They’d have nothing to wear in the morning. But between now and then lay an infinity of time.
Though Karis floundered in an agitated ocean of sensation, Zanja’s hands anchored her within her skin. Fragmented flesh knitted itself together, shocking her with each new joining: another recognition, another homecoming. Zanja’s sculptured face moved across her breast: perspiring, ecstatic, entangling them both in a mess of unbound hair, moaning sometimes like the lion upon her hill. Who’d have thought those knife‑scarred hands could be so appallingly gentle, or that a woman of such iron will could suddenly turn so soft? With one touch Karis could collapse her. She tried it, stroking the soft inside of a lean thigh, and Zanja fell prostrate and incoherent, as helpless as Karis had ever seen her. For a moment, Karis didn’t know what to do. And then she did know.
A strange, irresistible time followed. With Zanja shouting and sobbing and flailing under her touch, Karis felt the shock of her lover’s ravishment right through skin and muscle and bone. And then Zanja lay shuddering, gasping for breath in Karis’s arms, and beginning to shake with dizzy laughter. “Oh gods of the sky,” she said in abject gratitude, and laughed and cried, and Karis held her more closely than she had ever held anything, and could not imagine letting go.
Then Zanja tied her hair up in a knot and said, “Now I will follow the fire.”
Zanja lay across her, and Karis saw the callused bottoms of her well‑traveled feet. She took one in her hand. It was warm, and rough. The tendons tightened and the ball of Zanja’s foot pressed gently against her palm. Karis felt Zanja’s hands, and her tongue– unhurried, coaxing. Under that touch, her thighs gave way, and the rest of her gave way as well. Oh, it was fire, but it was also earth: a monolithic presence, waiting, wounded, for healing. Shaftal. She could not refuse.
The earth claimed her.
In the dead of night, Zanja awoke to find herself alone, with the blankets tucked carefully around her and the garden doors standing ajar. She walked out into a chilly breeze, and saw frost sparkle in the starlight. A year ago she had never thought she’d see stars again. Now the cold night felt huge around her, cupped within the folded hollow of the hills, but expanding out into the bright universe. The garden lay breathless and silent, the accuser bugs silenced at last, the frog song long since ended. It would be a sudden winter.
Karis lay naked on her back in a bed of thyme, staring up at the stars. Zanja paused. She knew there had been a mystery at the end of their lovemaking, when with the moment of consummation upon her, it was not to Zanja, but to the land itself that Karis cried out. Perhaps Karis had not slept at all since then, and all their lovemaking had been for her the opening of another door. Perhaps everything they did would ripple outward in the vast future: every breath, every word.
“Now you are afraid,” Karis said from the thyme bed. Her voice was hushed.
“I should be afraid.”
“Yes,” Karis said peacefully. “Anyone should fear to possess such powers as we possess.” Then: “Do you remember when I healed you?”
“I’ll never forget that day.” Zanja knelt down in the thyme. “You restored me to myself.”
Karis said, “Now you’ve done the same to me. So it was the land that sent me forth, to make whole the one who would make me whole. I’ll never again question the logic of my life.”
Chapter Twenty‑eight
At mid‑autumn, when the ground began to freeze, South Hill Company disbanded. The malaise that had affected the Sainnites seemed also to have affected the Paladins, like a plague jumping across the battle lines. By then, half the people of the company had no homes to go to, and only food delivered from outside would keep the people of the region, including the Sainnites, alive until spring. Even Willis had succumbed to the bitterness of that year. He was gone from South Hill; no one knew where. One of Emil’s friends had gotten a brief and inexplicable letter: I am released. I wish you the same. Though she shook her head in pity that so fine a commander had fallen victim to the silliness of middle age, she lay awake that night, thinking of the ways that her own service to the war had imprisoned her over the years.
Emil and Medric, on their second trip for supplies to the nearest town, outran the storm by less than an hour. They had scarcely finished unloading the wagon when the rain began to fall. Medric, who had insisted that they augment their already substantial supply of food and lamp oil, took on the project of cramming their purchases into the already packed storeroom of the little cottage. Emil went up to the attic to check for leaks, and wound up sitting for quite some time on one of the trunks of precious books, listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and peering out the one small window at the gray landscape below. When he climbed down the ladder, he found Medric curled in an armchair by the kitchen fire, with a book in his lap and a pen in his teeth, and the ink pot precariously balanced on a pile of papers on the arm of his chair. He looked up, took the pen out of his mouth, and said, “Why has no one ever written about Harald G’deon?”
“Chaotic times have brought us a dearth of historians,” Emil said. “And so many have blamed Harald for the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, I suppose that there is an impulse to erase him from history.”
“But some day people will wish they could know more about him,” Medric said. “And another thing: the House of Lilterwess came into being around Lilter, the second G’deon, largely to keep her powers regulated. So once Mabin made it clear she would not confirm Karis as G’deon, at that point, it could be argued, the House of Lilterwess lost its reason for existence.”
“Now that’s hardly true,” Emil began. He chopped some vegetables for a bean soup while he explained as well as he could how the Orders of Lilterwess had gradually become the unifying heart of Shaftal’s government and culture. As he put the pot onto the fire he caught sight of Medric’s smile, and leaned over to kiss the top of his head. “Do you hear?” he said. “The rain has turned to sleet, just like in your dream. What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking that ‘The House of Karis’ just doesn’t sound very impressive.”
“That’s because it’s impossible to imagine her as an institution.”
“That’s probably what they said about that woman Lilter, and look at what happened.”
Medric wrote for a while in his weird mix of languages and alphabets. Emil did not feel like doing anything, and made himself a pot of tea. Although it had been a long day, Medric still would sit up with his books and papers for half the night. Emil would go to bed, and wake up before dawn with Medric curled against him like a friendly cat. In the kitchen, Emil would find both the lamp reservoir and the wood box empty. He would go out on a solitary walk to watch the sunrise, and when he came back he’d start some bread and write a letter to Zanja, though he could not imagine how to arrange for its delivery.
Emil got up to stir the beans. The wind flung sleet at the shuttered windows. By now it was full dark, and the storm would rattle the shutters all night long. Within the cottage, here in the bright kitchen, it was easy to forget about the storm.
Zanja looked up from the uncertain text she was deciphering as someone came into the tavern, and she saw as the door closed that it was past sunset. The people clustered nearest the door shouted in good‑natured protest against the bitter wind that came blowing in. The tavern’s convivial cheer grew noisier by the moment, as miners and smelters came in to celebrate another day’s survival at their inevitably dangerous jobs. Zanja closed her book. Her tutor had gone home some time ago.
The door opened again, and Karis came in, accompanied by a half dozen other metalsmiths from her forge. The other smiths lined up to get tankards of ale, but Karis took cider instead, and a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese. She set her burdens onto a nearby table and then mounted Zanja’s table to engage her in a startling kiss, while the people in the vicinity burst into laughter, and the tavernkeeper shouted good‑naturedly across the room, “Hey, now, that’s no way to treat fine furniture!”