They sat Zanja beside Karis in a place of honor in the town's largest tavern, into which the townspeople packed, elbow-to-elbow, like beans standing in the pickling jar. The tavernkeepers did not have enough tankards to go around, and a dozen toasts had to be drunk, with the tankards being pa.s.sed from hand to hand until everyone in the tavern had drunk at least a swallow to Karis's health. All this took an inordinate amount of time, and at one point Karis glanced aside at Zanja's face and said dryly, "You endure some trials more gracefully than others."

"We should have crept to your house under cover of darkness."

"Sooner or later they'd have discovered I was home. We might as well get this whole thing over with."

She disappointed the folk of Mear later, though, when they demanded that she tell what had happened.

"I was kidnapped by brigands, and Zanja found me and saved my life," she said. "So I've learned the value of having a hero or two among my friends. Now are you going to hold me hostage to your good will much longer? Surely you have work to finish, and the day is nearly over."

The townsfolk dispersed reluctantly, clearly unsatisfied with the two-sentence tale, but sunset was drawing near and they all knew that Karis had to smoke or die. Karis gravely bid her well-wishers farewell, and only Zanja knew what the glitter in her eye was all about. At sunset Karis often was overwhelmed by desire for smoke, and by a lingering fear that somehow her miracle of liberation would prove to be illusory. After sunset came the jubilation at seeing the stars, yet again. She had gone through the cycle enough times now that she seemed to be starting to trust the jubilation and to distrust the fear.

Now they stood alone in a surprisingly empty street rimmed by soot-gray walls. Someone had taken Homely to the common stable; others had carried their gear away. Karis hesitated in the street, as though she had abruptly lost her sense of direction. After a while, Zanja sat down upon a stoop and tightened her bootstraps. When she looked up, Karis was gazing down at her with a curious expression. Zanja looked at her curiously in return.

"You've been very patient," Karis said.

"Actually, the discipline of peaceful waiting is one I never learned to do with grace. Emil is a true master of patience. You should watch him sometime. The contrast will show you how deliberately and awkwardly and unnaturally I wait. We na'Tarweins are notoriously impatient."

Karis seemed bemused. "But I don't want you to wait on me, well or badly. Why don't you just stop doing it?"

Zanja stood up and took hold of Karis by the shirtfront, and dragged her, startled, to the high stone stoop. With Zanja standing on the stoop, she could kiss Karis's mouth without having to climb her like a tree. Though Karis seemed affrighted, she did not pull away. Instead, in a moment Zanja felt a shudder run through that long frame, and Karis's fist clenched in the cloth of Zanja's shirt. She seemed to want to crawl inside Zanja's very skin. The shirt cloth started to tear. It was Zanja who took a step back, unnerved by the sensation that she had not so much chosen this moment as she had been delivered to it.

Karis lost her balance and sat down upon the stoop as though her knees had given out on her. Thebreeze, cool with the coming evening, inserted a curious finger into the hole in Zanja's shirt. She and Karis both were breathing as though they had just sprinted up a hill.

"Blessed day," Karis gasped.

Zanja knelt at her feet and said with mock seriousness, "The Ashawala'i call that feeling 'being struck by lightning.' Shall I explain the sensation to you?"

Karis said shakily, "I understand enough."

Zanja felt the entirety of Karis's attention focus upon her. She thought of Karis exploring the landscape of her body the way she had been exploring the heath, and her heart began to wobble in her chest. "Would you rather I go back to being awkwardly and unnaturally patient?" she said.

"Could you?" Karis asked, then answered her own question. "No. And if you could, I'd be offended."

Zanja grinned. "Well then, it's completely impossible."

Karis looked away. Her hands clenched each other like shy children before a stranger. "Zanja, it's not you I'm afraid of. It's my ghosts."

"I have my ghosts too. So what?"

"So maybe lovemaking will be an embarra.s.sing, disastrous farce."

"We've survived so much worse than that already."

Karis looked back at her, stricken.

Zanja said, "Karis, I can always find a way across. It's my gift." She gave her a hand, and helped her to her feet. They walked all the way to Lynton and Dominy's house without saying another word, and without letting go of each other.

The delivery of their gear had prematurely announced their homecoming to Lynton and Dominy, and they arrived to find everything in chaos as the two men frantically tried to make Karis's bed with fresh linens, cook a celebratory dinner, and heat the bathwater, all before sunset. Karis left Zanja to sort things out while she walked off by herself toward the green trees that cl.u.s.tered around a small pond. The sun was nearly down.

Zanja repeatedly explained to the two men that Karis no longer used smoke and there was no rush, but nothing she said seemed likely to overcome their disbelief. Finally, to calm them down she took over some of the work. She had never made a bed in her life; but it proved, as she suspected, to be largely a matter of common sense. She took out Karis's two cleanest shirts and hung one to warm by the fire. The second she took with her to the bathhouse, where the washkettle had come to a boil. Buckets of cold water stood waiting to mix in the tub with the hot. There was a crock of herbs and flowers to sprinkle in the water, a crock of soft lye soap, and a bath brush worn soft with use.

