Inevitable spring allowed him one last walk across the frozen water of the Finger Lakes, where he cleared the snow to watch the fish through ice as clear as glass. But as he stood on a rise of land about to turn toward home, he heard the sharp report of cracking ice. So the muddy thaw began.
Some twenty days later, during a break in the rain, he was planting flowering peas along the fence when something, a faint sound or a tingling of the skin, made him turn sharply, to see a pair of riders coming down the narrow from the direction of Gariston. In nearly thirty years as a Paladin he had come to trust his small talent for prescience, which never told him very much, but told it dependably. Knowing he had no reason for concern, he turned back to his pea planting until the travelers had ridden close enough to talk to. The horses were tired and muddy to the belly, for the roads surely had scarcely been passable. One rider looked cross; the other’s face was a closed door.
“Emil Paladin?” said the cross one. “I am Norina Truthken.”
He bowed to her in the old fashion, though he was not happy that the solitude of his last precious days had been disturbed.
The riders dismounted, and it was the silent one that Emil watched. Plain farmer’s clothing could not obscure her exotic appearance: the dark coloring and the sharp angles of her face. She moved with the fluidity and precision of a blade fighter, who had learned her skills in a place where pistols and gunpowder had not yet eliminated all the beauty and skill from combat. She looked up to meet his gaze with her own: eyes black as night, with a flame in their centers.
“By Shaftal!” Emil reached to clasp hand. “I think I remember your name. Zanja, am I right? When I heard about the Ashawala’i, I wondered what had become of you.”
“I guess they did make you a commander,” she said.
“I’m afraid they did. And all these years I have been making the best of it.” He gazed at her, feeling the distance from which she observed him, remembering the reserved but talented young woman she had been. She would be over thirty now, and for fifteen years her intelligence had been sharpened by bitter experience. He said, “I hope you have come to join my company.”
“Yes, sir,” she said impassively. Her face held back everything. Emil invited them to settle their horses and come in for tea.
Once they were all seated in the kitchen, with the Truthken choosing a chair and the tribal woman sitting on her heels, he poured tea from his small porcelain teapot and sliced bread fresh from the oven, on which they melted slices of midlands cheese produced from Norina’s saddlebag. Though the two women had certainly been traveling together for days, they exchanged not a word with each other. A silent journey it must have been.
Norina said, “Well, Commander, I see I need not explain who Zanja is. I have been charged with finding a place for her among the Paladins, and your company was suggested.“
“They say that a few survivors of the initial attack all but wiped out a battalion,” Emil said to Zanja.
“No, but seventeen of us did kill some sixty Sainnites.”
“It is more than my company has killed in six years.”
Her somber expression cracked away a bit. “Paladin techniques work well in the mountains.”
Emil sat back to think and sip his tea, and finally brought himself to say, reluctantly, “You will not have an easy time of it in South Hill, and perhaps you would be better off in one of the northern units, where they are more accustomed to the sight of northern tribesmen.”
“I am accustomed to being a stranger.”
Norina added, “She is too well known in the north.”
“Well, then.”
Norina took a money pouch from inside her doublet. “She has no family to support her.” She handed the pouch to Emil, who had not felt such a weight of funds in many a year. “A sponsor,” she explained, though it explained little. Where would a solitary tribal woman find herself a sponsor in such uncertain times?
“This has been a day of many surprises,” he said. The cups of the traveling porcelain tea set were very small, so he refilled them with the rare and expensive green tea. Though no one conducted hospitality rituals anymore, Zanja courteously complimented the tea’s fragrance and flavor, leaving him with the impression that she could have fulfilled her role in the entire ceremony, uncoached, without missing a step. She was not a warm woman, he thought, at least not on the surface. But oh, she was careful, and, like him, she belonged in another world. He fingered his right earlobe, where once had dangled two gold earrings that he had dropped into a well many years ago. The holes had since closed, but the scar tissue remained.
Zanja sat on the floor of the cramped attic, beside a small window that let in a gray, rain-smeared light onto the page of her book. What with the rain and the thaw, sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was melting. The letters on the page pushed and shoved against each other like people on market day. They gave up their secrets only with much coaxing and study. Then, they offended her first by ranting at her and then by cozening her.
She leafed through the pages of Warfare. In the kitchen directly beneath her, where Emil also read while waiting for the rain to end, she heard him add a log to the fire. On a day like this, the Ashawala’i would sit around the clanhouses, mending their clothes, sharpening their tools, and telling stories. She wished Emil had told her stones, rather than handing her this battered book, with its disembodied demands and disguised angers. Mabin’s Warfare, Emil had said, was the one thing held in common by all the members of South Hill Company. It was a language, philosophy, and history all in one. She needed to know it.
Nevertheless, a rainy day called for a story. Zanja turned the pages until a particularly worn page of the book caught her eye. “The Fall of the House of Lilterwess,” she read, sounding the letters out loud. Though she had learned her letters as a child, during the year she lived with a Shaftali farm family, she had not needed to read very much since then. The book also made occasional use of glyphs, which she could not interpret at all.
