At midday, they entered a village at a crossroads, which Norina said was called Strongbridge. The bridge was indeed impressive, and was frequently crossed by heavy wagons. The inn-yard they entered served as a kind of depot where huge dray horses stood harnessed while the drivers paced the cobbles, stretching their stiff legs, eating the meat and bread hauled out to them in baskets, and swigging tankards of ale against the oppressive heat. The inn itself was of startling size, recently painted red and green, with flowers cascading over its roof from an enterprising vine. Among the flowers a raven stalked. In the rectangular gap of a second floor window a very tall woman was intricately folded, nearly invisible in shadow. She looked as though she might be trapped there.

"Zanja," Norina said sharply, to call her attention to the girl who waited for Zanja to hand her the reins.

Zanja dismounted, and left horse and companions standing in the yard. She could not run yet on her injured leg, and the front door jerked open before she had reached it.

She had half forgotten how big Karis was. She filled the doorway, her shoulders almost wide enough to touch both doorframes, head bowed to fit below the lintel, big hands clasping the timber frame as though she might simply collapse it, and make the inside out, and the outside m. And then it was as though the earth itself had clasped Zanja in a bruising embrace and lifted her half off her feet, and made as though to completely encompa.s.s and engulf her.

Her ear was against Karis's heart. She gripped her with all her strength. She would not let Karis go again. All the forces of the Universe might range themselves against her, but she would not let Karis go.

"Just leave us alone, Nori," Karis said after a while.

A long time later, Zanja lifted her head a little, and realized that Karis had practically folded herself around her, and seemed not at all inclined to release her, though she did raise her cheek somewhat from the top of Zanja's head when she felt her move. Zanja said, "I'm making a mess of your shirt."

"How would anyone know the difference?" But Karis produced a sweaty handkerchief from somewhere, and Zanja used it to wipe the remaining tears and dirt from her face. "We're making spectacles of ourselves," Karis said.

Around the bulge of Karis's bicep Zanja could see into the public room, where a couple of hardened drinkers stared at them. "Surely there's a path by the river," Zanja said.

Zanja's limp gave them as good a reason as any to walk arm in arm despite the sweltering heat. She felt dazed, in a strange land, with no familiar landmarks. Dear G.o.ds, she thought, what boundary did I just cross? As they walked through the town, Karis stopped to buy some steamed buns from a stall, which did a desultory business. The streets were largely deserted, dogs lay panting in what shade they could find, and every window was propped open. On a day like this, the entire population of Asha Valley could have been found in or near the river, and so it was here. The shady sh.o.r.eline was crowded with lounging or dozing adults, and still more swam along the banks, keeping an eye on the shrieking children.

They found a solitary place at last, where the current was probably too swift for swimming, and they sat side by side upon the damp earth. Damsel flies covered a branch over the water like jewels on a rich man's jerkin. Karis gave Zanja a dumpling. Its meat filling was so spicy it made Zanja's eyes tear upagain.

"Now stop that," Karis said.

"It's really spicy. G.o.ds know I'll cry at anything lately, but this time it's not sadness."

Karis took a bite, and closed her eyes in concentration, chewing. "I guess maybe I can taste something,"

she said finally.

"It's like eating coals from a fire," Zanja said.

"Is that good? It certainly sounds interesting."

"In a painful kind of way."

Zanja had not quite remembered the utter chaos of Karis's hair, which grew in every direction and was twisted into vinelike tendrils that looked impossible to comb or tame. She had not quite remembered the intense blue color of her eyes, or the fine lines that radiated out from them like the splines of a fan. She had remembered that Karis's physical presence was a kind of a shock, like a stone tossed into water or a live voice penetrating a dream, but when they last met Zanja had been unable to truly feel the impact of it. Now, with every breath that lifted Karis's shoulders, every pulse in her throat, Zanja felt her own heart turn over. When Karis turned to her, she did not know what to do. Should she confess? Should she look away?

Karis said, "I've thought about you constantly."

Zanja opened her mouth, but didn't trust whatever might have come out of it. "How is it possible that you can act like this without desiring me?" she might have said.

Karis said, "Take off your pants."

Zanja felt a disorientation, then got a grip on herself and said with difficulty, "My leg is healing."

"Please, Zanja, I beg you. The trajectory of the pistol ball has torn up the muscles of your thigh. Even if it heals you'll have scarring inside your leg, and the muscle won't work right because of it, and I'll never be at peace if I don't fix it."

Zanja unb.u.t.toned and pulled down her breeches and lay upon her side while Karis cut the bandage from her thigh. She would turn this experience into a test of discipline, for she seemed to be sorely in need of such an exercise. "Can you leave the scar?"

