Текст книги "Earth Logic"

Автор книги: Marks Laurie

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Before I began writing again, I read what I wrote last night, andI feel it has no value. I realize now thatI have written to you, not to give you something, but to reassure myself, to make myself believe in you. I realize that I have nothing to give you– or rather, that by the time you read this, you will long ago have been given the most precious thing I have. But you will receive it like an assault; you will feel as though I have destroyed you; you may never forgive me for something that to you will seem a random, desperate, and ill‑considered act. So perhaps I do have something else to give you, after all; the knowledge, simply, thatI am thinking of you with kindness. When your great talent awakened in you, that was when hope awakened in me. When I realized what you are, I wept, yes. Your body will always remember the abuses it has endured. Sainnites and Shaftali alike may make you a pariah because of your “tainted” blood. But to one old man, who halfway knows you, who can only guess your future, you are a hope, a love, a calling to be steadfast to the end. Because of you, I can let the dogs howl. My certainty in you gives my life, and especially my death, coherence.

So I am writing, after all, to thank you.

The writer had filled up the book. There was no more to be read. Karis closed it and sat with it held between her hands. The house grew silent, except for the rain. The candle burned low and dripped a long strand of yellow wax down the wall. Karis stood up finally, and went to lift a window sash, and open the shutters. Four wretched, sodden black birds flew in, quarreling with each other, and found perches on her chair. “That’s a new chair. Try to aim your crap on the floor,” she told them. “Poor Garland! Maybe I should scrub the floor before he sees it. But he’ll be up before me, humming to his bread dough.”

One of the ravens said, “He’ll forgive us.”

“Give us something to eat,” said another. “The starvation season has begun.”

She went into the dark kitchen and came back with the scrap bucket. “Garland has started saving food for you.”

The ravens set to emptying the bucket. They made quite a mess. Karis watched them, with the book out of danger in her hands. When they were finished and settled again on the chair to preen their feathers, one of them looked at her and said, “Well? What?”

“Tell your brothers in the Midlands to fly to Medric’s window. He’s awake, probably packing his books. I imagine he already knows what the raven will say to him, but say it anyway. Tell him to pack up the house and come to me, with Emil and Norina. Tell him we have work to do.”

Chapter Seventeen

In a ditch where water and mud were chilled by their anticipation of winter, the battered woman lay bleeding. The darkness had come all at once, and she had shut her eyes against it. The last light of the stumbling sun flickered out. Her outstretched hand lay limp, with the churned up ruts of the road beyond reach.

Now the wagon came, hauled through the mud by weary horses, driven by a man who had repeatedly been forced to get out and put a shoulder to the wagon to get its wheels unstuck. That they traveled on this wet day was his passenger’s fault: that detour east to Hannisport, those three days in the dockside fabric shops. Yet she berated him for the slow progress, the constant risk the rain posed her load of silks. Watfield was still hours away, and soon the driver would have to light the lamps. He could hear water running, but the ditches were already black, their contents obscure.

The horses shied sharply. The passenger cried, “Stop!”

A pregnant woman who had to relieve herself at every turn of the road ought not to travel at all, thought the driver. Now the wheels would sink in and it would take more horses than he had to get them loose again.

The woman had seen something, though: an open hand, the gray smear of a face. She picked her way fastidiously through the mud, and stood looking down at the woman who lay in mud and running water like another shadow. She looked again, to make certain that what she saw was there.

“What?” said the driver wearily.

“I’ve never seen the like,” said the pregnant woman. “A border woman, I think. She may be dead. But we can’t just leave her here.”

“I’ll light the lantern,” the driver said. “A border woman? There’s no tribes around here.”

With impatient displeasure, the woman observed the mud staining her shoe. The driver came over with a lantern. “Look how her eye is swelling up! Someone was angry with her, that’s certain.” He looked around himself, worried that the border woman’s attacker might still be lurking in the dark. There was nothing in the woods but trees, though.

“Look how bloody she is,” the pregnant woman said. “She must be dead.”

She had made it apparent that she would not touch the woman sprawled in the ditch. Sighing, the driver gave her the lantern, and knelt in the mud. Seeing no buttons, he tore open the front of the border woman’s blood‑soaked tunic. He spread the edges of the wound in her breast, and said sharply, “Don’t look if you’re squeamish. But hold the lantern steady. No, she’s not hurt to death that I can see. Just fainted, probably.”

The pregnant woman said, exasperated, “We’ll have totake her to the next farmhouse. And she’s all mud! She’ll wreck the silk!”