She moved the book closer to the cracked windowpane and read out loud:
“When Harald G’deon died, I had been sitting at the head of the Lilterwess Council for three years. It had been considered strange, and even unheard of for a Paladin to head the council, but the majority of the council members had decided a warrior should lead in times of war.
“Unfortunately, Harald G’deon disagreed with the majority. It is commonly known that the G’deon and I, though we accorded each other a great respect, never were at peace with each other. It is still true that when my thoughts are in argument with themselves it is his implacable voice I hear. He was too great-hearted a man, for he could not believe that the Sainnites meant to harm us. While I argued and he remained unconvinced, the council sat paralyzed and the Sainnites continued to invade our shores. While the G’deon lay dying over a period of many months, he refused to the last to name a successor. So the great succession of G’deons, who for ten generations have protected and made fertile the land of Shaftal, arbitrarily and inexplicably ended, and no one will ever understand why—least of all myself. Harald G’deon at the very least, committed a dreadful error. Some even call it a betrayal.”
As Zanja read, she realized that she was imagining Mabin, who she had only met the one time, speaking these words. On the page, they seemed neutral and harmless, but speaking them aloud revealed the concealed anger and sarcasm. Harald had betrayed Shaftal with his naive obstinacy, according to Mabin. Zanja, disinclined to be generous to a woman she had disliked on sight, suspected that Mabin might be in the habit of considering stupid the things that she merely did not understand.
She continued to read, listening closely to herself now, and hearing how skeptically and ungenerously she interpreted Mabin’s revered text. “The very night of Harald G’deon’s death, the Sainnites attacked the House of Lilterwess. Harald G’deon must have known of the Samnites’ secret encirclement of our sacred home, but he died without the least word of warning that might h
ave spared us all the years of sorrow which have followed. That night, many of us lay wakeful, fearful for the future. The Lilterwess Council never did sleep at all, but sat with our advisors and scribes, free at last to chart a new future for Shaftal. At dawn we planned to gather the Paladins and ride forth against the invaders.
“But the night was not even half over when an alarm bell began to ring. Some wakeful soul—commonly believed to have been Harald G’deon’s companion, Dinal Paladin—must have discovered the breached gate or the assassinated guards. She was certainly the first to die that night, but not before her courage made it possible for some of us, at least, to escape by a secret way. As I stood on a far hilltop that terrible dawn and watched the smoke of destruction blur the sun, I and my companions had much cause to wonder for what purpose we had been spared, while our friends, lovers, children, and whole history were destroyed before our eyes.
“Now our hearts, first stunned by the magnitude of our defeat, then ripped apart with grief and rage, have become cold and hard as stone. The law failed us, we realize now, because it made us gentle. It relied upon a decency at the heart of every community, the willingness of each person in Shaftal to treat the next with generosity and understanding. When strangers came who were estranged from that decency, our kindness became our weakness.
“Therefore there is no longer a place in this war for acts of mercy. Lest we balk at this grim truth, let us always remember that this is a new Shaftal, a Shaftal created by the Samnites. This is the land they wanted. Why should we suffer our pains while they become rich and fat from our labors? It is they who have created this new Shaftal. Let them pay the price.”
Zanja lay down the book, and noted distantly that it had stopped raining. Oddly, Mabin’s last bitter statements had caused her to think not of the Sainnites who had killed her people and who she had and would continue to kill in return, but of Karis. Nowhere did Karis appear in Mabin’s account, except, perhaps, in the reference to unnamed companions. Yet she had been there, she and Norina, two precious talents saved from the destruction.
Zanja looked out the small window at the darkening sky, but what she saw was Karis, apparently a prisoner, possibly out of her mind with smoke, being walked by Norina to the wagon. She thought of the old suicide scars on Karis’s wrists. Was it simple dislike that made Zanja want to make Mabin the source of Karis’s misery, or was it fire logic?
Throughout the cold winter and into the harsh early spring, Zanja had scarcely thought of Karis. Karis had sent the artful blades she had promised as a poor substitute for friendship, and Zanja had accepted them. Now, she was a Paladin, and soon would wage war against the destroyers of her people. Still, thinking of Karis now, Zanja felt a restlessness, and a haunting loss. Why? she asked herself, and could not think of an answer.
She stood up, remembering almost too late to duck the low ceiling, and climbed down the ladder. In the kitchen, a pot of salt-meat stew bubbled on the hearth, and Emil darned a sock by the dim light of the fire. His supply of lamp oil was exhausted, he had told her, and the last of his candles had been eaten by mice. It was when he sat working in the dark like this, refurbishing his gear for the hard season ahead, that he seemed most willing to talk.
He said to her now as she knelt upon the hearth, “What do you think of Mabin’s Warfare!”
“I notice she does not dwell much on heroism.”
“She always argued that we would win through intelligence rather than bravery.”
“And are we winning?”
“We merely resist. We keep the Sainnites from becoming comfortable, and we keep the people of Shaftal from forgetting that they used to be free. We outnumber the Sainnites, of course, but their advantage over us is too great.”
“I have studied the Sainnites,” Zanja said, “And I cannot see their advantages.”
