Fire Logic (12 page)

He did not speak to Zanja again until she began to half-heartedly tear apart the mats in her hair. “Let me help—I’ll get a comb.”

So she leaned her head weakly upon his knee, and he seemed happy enough with his task, employing every trick Zanja had ever heard of to keep from resorting to the scissors, even before she explained, in response to a question, that her hair was uncut because among her people shorn hair is the mark of the outcast. She liked him all the more when he did not seem troubled that she wept as he worked, and she would even have thought he had not noticed, except that he commented later, “Someone you loved must have once combed your hair.”

“My brother Ransel,” she said. “He was killed near summer’s end.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. My brother used to comb my hair too. It’s been years since I saw him last.”

The healer had gotten up once to tend the fire, when the bedroom door opened suddenly, and Karis crouched through into the kitchen, red-eyed as a crapulent drunk. She dazedly examined the room as she fumbled with shirt buttons. Her wandering gaze chanced across Zanja’s face, and paused.

“Try a swallow of this,” the healer said. He had leapt to his feet, and offered Karis an earthenware flask.

“J’han,” Karis rasped in her smoke-ruined voice.

J’han looked startled, as though he had not expected her to know his name.

She sipped from the flask, and lifted a hand to her throat.

“Those with Juras blood have such beautiful voices,” the healer said.

Zanja looked at Karis, startled, as if she had not seen her before. She had heard of the Juras, a tribe of giants that were said to far to the south of Shaftal, at the edge of a great waterless wasteland. It was said that the sound of their singing could cause the stars tremble in the sky. Perhaps Karis’s voice could not be fully mended, but the ghost of its lost richness echoed now behind the hoarseness as she thanked him and then sat down heavily in a chair that was too small for her long frame. With a crease between her brows, she reached down to brush a thumb across Zanja’s tear-stained cheekbone. The gesture left Zanja speechless.

“Can you eat yet?” J’han asked Karis.

“Chew tongue,” she slurred.

J’han seemed scarcely able to restrain his curiosity, and the corner of Karis’s mouth quirked a bit. “Angry Norina?”

“She is on one of her rampages,” he admitted.

“My fault.” Karis’s big, work-hardened hands folded together, finger by finger, and she rested her forehead upon this support as though she had much to think about. “Where is she?” she asked after a while.

“She needed to go to Leston.”

Karis raised her head. “Did she sleep last night?”

J’han opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“No,” Karis said for him. “Shaftal protect us.”

Apparently having decided that Karis’s mouth had been released from its paralysis, J’han distractedly served her some breakfast. She ate carefully, dutifully, without apparent appetite. Watching her, Zanja remembered something she had heard once about smoke addicts, but had not heeded because it seemed absurd: that they live in lack of pain, and die for lack of pleasure. Karis ate as though she had been trained to do it; smoke surely had destroyed her sense of taste, just as it had her sense of touch. And so, Zanja realized with a shock, Karis would indeed be deprived of both desire and agency, since the earth bloods understand through physical sensation. It must have taken an enormous talent indeed for Karis to have healed and rescued Zanja with so little apparent difficulty.

“Is there a place where I can sit in the sun?” Zanja asked.

J’han had returned to his labors at the table. He said with some surprise, “It’s bitter cold out there.”

“I’ve been in the dark for months.”

“Well, there’s a bench out by the barn. I’ll let you use my shoes, but I doubt you can walk in snow, considering the trouble you had with walking on a solid floor.”

“I’ll go out with you.” Karis fastened her bootstraps, and Zanja put on J’han’s shoes and his doublet of quilted wool that he had worn the night before. On the way out the door, Karis asked for a slice of bread, which she held in the air as soon as the door was closed, and the raven swooped down to snatch it out of her hand.

Supported on Karis’s arm, Zanja made it to the frost-encrusted bench without falling. The light reflected from the snow was bright enough to make her eyes tear up. She said, “I don’t know how much you remember. But last night I frightened you, and I owe you an apology.”

Karis frowned as if she were trying to remember a dream. “That’s right, you did.”

“I should have explained first what I was doing. It didn’t occur to me.”

Karis sat down beside her. “Smoke and rape go together,” she said, “Like bread and butter. It’s a lesson hard to forget, once learned.”

Zanja felt a searing shame, for she understood far better than she should have the attraction of that helplessness. “You never should have taken me with you, and I never should have forced you into it.”