"For bragging rights?" Karis sounded amused.

"I was abandoned by my fellows in the middle of a firefight because they wanted me dead. That hardly seems a thing to brag about. But I'd rather not have to explain why I don't have a scar to show for it."

"All right. I'll try to restrain myself."

The violence of metalsmithing had not spoiled Karis for more gentle crafts. She almost made the healing seem as if it were not work at all, except that occasionally a drop of her sweat fell and landed on Zanja's skin. Zanja worked to keep her breathing steady and her muscles relaxed; her old trainers would have been proud of her. When Karis's warm hands lifted from her thigh, it was a relief but also a loss.

"That's better," Karis said.Zanja pulled up the bloodstained remains of her pants. "How do you do it," she asked shakily, "without being able to feel?"

"I feel a little. It's not much, but it's all I have."

"When I think of what you could do . . ."

"Don't think about it."

"The man that got you addicted to smoke-"

"He's dead already, not that it does me any good."

"I'd like to kill him again."

"You'd have to wait your turn."

Behind the clear eyes, the powerful, pa.s.sive muscles, the soot ground into her skm, and the quiet, waiting expression of her face, lay a deep anger. Zanja said, "Karis, you are not tame, merely caged."

Karis made a sound as if she had accidentally sliced a finger. "You know, talking to you is a bit like chewing on hot coals."

Zanja broke into a startled laugh.

"My raven said you were in a black despair."

Zanja said grudgingly, "Norina has been as kind as I would tolerate, and I guess it's done me some good. You must have done something dramatic, to force her to treat me so gently."

Karis showed her teeth. "Oh, I did."

"Did you threaten to come get me yourself?"

"Threaten? No, she is immune to threats. I started to South Hill moments after I'd gotten your message, and I challenged Nori to give me a reason to turn back and let her go in my place."

Karis lay upon her back and gazed up into a sky as blue as her eyes. Her shirt collar was unb.u.t.toned and sweat collected in the hollow of her throat. Zanja shut her eyes and begged the hot afternoon to anesthetize her. After a long time she said, "But Norina seems desperately worried, and much as I don't like her I must respect her. I wish I understood what she understands."

"Mmm. This is what you sound like when you're being diplomatic. It's not chewing coals anymore, it's more like-oh, I'm no good at metaphors. You tell me one."

Zanja tried to think of texture, for although Karis could not taste, she surely could feel enough to be able to tell soft from hard. "Those crisp cakes with chewy pieces of fruit in them," she suggested.

"They feed those to me when I've forgotten too many times to eat. They must be mostly b.u.t.ter. What are you laughing at?"

"You don't like those little cakes?"

"I hate being treated like I'm an invalid."

"I apologize. It's my own ignorance that makes me resort to indirection. I don't know what I'msupposed to say or know. I don't know what might hurt or offend you."

Unlike the sun-parched sky at which she gazed, Karis's eyes were a bright, unfaded blue. She squinted them shut suddenly, as though sweat stung them. "When Norina takes you away, you won't know any more than you do now."

"That's not going to happen," Zanja said.

Karis turned her head. "Norina is my protector because she's dangerous."

"Yes, but she has more to lose than I have."

"Are you going to make me demand that you obey her?"

"Are you going to treat me like a servant?"

"Are you going to make me choose between you?"

"Why not? Norina makes you choose."

"She has a good reason."

"What good reason could she possibly have?"

Karis said unsteadily, "I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm bound by obligations I can't explain to you. Why are you so cantankerous? Is it the heat?"

Zanja said, "From beginning to end, this year has been a disaster. But I've learned something that you and Norina both don't know: how impossible it is to really make a choice, when the best choice of all is an option you couldn't even imagine."

Karis blinked up at the glaring sky. "Say that again, but fill it up with human experience and leave out the abstract words, and maybe I'll understand it."

"The Sainnites defined my choices for me. And before that, the Ashawala'i did the same. Because I am a katrim, and because the Sainnites are fools, I am living a life that I hate. I'm thinking I should do something else."

"I see," Karis said.

"In much the same way, Norina makes it possible for you to live within your cage. And so long as she helps you tolerate captivity you never will break free. You'll have no reason to try."

"Shaftal's Name!" Karis sat up abruptly.

Now ends our friendship, Zanja thought.

"Oh, you are dangerous," Karis said.

She settled back onto her elbows, and in the heated silence the accuser bugs suddenly began to shrill.

After a long time, she said, "Norina has insisted that you be left in ignorance, lest you do something disastrous. But now it seems that you have done something disastrous because of your ignorance.""Names of the G.o.ds! What have I done?"

