*
At noon, the raven spoke. “Pendant,” he said.
Zanja had been riding cross‑country, following whatever animal trails and streambeds she could find that went more or less northward. She had recently stumbled onto a deeply rutted dirt road. While the horse rested, Zanja searched up and down the stretch of road, sometimes kneeling in the muck that remained from a recent rain storm. Finally, she found it, buried in the mud: the pendant of green stone that she had given Karis beside the river in Strongbridge. A torn piece of green ribbon trailed from it as she pulled it out of the mud. Karis must have torn the ribbon that first dawn, when she started to come out from under smoke, and realized something was wrong, before her kidnappers forced her to smoke again. That was the dawn that the raven had flown to Zanja with his dreadful message.
“You’re watching, aren’t you Karis?” Zanja said, after she had started on her way again, with the raven on her shoulder. “I can’t feel you any more, but at least sometimes you still see me through the raven. I must seem very far away to you, just as you seem to me. Can you hear me now?”
“Yes,” the raven said.
“Can you tell me where you are?”
“Mabin,” the raven said.
“Mabin? Has she been captured also?”
The raven looked at her blankly, and said nothing more.
The countryside remained treeless and desolate, and the road she followed northward seemed to go nowhere, though wagons traveled it often enough to keep the grass from growing in the ruts. Norina’s maps showed empty, un‑annotated countryside.
One morning, as Zanja saddled her horse behind the knoll where she had spent the night, a single rider loped past. The only remarkable thing about him was his horse, a luxury Zanja could not have afforded if she hadn’t been given money so generously by friends and by strangers. She continued more cautiously, traveling far to one side of the road rather than upon it. Here and there were sudden fingers of rock pointing at the sky. She noticed, atop one of these, a watchkeep huddled in the shade of a lean‑to that looked almost like a pile of brush, if one didn’t look too closely. Zanja slipped past in the countryside behind him, where the lean‑to blocked his view, and from there she could see the little bell tower upon which he could ring his alarm.
She soon came upon the thing he guarded: a lush green valley much like the valley of her birth, with a small, but busy village at one end–a village with walls, and a sentry at the gate. The valley had been carved out of the earth by a river that cut a deep swath across the countryside as far as Zanja could see in either direction. This river, at least, appeared on Norina’s map, though the valley and the village did not. As she watched the village from the rim of the valley, Zanja realized it was not a village at all, but a military settlement–not of Sainnites, but of Paladins. She had found the hidden heart of the Shaftali resistance; Shaftal’s government in exile.
Both the glyphs and her own judgment pointed inexorably into the valley. Zanja wanted to violently brush away the possibilities that tickled at her skin. Had Karis been kidnapped and cruelly drugged, not by Sainnites, but by the Paladins?
To break into a Paladin stronghold without assistance or even the vaguest idea of where to hunt for Karis seemed insanely foolhardy. She would do it tonight, she decided, and shut her eyes to think.
It was a warm summer afternoon, and the accuser bugs droned their shrill curses down in the valley. Nearby, Homely chomped away at the grass, and the raven, perched overhead atop a pointed rock, cleaned his feathers busily. It was a commonplace kind of sound, like the rustling of paper. In the midst of her dismay, Zanja felt a sudden, unlikely sensation of peace.
When she opened her eyes, the summer sun hung low and red, glaring into her face like coals of a fire. She could still hear the rustling paper sound, but she could not see the raven. She rolled over, groaning, for she had fallen asleep with her back against the pile of rocks. The man sitting nearby turned a page of the book in his lap, nodding and chuckling to himself. His spectacles were glazed red with sunset. “Dear gods,” Zanja said.
Medric looked up from his book. He seemed rather the worse for wear: a rag tied back his stringy hair, and dust covered his drab clothing. “I guess you were tired. Some warrior you are.”
Two additional horses grazed companionably with Homely on the other side of the clearing. She got stiffly to her feet, and found a smokeless fire burning at the other side of the rock pile, where a soot‑black pot stood empty, and a porcelain teapot steeped upon a stone. Emil sat there on his folding stool, just looking up from the book upon his knees. “You’re awake at last. Now we shall have some answers.”
“You’ve left South Hill?”
He closed the book carefully, and wrapped it in a jacket of leather. “It was time I remembered what my life was about.”
“I hope you’re here to help me.”
“Sit down. Despite that nap, you still look ready to collapse.” Emil opened his padded box and took out two teacups. “Why else would we rush up here into the wilderness like madmen chased by rabid hounds, except to help you? Help you do what, by the way?”
Medric sat on Zanja’s other side. “Zanja, I see history rippling away from you.”
Emil smiled affectionately at the Sainnite seer. “Medric is full of wild stories he’s made up from reading too many books.”
Medric said, “It’s not possible to read too many books. To read too few, now that’s possible.”
“Medric says there’s a third road for Shaftal. We–the three of us–are at the crossroads, he says.” Emil offered Zanja a cup of tea. The cup might have been made of flower petals that released a delicious fragrance. Somewhere, Emil had invested in some very expensive tea. She took a sip. Her hands were shaking like any smoke addict’s.
Medric said, “Zanja, where is the lost G’deon? Somehow, she must be saved!”
Emil murmured, “Set that cup down before you drop it. It’s irreplaceable, you know.”
Zanja put the cup on the ground.
Medric said, “I saw her in a dream, a woman like a mountain, but shackled hand and foot, blinded, with her tongue cut out… .”
Emil put his arm around her. Zanja lay her head back upon his shoulder and stared up at the sun‑red sky, which swirled and swam in her vision. “But she is not the G’deon.”
“She is. I know what I dreamed. The land cries out to her to give it healing.”
Emil said, “Zanja, have mercy. Who is she?”
“Karis. The Woman of the Doorway. How can she be G’deon… a half‑Samnite smoke addict?”
“She’s a smoke addict?” Emil cried.
“She’s Sainnite?” said Medric.
“But if Harald G’deon meant to choose her, and not just to use her as a kind of storage, then every moment, from the day of her birth–and even before–the people of this land have failed her.” And then it came to Zanja, the truth she had not wanted to know, and she started wildly to her feet, crying, “Mabin did this to her, and it’s my fault! Dear gods–” Something was impeding her, and she struggled with it blindly until a mild voice entered her awareness, saying her name. Medric stood before her, his hair having come loose, somewhat out of breath. Emil had her by the arms, from behind.
“Sit down,” he said. “You’re off your head and that’s never good when someone carries weapons as sharp as yours. Sit down and explain.”
She sat back down, her knees gone weak, and let Emil talk her into some semblance of calm, until he trusted her with a teacup again.
Medric said, “The G’deon’s choice of a successor had to be confirmed, isn’t that right?”
Zanja said, “Norina told me that Harald waited until the last possible moment to send for Karis, and then he did it in secret. But perhaps he did it on purpose, so he could get around the council, for everyone knows that he was at odds with them, and with Mabin in particular.”