Karis said, “But your oath was good.”

“Of course my oath was good. But how could you have known that? And still, we nearly died of cold.”

Karis closed her eyes to the bright sun, and murmured, “You sound so like Norina, it’s almost funny. And you’re even wearing her clothes.”

Zanja did not find it funny at all, for she might admire Norina’s genius and yet have no desire to imitate it. “She and I know the truth in different ways,” she said. “My way is much more messy: confused and hazardous. I’ll never have Norina’s certainty, but I’ll never want it, either.”

Karis began to laugh, and seemed to find it hard to stop. “Blessed day,” she said at last, wiping her eyes upon her sleeve, “You dismay me. What did Norina do to you last night, to leave you so bitter in the morning? Not that I can’t imagine it, mind you, since I’ve known her half my life.” When Zanja did not—could not speak, Karis looked over at her and said more gently, “You must have put her in a panic. I wish I could have seen such a rarity.”

“You flatter me.”

“I dared hope that once she’d seen beneath your skin you might become friends somehow. A fond hope, I know, but still, Norina can be a fine friend. She does it in her own way, but she’s appallingly reliable.”

“Did you wonder if we might be adversaries instead?”

There was a silence. Karis said in a muted voice, “I confess, that is a novelty that hadn’t even occurred to me. I want to ask, adversaries over what? But that makes me sound naive.” She leaned her head back and shut her eyes again, wearing her sadness like an old and familiar shirt. “But if you had wanted to try to control a wild power—” her voice was heavy with irony “—you missed your opportunity when you had my smoke purse in your hand and didn’t take it. So it’s not power you and Norina are adversaries over, and what else is there?”

Sitting beside Karis, with the warmth from her powerful left arm soaking into the wasted flesh of Zanja’s right shoulder, Zanja abruptly found herself unable to answer, unwilling, in fact, to continue down this path of conversation that she had embarked on so boldly. She said, knowing that she had intended to say something quite different, “I have sworn you an oath of friendship, and I have foreseen that I am destined to serve you. But Norina says that my visions and passions would be poison to you, and she threatened to kill me if I don’t stay away from you.”

She felt Karis’s muscles twitch, but when Karis spoke, Zanja heard nothing in her voice to explain that spasm of shock or pain. Without emotion, she said, “Norina often takes it upon herself to teach people their duty.”

So, Zanja thought, I am to lead an empty life.

But Karis continued after a moment, her voice straining, “When I was young, not twelve years old, my master thought that smoke would make me a better whore. He’d gone through great expense to raise me from infancy, because he knew that my mother’s size and strength had made her popular with the Sainnites. But I was such a disappointment to him: willful, disobedient, tearful, rude to the clients. And perhaps, as he realized how large I would grow, he also began to fear my eventual strength. So he made me into a smoke addict, to ensure my compliance.”

Zanja felt Karis’s weight shift, and she turned to find her peering into her face. “What would it take to shock you?”

Zanja said steadily enough, “You found me paralyzed and mutilated and lying in my own shit, yet you never shamed me for it. Surely I owe you the same courtesy.”

Karis looked away, and for a long time neither of them said anything. In her full strength and clarity of mind, Zanja might have been able to interpret this silence, turning its raw material into a thread of her own spinning. But now she could only wait, until Karis took a breath and continued, “That I have a purposeful life now, in spite of smoke, is largely thanks to Norina’s overbearing, cold-hearted, unscrupulous meddling.”

Zanja said, “You owe me no explanations, Karis.”

“No, I am trying to explain to myself why I would follow her advice in opposition to my own—wisdom.” She paused again, as though astonished to hear herself use such a word. When she continued, it seemed she was arguing with herself. “I know it was wisdom, to save your life. And I would have done it much sooner, if not for Norina’s interference.”

Zanja said bleakly, “But now you will accept her interference once again. And what am I to do with this life, now that you have given it to me? If I am not to serve you, then what am I to do?”

Karis said, “Serve Shaftal, if you must serve.”

“I am just one warrior…”

“Is it an Ashawala’i habit, to display a false humility? It makes me wonder if you take me for a fool.”

Zanja sat silent, and then, as Karis began to apologize, interrupted her to say, “I am not often admonished for having too little self importance. But I might admonish you for the same thing.”