They got her into the wagon, wrapped in a blanket to prevent her from staining anything. The horses smelled blood and tried to hurry away, but the smell followed them. The driver peered anxiously into shadows. The passenger kept a sharp eye out for the lights of a farmstead, but perhaps the winter shutters were already closed everywhere, for the darkness was unrelieved even by stars. She finally said in frustration, “We’ll take her to Watfield, then. My wife will know what to do with her.” Then she sat glumly tapping her foot, wishing she had not noticed that hand reaching toward her out of the darkness. Or that she had looked away.

Chapter Eighteen

The note, written in Shaftalese, remained obscure even after Gilly read it out loud to Clement: “Please visit as quickly as you can. You will not regret it.” The note was signed, not by Alrin, but by Marga.

“You look flabbergasted,” Gilly said, clearly enjoying the sight.

“Come to Alrin’s house with me,” said Clement.

“What for? It’s raining!”

“It’s dinnertime, isn’t it? Or teatime?” Clement raised her eyebrows at him.

“Of course I’ll go with you,” he said hastily.

She sent an aide to put together an escort and sent another with an explanatory message to Cadmar. That day they had gotten more bad news about a nasty attack on tax‑collecting soldiers in the east–some ten from the same garrison, all hunted down and slaughtered, one by one. Now Cadmar was working off a bad temper in the training ring, which was fortunate. Given his foul mood, he almost certainly would forbid both of them to go anywhere.

But the people of Watfield had finally gotten distracted from their pot‑banging by the urgency of autumn work, and Clement’s instincts told her it was reasonably safe for her to go out on the streets. “You just want me along to keep you out of that woman’s bed,” grumbled Gilly.

“I do feel like I’d do almost anything for clean sheets,” Clement replied.

Getting Gilly onto his horse was a painful process, but he looked around himself with lively curiosity as, surrounded by soldiers, they rode out the gate and into the city. “What are all these people doing in town? It’s pouring rain!”

Even as he spoke, the sky opened up with a deluge, and so did hundreds of umbrellas: strange, heavy contraptions of wooden spines and waxed leather that spooked the horses. The farmers that crammed the main road were so intent on business that they hardly looked twice at the company of soldiers pushing through the crowd. Parcel‑laden adolescents followed their elders dutifully in and out of shops, and frequently paused to look around for familiar faces and to loudly greet the friends they were able to spot on the far end of the street, or even across the square.

Gilly pulled the hood of his oilskin cape over his head, muttering, “An umbrella would be a fine thing.”

“Your horse would have a fit,” said Clement.

“Not this horse.”

The short journey was lengthened by the crowds, and Clement’s trousers were soaked through by the time they reached the quiet side street, and the respectable townhouse where summer flowers still bravely bloomed at either side of the front steps. The curtains all were drawn, but Clement saw light glimmer in the parlor window, and it was only a moment’s wait for Marga to open the door. She looked beyond Gilly and Clement at the soldiers and horses standing miserably in the road. “You can bring them into the kitchen to dry out and have a bit of cake,” she said.

Clement called an order to the sergeant, who did not conceal his pleasure. She said to Marga as she and Gilly stepped in the door, “This is Gilly, the general’s secretary. Why have you asked me here?”

“I’d like you to meet my brother,” Marga said. “He’s in the parlor. I’ll leave you alone, if you don’t mind helping yourself totea.” Her words were polite enough, but her tone suggested she had no intention of going anywhere near the parlor no matter what Clement said.

“Meet her brother?” said Gilly doubtfully, in Shaftalese.

“Cake,” said Clement, handing over her wet cape for Marga to hang up in the hall.

“Oh, cake,”said Gilly sarcastically as he followed her toward the parlor. “Well, if he’s waiting in there to shoot you, at least you’ll shield me from injury. And maybe I’ll have time while he’s reloading to shout that I’m a helpless cripple. And maybe he’ll slice me a piece of cake.”

Clement stepped through the door with her hand on her saber. The emaciated man who huddled miserably by the fire looked up at her entry, but certainly seemed unlikely to attack her.

“I can tell you what you want to know,” he said. “But first I want my Davi back.”

He sat silent while Clement got Gilly settled in a comfortable chair. It had been a long time, Clement judged, since Gilly had even been able to sit in comfort–somehow, she must get him an upholstered chair. She brought him a steaming cup of tea and a great slice of the splendid cake that had been sitting untouched on the side table. “What are you trying to do to me?” Gilly moaned.

