Karis grinned wickedly. “Greetings, wife.”
“Whatever that means,” Zanja said.
Karis sat down decorously on the bench across from Zanja, and retrieved her cup and plate from the other table. “It means whatever I want it to mean.”
“Well, that’s convenient. What does it mean tonight?”
“Tonight, it means you can share my bread and cheese without asking. I’ve been daydreaming about supper ever since dinner, haven’t you?”
“No, since breakfast. I missed dinner.” Zanja took some bread and cheese.
Karis tasted the cheese, and shut her eyes. “Oh, my.”
Throughout the short months of autumn, Karis had immersed herself in the ordinary, which to her was not ordinary at all. Meartown was a busy, everyday kind of place, and Karis seemed steadied by the straightforward effort of labor. Zanja gathered that she had never worked so hard or so brilliantly, and some of the more perceptive townsfolk had already come to Zanja to ask plaintively whether Karis needed help in setting up her own forge, as though they hazily recognized that Karis’s talent could not be contained much longer in the narrow patterns of her earlier life.
To be the speaker for a single person was a role Zanja did not much savor. She advised these people to talk to Karis, but none of them did. Instead, everyone participated in Karis’s pretense that nothing of significance had been changed. They accepted Zanja as Karis’s lover and apparent dependent, they were puzzled by Karis’s recovery from her addiction, and their labored lives continued unaltered. The mysteries of Karis’s late summer disappearance lay in the past, and now the preoccupations of winter distracted everyone’s attention. Karis seemed to prefer it that way. Zanja alone knew that Karis’s senses had developed far beyond the limits of Zanja’s experience or vocabulary, and that sometimes she could only understand Karis in the same way she understood glyphs or poetry, through the faith and vision and intellectual recklessness that Emil would have called fire logic.
It had been a preoccupied autumn. Love had not so bedazzled Zanja that she did not regret its cost. She had finally ceased to be a katrim. What she was becoming instead she did not know, but she found Karis’s joking use of the undefinable word “wife” to be deeply unnerving.
Something in the tavern distracted her: a strange quality to the sound, perhaps. Someone from the forge had come over to engage Karis in a technical conversation that Zanja ignored. She got up to refill her cider cup, listening closely as she worked her way through the crowd. Ale and good cheer had made everyone a storyteller tonight, and although not all the stories she overheard had to do with the metal crafts, she heard nothing extraordinary. “Are there any strangers here tonight?” she asked the girl who poured the cider.
The girl pointed at a corner table which was surrounded three‑deep by soot‑smudged listeners with tankards in their hands. As Zanja edged her way over, she caught sometimes the tenor of an unfamiliar voice, and spotted a wool‑clad shoulder and arm as the speaker gestured.
“What?” someone said, with an astonishment so deep and sharp that many more heads began to turn. ‘What are you saying!“
“I’m only telling you what I have heard,” the voice said, its articulation blurred by drink. “But I heard it from the people who saw it happen.”
The tavern was rapidly falling silent, like a noisy audience that realizes that the play is beginning. Zanja began to work her way back to Karis, but the hush passed her and reached Karis before she did. Karis turned around on her bench, curious, relaxed. Zanja made a glyph with her hands: Danger. Karis leaned forward and rested her chin in one hand, disguising her height, making herself momentarily invisible in a room full of muscular, soot‑stained people.
“It was a big woman that did it,” the man said, his voice reaching all the way across the crowded room now. “She came out of nowhere, and knocked Councilor Mabin down, and drove a spike into her heart. And Mabin still lives, that I can tell you for certain. At summer’s end it happened, and her heart is still beating this very day.”
“This is a wild and dangerous tale,” someone objected, and there was a murmur of agreement.
The rest of the people sat in stunned silence, however, some with their drinks half lifted, others staring at each other in disbelief. “That big woman,” someone finally said, “Who is she?”
“Well, Mabin certainly knew who she was,” the stranger said. “And perhaps only Mabin knows the whole story, a story she’s not telling. But whatis that big woman? That’s what I want to know.”
Everyone spoke then, in a cacophony of wild disagreement. Karis sat without moving, her face slightly pale in the shadows. Zanja knelt beside her and murmured, “If we try to slip out now, everyone will look at you, and at least some of them will truly see you, and put all the pieces together.”
Karis’s ragged hair frayed out into the darkness, but when she straightened up from her crouch, her eyes filled up with light. “Zanja, it’s time for the journey to begin.”
Kneeling beside her, Zanja’s thoughts began to fragment strangely. She thought of how Karis had insisted that they build Homely a paddock up at Lynton and Dominy’s house, rather than stable him in town. She thought of the money Karis had earned in these few months, quite a lot more than had been spent. She thought of the random tools that had begun to accumulate mysteriously under Karis’s table, taken home one by one from the forge. She was not surprised when Karis stood up, and faced the accumulating stares and the rising silence of the tavern.
Karis said, “I had to make do without Meartown steel, but I don’t think you’d be ashamed of the workmanship. It was a fine spike.”
She picked up her doublet from the bench, and left the tavern, with Zanja behind her. Outside, the storm clouds had begun once again to extinguish the stars. Breathing clouds of white, fastening up their buttons against the cold, they walked briskly away from the tavern. Karis said, “My accounts are all settled. I’ve hinted to the forgemaster that I’m leaving. Lynton and Dominy tell me my responsibility for them should not hold me back, for they both have lived well beyond their time already. I’m afraid we’ll have a miserable night’s journey–this storm will drop some snow before it’s done. Is Emil’s cottage big enough for the four of us?”
Zanja’s heart had filled up with fire, like a furnace. “What does one cottage matter, when we have the world?”
Karis tucked her big hand into the crook of Zanja’s arm, nearly dislodging the book she carried there. “Meartown bored you to tears, didn’t it?”
They walked out the gates, greeting Mardeth as always. Only as the gate closed and locked behind them did Karis seem to hesitate. She turned, and looked behind her. “Mardeth,” she said.
The gatekeeper had started to her cottage, but turned back. “What?”
“We’re off to see what we can make of the world,” Karis said.
The old woman smiled indulgently. “Are you, then? Good luck to you.”
“She thinks you’re joking, or drunk,” Zanja muttered.
Beside her, Karis uttered a laugh. “Maybe that’s what they all think.”
Arm in arm, they walked up the hill.
Laurie J. Marksserves on the steering committee of Broad Universe and is a member of SFFWA and the National Council of Teachers of English. She lives in Melrose, Massachusetts.