Norina opened her shirt and Karis put a hand inside to feel her belly like the midwife or healer she would no doubt have been, had the elements in her blood been less radically out of balance, and had the story of her life been less out of true. "It's a daughter," Karis said. "Ready and restless to come out of there.

And a vigorous child she'll be-how could she not be?"

"How indeed?" Norina grumbled. "Conceived by an earth witch's meddling-" Norina b.u.t.toned up her shirt. "It's been a bittersweet year," she said heavily.

They both were silent then, until Norina said quietly, "Karis, it's a terrible position you've put me in. Ten years ago, when I offered to help you, I never offered to be your jailer."

"You've given me ten years I wouldn't have had otherwise. Nori, I want you to tell Zanja what you're afraid she's done."

Norina sat up. "No, Karis, I told you . . ."

Karis looked over at Zanja, who would be just a shadow against the blaze of sunlight. "Zanja, come here."The grotto smelled of mold and rotten wood, but it certainly offered relief from the heat. Zanja used her porringer to dip some water from the spring; it was so cold it made her teeth ache. She brought some more for Karis, who drank it with the air of one accustomed to doing as her caretakers told her. Karis said, when Zanja had squatted on the ground beside her, "Since Norina refuses to talk, perhaps you would talk to her instead. Tell her about Fire Night, and about Medric."

Zanja told her tale again. When she had finished, there was a silence. Norma gazed into Zanja's face as though she were reading and re-reading an unexpected letter and could not decide if the news it contained was good or bad. Then she put her head into her hands.

"Truth?" Karis said.

"A fire blood's truth," Norina said grumpily. "As full of mystery and metaphor as a blasted book of poetry. I don't know what to make of it."

"Well, I think it only sensible to accept this seer. In fact, if what you fear is as inevitable as you say, I don't see what else we can do."

"You want to trust him?" Norina seemed appalled.

"Put him through your Truthken's meat grinder first if you want."

"A seer? His truths will change from one moment to the next. There is no point."

"There must be a way."

"No, Karis." She sat forward on the bench, implacable. "No."

Karis said, "Nori, I can't continue like this."

Nonna stood up abruptly. "Near fifteen years you've trusted me-"

"Sit down," Karis said.

There was a silence. To Zanja's surprise, Norina sat down. The spring made soft, lapping sounds, like a cat drinking milk. "You are not infallible," Karis said. "I intend no insult by pointing this out, no more than you intend to insult me when you remind me of my many weaknesses. This time, I want you to trust me.

Tell Zanja the truth. Let her find this seer and bring him to me."

"No." Zanja had never heard a voice so cold.

"If you don't do it, I will."

"Then you have no further need for my advice. And I have no desire to either struggle with you further or to partic.i.p.ate in your folly. You'll go to your doom without my help."

In the dim light, Karis's face seemed very pale, but this time she made no move to stop Norina from standing up and leaving. It was Zanja who leapt up and blocked the door.

"Are you insane?" Norina said softly.

"You're making a mistake."

They looked at each other, eye to eye, more than long enough for Norina to figure out that Zanja was no threat to her, and her entrapment in the lathe house was an illusion. But Norina didn't move to push pastZanja. She turned and said to Karis, "No matter what I do, I am forsworn. Only you could put me in such a position."

Karis said, exasperated, "You're too angry to think. Even I know a way out of your dilemma."

It was unusual, and gratifying, to see Norina so taken aback. To see her cold face quirk with wry humor was even more surprising. "You're getting very subtle for an earth witch," she told Karis. And then her unnerving gaze shifted to Zanja's face. "I a.s.sume you're wondering why Mabin arranged your murder. It was to prevent you from delivering to the enemy one of Shaftal's most guarded secrets. But you had already done what she most feared, when you crawled through Medric's window on Fire Night."

"I had? What had I done?"

But Norina apparently had said all she would say. She shifted her heavy, off-balance torso, pressed her hands to the small of her hack, and waited. Beyond her, Karis sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. Whatever they were waiting for, they seemed prepared for it to take a while.

