Except that she was lonely, broken, crippled by loss. Except that every year the ghosts returned, and Zanja felt anew the horror of being the only one, the last survivor, of her people.
She felt that slick, powerful hand on her thigh, and a sensation like sunlight flowed upward through her veins and out the top of her head. She parted her legs, grasped Karis’s strong wrist, and pulled the big, slick, careful hand toward her until it slid inside of her. Like this? Zanja wondered. Was this what Medric meant? Karis began to gasp a dizzy, heady rhythm, with a small sound as though she were about to weep or to laugh.
Inside. Where sorrow hides, deeper. Where the open wounds ooze pain. The slashed sinews that once connected Zanja to her ancient people.
Why would I, how would I, give her this pain?
Your whole self, said Medric.
“Yours also,” Zanja said, or tried to say. The slow bleeding of sorrow, the injuries that cannot seem to heal. “For you—” Zanja gasped. “Broken. For you.”
Karis uttered a helpless sound. Zanja felt that distinctive heat, between her legs, in muscle and bone and the thunder of hearts: Earth magic. Karis was doing something to her, however inadvertently, and Zanja let it happen.
Hands. Breast. Heart. Whose? She couldn’t tell.
Their lovemaking became very strange.
Chapter 16
When the blue afternoon began to turn gold, Seth again arrived at Chaen’s door with a tray of food. “I see a shop sign out in the hall. Were you painting today?”
Chaen said, “Are you going to eat all your meals here? I wish you wouldn’t.”
“This is the time I have to spend with you.”
“I don’t want you here at all.”
The cow doctor gave Chaen a level look. “Are we to have the same argument over and over? I’m already doing that with the people of Hanishport all day long. They are the most argumentative people! If my family argued like that, the cows would die of milk fever, the cheese would turn rancid, and the hay would rot in the field.”
She put a steaming bowl at the second chair, with a spoon, and sat down to eat her own meal. It seemed to be a stew of fish and summer vegetables, with green herbs floating in it. There was bread too, and butter, but still no butter knife. Chaen had eaten nothing since the day before, and the stew smelled delicious. Standing at the window, she turned her face into the breeze so she couldn’t smell it.
Seth said, “I never cared about glyphs, but some people were dreadfully sad that most of the glyphs were lost when the lexicons all were burned when the Sainnites razed the library at Kisha, and we were left only with the hundred glyphs in common use. Now we have a lexicon again, and Zanja will tell you that she stole it, but what really happened is a lot more complicated. She stole it, and then she was forced to return it, and then it was given back to her . . . or maybe it was given to Karis . . . and we’ll never know why, because it all happened two hundred years ago.”
Chaen turned to Seth, surprised and suspicious.
Seth was holding her head. “Water magic. Just talking about it makes me seasick. I might not be able to tell you this story at all.”
In time, she recovered enough to butter her bread with her fingers. Chaen looked away again, but she had been captured by the bits and pieces of Seth’s account and couldn’t help but try to put them together in a way that made sense. “How was it given to Zanja?” she asked reluctantly.
“Tadwell G’deon put it in a box that he sealed with earth magic, and left it in the attic of my family home in Basdown. There it sat for two hundred years. I lived in that house nearly my entire life and never knew it was there.”
“And Zanja stole it from your family?”
“No, Jareth stole it from my family. And he stole a donkey to carry it. That’s why Damon and I were chasing him. Also, he had killed one of Karis’s ravens.”
Chaen said, “Since you insist on telling me this tale, I wish you would tell it like a normal person. Who did Zanja steal the book from?”
“Zanja stole the book from the library at Kisha, two hundred years ago.”
For quite a while after that, Seth’s mouth was full, and Chaen restrained her impulse to ask any more questions. The harbor was luminous with sunset, and music and laughter rose like the tide. Seth said, “I was with Zanja when she broke through the ice of a river we were crossing, and disappeared. And I was there to pull her out of the ocean, a couple of months later. During the time in-between, she was visiting Shaftal of two hundred years ago. If you want to know more about what Zanja did there, ask one of the fire bloods to tell you about Grandmother Ocean. Water magic doesn’t seem to bother them.”
“What a tale,” Chaen said dryly.
“I’m an earth blood, Chaen. I’m never confused about the facts. I don’t repeat other people’s stories until I know they are true, and I don’t invent things.”
All day, people had arrived and left from that creaking old house, sometimes in a hurry, sometimes waiting in the road, sometimes alone and sometimes in a crowd, while the sounds of music and revelry in the city seemed like echoes from an alien country. Always, the dogs barked when someone drew near. Now, once again, the dogs made their announcement, and Seth went to the window and called to someone below, “I’ll come right down!” She said to Chaen, “The lexicon revealed something truly astonishing about the history of Shaftal.”
“And I suppose you’ll tell me about it in the morning over breakfast,” said Chaen. “But before you go, there’s something I need your help with. A question about the law.”
“I can bring you a copy of the Law of Shaftal. But it’s awfully tedious. When the Truthken recites it from memory, I always get distracted by wondering how she could have memorized the entire thing, and whether she ever makes a mistake, and if she did make a mistake, how we would even know. And why anyone would memorize it in the first place.”