"I can't tell you-that's Norina's business. But I think I will point out to her that to continue to leave you in ignorance seems, at best, ill-advised," Karis said. "And to treat you like a servant seems ridiculous, since you will not-cannot-act like one-except as a kind of play-acting. And to send you away has proven impossible since no matter how far you go I continue to hold onto you in spite of all advice and common sense. Norina insists that I must not-cannot-simply call you my friend. I am a smoke addict, and she is a Truthken. Only an idiot would trust my judgment over hers. So tell me what I am to do, Zanja, for I am at a loss."

Zanja said, "Why don't you seek the advice of a seer? It just happens that I know one, and-"

She had to stop, because Karis had begun to howl with laughter. Nonplused, she waited for Karis to recover from her mirth, which had a certain bitter edge to it, for she seemed almost to be sobbing by the end, and had to wipe her tears on the tail of her shirt. "You have no idea-" she gasped.

"No idea at all," Zanja agreed.

"I'm sorry," Karis said. "Tell me about your seer. Tell me how you met."

"I met Medric on Fire Night," Zanja began. "Emil had sent me to find Annis, who had gone rogue after the Sainnites torched her family's farmstead, and my search brought me to Wilton, where I found her.

But along the way, something began to happen to me, and I began to do things that made no sense . . ."

But at least one thing she had done did make sense. She opened the pouch that held her glyph cards, and shook out from the bottom, where she had nearly forgotten it, the pendant of green stone and silver wire.

"That day I bought this for you, though I had no reason to even imagine that I would see you again. I thought I had lost my mind. I was starting to remember things in a way that seemed insane. But perhaps it was, after all, a kind of prescience. When the veil between present and past tore apart, so also did the veil between present and future. I hadn't lost my mind; I merely knew something I had no business knowing."

She put the pendant into Karis's hand. "You see, now I have given you the pendant. I look forward to someday understanding how everything I did that day makes as much sense as buying this pendant did."

Karis seemed dumbfounded, and said not a word as Zanja resumed her tale, but lay back in the gra.s.s with the pendant in her fist, resting against her breast, until Zanja had described her last sight of Emil standing in the middle of the road, and then fell silent.

Then Karis said, "Name of Shaftal, it does make sense. Norina has been wrong-wrong from the first moment I sensed your presence in Shaftal. Zanja-" She swallowed. She was breathing as though she had run a race. "Yes, I do want to speak to Medric, very badly."

"I can bring him to you. Unless I've sorely misjudged him, he would make himself easy for me to find. He wants nothing more than to do some good in Shaftal. It doesn't bother you that he's half Sainnite?"

As Zanja talked, Karis had gotten to her feet. Now, she gazed down at Zanja, and her face seemed very far away, and shadowed suddenly as her height blocked out the sun. "What is it exactly that you think I am?" she asked.

Zanja stared up at her. The people of the Juras tribe were yellow-haired, blue-eyed, extremely strong giants. But Karis's Juras mother had been a Lalali wh.o.r.e. "Your father would have been a very big man,"

she said. "And a Sainnite."

"No doubt. I suppose that would matter to some people."

"To some people, it is the most important thing about me."

"Well, Karis, you know some tremendous idiots."

Karis leaned over, and took hold of Zanja with both her hands, and set her on her feet. "So long as you're not one of them," she said, and Zanja saw that she was smiling.

Beyond the inn-yard and the inn, behind the kitchen, grew an undisciplined garden where climbing roses and fragrant herbs tangled into a blooming thicket, over which bees operated in a hum of industry. The beehives stood at the garden's edge, nearly half a dozen of them. Bees b.u.mped into Zanja and Karis as they walked across the flight path, their feet crunching in the dried bee corpses that littered the ground.

Zanja followed Karis into the tangle of roses, and Karis in turn followed a path to a lathe house overgrown with rich, green vines. The door had fallen off its hinges. Within, Norina lay upon a bench in a mossy shade garden planted beside a spring. The bubbling pond was filled with sodden wooden crates that contained bottles of milk and wine, kept cool by the cold water. The shade garden seemed damp and almost chilly compared to the sun-sodden outdoors. Norina lay on her side with her head pillowed on one arm.

Zanja hesitated at the doorway as Karis knelt beside Norina and lay a hand upon her gravid torso. She smiled so sweetly that Zanja wondered how anyone could remain angry with her. Even Norina could be cajoled, for after a moment her scarred face creased with a rare smile. Bits of sunlight that came in through the lathwork speckled them with sparks of brilliance.

Leaning upon the rotting door post, Zanja saw how it must always have been between them: bound by an affection st.u.r.dy enough to survive all the disagreements and power struggles that were inevitable between two such willful women.

They talked in low voices, then Zanja heard Karis say, "Are you certain you want to know?"