Clean, dressed only in Karis's shirt, which hung to her calves, carrying her knife belt, she walked back to the house and let herself quietly into Karis's room by way of the garden. It was full dark by then, and she could hear Karis's voice in the kitchen. Zanja built up the fire in the fireplace and combed her hair with her fingers as it dried. She supposed she was missing dinner.She fell asleep in the warmth of the fire, and when she awoke, Karis stood nearby, b.u.t.toning her clean shirt. She had set a burning candle into the chimney nook, and gazed down at Zanja with her eyes set into dark hollows by the angle of the light.

Ordinary and commonplace words could have filled the silence, but Zanja did not move or speak.

Karis knelt beside the settle and lifted a hand to awkwardly brush the loose hair out of Zanja's eyes. Her fingers were steady, but her agitated breathing revealed how close her ghosts hovered. She smelled unlike herself: of soap and herbs rather than of smoke and old sweat. She abruptly leaned over and kissed Zanja's mouth. Then she tried to pull away but Zanja couldn't seem to release her. Karis easily could have broken free but she held herself still, trembling like a wild horse trapped into the traces.

Carefully, Zanja let go of her. She told herself she could wait as long as she needed to, and she could do it gracefully, without resentment. She was a katrim. She could sleep on the hearth in the kitchen and she wouldn't blame Karis, and she wouldn't complain.

She sat up, rubbing her face. Karis sat down beside her on the settle and said miserably, "You deserve-"

Zanja crawled into Karis's lap. Though startled, Karis moved instinctively to embrace her, to accommodate the weight of her. Zanja was so much smaller than she, a tribeless mountain woman lost here in the plains, ready to die of loneliness. Holding her like this, would Karis remember the bitter winter day she rescued her? There had been no coercion when Karis gave her back her life, just generosity: unearned, unsought, utterly unexpected. Zanja felt Karis's hand in her hair, and shut her eyes and thought of Karis stroking the heath's soft gra.s.ses. She willed herself to be as pa.s.sive, and as vital, as the heath had been.

She shuddered alert when she heard Karis's breathing change. Karis's big, gentle hand had found its way to Zanja's face and now she began kissing her, and Zanja made her hands lie still. Time carried them upon a quiet river. The fire died down and the candle guttered in its socket. The moon rose and cast a modest light through the garden door's gla.s.s windows. Zanja tasted salt.

She lifted a hand to Karis's face and found her gasping with surprise, awash in astonished tears. Zanja straddled Karis on her knees and the river took them again and the moonlight faded away. Karis stood up and carried Zanja to the bed. Zanja's exquisite restraints snapped, and in a matter of moments she ruined both their shirts.

They'd have nothing to wear in the morning. But between now and then lay an infinity of time.

Though Karis floundered in an agitated ocean of sensation, Zanja's hands anch.o.r.ed her within her skin.

Fragmented flesh knitted itself together, shocking her with each new joining: another recognition, another homecoming. Zanja's sculptured face moved across her breast: perspiring, ecstatic, entangling them both in a mess of unbound hair, moaning sometimes like the lion upon her hill. Who'd have thought those knife-scarred hands could be so appallingly gentle, or that a woman of such iron will could suddenly turn so soft? With one touch Karis could collapse her. She tried it, stroking the soft inside of a lean thigh, and Zanja fell prostrate and incoherent, as helpless as Karis had ever seen her. For a moment, Karis didn't know what to do. And then she did know.

A strange, irresistible time followed. With Zanja shouting and sobbing and flailing under her touch, Karis felt the shock of her lover's ravishment right through skin and muscle and bone. And then Zanja lay shuddering, gasping for breath in Karis's arms, and beginning to shake with dizzy laughter. "Oh G.o.ds ofthe sky," she said in abject grat.i.tude, and laughed and cried, and Karis held her more closely than she had ever held anything, and could not imagine letting go.

Then Zanja tied her hair up in a knot and said, "Now I will follow the fire."

Zanja lay across her, and Karis saw the callused bottoms of her well-traveled feet. She took one in her hand. It was warm, and rough. The tendons tightened and the ball of Zanja's foot pressed gently against her palm. Karis felt Zanja's hands, and her tongue- unhurried, coaxing. Under that touch, her thighs gave way, and the rest of her gave way as well. Oh, it was fire, but it was also earth: a monolithic presence, waiting, wounded, for healing. Shaftal. She could not refuse.

The earth claimed her.

In the dead of night, Zanja awoke to find herself alone, with the blankets tucked carefully around her and the garden doors standing ajar. She walked out into a chilly breeze, and saw frost sparkle in the starlight.

A year ago she had never thought she'd see stars again. Now the cold night felt huge around her, cupped within the folded hollow of the hills, but expanding out into the bright universe. The garden lay breathless and silent, the accuser bugs silenced at last, the frog song long since ended. It would be a sudden winter.