“Oh, I know that I am important,” said Karis bitterly. “Not a day passes that I am allowed to forget it.”

When Norina came into sight, skiing behind the Raven that flapped ahead of her like a black rag blowing over the snow, Karis walked part of the way to greet her, and they stood for a long time, leaning in each other’s arms, as though, without the other, neither could stand.

Almost as soon as they ended their embrace, they began to shout at each other. Zanja, able to hear the tone of their voices but not the words, turned again to look at them only when they both fell silent. The sun shone full on Karis’ stark face. Norina, in shadow, seemed grimly resolute. She had taken off the skis, and carried them on her shoulder. Karis bent down and took the satchel Norina had dropped upon the ground. It seemed a gesture of capitulation.

They turned, and started down the snowy hillside. Norina’s head came to Karis’ shoulder, and she took two steps to Karis’ one. She wore a leather doublet over her sweat-stained wool longshirt; from a distance, it looked like armor. Karis plodded beside her, head down.

“I’m taking Karis away tomorrow.” Norina’s voice was tight with controlled rage. “You’ll stay here for the winter, with me and J’han.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Zanja made no attempt to conceal her irony. She had half expected the command, for, much as Norina might hate it, she had no choice except to shelter Zanja. But there was no point in pretending to be happy about such an uninviting prospect as a winter spent in Norina’s company. Little wonder Norina was so ill-tempered, Zanja realized. Even politeness, which was sometimes the only thing that made human company tolerable, was completely transparent to her.

“She has asked me to help you find a place,” Norina said.

Zanja glanced curiously, not at Norina, but at Karis, who had pressed her lips together as though she didn’t trust what might come out of her mouth. “A place in what?”

“One of the Paladin companies, perhaps.”

“South Hill Company,” Karis said.

Norina took in her breath and released it. “Karis—”

“The commander has a good reputation.”

“Have you put this matter into my hands or haven’t you?”

Karis replied just as sharply. “Are you going to do as I ask, or aren’t you?”

There was no capitulation here, and Zanja was hard put to sort out which of them was giving orders to whom. She did not know enough about the old Lilterwess rankings, but a Truthken, as far as she could understand, outranked everyone, for in contested matters the Law must take precedence. But there was no place in that old system for earth or water elementals; their very rarity precluded the creation of an Order to restrain them. No Rule or Way existed for Karis to follow, no Law that gave Norina dominance. Karis could do as she liked.

“You should think,” Norina said, “Of what you’re doing.”

“I have. It makes no sense.”

There was no possible reasonable response to senselessness. Karis could not be physically restrained, either. Norina seemed nonplused.

Reluctant to put herself in the middle of a dangerous disagreement that she did not even understand, Zanja spoke cautiously. “
Serrainim
, I beg you not to sacrifice your friendship over so unworthy a cause.”

They both looked at her as though they had forgotten her. Then Norina seemed to come to her senses and said quite prettily, “I beg your pardon. Of course you may not wish to join the Paladins or to concern yourself in any way with Shaftali troubles. What is it you want to do?”

“The Sainnites themselves have made this my war. But my first concern is that Karis endanger herself no further on my behalf. Last night, I placed myself under your command, and so I must agree to whatever you say, regardless of what Karis demands. So the two of you have nothing left to argue over.”

Norina said, with scarcely a hesitation. “Perhaps I might reward your acquiescence.”

At this point in a negotiation, Ashawala’i protocol required endless protests of one’s unworthiness. But such insincerity in the presence of a Truthken would have been absurd.

“Karis?” Norina prompted, with somewhat less exasperation.

“I’ll behave myself so long as you take care of her,” Karis said.

“For what your promises are worth —”

“It’s you who have sworn to make my life possible —”

“And how was I to know —”

“You’re the Truthken!”

Norina threw up her hands. “But you are beyond comprehension!”

It was, Zanja realized, a truly astonishing statement for a Truthken to make. Not until Karis collapsed onto the bench beside her and roared with laughter did Zanja realize it had been a joke.

“It wasn’t that funny,” Norina said after a while. She had leaned against the barn wall, and seemed almost despondent. “It was the truth.”

“And whose fault is that?”

Karis took Zanja’s hand again, not to hold it, but to measure it against her own. “You’re being very patient with us,” Karis said to her, “While we fight like—”

“—A couple of sisters,” Norina said dryly.