Perhaps they expected Zanja to determine for herself whatever it was that Norina's vows prevented her from telling her. Zanja took her glyph cards from their pouch. "You say I know an important secret, but what secret do I know?" She looked down: in her hand she held the Woman of the Doorway. "Karis is Shaftal's most guarded secret? Why?" She sorted through the cards, wishing for Emil's insight. Her fingers stopped: she held the card called Death-and-Life. The G'deon's glyph.

She could not take a breath. Norina held her arm in a painful grip. She must have seemed on the verge of falling over. "But Harald G'deon didn't-" she protested, and stopped. Who really knew the truth of what had happened the last day of Harald's life? Not many people would have been in his sickroom, and almost everyone had been killed by the Sainnites soon afterwards. She looked up from the card to Karis, who was making a serious study of the dirt beneath her feet. "He laid his hands on you before he died.

He vested you with the power of Shaftal."

Karis raised her gaze and said to Norina, "Now may I speak? I think she is under a misapprehension."

They waited rather long for Norina to calculate a grudging answer. "Yes."

"When Harald died, I was the only earth witch in Shaftal. They found me and brought me to him at the last moment of his life. As he died, he dumped his load of power into me. I did not know what was happening, and it was done without my consent. After it was done, and could not be undone, my unworthiness was discovered. It became apparent to everyone that Harald could not have intended to make me his successor, but only to use me as a receptacle."

"By the nine G.o.ds!" Zanja turned to Norina. "For fifteen years Shaftal has been in turmoil-"

Norina said quietly, "Despite having been so foully treated, Karis serves Shaftal with more honor and consistency than anyone thought possible."

It was a statement amazing in its sincerity, for Zanja had come to think that Norina admired and respected n.o.body. Even Karis looked rather surprised.

Zanja said, "I mean no disrespect, but I don't see how."

"She accepts obscurity, she chooses not to exercise her significant powers, she resists the lure of smoke as much as she can, she lives when sometimes her life is unendurable, and someday she will pa.s.s on the power she carries, and give Shaftal a G'deon."Shaken, chastened, Zanja could scarcely think of a response. So this was how a woman so dishonored might reclaim her honor and even be a hero. Yet the tragedy of Karis's life made her own tragedies seem almost ordinary. She said, "How can I help her?"

Norina said, "I guess I should have trusted you from the beginning."

It was like a river reversing its course by an act of will, with a new current just as inevitable and irresistible as the old. Zanja must have been staring at Norina in blank amazement, for Norina's grim expression finally gave way to one of sardonic humor. "Now, Zanja, get yourself in hand. The ritual must be completed."

"You acted as your duty required," Zanja said.

"Formidable enemies can make formidable friends."

"I'm hardly in a position to refuse-"

"Well, that's a bit half-hearted," Norina said.

"There's no point in lying to you."

"That's true, but this little drama is for Karis, not for me." Norina glanced at Karis.

"She's satisfied enough." She took Zanja's arm, and propelled her back to the bench and to Karis, who got up and fiercely embraced them both.

Norina said, "You were going to let me leave."

"And you were going to go."

They examined each other rather cautiously. For the length of their friendship, Zanja thought, Norina had been reading Karis back to herself like a book read to a blind woman. Surely she must have been unnerved to look up from her reading and find the other chair empty and the door standing ajar.

Zanja said, "You're afraid that Medric knows of Karis, even though I told him nothing?"

"She created you," Norina said, "just like she created these blades we carry, just like she created the ravens. So she is in you, and when Medric met you, he met her as well. It may take some time for the small bit of truth he's seen to become a whole, but if he's the seer you say he is, then it will happen."

"So I must find him, just as Karis says."

"Well, I must consult with Mabin before we do anything."

"You know that won't work," Karis said. "Giving birth will lay you up for a while, and you won't even be around to consult with anyone. And if Mabin forbids us to contact him, as I'm sure she will, what then? You know that Zanja won't stand quietly by while Mabin's a.s.sa.s.sins hunt Medric down."