“Eat slowly,” Clement said. “Or I’ll make you eat another piece. We’ve got to stay here long enough for all those soldiers in the kitchen to get their bit of cake.”

She turned to the miserable man by the fire and asked if she could serve him some tea. He looked startled, and then disgusted. Nearly five months had passed since Clement took his daughter from his arms, but the sight of the tough old woman at the garrison gates with the child’s name wrapped around her chest had reminded Clement of that family nearly every day. She particularly remembered the way this man had tried to soothe his screaming daughter’s terror.

She said, “You want your girl back before you’ll talk to me? What exactly have you got that makes you think you can make such a bargain?”

The man turned to face her then. He had looked terribly ill five months ago; now he looked half dead. “One of my husbands was in the garrison that night it was burned down,” he said. “And then he ran with those people for a few months. All over the land he went, having what he said were adventures. Then he was hurt and they brought him home to recover, but he died. I can’t do farmwork any more, so I took care of him. He told me some things–he wouldn’t have, but he wasn’t in his right mind towards the end. When I’ve got Davi back, I’ll tell you what he told me–all of it.”

“I’m not setting out to fetch your girl until I know what it is you know,” said Clement impatiently.

He said, “Kill me if you want. I’m dying anyway. When I told my family they couldn’t stop me from coming to you, they abandoned the farm. They figured you’d come after them, I guess, to try to force me to talk. Now there’s nothing you can do to me, nothing you can kill that isn’t dead already. Do what you want.” His tone was flat, bitter, and utterly without hope. He sagged wearily in his chair.

“Friend,” said Gilly, with his mouth full of cake, “I suggest you give the lieutenant‑general a little more than that. She’s got to commit a whole company of soldiers to a foul‑weather journey, and she’s too good a commander to do that for nothing but a vague hope. Give her an idea of what you know, anyway. You can do that, can’t you?”

The farmer, apparently roused out of his lethargy by the sight of Gilly’s remarkable ugliness, gave him a frankly puzzled look. He wanted to ask Gilly something. It would have been a rude question, something like what are you,prompted as much by how Gilly spoke as it was by how he looked. But the farmer apparently could not bring himself to be so rude.

Clement sat down, and crossed her legs, and endeavored to look as if she really didn’t care about the outcome of this conversation. She sipped her tea.

Eventually, the farmer turned to her. “This group that calls itself Death‑and‑Life, they want to do something that will rouse all of Shaftal to join them. Then they figure they can exterminate all of you by spring. I know what that thing is that they’re going to do. I know when, and I know where.”

Clement set down her teacup. “It’s almost winter already.”

“It is,” the farmer said indifferently. “Maybe you’d better stop wasting your time.”

She looked at Gilly. He was rapidly, regretfully, eating the remainder of his cake. “How will I recognize Davi?” Clement asked the farmer. “And how do I contact you when I have her? Through Marga?”

As they discussed the details, Clement cut another slice, wrapped it in her handkerchief–the first clean one she’d had in almost half a year–and put the cake carefully in her pocket to give Gilly later. “It will be some time before you hear from me,” she told the farmer. “Fifteen, twenty days.” Because she was unhappy to know that an entire farmstead had emptied itself for fear of her, she wanted to add coldly that theirs had been an absurd overreaction. But even now she was reconsidering her decision to let the farmer go unmolested, wondering if after all it might be better to hand him over to the torturers. Perhaps, she thought, his family had been wise after all.

She lay a coin on the side table for Marga to find, and left the parlor with Gilly sighing sadly at her elbow.

In the kitchen, the dozen soldiers stood or squatted around the hearth, with pieces of cake in their hands, not eating, not bickering with each other, but listening raptly to a woman who sat on a stool at the table, with a bowl of beans at her elbow. She was telling them a story, in Sainnese.

Some of the soldiers glanced at Clement pleadingly, asking her not to interrupt, so Clement let Gilly in and closed the door behind them. Marga silently offered Gilly her stool, but he gestured that he could continue to lean on his cane. The storyteller, without pausing or seeming to notice the new arrivals, continued to weave her tale, which had to do with an arrogant man, a magical forest, and a vicious wild pig. Having arrived as the tale was finished, Clement could not follow its import, but the storyteller was an extraordinary sight. Though she was dressed in a plain servant’s outfit, and covered to the knee with a stained apron, her dark, angular face could not be disguised as ordinary. She had black hair, black eyes, skin of such deep brown it would disappear into shadows, a face that was all hollows and jutting angles. She had seen some action recently, for that face was marred with fading bruises.