Chaen knew how tedious the Law of Shaftal was. She had looked at the copy Saugus had acquired somehow, and given to Maxew, because she was curious what the law had to say about the right of Shaftali to defend themselves against a military occupation. But she had soon given up. The book had not merely been boring; it had been irrelevant, an artifact from before the Sainnites came.
She said, “I want to know if it’s against the law to manipulate and trick a person into breaking the law.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“The raven followed me, and by watching me they learned my weaknesses. The fortune-teller, she told me to leave the city, and she knew I would do the opposite. Then they dangled the false G’deon before me, knowing I couldn’t bear for anything to be left incomplete.”
“So you think they put you in a position that you couldn’t choose what to do? Well, I will ask . . .”
“Who will you ask?”
“Norina Truthken.”
“How could I trust anything she says?”
“She’s all there is, the only Truthken,” said Seth. Her patience was beginning to require some effort, Chaen noticed.
“There was a boy with her.”
“Maxew? He has only studied the law for a few months.”
“Still, he knows more than you or I, doesn’t he? Please ask him.”
After Seth left, Chaen brought a chair to the window and sat with the cool, salty breeze washing across her face. She gazed out at the harbor and at the bay beyond, where the water at the horizon lay in darkness while the nearby water still glowed with light. The city was filled with music. Perhaps everyone in Hanishport was dancing tonight.
Maxew would understand Chaen’s message. Tonight he would come for her.
Chaen and Max had been vagabonds for eight years. One day, at a fair, Max said to her, “There’s a madman down by the river.”
She did not look up from her drawing of the young man whose portrait would be a gift for his sweetheart. “The
re are a lot of lunatics lately.”
The young man relaxed his far-away expression, which he seemed to think was romantic even though it made him look dumb as a cow. “That ranting man? Willis of South Hill? Keep away from him!”
“Sit still please,” Chaen said.
By the time she finished the portrait, her son was gone. Two portraits later, when Chaen, on the lookout for a new patron, was eating an apple for supper, Max returned. “Take a penny and get yourself something to eat,” she said, before she realized that the man who stood nearby had arrived with him.
Max said, “Mother, this is Saugus. He travels with that madman, Willis.”
Chaen no longer apologized for Max when he was rude, and the stranger didn’t seem to mind that a mere boy had called a friend of his a madman.
He was a clean man in neatly mended clothing, older than Maxew and younger than she, vigorous and well fed, with an odd rigidity of expression. His felt hat had weathered several seasons of snow and sun.
“Your son allowed me to buy his supper already,” he said.
Max could not be fooled by false generosity. Nonetheless, Chaen felt a stab of suspicion. “That was kind of you. You must allow me to draw your portrait.”
“I don’t want one, and I don’t have a wall to hang it on. I want to talk to you about Maxew.” He sat on the stool and laid a coin on her easel. “That’s for your time.” It was more than she could earn in a day—in a good day.
Max said, “Take it, Mother.” She handed him the coin, and he put it in the bottom of her brush box, where their savings for winter increased much too slowly.
Saugus said, “You have no reason to trust me. I’m just a stranger at a fair. But you do trust your son’s judgment. Max noticed me in the crowd, watched me for quite a long while, and finally approached me. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘The people who have holes in them, you’re choosing them, talking to them, and getting them to give you money.’”
Chaen looked up.
“You don’t need to fear him,” said Max. “He’s an air witch, like me.”
The night Arin and the rest of Chaen’s family burned to death, she had lost her capacity for joy. But, through the horrors and trials of the years that followed, she had tried with all her being not to fail her surviving son. Even when she could not be what he needed, she had continued to struggle. And now, quite abruptly, the struggle was over.
She said, “Will you teach my son how to use his air logic as it should be used, for the good of Shaftal?”
“Why do you think I know what the good of Shaftal is?”
Chaen’s air self and her fire self had achieved a rare agreement, and the argument inside her head had fallen silent. She did not speak, and the air witch said, “We must eradicate the Sainnites so the people can decide what is the good of Shaftal.”
She turned to Max. “You can go with him.”
Her son said, “What about you? Do you think you will return to the Midlands? You can never be a farmer again.”
“No, but my mother’s family will shelter me, and I’ll join Midland Company.”
Saugus said, “Why not join my company? You need not be separated from Maxew.”
Chaen examined her smudged hands and paint-daubed sleeves. Then she looked up at Max, but it was Saugus who answered her silent question. “Yes, Willis is a madman, because he passionately believes that a drunken dream he once had was a vision. Most members of the company believe in his vision, and that belief gives them the wholeness, the virtue, and the courage to raise arms against the Sainnites. But I don’t need to believe in that vision, no more than you do.”
A girl interrupted them to ask if Chaen would make a half-size drawing for penny, as that was all the money she had left. Chaen said, “Go away. I am done drawing portraits.”
