like the gate bell, and set the woman’s dog to barking. “She’s disappeared?”
“Yes, of course she’s disappeared. What else are you here for?”
“The raven couldn’t tell me what was wrong. I thought she might be ill.”
“Well now, that’s odd,” the woman said, looking askance at the raven, who paced restlessly along the back of a chair. “Very odd indeed. Not that I know a thing about elemental ways, but they say a witch’s familiar knows everything she knows, and if the raven doesn’t know anything, what does that mean, I wonder?”