“They can make their living by stealing food from farmers— taxing them, they call it—while the people of Shaftal must either work or starve. To fight, as you and I will fight, is a costly luxury to people who live on the edge of hunger. South Hill Company survives on charity: the leavings of the already depleted harvest. So we often go hungry, while the Sainnites eat the fat of the land. That is their advantage.“
Emil stitched away at the heel of his sock for some time. “I have not discouraged you?”
“No,” Zanja said, thinking rather distantly about how her loss had left her with nothing to be discouraged over.
Emil cut himself another length of yarn. The yarn was a sorry sight, gray and lumpy with weed seeds, and the famous weavers of Zanja’s extinct people would have sneered at it. Emil had spun it himself, probably, out of wool gleaned from a thorn bush, with a spindle cobbled together from a rock and a stick. He was not, she had noticed, ashamed to do things badly, so long as they got done. He glanced down at her, where she sat upon the stone hearth. “You don’t like furniture.”
“It just seems unnecessary.”
Emil looked amused. “I think the rain is done for now. What do you say, shall we spend one more day here, or shall we leave tomorrow and slog our way through the mud?”
“Truthfully, my aimlessness wearies me more than any walk in the mud will.”
“And the mud can’t be avoided anyway, this time of year. Well then. Let’s grease our boots and pack our bags.”
Outside of Meartown, no one knew whose invention had made the Meartown pistols more accurate and reliable than those of the Sainnites. Years ago, Karis had determined that the pistol ball rattled about in the barrel when the gunpowder exploded, making its trajectory unpredictable. It was she who told the metalsmiths how they could make the pistol ball spin instead, by cutting spiral grooves on the inside of the barrel. Yet Karis had refused to make a gun or any part of a gun. She refused to even make a fighting blade, though the single dagger she forged long ago for Norina had become famous over the years, and connoisseurs of weaponry frequently appeared at fairs or even in Meartown itself, insisting that someone there could make a blade of rustless, folded metal that never lost its edge. It was not only this refusal to profit from her own genius that baffled Karis’s fellow metalsmiths. Though her apprenticeship was long ended, she had never been able to choose a glyph to be her mastermark. Even though she had been relentlessly educated, the glyphic syntax of metaphor and implication had resisted her every attempt to comprehend it. She was always too honest to engage in a purely mechanical exercise, and so when faced with the mechanical exercise of choosing a glyph to act as her mark of certification, she could not do it.
Without a mastermark she could not be a mastersmith. So Karis never opened a smithy of her own, and never took apprentices, and never went to stand behind her work at major fairs, and never dressed in silk or soaked her hands to leach out the soot ground into her skin. She kept working where she was, and her old master paid her five times an apprentice’s wage to keep her from going somewhere else.
When the word got out in early winter that she was making a blade, the work of Meartown practically came to a standstill, as the mastersmiths of Meartown sent all their best apprentices to learn Karis’s secret.
Metalsmithing, a dramatic and dangerous profession, was never practiced in solitude, especially not in Meartown. But Karis would rather have made Zanja’s blades in private, for she engaged in a private conversation as she shaped them. She could have made a model of Zanja’s right hand, including the blood vessels and the nerve endings, but to fit the blade to the hand was the easy part; it was the less tangible matters that preoccupied Karis to the point that she forgot her rapt audience and lost all track of time. She had never seen Zanja in her strength. Forging a blade to match Zanja’s fighting style when Karis’s only information came from an intimate knowledge of Zanja’s wasted muscles and compact skeletal structure was a matter of the purest kind of speculation.
People fight the way they talk, Norina had said once, and so Karis made a blade for a gracious and graceful fighter whose manners were the velvet that covered the steel
. Zanja would win by talent and persistence, not by power, so Karis gave the blade an edge that would slip m and out on the moment of inspiration and be gone before the recipient of that moment could know that he was dead. It was indeed an artist’s blade, and that worried Karis. She realized as she forged it that if Zanja fought the way she talked she didn’t belong in a war at all.
Karis loved the work of making the dagger and its companion knife, but hated the aftermath. A half dozen people were injured trying to imitate her methods, and many others demanded that she show them again how to do one thing or another, and explain it this time. She couldn’t have explained what she was doing even if she had been willing to do the demonstration. For a while her relationships with nearly half the townsfolk were in disarray, and various people had to go around reminding other people that she wasn’t like the rest of them.
Later, when the blades had been delivered, Norina admitted that when Zanja unwrapped them she had nearly been in tears. She admitted that Zanja fought as if she were dancing, and that it was a beautiful but not completely impractical performance.
Now, with the spring mud season not even half over, Norina had come to visit. Her face was familiar in Meartown, and the people there at least vaguely understood her role as Karis’s protector. The rain prevented them from walking the barren heath as they usually did, so Karis left the forge to spend the day in a tavern instead, and the metalsmiths who constantly sought her advice soon began to find her there. After one of these interruptions during which Karis solved a problem with a new kind of door latch that the smith was inventing, Norina commented, “Meartown’s reputation has become practically legendary in the last ten years. While the people of this town conspire to maintain you in obscurity, the entire town has become notorious instead.”
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