In a goat’s burrow hidden in the nearby hills, Zanja lay as Karis had left her, wrapped in the horse blanket, watched over by the raven. She still slept like a child, her skin flushed as with fever, her hair a matted tangle, her hands limply open against the earth. Her fingers were thin as sticks, and every bone stood out harshly in her sharply angled face. Karis lay down the fistful of oats she had reserved for the raven, and sat in the opening of the burrow, just out of reach of the falling snow. She heard faintly the horse crunching dry oats with his big teeth. He needed to be stabled and fed properly, but a good bit of grueling travel still lay ahead of them this night.
Zanja had slept the entire day through, collapsed in Karis’s arms like a jointed puppet with the strings cut loose. While she slept, Karis nourished her, and felt herself slowly emptied, and knew the giddiness that comes from too much generosity. When the raven rejoined them, he crept inside the shelter of the blanket that wrapped them both, and he muttered in Karis’s ear all he knew, every word Zanja had spoken during that strange night. It had been genius to send the raven, Karis supposed, but now there seemed something diabolical in his masquerade. She had created him intelligent, but he was also without compunction.
Now sunset was approaching and Karis still could not decide what to do. When she turned her head, Zanja was looking at her.
Zanja awoke in a cramped cranny between two boulders, which was blocked at one end by brush and stone, and at the other end by Karis, whose extraordinary length folded impossibly into the narrow space. Her back bowed to match the curve of the stones; her legs fit tightly to her chest, and her arms tucked to her sides, bent at the elbows, with her hands atop her knees. Her shirt hung loose at the neck and wrist, and oat grains were stuck m the weave of the fabric. Slush and melted snow puddled at her feet and dripped from the curled tips of her hacked-off hair. She looked as worn as her stained and poorly patched clothing: a used-up woman on the verge of going to rags.
Why did her kith and kin let a woman of rare and valuable talent go hungry, cold, and poorly clothed like this?
Karis turned her head, and Zanja caught her breath. She sat up, tossed off the heavy horse blanket which covered her, and took off Karis’ sheepskin doublet.
Karis said hoarsely, “No, you wear it.”
“Not while you are cold.”
“I’m not.”
“But you’re trembling.”
Karis lifted one of the hands with which she clasped her knee, and examined its tremor without surprise. “It’s nearly sunset.”
“It is?” Puzzled, Zanja examined their droppings-strewn shelter: the raven, who ate oats greedily, the plain round loaf of bread and the jug and eggs that waited beside it on the ground, and Karis again, who gazed at her steadily, as though waiting for something. Zanja remembered how the day had begun, but she remembered nothing else. Now, a green and raw energy pulsed in her wasted body, like sap rising in winter’s skeletal trees, and Karis, who that morning had seemed gigantic in spirit as well as body, now seemed diminished, exhausted, worn to the bone. It was as though she had poured herself into the wreck of Zanja’s flesh until all her reserves were exhausted.
Zanja said, “ Serrain, I don’t understand you.”
Karis slid into the cleft and crouched close to Zanja, so close that drops of melting snow from her hair stung the skin of Zanja’s hand. “Why do you call me ‘Serrain’? What does it mean?”
“I—honor you. I don’t know how it’s proper to address a Shaf‘ tali elemental…”
“So you’re making me a stranger.”
“No, my people value formality—”
Karis looked away, the line of her body a cipher of frustration. “But if you were being impetuous, even foolhardy?”
“Karis.” It did seem foolhardy, even to call her by name like this. “You could have my servitude, for surely I owe you whatever you demand. So why demand a friendship, which requires an obligation in return?”
“How else could my behavior possibly be explained, except as fulfilling an obligation? Well, madness, I suppose.”
“It does seem like madness,” Zanja said.
“Do you think so?” In body and in spirit Karis filled a great deal of space, and Zanja was fighting with herself to keep from backing away. There was something of the raven in Karis’s way of waiting for Zanja to speak: intent, expectant, almost apprehensive. Unlike the fire bloods, earth bloods normally were stable as stone, but it appeared that Karis doubted her own sanity.