"Good luck to them," said Zanja. "That man has already outsmarted the smartest commanders in Shaftal.

But no, I don't owe Mabin any loyalty. Medric, however, deserves all the help I can give him."

Norina said, "Unlike both of you, I still answer to the councilor, and will until I die. So what am I to do?"

"Go ahead and write her a letter," Kans said. "Tell her what we're doing, but don't ask permission.""She won't be happy. She'll say you're overreaching yourself, and she'll blame me."

Karis said, "Oh, I'm sure she will. But you can endure it."

Chapter Twenty-one.

"Don't send that letter!"

Awakened by Medric's cry, Emil put an arm around him. Sometimes, when Medric became restless in his dreams, Emil could soothe him without awakening him. But Medric turned away, mumbling urgently.

The sky had clouded over. A summer shower would give relief from the dust, thought Emil. He got up to check the oilcloth that covered the trunks of books in the back of the wagon. When he returned, he found Medric sitting up in the tangle of blankets, fumbling frantically for his spectacles.

"We're running out of time!" Medric looked around himself rather wildly.

"Are you awake? Or still asleep?"

"I'm not sure. I can't see."

Emil found his spectacles for him. Medric peered up at him and said, "I'm awake."

Five days they had been traveling lazily, following the wagon down the dusty road, holding hands. It was summer, and all across Shaftal, Sainnites and Paladins were desperately killing each other. Emil knew this holiday of his could not last long, but still he asked, "What are we running out of time for?"

"Zanja is looking for me," Medric said. "She needs us both, more urgently than she knows. But we can't leave the books. How much further do you think we have to go?"

"Four days travel, or thereabouts. Where is she?"

"Oh, I don't know." Medric disengaged himself from the blankets. "I'll tell you if I can see a map."

Emil fetched the map and lit the lantern. When he sat down, Medric leaned against him. Emil tucked him close and kissed his head.

"Maybe we can just ignore everything," Medric suggested.

"I don't believe that's an option you'll find in Way of the Seer." Emil kissed him again, and unfolded the map. Medric pointed. Emil asked, "Strongbridge? What is she doing there?"

"Being a hinge of history." Medric sighed. "Oh, well. The letter's going to be sent, and nothing I can do will stop it. If I could, maybe it wouldn't make any difference anyway." He studied the map. "I suppose that to find me, Zanja will go to where she knows I was last, and wait for me to come to her. She'll wait a few days, and eventually work her way to Haprin, for she knows I shipped my books there, doesn't she? And then she'll be able to find out that you and I left together, and perhaps even which way we headed. So she'll guess where we're going, because she's been to your shepherd's cottage before, and come after us.""She will," Emil agreed, stunned by the simplicity of it. So this was how Rees Company had been systematically slaughtered, one person at a time. It was best not to think about it.

Medric rolled up the map, and blew out the lamp. "After we've secured the books, we'll turn back and go to her, and meet her on the road somewhere. Now we can sleep."

But when Emil awoke at dawn, Medric was still awake, and had spent the night pacing back and forth, watching the clouds gather and then disperse without issuing a single drop of ram.

Karis came home again to Meartown, to the furnaces and the forges and the teams of gigantic horses hauling wagonloads of ore from the nearby mines. Because Meartown was less than a day's foot journey from Strongbridge, Norina had reluctantly let her go as she had come, alone. Norina had her own journey home to make: to her first home, the seaside village far on the southern coast, to the rambling house in which she had been born, and where her older sister now ruled, a benign matriarch by all accounts.

The region of Mear was a place of hostile, stony hillsides and occasional, straggling trees, home to many kinds of mice and the foxes and hawks that ate them, but unfarmable and, except for a few places, too barren even for sheep. In spring a few tiny flowers bloomed among the stones; in winter the snow blanketed the land and blew into drifts taller than Karis could reach. Yet, for hundreds of years Meartown had thrived in the middle of this wasteland, its fires stoked by coal mined from the same hills that the iron came from; all its other needs came in by wagon. The road to Meartown was like a heart's artery, and there was no road better laid or maintained in all of Shaftal. All summer long the road crew wandered that road, filling potholes and replacing stones; all winter long that same crew worked the snowplows.