Karis lay naked on her back in a bed of thyme, staring up at the stars. Zanja paused. She knew there had been a mystery at the end of their lovemaking, when with the moment of consummation upon her, it was not to Zanja, but to the land itself that Karis cried out. Perhaps Karis had not slept at all since then, and all their lovemaking had been for her the opening of another door. Perhaps everything they did would ripple outward in the vast future: every breath, every word.

"Now you are afraid," Karis said from the thyme bed. Her voice was hushed.

"I should be afraid."

"Yes," Karis said peacefully. "Anyone should fear to possess such powers as we possess." Then: "Do you remember when I healed you?"

"I'll never forget that day." Zanja knelt down in the thyme. "You restored me to myself."

Karis said, "Now you've done the same to me. So it was the land that sent me forth, to make whole the one who would make me whole. I'll never again question the logic of my life."

Chapter Twenty-eight.

At mid-autumn, when the ground began to freeze, South Hill Company disbanded. The malaise that had affected the Sainnites seemed also to have affected the Paladins, like a plague jumping across the battle lines. By then, half the people of the company had no homes to go to, and only food delivered from outside would keep the people of the region, including the Sainnites, alive until spring. Even Willis had succ.u.mbed to the bitterness of that year. He was gone from South Hill; no one knew where. One of Emil's friends had gotten a brief and inexplicable letter: I am released. I wish you the same. Though sheshook her head in pity that so fine a commander had fallen victim to the silliness of middle age, she lay awake that night, thinking of the ways that her own service to the war had imprisoned her over the years.

Emil and Medric, on their second trip for supplies to the nearest town, outran the storm by less than an hour. They had scarcely finished unloading the wagon when the rain began to fall. Medric, who had insisted that they augment their already substantial supply of food and lamp oil, took on the project of cramming their purchases into the already packed storeroom of the little cottage. Emil went up to the attic to check for leaks, and wound up sitting for quite some time on one of the trunks of precious books, listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and peering out the one small window at the gray landscape below. When he climbed down the ladder, he found Medric curled in an armchair by the kitchen fire, with a book in his lap and a pen in his teeth, and the ink pot precariously balanced on a pile of papers on the arm of his chair. He looked up, took the pen out of his mouth, and said, "Why has no one ever written about Harald G'deon?"

"Chaotic times have brought us a dearth of historians," Emil said. "And so many have blamed Harald for the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, I suppose that there is an impulse to erase him from history."

"But some day people will wish they could know more about him," Medric said. "And another thing: the House of Lilterwess came into being around Lilter, the second G'deon, largely to keep her powers regulated. So once Mabin made it clear she would not confirm Karis as G'deon, at that point, it could be argued, the House of Lilterwess lost its reason for existence."

"Now that's hardly true," Emil began. He chopped some vegetables for a bean soup while he explained as well as he could how the Orders of Lilterwess had gradually become the unifying heart of Shaftal's government and culture. As he put the pot onto the fire he caught sight of Medric's smile, and leaned over to kiss the top of his head. "Do you hear?" he said. "The rain has turned to sleet, just like in your dream. What are you thinking about?"

"I was thinking that 'The House of Karis' just doesn't sound very impressive."

"That's because it's impossible to imagine her as an inst.i.tution."

"That's probably what they said about that woman Lilter, and look at what happened."

Medric wrote for a while in his weird mix of languages and alphabets. Emil did not feel like doing anything, and made himself a pot of tea. Although it had been a long day, Medric still would sit up with his books and papers for half the night. Emil would go to bed, and wake up before dawn with Medric curled against him like a friendly cat. In the kitchen, Emil would find both the lamp reservoir and the wood box empty. He would go out on a solitary walk to watch the sunrise, and when he came back he'd start some bread and write a letter to Zanja, though he could not imagine how to arrange for its delivery.

Emil got up to stir the beans. The wind flung sleet at the shuttered windows. By now it was full dark, and the storm would rattle the shutters all night long. Within the cottage, here in the bright kitchen, it was easy to forget about the storm.

Zanja looked up from the uncertain text she was deciphering as someone came into the tavern, and she saw as the door closed that it was past sunset. The people cl.u.s.tered nearest the door shouted ingood-natured protest against the bitter wind that came blowing in. The tavern's convivial cheer grew noisier by the moment, as miners and smelters came in to celebrate another day's survival at their inevitably dangerous jobs. Zanja closed her book. Her tutor had gone home some time ago.

The door opened again, and Karis came in, accompanied by a half dozen other metalsmiths from her forge. The other smiths lined up to get tankards of ale, but Karis took cider instead, and a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese. She set her burdens onto a nearby table and then mounted Zanja's table to engage her in a startling kiss, while the people in the vicinity burst into laughter, and the tavernkeeper shouted good-naturedly across the room, "Hey, now, that's no way to treat fine furniture!"

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 partic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.sed 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 what is 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 acc.u.mulate mysteriously under Karis's table, taken home one by one from the forge. She was not surprised when Karis stood up, and faced the acc.u.mulating 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 b.u.t.tons 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.