Zanja said, “Perhaps it only seems like madness since you are a complete stranger and have no reason to be obligated to me. But—” The inexplicable certainty of insight rose up in her and she said in astonishment, “but in the future, I will serve you, and you will indeed be obligated—”
Karis let out her breath as though someone had suddenly slammed a fist into her back.
Zanja reached for Karis’s hand. It was surprisingly warm, and had a fluttering tremor, like a palsy. Karis’s other hand rested upon her thigh. When Zanja touched it to turn it over, it flexed involuntarily but did not pull away. Upon this wrist, as upon the other, was inscribed in faded scars an old despair. There had been a time, years ago, when Karis had tried to kill herself.
And then she remembered: the gangly, extraordinarily tall young woman, a refugee from the fall of the House of Lilterwess, being escorted like a prisoner to the waiting wagon. She remembered how she had watched her being carried away, and how the sight had laid a horror upon her heart.
She looked up into Karis’s shadowed face. That despairing prisoner certainly had been she, though she hardly seemed helpless any longer. Karis broke the silence with a voice that strained to seem indifferent, “If I simply sat here in silence long enough, would you discover all my secrets?”
“I’m beginning to think I might.”
She still held Karis’s trembling hand. In the silence, she could hear how unsteadily Karis breathed. Zanja didn’t say anything, fearing that she had already been too presumptuous. Then Karis said, “There was a time that I could not endure my life. I wish it were my worst dishonor or my greatest shame. But the truth is that I dishonor myself every day, and will do so again today.”
She had spoken these terrible words with a bleak hopelessness that defied response. Zanja groped her way out of that silence with uncertain words. “Surely … if it were true that you have no honor, then there would be no reason for you to be so tortured.”
“I have no honor,” Karis said heavily. “I would—and can—do anything for smoke.”
Three months ago, Zanja would have dropped Karis’s drug palsied hand and pulled away in involuntary disgust. But she had seen repugnance in the eyes of her Sainnite guards every day since then, as they recoiled from her crippled body. Karis, though, had touched her without hesitation or disgust. So now Zanja held onto Karis’s hand. “You consider yourself responsible,” she said. “Call it what you will, it seems honorable to me.”
A long time Karis gazed at her, until the raven said harshly, “You are in dire danger!”
“Oh, shut up.” But Karis gently eased her hand from Zanja’s grasp.
Zanja said, “What kind of danger?”
“More kinds of danger than I can begin to name,” Karis said briskly, and served without ceremony the scavenged meal of bread as hard as stone, milk fresh from the cow, eggs raw in the shell. Zanja ate like the starved soul she was; Karis ate as though she were doing the food a favor. While Zanja ate, she considered whether she might demand to be told what Karis had to fear. If she had been caught up in this strange woman’s destiny and was somehow to do her a great service, then surely she might be in a position to insist upon the truth.
When the last dry crumb was gone and the raven had pecked apart the emptied eggshells, Karis said suddenly, “Well, there’s a farmstead not far from here, where I imagine they would take you in, and even marry you into the family. Isolated places like this get hungry for new blood, and it’s a prosperous little farm. I cou
ld give you a bit of a dowry, to ease your way.”
Zanja said, bewildered, “Wherever you go, I am going with you.”
“No, you are not.” Karis busied herself with getting ready to go.
The day had succumbed to a cold twilight. Zanja looked down at her wasted limbs. “But I am no threat to you. Even in my full strength—”
Karis looked up sharply, and Zanja saw how distressed she was. “Under smoke I am utterly defenseless.”
“After you saved my life and took such risks, I couldn’t even think of harming you.”
Karis slung the horse blanket over her shoulder.
“But still, you dare not trust me? I’ll swear you an oath. My word is my honor—your raven, who knows my entire life, can tell you as much.”
