Zanja felt the shirtcloth. “It’s soft, the way old shirts get.”
Karis alternately felt her face and the cloth. Then she looked at her callused, soot black hands. “I am alive,” she said. “It feels very odd.”
The flat heath spread out before Zanja, oddly out of kilter. When Zanja looked at Karis, she hardly could endure the sight, and had to look away again. The silence became awkward, and at last Karis said in a strained voice, “Well, I must ask you, since you haven’t volunteered. Where are you going to go?”
Zanja turned, startled, pained that Karis would even think of sending her away.
“Because I’m going with you,” Karis continued.
“I think I’ll go to Meartown.”
“Well.”
“Karis–”
“Be careful,” she said hoarsely. Her attention seemed intensely concentrated, as if she had been rescued from deep water and needed to breathe.
“With your permission,” Zanja said, very carefully, “I’d like to court you.”
Karis uttered a sharp laugh, but even her laughter had no peace in it. “And up until now, what have you been doing?”
“Well, if this whole year has been a courtship …” Zanja paused, and said, “Perhaps it has.”
“I don’t think the earth sent me out to rescue you on a whim.”
“It seemed whimsical enough at the time.”
Karis was smiling, her panic passed for now. But Zanja knew, quite clearly, how uncertain was the path on which she trod.
Zanja said, “I would like to make a suggestion. Take Norina into your good graces again.”
“Have you forgiven her?”
“I will, before I bid her goodbye. She makes amends the same way she goes into battle. Gods help the fool who gets in her way. If you forgive her, we all will be the safer for it.”
Karis uttered a snort of laughter and unfolded herself a bit. “Well, since you’ve gotten in her way before, you know what you’re talking about. Nori!”
Norina came over with J’han’s book of poetry and gave it to Zanja without a word. Without a word, Zanja stood up and gave Norina her seat, and pointed out to her the porridge cooking in the ashes.
Karis said to Norina, “You must be bored with penitence by now.”
“My boredom is only just beginning,” said Norina morosely. “But J’han is never bored. Why couldn’t he be the one with the breasts? That’s what I want to know.”
Zanja went for a desperately needed walk across the flat, rocky countryside. The yellowing grasses were weighed down by seedheads, which in places had been cropped neatly off by their wandering horses. She reached the clear rivulet that had served as their camp’s water source. When she looked back, Norina sat at Karis’s side, talking earnestly. Karis listened somberly, speaking little. It seemed like old times.
Zanja walked in a wide circle around the camp. The next time she looked at the cookfire, Norina had been replaced by J’han, who seemed to be systematically giving Karis most of the contents of his healer’s pack: a brown bottle of something to soothe her throat, herbs to build her strength, and a great deal of advice. But in the end he seemed to offer some kind of reassurance, and Karis must have said something amusing, because he burst out laughing.
The next time she looked, Emil and Medric sat on either side of Karis, and all three of them were roaring with laughter. The sound of it carried far across the plain. J’han and Norina were saddling their horses. Zanja started back toward the camp. By the time she reached the fire Karis was sitting alone, with packets and bottles piled at her feet like homage. Zanja took the small fortune that the people of Meartown had collected to fund her rescue of Karis, and divided it up among them. At least none of them would go hungry or cold this winter.
Zanja first said goodbye to Norina. “Karis should never have to choose between us,” she said.
“You’ll wish a thousand times that you had never said those words.”
“I already wish I hadn’t.”
“That’s once.”
Zanja said seriously, “If you have any advice, I would hear it.”
The sardonic side of Norina’s mouth lifted at the corner. “You’re the one who threw yourself into the middle of this avalanche. Are you trying to tell me now that you’re worried about where it’s taking you?”
“Not at all,” Zanja said. “And I’ll never forgive you for trying to murder me.”
Norina said, “In all my days of seeking the truth, I’ve never met a worse liar.”
When Medric embraced Zanja in farewell, he said, “Do you ever think about that other Sainnite seer’s vision? The one that predicted that the Ashawala’i would defeat the Sainnites?”
“I try not to,” Zanja said.
“That’s good,” Medric said. “I never would have told you about it had I known who you were. But if the fate of my people is in your hands–”
“Then that puts it in your hands, doesn’t it?”
Medric looked taken aback. “It does? Oh, it does.” She left him fumbling for a different pair of spectacles.
Emil’s hug was bracing. “You know where to find me,” he said.
*
Her arms were aching and empty as she stood beside Karis and watched the four of them ride away. Homely, laden with their food and bedrolls and a book each from Medric and Emil, nibbled a few sprigs of grass and then snorted impatiently at them.
Karis said, desolate, “How I’ll explain all this to the townspeople I have no idea.”
Zanja’s patience had never been so tried by travel. Karis slept insatiably, ate ravenously, and in what daylight remained dawdled on the path, infinitely distracted by a curiosity as global and undisciplined as any child’s. The barren heath was to Karis an extraordinarily complicated living puzzle that she could not resist figuring out. But the more she understood, the more there was to understand, and they would starve to death before Karis was satisfied. The rigors of the last month had melted Karis like a candle. It had taken only a sense of taste to make her devoted to food, and when Zanja pointed out their shrinking food supply, their pace picked up substantially.
Still, Karis touched everything, meditatively, absorbedly; and often smelled and tasted it as well. She wore herself out with sensation, and Zanja wore herself out with trying to explain to her the marketplace of physical experience that she had always taken for granted. Karis could not distinguish between hunger and thirst, between tiredness and sleepiness, between softness and smoothness; and teaching her the difference was not nearly so simple as one might think.
Late one afternoon, after several days of leisurely travel, they climbed steadily up the steep road to the Meartown gate, but long before they reached the gate, people had begun to come rushing out and down the road, one or two at first, and then dozens more as the word spread of Karis’s arrival. Faster than seemed possible, the entire town turned out to welcome her home. In the heart of a celebrating crowd, Zanja clung grimly to Homely’s reins and to Karis’s elbow, tempted sometimes to beat the people back so that Karis at least could breathe. Karis, however, seemed resigned to the attention, and patiently embraced the babies born since her disappearance, and shook the hands of forge‑jacks and forgemasters and hundreds of other muscular, smoke‑begrimed people who had not even taken the time to remove their scorched leather aprons.
They sat Zanja beside Karis in a place of honor in the town’s largest tavern, into which the townspeople packed, elbow‑to‑elbow, like beans standing in the pickling jar. The tavernkeepers did not have enough tankards to go around, and a dozen toasts had to be drunk, with the tankards being passed from hand to hand until everyone in the tavern had drunk at least a swallow to Karis’s health. All this took an inordinate amount of time, and at one point Karis glanced aside at Zanja’s face and said dryly, “You endure some trials more gracefully than others.”