Her tale was finished. The soldiers uttered sighs like children when the show is over, and only then remembered their uneaten cakes. The storyteller, though, seemed to be waiting for something. Some of the soldiers gave another one a nudge, and he cleared his throat and told a soldier’s tale that Clement had heard many times before, usually told better. When he was finished, though, the storyteller gave a bow, as though to thank him, and her hands, which had been gesturing to illustrate her tale, returned to the drudge’s work of shelling beans.

The soldiers stuffed their cake in their mouths and reached for the rain capes that were drying on hooks by the fire. But they paused and glanced at each other hopefully when Gilly grated in his unlovely voice, “I’ve never heard that tale before. Might I trouble you to tell another?”

The woman said, “I am a gatherer of stories, and I will trade with anyone, story for story.”

Gilly seemed nonplused, but one of the soldiers said, “Iness will make the trade for you, sir. Iness knows lots of tales.”

“Well,” said Gilly, “Perhaps I will accept that stool after all.” He perched on Marga’s stool with his hands resting on his cane. Clement, standing beside him, leaned down so he could explain himself. He whispered, “Winter entertainment.”

Then the kitchen door opened and Alrin, dressed in gorgeous silk, bustled in. She stopped short in surprise at the crowd. The storyteller leaned towards Gilly, as though to directly address him. “I will tell you a tale of a people who live on the sea, whose harbor is called Dreadful because so many boats have been wrecked going in and out of its narrow entrance. Within the harbor, though, the water is still as glass, and the boats must be rowed because no breath of wind ever stirs there. The people walk from boat to boat to go visiting and never set foot on land at all, except to fill their water barrels. A woman of these people was so ugly that no one could bear to look at her, and she lived by herself without even dog or cat for company. No one would fish with her, either. So no one could explain how she came home, day after day, with her hold full of newly caught fish.”

Clement had heard Alrin take in her breath, and looked at her in time to see her glance with horror at Gilly, and then open her mouth as though to stop the story. But Gilly’s ugly face was decorated with a delighted smile. Clement whispered to Alrin, “Leave it be.”

The storyteller’s tale slowly, quietly, became hilarious. She told of the various, increasingly absurd ways that the fisherwoman’s kinfolk, jealous of the ugly woman’s wealth and success, tried to trick her into revealing her fishing secret. Then, they began to offer bribes, and finally offered her the one thing she did not have, and could not get for herself: a loving husband. But first she demanded that her potential husband prove his love (here the tale became as salacious as any soldier might wish) and, to his surprise, the potential husband managed to do this. And so, in the end, it was revealed that the ugly woman was sticking her face into the water, and the fish, fleeing the sight, were swimming directly into her nets.

The kitchen had echoed with laughter, and even Alrin wiped her eyes and exclaimed, “Well! Who would have thought!”

Iness, the soldier, told his own tale, but with a certain self‑deprecating air, for he was a mere amateur and Alrin’s servant clearly was a master.

In the crush of the hallway, as the soldiers wrapped themselves in capes and pressed out the narrow door, Gilly, Alrin, and Clement were trapped together into a corner. Alrin said rather anxiously, “I had no idea she spoke Sainnese. Or that she was a storyteller. She’s just a tribal woman who’d been set upon … I found her by the roadside.”

Gilly said, “What is her name?”

Alrin hesitated. “I don’t know. She seems a bit addled.”

“Really! But she tells a good tale. Perhaps we might hire her to tell tales in the garrison on these long winter nights.”

Out in the rain again, once Gilly had been hoisted into the saddle and had wrapped himself thoroughly against the wet, he said ironically, “Now what do you suppose got your courtesan so flustered, eh? I’d have thought she’d have nerves steady as my horse’s.”

“Perhaps she feared the servant’s tale had offended you. People are always assuming you to be short‑tempered.”

“Like that ugly woman’s fish, they flee my ugly face! Ha!” He chuckled to himself all the way to the garrison.

Chapter Nineteen

It was snowing: a light snow, like powered sugar sifting down from the shimmering dawn sky. It glittered, casting a dazzling haze like dust, or mist. Shivering and sleepy, Garland picked up the milk can that Karis had hauled up the mountain the night before and left out on the porch all night, and felt that its contents were frozen solid. The four ravens muttered restlessly on the protected perches Karis had built for them, then one came flapping out and asked, “Will you feed us?”

“Be patient. I’m baking you some cornbread.”