Trembling, glassy-eyed, Karis said, “An oath would make no difference. I can’t take you with me.”
Zanja said, “Then leave me where I am.”
“You’ll freeze to death this very night!”
“I do not want a life that has no purpose.”
Karis said angrily, “I’ll carry you to the farm against your will, if I must.”
Zanja waited. Ransel always said there was something uncanny about her ability to distinguish a true threat from a bluff. Karis sat back on her heels. “What oath?”
“Before my god Salos’a, She Who Travels Between the Worlds, I swear I will value your life as my own, protect you from harm when you are injured, serve your interests when you are absent, guard your back in every battle, love your friends and hate your enemies, and honor your name in life and in death.” It was the oath Zanja and Ransel had sworn to each other when they were scarcely more than children.
Karis said, “Now you are being foolhardy.”
“You think I would choose to sit warm and dry in some farmer’s cottage, while you go forth alone into the bitter night? That I would be content to live out my days bearing children and hoeing corn when I could have embraced a perilous destiny instead? You do not know me, Karis.”
“I know Norina, to whose house we are going. She will blame you that I put myself at your mercy. And you will indeed be in peril.” Karis crawled out of the burrow and whistled shrilly for the horse.
The snow lay deep upon the barren hills, which swelled like a lovely woman’s breasts under a gray silk sky. In the cleft between them clustered groves of leafless trees, and far away in the lower country Zanja thought she spotted a speck of light, perhaps a window of that farm where a warm fire burned behind thick windowpanes.
It was cold, bitter cold, and would be colder still if the wind picked up. Karis waded in knee-deep snow as she carried Zanja down the hillside to the waiting horse. Trembling had taken over her entire frame, and she stumbled in the snow like a dying animal struggling to remain afoot. Her skin, where Zanja touched it, was clammy, and the color had drained out of her face. Zanja had seen many a warrior stricken to the heart who looked no better than this: dazed and shiny-eyed as her soul already started down the last path. Karis managed to lift Zanja to the horse’s back, and stood leaning against the beast’s broad shoulder, breathing shallowly as though she might faint, fumbling one-handed at the buttons of her woolen shirt.
Zanja worked one hand under the cinch to hold herself steady on the horse’s unsaddled back. “Can I help?”
The raven, now perched upon the horse’s rump, said, “Leave her be.”
Zanja looked hastily away as Karis drew a smoke purse out from within her shirt. Zanja once had curiously examined such a purse in the marketplace, not realizing until later what it was for. It would contain a tin matchbox filled with expensive sulfur matches, a charred pipe of carved wood, and a supply of the drug, each small piece wrapped in a twist of waxed paper.
The raven said, “The horse will be unable to carry the two of you in such deep snow. You’ll have to ride alone, while she walks.”
“I will stay on the horse somehow,” Zanja said. She would tie herself to the cinch if she had to.
She heard the crack and sputter of a match being lit, and smelled the stink of sulfur, and then a second smell, like burning mold, the scent of dark alleyways and dilapidated doorways. Karis sighed out her breath and said, suddenly and clearly, “Zanja, the raven is only clever in certain ways. You will have to use your judgment.”
“I understand,” Zanja said, continuing to gaze out at the landscape.
“And you must instruct me—much as we both … dislike the idea. I will obey you. I will—have to.”
The raven said, “You didn’t take a second breath of smoke. Do it now.” Karis said nothing, but Zanja heard another heavy sigh. “Now pack the purse—shake the ashes out of the pipe first—and button your shirt.”
Zanja took off the sheepskin doublet and leaned down to put it on Karis. Karis allowed herself to be clothed and fastened against the cold, all the while gazing into Zanja’s face with the eyes of an infant: startlingly blue and terribly, invitingly helpless. Zanja said to her, her voice strange and rough in her ears, “Good raven, does she have no cap to wear?”
