Her shirt smelled like plain lye soap, with a lingering scent of old sweat and coal smoke. That smell was the only ordinary thing about her. Zanja got up on one elbow and stroked the springy tangle of Karis's hair. It pushed back against her palm, and when she raised her hand, it went back to its wild shape. Karis took a shaky breath. Perhaps Zanja had frightened her, or perhaps the tenderness had sunk through senseless flesh to some deep place where Karis could feel it.

Zanja said, "Of course you are uncertain. That's the way it is."

"For everybody?"

"Do you think I know what I am doing? I see a universe of possibilities, and some of them are very unpleasant. Perhaps the people of Shaftal will turn against each other. Or perhaps they will destroy the Sainnites, trading one ma.s.sacre for another. Perhaps the people will claim you as G'deon and you'll be consumed by them until nothing is left. Perhaps our little tribe will come apart like a herd with too many stallions."

Karis uttered a hoa.r.s.e, ragged gasp of laughter.

"Perhaps desire will never be fulfilled. But to live is only worth the effort if you live in hope. And living in hope is a discipline, a practice that can be learned."

"Is that why you insist on teaching it to me? I'll never do it as well as you do."

"But I do it so badly. Blundering through the thickets like an ox, tripping and falling into traps of despair, bleeding and raving and starving like the refugee I am . . ."

"How could anyone resist the attraction of such a life?" said Karis.

Side by side, they gazed up into the close crowded constellations. At last, Karis added, "Weren't you going to tell me the stories of the stars?"

"That's what I have been telling you."

A long time they lay talking, a peculiar, fragmented, spiraling conversation that Zanja filled with pieces of stories which Karis kept interrupting with stories of her own, so that none of the tales were finished. The silences grew longer, and then silence took over the entire conversation. Zanja opened her eyes, and realized she had been dozing. Karis lay prostrate, wholly surrendered to sleep. Zanja rolled her onto her side without awakening her, and cleared away some of the stones from underneath them both, thenfolded herself against Karis's back. Karis's shirt had slipped down from her shoulder, and Zanja kissed the bare skin that pressed against her cheek.

She dreamed that the kiss had been like flint on steel, and Karis had ignited like tinder.

Zanja awoke at dawn, but Karis slept well into the morning, utterly collapsed in the greensward, with the ripening seedheads bobbing over her and the sun bringing out beads of sweat on her forehead. J'han checked on her and said simply, "Let's leave her alone unless Mabin comes after us." So they improvised a sunshade for her, and spent the morning in aimless repairs to their gear, sorting their baggage and sharpening their knives, like soldiers awaiting orders. After eating three servings of camp porridge, Zanja found she finally could walk steadily. Emil sewed up her breeches, where they had cut open the seam to splint her leg. Norina and J'han seemed engaged in extremely complex negotiations, which no one dared interrupt. Medric was suffused with restlessness until he calmed himself by reading out loud from a book of poetry J'han carried with him. Zanja had never before heard such poetry, in which the words worked like glyphs or like doors, doors upon doors upon doors.

In the middle of a poem, Karis came stumbling groggily over to the smoldering cookfire and half sat and half fell onto the stone chair that Emil vacated for her. Medric finished the poem and looked up from J'han's book.

"I think I had a dream," Karis said uncertainly. Had she never dreamed before? She rubbed her face with her hands. "Dreams are like poetry, aren't they?"

"Yes," Medric said.

"Well, I'm no good at metaphors. I dreamed I was naked and so I started to put on my clothes, but then I looked down and realized that I was putting on my own skin. What does that mean?"

"Oh, my." Medric closed the book and hastily put on his other spectacles.

Emil, squatting by the coals to pour water into a fresh teapot, set the pot of water down suddenly.

"Karis, I've been thinking that perhaps the best gift we might give you is a season of solitude."

Karis looked at him, and finally said in a voice gone blank with shock, "What?"

J'han had been examining her from across the cookfire. Now he said, "Certainly, it doesn't look like you need me anymore, and Norina and I have already agreed to return to our daughter, to raise her together through winter, anyway. The spring is still an open question, of course, but the sooner we leave the better."

Karis glanced at Norina, who neither spoke nor looked away. In fact, Zanja realized, Norina had yet to speak a word in Karis's presence, which surely required an inhuman discipline on her part. "Of course you don't know what to do in the spring," Karis said, as though she had not realized before now exactly how much her friends' decisions depended on hers. She accepted a steaming porringer from Zanja, along with the spoon from her belt, and obediently stuck the spoon into it.

Emil said, "Medric and I can go to my winter home, perhaps. It's distant, but not so far that we couldn't visit you if we needed to, or you us. Medric, what do you think? It's a lonely and wild enough place. Will we get sick of each other?"