Death-and-Life Company had been created and trained by the Sainnites themselves. They were a collection of hardened veterans who had survived awful events and continued to fight, becoming more ruthless and fearless with every passing year; a company that depended on no one’s approval or good will and was not hampered by the cowardice that the Paladins said was philosophy. Even though Willis had invented a god so that he could be designated the god’s chosen servant, he still was a canny commander who knew his enemy, calculated risks without being ruled by them, and rarely accepted new members. After a year in the squad captained by Saugus, which gathered money, supplies, and information, Chaen moved into positions of greater danger, eventually making it into a detachment whose members could have been the most determined, inventive, and ruthless fighters in Shaftal, were they not overshadowed by the squad of forty that was led by Willis. By the third year, the enemy that had once seemed impossible to defeat was faltering, and she began to think their cause could eventually be achieved.
Then Willis was killed, along with his entire squad, in an operation they had expected to be bloodless. And Karis came out of obscurity, declared herself the G’deon of Shaftal, and made peace with the Sainnites.
Chapter 17
Zanja awoke to a pale sunrise glow from the small window. She lay in the tangled bedding, wondering lazily what had happened.
She found the kitchen empty except for Garland, who was splashing dishwater in the scullery. She served herself sausages from the warming oven, a fat slice of bread from the loaf on the sideboard, and a cup of rather strong, lukewarm tea. While she ate, she studied an array of glyph cards on the serving counter. The parts would not cohere. Could it be that a card was missing?
Careful to wipe the grease from her hands, she reached into the satchel—
—the iron gate latched with a quiet snick. “That’s better,” she said, except that she hadn’t said it, and it wasn’t her voice. She heard the familiar sound of the dogs huffing out small, joyful exclamations, the way they did when they were with Karis. She stood up, with the dogs dancing around her, half-blinded by the sunlight glaring from the surface of the sea. She felt extraordinarily tall—
—her hand was caught in the straps of the satchel. She saw the varnished serving counter, the gorgeous glyph cards lying at a careful distance from the plate. Her hands. Her breast. Her heart.
She looked up and discovered Norina examining her in a way she did not like. “Am I losing my mind already?” Zanja asked.
Norina pierced a piece of sausage on her knife. “What have you done?” she asked.
Garland’s chopping knife pounded a quick rhythm. The kitchen smelled like onions. But a moment ago, Zanja had been smelling the ocean, the wind, and the oil can that Karis carried in her toolbox.
Norina said, “I saw Karis in you. Not the thought of her, but her. Her awareness. Her presence. What have you done?”
Medric poked his head in the doorway. “Zanja? Oh.” He backed out the door.
Norina slammed her knife down on the counter.
Garland glanced over his shoulder. “Norina! What if I had a cake in the oven?” He picked up a spoon as if to stir the onions into his bowl, but stopped, seeming startled, and subjected the spoon to a puzzled examination.
Norina had chased Medric into the hall and dragged him back, with her fist clenched in his shirt. “Explain!”
Medric pushed his dislodged spectacles back into place and said in a strained voice, “I’d rather not.”
“My duty is to protect the G’deon of Shaftal! Explain!”
Zanja said, “But Medric’s duty is to shape the future.”
Norina gave her a hard look. Zanja added, “I don’t know what happened last night, but I know better than to demand an explanation from a seer.”
“You fire bloods may love peril and uncertainty. But now Karis must share your perils, Zanja. For when she changed you, she changed both of you.”
“Is that what happened?” Zanja felt a growing dismay. Years ago, when Karis created the ravens to be her eyes, ears, a
nd voice, she had put a bit of her physical self into them. When a raven was killed, as had happened four different times, Karis was diminished. Surely that loss would be far greater if the raven who was killed was Zanja.
Norina, having watched Zanja think, said bitterly, “Yes, she did promise not to create any more ravens.”
“She didn’t break that promise intentionally.”
“You tricked the G’deon of Shaftal?”
Although Zanja wasn’t as punctilious as Norina, she would never have followed Medric’s instructions had she known what would result. Last night’s lovemaking had been extraordinary. Now that she could remember it more dispassionately, it seemed obvious what had been happening when she became unable to distinguish her body from that of Karis. Meanwhile, Medric, keeping watch outside the door, had heard it happen. If Karis had been tricked, Zanja also had been tricked.
Medric already looked wretched, but she said to him, “You knew I wouldn’t have consented. Were you coming in here to apologize?”
“No, to ask you to trust me.”
“If something happens to me, if I’m killed again . . .”
“A catastrophe,” Norina said.
Medric said nothing. He looked away.
Karis came in, with the dogs at her heels and a raven on her shoulder. She set her toolbox down with a thump and surveyed the three of them. “Are you fighting again?”
“Are we ever not fighting?” said Norina.
“Karis, I have to tell you something,” Zanja said.
“I know, I heard the conversation with your ears.” She turned to Norina. “It’s done. It can’t be undone.” Then she turned to Medric.
“Don’t ask me!” Medric cried, and fled.
The three women stood looking at each other, like friends gossiping on market day, except for their unhappiness. “Something’s going to happen,” Karis said. Dread strained her voice.
“I’ll talk to Emil,” said Norina.
Air Logic Page 14