The answer, it seemed, was no, and neither could the raven reassure Zanja that Karis’s boots were well greased or her stockings warm enough to keep her feet from freezing. Karis had embarked on her cold journey no better equipped than a pauper.
Zanja would have to keep Karis moving so that she would not freeze, and perhaps in the end the horse would still have to carry them both. For now, though, Zanja wrapped herself in the heavy blanket, and hoped that their journey would not take so very long.
“It will take half the night at least,” the raven said, when they had started in the direction he told her.
Zanja sighed, dismayed anew. “Is Norina her commander? Her lover?”
The raven cawed a harsh and even bitter laugh. “Lover? Smoke deprives its users of both agency and desire. And,” he added gleeful at her shock, “Norina will happily kill you.”
Some hours had passed when the clouds parted to reveal the light-edged blades of the stars, none of which seemed to be in quite the right place any more. Zanja gazed up at them, stunned by cold and by the beauty of the night sky, which she had never expected to see again. The relocated stars reminded her how far she was from home, and how much she was altered, and how much she had forgotten. The obedient giant trudged listlessly through the snow, breaking the way for the horse and perhaps being broken in the process. The snow cracked like ice beneath her weight. The iron chill invaded Zanja’s flesh, cutting like knife to bone.
When Karis tripped over the road stones and fell into the road, Zanja dazedly thought that it must be her fault. And then she came out of her daze enough to realize what danger they were in. “How close are we?” she cried to the raven, who had flown to Karis and flapped around her as she floundered to her feet again. There was blood, Zanja saw, in the snow. Earth blood. The spilling of it would bless this spot, and the road workers would curse the weeds that would displace the stones here with grand abandon, come spring, and only Zanja would know why, if she lived until then.
The horse had followed Karis into the road, and nosed her gently, as though she were a foundering foal. “Karis, come here,” Zanja slurred. Karis came, and stood quietly as Zanja brushed the snow from her shirt front and her hair, stopped her nosebleed with the help of some snow, and then felt her hands, which seemed even colder than her own. She slipped her fingers into the breast of Karis’s shirt. Karis gazed up at her, seemingly relaxed, with her lips parted, but suddenly breathing too quickly, and with her heart pounding against Zanja’s hand. What did Karis fear? That Zanja would embrace the temptation of that terrible, malleable innocence? Or that she would take the smoke purse and so take control of all Karis’s choices?
Zanja hastily removed her hand and said, “Karis, your heart is still warm—that sheepskin doublet will keep you alive, at least. But you’re too tired to continue, and I am too cold. Perhaps the smoke keeps you from even knowing that you’re tired. But you were tired to start with, and perhap
s you didn’t know it then, either.”
The raven had been watching Zanja as if considering whether to peck her to pieces. But now, he said with great civility, “We’ve gone more than half the distance.”
“How much more than half?”
“Not much at all.”
“Then this journey is going to end badly, good raven. There is no shelter nearby?”
“No.”
Zanja’s emaciated frame had begun to shiver uncontrollably, with cold or with weakness. “Karis—should have abandoned me— she could have ridden. I should not have been so insistent. Now we both are in danger.”
The raven watched her, with inscrutable raven’s eyes.
“We will die without help,” Zanja said.
There was a weight and warmth against Zanja’s knee where Karis had leaned suddenly. Perhaps, in that long silence, she was considering Zanja’s words, in however slow or strange a way. The raven said, “Follow the road south to the third set of milestones, and then go east into the woods. Due east, until you reach a ridge, then follow the ridge to the southeast. You understand?”
“Yes.”
The raven still hesitated, as though he wanted to admonish her further, or threaten her perhaps. Then, the raven spread his wings, and flew into the darkness.
Following Zanja’s instructions, Karis struggled to mount the horse, and even using a large stone as a mounting block almost could not succeed. But when at last she rode behind Zanja, with the blanket wrapped around them both, they had a little warmth for a while, which they shared between them like two starvelings might share a piece of bread.
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