“Wake me up once you’re awake.”
Karis nodded. Her sorrow might have been a load of iron, yet she smiled wryly, as though she recognized that she was accepting the very compromise she detested: an arm’s length intimacy that must inevitably be corrupted by bitterness. After she had gone inside, Zanja sat alone upon the beach, wishing futilely for one easy choice, one option that did not leave her bleeding and bereft. The sky grew dark, and Emil and Medric came walking down the cliff path, hand in hand, talking earnestly, carrying a brace of rabbits and a basket of mushrooms for supper. Between the two of them, they were more kind to her than she could endure, and she went to bed early to get away from them.
After sunrise, Emil walked with Zanja to the top of the canyon path where their horses were picketed. Emil decided not to tell her about Medric’s restless night; she did not need to worry more. He promised to look after Karis. From Homely’s back, Zanja looked down at him and said with something of her old irony, “So now you’re nursemaid to two rogue elementals. Your elevation has been meteoric.”
“I can stand it a little longer,” he said. “Just look out after yourself.”
She did not remind him that her survival up until now had bordered on the miraculous. “A warrior shouldn’t have so much to lose,” she said. “Especially knowing as I do just what it’s like to lose it.”
“Nothing will be lost.” He took her hand and lightly kissed her knuckle. “I’ll look for you in twelve days. Medric and I will hunt some fowl, and we’ll have a feast. And then all of us will decide what we’re going to do with ourselves. Now go.”
Her ugly horse pranced across the pathless ground as though he thought he was on parade. Watching her go so lightly and yet so heavily, Emil had the odd thought that she did not yet know what she had to fear. Yet, knowing her way was fraught with unknown danger, she had set forth. And so we all are Paladins, Emil thought, every last one of us who sets forth so lightly upon a dangerous road.
He had this same thought again, later, when Karis came out from under smoke and spent the afternoon with him and Medric in a hilarious attempt to circumnavigate the lake. Karis feared deep or flowing water and, like all earth witches, could not endure setting foot in a boat. While scrambling up and down the rocks, Karis made herself entertaining, with a humor that was deep and subtle and utterly entrancing. But the charming afternoon left Emil with an aching heart, and he and Medric spent a strangely silent evening afterwards. That something of great import was at work in both of them seemed clear. But what they struggled with Emil could not fathom, and both of them kept their own counsel.
Six days Zanja traveled across a familiar landscape. She skirted Meartown to the west and forded the river north of Strongbridge, then worked her way south, cross‑country. A day’s journey south of Strongbridge, she took lodging at a farm near the road she and Norina had traveled, and settled down to watch the road. In the afternoon of her second day of watching, Norina appeared. She traveled in the company of her gentle husband, riding horses so tired they dragged their hooves in the dirt.
Zanja greeted J’han first, who said in some bewilderment, “Zanja? I hardly can believe my eyes!” She clasped his hand, thinking how incredible it was that he had endured Norina’s company long enough to claim a husband’s right, and yet his wife did not trust him enough to explain where they were traveling, or why.
To Norina, Zanja said, “Some terrible things have happened, but Karis has survived.”
Norina subjected her to a remote examination. “You are not confident of her well‑being, though.”
“At that farmstead over there, you can have your horses looked after, and perhaps even eat some supper and get a night’s rest. It will take some time for me to explain.”
“We’ll go to the farmstead, of course,” J’han said, and started his reluctant horse forward. In a moment, Norina followed. J’han laid his hand on Zanja’s shoulder as she walked at his stirrup. “So this is all about Karis? I should have known.”
Norina said, “And it’s not your business, as I’ve been telling you all along.”
“Your health and safety are not my business,” J’han said, as though agreeing. Norina glared, and fell back out of hearing rather than be further subjected to the criticisms she could not help but hear, no matter what words her husband chose to use.
J’han said to Zanja, “We have a hearty daughter, with a healthy set of lungs on her. She’s down there on the seacoast, no doubt screaming fit to raise the dead.” And I should be with her, his tone of voice said, so clearly that even a non‑Truthken easily could hear it.
Zanja said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to return to your daughter.”
J’han smiled sadly. “I have every intention of doing that.”
“Without Norina?”
“Norina chooses differently from how I choose. And as you know, she is uncompromising. So this is how it ends.”
Later, having situated the horses and made suitable arrangements with the farmers for lodging, Zanja sat with Norina in the guest room and told her how Mabin had tried and failed to kill Karis. Norina listened in unnerving silence. She asked no questions, neither did she argue. For a while she lay upon the rope bed, then she got up to pace the room, then she sat down and picked the dried mud from her boots. When Zanja had finished, Norina went to the window and leaned out to shout for J’han to come inside.
“Have you ever heard of someone using less smoke?” she asked him when he came in, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Less than what?” he asked blankly.
“Karis was forced to smoke more frequently than her usual amount, much more. Enough to nearly kill her. And now she’s decreasing that frequency, trying to reduce herself back down to once a day. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“No,” he said in some astonishment. “Is she being successful?”
“Yes, apparently, though it hasn’t been easy.”
“I always have heard the smoke users inevitably increase the amount they smoke, until they die of the poison or else from their inability to buy as much drug as they need. If it’s possible for them to use less…” He paused, shaken and distressed. “Then we have abandoned them to a fate that we always assumed to be inevitable, when in fact we should have been trying to help them.”
“Karis is different,” Norina said.
“She is an extraordinary person of great wit and will. But she is human, and her body is no different from mine or yours.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Norina snapped.
J’han set his lips and visibly restrained himself from a sharp reply.
“What is wrong with you?” Zanja said to Norina later, after she had sent J’han away again. “I can hardly endure your company, and I don’t see how bringing you to Karis will do her a service.”
“Watch your words, Zanja na’Tarwein. I’m not in a tolerant mood.”
“I would never expect you to be tolerant.”
Norina sat again on the bed and dug her fingers into her short hair, which was stiff with dirt and stood upright like wheat stalks. “Go away.”
After a long silence she looked at Zanja, who had remained sitting where she was, at the table by the window. Norina said, “You tell me that Karis’s true enemy is my commander and a hero of the people, and that somehow I, a Truthken, never noticed. You tell me that when my dearest friend needed me the most desperately, she nearly died in my absence. And now you imply that you have the ability and the right to keep me from her unless I behave myself according to your high standards. Your very presence chides me. Go away and chide someone else.”
Zanja left her, and found J’han out in the kitchen, examining a collection of dirty and impatient children, who clearly wanted to make the best of the remaining daylight and saw no reason to be subjected to a healer’s scrutiny. J’han sent them away, reassured the gathered parents about their health, and took Zanja by the arm out into the privacy of the yard. They sat upon the edge of the well, and for some time neither of them said a word.