"We'd better not. You're going to help me write my book-""I am?"

"-and there's that library to build."

"Hmm. Not this year, I don't think."

"That's what I mean," Medric said. "You are I are in it for some years at least. Karis-"

She looked at him, sullen as though she were the youth and he the elder telling her what to do. "Go back to Meartown," Medric said.

"Why?"

"Because the most important journeys all begin at home."

Karis opened her mouth, but said nothing.

Zanja said, "Then we all should come to Meartown. The tribe should stay together."

They all looked at her in some surprise. Then Medric said, "Tribe? A community, maybe, after Mackapee."

"No, a company," said Emil.

And J'han said, "Or a family, perhaps."

Norina put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from speaking. Perhaps she would have demanded that they found a new order.

"But not yet," said Emil. "The last thing you need, Karis, is to be surrounded by people who are slavishly waiting for you to tell them what to do with their lives. You must answer your own questions first."

Karis said mutinously, "So you're all going to abandon me out here in the wilderness instead?"

Emil said, "Why, yes, I believe we are."

Medric added irrelevantly, "Slavish? That's a bit of a hyperbole, isn't it?"

They argued amicably and finally settled on "obsequious." Norina seemed to be trying to tear her hair out of her head. Karis glanced at her and said irritably, "What?"

"Eat your porridge," Norina said.

Karis seemed flabbergasted. "The first words you've said to me in ten days-"

"Eat your blasted porridge," Norina amended.

"You'll be a rotten mother," Karis muttered. She put a spoonful of porridge into her mouth.

There is a stillness that comes across the earth sometimes, at dawn, or just before a storm, a stillness as if the entire world lies stunned by possibility. So Karis became still, and so the agitated, half-hilarious talk of her friends fell silent, and so the breeze itself seemed to take its breath. Karis looked at the bowl of porridge as though she had never seen food before.

"Porridge is pretty dull, as food goes," Norina said."Dull?" Karis took another taste. "This is dull?"

Comprehension struck Zanja like a stinging slap in the face. "Dear G.o.ds," she whispered.

"Oh, my," said J'han.

But Medric grinned complacently and gave J'han his book, and Emil calmly poured out onto the ground the pot of tea he had just made, and packed his tea set away. Zanja caught a glimpse of how irritating fire bloods could be when they have realized a truth before anyone else. J'han got up and began fussing in his saddlebags, taking things out and putting them in again. Norina laced her fingers across her knees and in silence watched Karis eat another astounded spoonful of porridge. Of course, to a Truthken there is no such thing as privacy, but Zanja felt it proper to look away, if only to hide her own expression. She would have found something to do, like Medric and Emil, who were fretting now over how to distribute the weight of books and food between their two horses, but it just would have made her feel as foolish as they looked.

Karis sc.r.a.ped the porringer clean. Zanja took it from her and filled it up again with oats and dry fruit, and set it in the coals. Norina stood up without a word, and went to help with the packing. Karis wiped her face with the ragged tail of her shirt. "I think I'm hungry," she said, as though there were nothing extraordinary about her hunger. Then she looked at the cloth of her shirt, and touched it to her face again.

"What-"

Zanja felt the shirtcloth. "It's soft, the way old shirts get."

Karis alternately felt her face and the cloth. Then she looked at her callused, soot black hands. "I am alive," she said. "It feels very odd."

The flat heath spread out before Zanja, oddly out of kilter. When Zanja looked at Karis, she hardly could endure the sight, and had to look away again. The silence became awkward, and at last Karis said in a strained voice, "Well, I must ask you, since you haven't volunteered. Where are you going to go?"

Zanja turned, startled, pained that Karis would even think of sending her away.

"Because I'm going with you," Karis continued.

"I think I'll go to Meartown."

"Well."

"Karis-"

"Be careful," she said hoa.r.s.ely. Her attention seemed intensely concentrated, as if she had been rescued from deep water and needed to breathe.

"With your permission," Zanja said, very carefully, "I'd like to court you."

Karis uttered a sharp laugh, but even her laughter had no peace in it. "And up until now, what have you been doing?"

"Well, if this whole year has been a courtship . . ." Zanja paused, and said, "Perhaps it has."

"I don't think the earth sent me out to rescue you on a whim."

"It seemed whimsical enough at the time."Karis was smiling, her panic pa.s.sed for now. But Zanja knew, quite clearly, how uncertain was the path on which she trod.

Zanja said, "I would like to make a suggestion. Take Norina into your good graces again."

"Have you forgiven her?"

"I will, before I bid her good-bye. She makes amends the same way she goes into battle. G.o.ds help the fool who gets in her way. If you forgive her, we all will be the safer for it."