The barren land inspired a barren kind of love, an intellectual and pa.s.sionless appreciation for its empty s.p.a.ces and harsh, stony ridges. By day, the sky was brown with coal smoke, and she spent most of those days within the gray city of the forges. Hemmed in by stone and metal, she longed for green and living things. She sighed as she walked into Meartown that afternoon and waved a hand at Mardeth, who collected the gate toll from outsiders. "So you're back," Mardeth called. "Have you eaten today?"

Karis sat down by the town well and ate the lunch that the inn had packed for her that morning-more of those dumplings that had made Zanja cry, there by the river.

Present yet absent, Zanja moved across the countryside like a spark of light through darkness. If Karis had shut her eyes and started to walk, she would have walked directly to her side. With her whole being, she yearned to do that very thing.

In Strongbridge, Karis had bought Zanja an ugly, hammer-headed, evil tempered horse. With one touch, Karis had won the willful horse's abject devotion. The horse, who she named Homely, proved himself a st.u.r.dy mount, with an easy, light gait and an eagerness to run that Zanja did not always rein in. She had left with most of Norina's equipment: her saddle, her spare shirt, her cooking gear, and her maps. Zanja had never seen such beautifully drawn and detailed maps, though many of the details made no sense to her. They were judicial maps, Norina said, copied from an original that still survived in a secret archive.

But Norina had overwritten the maps with her own notations, which had been incorporated when the map was re-drawn by an artist who could not resist ornamenting what blank s.p.a.ce remained withdrawings of boats, trees, castles, and the like. The maps had been re-drawn perhaps a dozen times since Norina first began carrying them, and now she admitted that even she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing the roads from the welter of detail.

Following obscure but direct routes, along byways and cowpaths that are usually known only to locals, Zanja traveled east and then south, and in six days hardly saw a single soul. Not until she drew close to Haprin and camped for a few days just over the hill from the main road did she even have a conversation-with an enterprising farm girl who visited every day to sell her eggs, bread, and milk. With nothing to do but wait and think, Zanja found herself sorting through the events of her life as though they were glyph cards, picking and choosing which ones had significance, and deciding what that significance would be. She had not spent such a peaceful time since she could remember.

At last, she roused herself to go into Haprin and make inquiries. A watch woman at one of the warehouses was much taken with her, and for the price of a dinner told of a bespectacled young man who had slept beside his shipment for some days before he was joined by an older man, and they left with the trunks, by wagon, headed for the ferry. Yes, a man with hair going gray, his face creased by wind and sun, but definitely not a farmer. "A Paladin," said the watchwoman, who by the end of the meal was speculatively stroking Zanja's knife-scarred hand.

"I don't suppose he had a limp."

"Yes, he did. But a night with that young fellow did him a world of good."

"You amaze me," Zanja murmured, more amazed, in fact, than she let on. Though the friendly watchwoman was appealing enough, Zanja disappointed her hopes, and went back to her solitary camp, to gaze up at the brilliant stars and think of Karis.

In Strongbndge, after Karis had gone to her room to smoke and then sleep under the watchful guard of Norina's tireless a.s.sistant, Norina and Zanja had shared a fine supper. As was inevitable, Norina commented on how well Zanja was comporting herself, and particularly complimented her efforts to keep secret the fact that she was in love with Karis. The Truthken was not as unsympathetic as Zanja had feared she would be, but neither had she held back the facts, both about how Karis had been brutalized in Lalali, and about how smoke irrecoverably destroys sensation. The unpleasant conversation certainly had helped to cool Zanja's ardor.

But she lay now, thinking of Karis's big, gentle hands stroking her injured thigh. That touch had ruined her, she thought wryly, for now she wanted nothing else. She could only hope, as she had promised Norina, that she would recover quickly.