Karis shook her head. She looked frightened and worn out, and Zanja remembered that Karis had no way to judge what her limits were. “Shall I come in?” she asked.
“You’re very formal.”
“Well, I’m making up this dance as I go along. I can’t get it right all the time.”
Karis smiled. “That’s better. You know, you aren’t always the most restful of companions.”
“Are you admonishing me?” Zanja sat down beside her. “I’ll be boring if you will.”
“No,” Karis said, “and no again. But let’s not talk about the future anymore.”
So Zanja diverted Karis with tales of her lifelong friendship with Ransel, until the water level in the bowl had risen high enough, and Karis reached for the pipe. She suffered no life‑threatening convulsions, and because of her rapidly increasing strength, she remained awake after she had smoked. Zanja supposed she could take her for a walk, like a pet, but the very idea was so unsettling that she got up and left the cave instead. It was more than disconcerting to see Karis go from the morning’s robust passions and willful vigor to this helpless passivity. The contradiction between the two Karises was not at all easy to encompass, and Zanja began to understand a little of why Mabin and Norina and even Karis herself had been unable to imagine her as anything other than a flawed vessel, to be patched together until it could be replaced. But if fire talent could not encompass a grand contradiction, what good was it?
It seemed strange that the nights had turned chilly, until Zanja examined the night sky and realized that any day now, the stars of summer would set. Karis took Zanja exploring up the river canyon, which required more stamina than Zanja would have thought Karis possessed. Karis’s energy seemed inspired by the grand scale of the landscape: the broken rocks as big as houses, the foaming river, the looming stone cliffs, the narrow strip of sky. Her fascination with the place worked as a camouflage, and it took some time for Zanja to realize that the quality of their conversation had changed, and not for the better. They skated across the surface of a conversation mysteriously opaque and impenetrable, like water turned to ice.
By the time they returned to Otter Lake, Zanja was utterly confounded. Karis had used herself up by then, and they stopped to rest on a rock at the edge of the beach. The sun had dropped below the canyon rim, but the rock retained its warmth, and Zanja lay back upon it and shut her eyes, only to be assailed by a chaos of emotion that her disciplines could hardly keep in check. So this was love, she thought ironically, and hoped she’d soon discover the remedy for it. Then, she felt a mouth touch hers, tentatively, curiously, and she opened her eyes to find Karis’s somber face, carved into hollows by her hard tight with smoke, so close that Zanja scarcely would have had to move to kiss her again. Zanja said desperately, “Now you are torturing me.”
“I’m torturing myself,” Karis said. She sat back, but Zanja still could scarcely breathe. “If my hands had been cut off I’d still be interested in picking things up, and I might even try it once in a while.”
Zanja said, in a voice that did not seem hers, “Please don’t try it again.”
“Then how am I to live as well and joyfully as I can? You pose me quite a paradox.”
Karis had given Zanja’s scarcely functioning mind a glyph of words to figure out. While Zanja floundered in her divination, Karis sat with her chin upon her fist. Sometimes, a trembling passed over her. At last, Kans spoke again. “Maybe you’ve been merciless for good reasons, but you’ve been merciless nonetheless.”
“It’s a wonder you can stand my company,” Zanja said stiffly. “Surely it’s not pleasant to be reminded constantly of what you cannot have.”
“Zanja, I could have whatever I wanted, if only I couldwant it. But I’m not like you, for even when you lay paralyzed, with your back broken, you still could want something. So you could imagine a life worth living, though there was much you might want and be unable to have. It’s not the having that matters to you, am I right? So you can imagine living your whole life beside me, in a state of unfulfilled desire, and that’s acceptable to you because it is desire itself that gives you joy. But I am an earth witch and no matter how rich my life of heart and mind become–and I am rich now, richer than I ever have been–it never can amount to joy. I need the earth, the flesh, the life of the skin. Without that, this whole thing–” she gestured at the shadowed canyon, the vivid sky, “–is just an intellectual exercise.”
Zanja sat up, more bewildered by herself than she was by Karis. “I can’t explain it, but I know that what you’ve said is only half the truth. You’re standing in a doorway looking in one direction and thinking that what you see is all there is. But if you turned around you’d see something else entirely.”
If Karis had received a classical education, then surely she would know that the Woman of the Doorway faces danger any way she looks. But Karis did not state this obvious objection, and she sighed and seemed relieved, as though this very peculiar conversation had served a purpose only she could comprehend. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try to turn around. I apologize for my behavior,” she added. “It seemed like you wanted to give me some comfort yesterday with all your talk of Ransel–a model friendship, untainted by desire. But it only made me realize how much I detest the compromise you’re offering. So I thought of how I’ve learned to feel the metal beneath my hammer, not by touch, but by knowing it from within. I thought I might know you that way.”
“How is that different from what you had to do in Lalali?” Zanja put her head in her hands. “You can know me without touching me.
“If I were a fire blood, yes.”
“I see,” Zanja said, in the grip of a deep dismay.
After a while, Karis’s big hand stroked softly down the back of Zanja’s shirt, and Karis said, “There’s no point agonizing. I just want you to understand.”
“I can’t understand without agonizing,” Zanja said. But she lifted her head and added shakily, “You’ll be wanting to get back.”
Karis stood up and they started down the beach, and after a while Karis closed her hand around Zanja’s. “Norina already has left her child and is traveling north. I had promised to send the raven before her labor began, so if I know Norina, she’s in a panic now.”
Zanja said, “Well, we can’t have her tearing apart the countryside looking for us, with no idea of what the dangers are. I’ll have to go find her, somehow, before Mabin does.”
Karis nodded. Zanja’s hand felt like it was pinched in a trembling vice.
“How soon do you think I’d have to leave?”
“She’s traveling very fast, and we’ll want to catch her well before Strongbridge. That’s what, six day’s travel from here?”
“At least.”
“At least? Then you should leave tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!”
Karis said softly, “I agree. It’s much too soon.”
“She’ll come rampaging in–”
“She will,” Karis agreed.
They had walked in silence almost to the cave before either one of them spoke again. Zanja said, “The last time I left you, you disappeared.”
“Well you could be the one who disappears this time. I’m sure Mabin is looking for you. You should take Emil with you.”
“No. Emil stays with you. Emil and Medric both.”
“With Medric and the water witch looking out for me–”
“They don’t have Emil’s knowledge and experience.”
Karis sighed. “You want Emil to stay with me for the same reason I want him to go with you. Well, let’s not get into an argument about whose life is most worth protecting. I always lose that one.”
They were standing at the entrance to the cave, and Zanja realized that this time Karis did not want her to go in. Karis said, “I’ll be awake long before the sun tomorrow.”