Karis uttered a snort of laughter and unfolded herself a bit. "Well, since you've gotten in her way before, you know what you're talking about. Nori!"

Norina came over with J'han's book of poetry and gave it to Zanja without a word. Without a word, Zanja stood up and gave Norina her seat, and pointed out to her the porridge cooking in the ashes.

Karis said to Norina, "You must be bored with penitence by now."

"My boredom is only just beginning," said Norina morosely. "But J'han is never bored. Why couldn't he be the one with the b.r.e.a.s.t.s? That's what I want to know."

Zanja went for a desperately needed walk across the flat, rocky countryside. The yellowing gra.s.ses were weighed down by seedheads, which in places had been cropped neatly off by their wandering horses.

She reached the clear rivulet that had served as their camp's water source. When she looked back, Norina sat at Karis's side, talking earnestly. Karis listened somberly, speaking little. It seemed like old times.

Zanja walked in a wide circle around the camp. The next time she looked at the cookfire, Norina had been replaced by J'han, who seemed to be systematically giving Karis most of the contents of his healer's pack: a brown bottle of something to soothe her throat, herbs to build her strength, and a great deal of advice. But in the end he seemed to offer some kind of rea.s.surance, and Karis must have said something amusing, because he burst out laughing.

The next time she looked, Emil and Medric sat on either side of Karis, and all three of them were roaring with laughter. The sound of it carried far across the plain. J'han and Norina were saddling their horses.

Zanja started back toward the camp. By the time she reached the fire Karis was sitting alone, with packets and bottles piled at her feet like homage. Zanja took the small fortune that the people of Meartown had collected to fund her rescue of Karis, and divided it up among them. At least none of them would go hungry or cold this winter.

Zanja first said good-bye to Norina. "Karis should never have to choose between us," she said.

"You'll wish a thousand times that you had never said those words."

"I already wish I hadn't."

"That's once."Zanja said seriously, "If you have any advice, I would hear it."

The sardonic side of Norina's mouth lifted at the corner. "You're the one who threw yourself into the middle of this avalanche. Are you trying to tell me now that you're worried about where it's taking you?"

"Not at all," Zanja said. "And I'll never forgive you for trying to murder me."

Norina said, "In all my days of seeking the truth, I've never met a worse liar."

When Medric embraced Zanja in farewell, he said, "Do you ever think about that other Sainnite seer's vision? The one that predicted that the Ashawala'i would defeat the Sainnites?"

"I try not to," Zanja said.

"That's good," Medric said. "I never would have told you about it had I known who you were. But if the fate of my people is in your hands-"

"Then that puts it in your hands, doesn't it?"

Medric looked taken aback. "It does? Oh, it does." She left him fumbling for a different pair of spectacles.

Emil's hug was bracing. "You know where to find me," he said.

Her arms were aching and empty as she stood beside Karis and watched the four of them ride away.

Homely, laden with their food and bedrolls and a book each from Medric and Emil, nibbled a few sprigs of gra.s.s and then snorted impatiently at them.

Karis said, desolate, "How I'll explain all this to the townspeople I have no idea."

Zanja's patience had never been so tried by travel. Karis slept insatiably, ate ravenously, and in what daylight remained dawdled on the path, infinitely distracted by a curiosity as global and undisciplined as any child's. The barren heath was to Karis an extraordinarily complicated living puzzle that she could not resist figuring out. But the more she understood, the more there was to understand, and they would starve to death before Karis was satisfied. The rigors of the last month had melted Karis like a candle. It had taken only a sense of taste to make her devoted to food, and when Zanja pointed out their shrinking food supply, their pace picked up substantially.

Still, Karis touched everything, meditatively, absorbedly; and often smelled and tasted it as well. She wore herself out with sensation, and Zanja wore herself out with trying to explain to her the marketplace of physical experience that she had always taken for granted. Karis could not distinguish between hunger and thirst, between tiredness and sleepiness, between softness and smoothness; and teaching her the difference was not nearly so simple as one might think.

Late one afternoon, after several days of leisurely travel, they climbed steadily up the steep road to the Meartown gate, but long before they reached the gate, people had begun to come rushing out and downthe road, one or two at first, and then dozens more as the word spread of Karis's arrival. Faster than seemed possible, the entire town turned out to welcome her home. In the heart of a celebrating crowd, Zanja clung grimly to Homely's reins and to Karis's elbow, tempted sometimes to beat the people back so that Karis at least could breathe. Karis, however, seemed resigned to the attention, and patiently embraced the babies born since her disappearance, and shook the hands of forge-jacks and forge-masters and hundreds of other muscular, smoke-begrimed people who had not even taken the time to remove their scorched leather ap.r.o.ns.