The raven flew up to the railing. “Here, here, here, here, here!” he called. Black shadows flapped in the shimmering mist of snow, and three more ravens landed on the rail in an icy spray of slush. So many ravens! Garland stepped backwards into Karis, who was just coming out the door with her head buried in an enormous knitted jerkin.

Her tousled, sleep‑flushed face emerged. Her eyes, which had been stark, now glittered at him with something resembling humor. “You don’t have to cook breakfast for the birds.”

“But they’re people.”

“Created people? They’re so alike, even I can’t tell them apart.”

“They talk,” Garland said. “So they’re people.”

Karis jammed a cap onto her head, pulled on a sheepskin jerkin, and took some heavy knitted gloves out of the pocket. “Well, you’ll also have ten human people for breakfast. Six of them have been on the road all night, running before the storm. They’re at the foot of the mountain now, with three heavy wagons and a lot of exhausted horses, and a very slippery road ahead of them. Raven, go tell them I am coming to help.”

The raven that had asked about breakfast leapt off the railing into the snow.

“Will you take these three raven‑people inside to get dry?” Karis said to Garland. She looked ruefully at the moth holes in her gloves which left large portions of her fingers exposed. “I hope they brought the rest of my clothes.”

As Karis set forth after the bird, into the snow, Garland offered his arm to the nearest sodden raven. “I’ll take you in to sit by the fire.”

The raven stepped from the railing to his forearm, and thanked him politely.

The day after Karis had finished the beds, she had made mortar out of sand and slaked lime, and with scavenged bricks had built into the kitchen chimney the sweetest oven Garland had ever baked a pie in. By the time harnesses could be heard jingling in the yard, two pans of cornbread were cooling for the ravens, and the oven was full again, this time with eight loaves of bread that puffed up in the heat quite satisfactorily. Applesauce bubbled in the pot on the fire, and a pan of pork sausages kept warm on the hearth. Garland heard the front door open, and swung the teakettle over the hot part of the fire. He did not have enough plates or cups to go around, but few travelers show up without their own tableware.

A cold draft washed in, and Garland heard the grunts and curses of weary people moving heavy objects. A slim young man came blundering down the hall to the kitchen doorway, where he paused vaguely, blinking snow from his lashes and polishing his spectacles on the front of his rather dirty shirt. “I’m all snow,” he complained. “There you are,” he added, as he perched his still‑dirty spectacles on his nose. “My brother!” He clasped Garland’s hand in his own very cold one. “So happy to meet you!” he said in Sainnese. “I get so lonely for my own language, don’t you? Even though I don’t miss those bloody, boring soldiers the slightest bit.”

Apparently oblivious to Garland’s stunned surprise, he unpeeled from himself several layers of dripping jerkins, still talking.

“That’s my books they’re swearing at. The damned things are no end of trouble. And of course, they’re going all the way up to the attic.” The young man paused to peer closely at Garland through his smeared lenses. “Thank you for feeding her.”

“Are you Medric?”

“For feeding Zanja,” said the very peculiar young man.

“The one who’s dead?” Garland felt quite bewildered now.

“In the woods, late in the summer. A rabbit stew.”

Garland remembered a silent, remarkable, solitary, well‑armed woman who had walked through the pathless woods as though she had been traveling there since the beginning of time. She had not been of Shaftal; she had, it seemed to him, not even been of that world. Wholly preoccupied with some massive mystery, she seemed to scarcely notice Garland. But when, along with the stew, Garland had cooked pan bread for her, with wild herbs in it, she had come out of her preoccupation to say to him, “This is the best meal I ever tasted.”

“It wasn’t just a rabbit stew. There was bread …”

“Well, I don’t know allthe particulars.”

“That was Karis’s wife?”

“Her tormentor,” said Medric. “Her champion. Her poet. Her captive.”

It appeared he could indefinitely continue with this contradictory list, but he was distracted by the arrival of two more people: a gray man, who looked like the breath had been knocked out of him, supported by the most terrifying woman Garland had ever set eyes on.

Medric hurried to grab both the man’s hands in his. “What happened?”

The frightening woman, having settled the gray man on a stool, said, “They dropped a box of books. He tried to catch it, of course.”

“You can’t be killed by the books! After all you’ve done for them!”

The gray man, despite his obvious pain, managed to laugh.

“Maybe we’d better find J’han,” said the woman.

With a worried glance at the baking bread, Garland fled the kitchen in a panic. In the hall, extremely muscular people, Karis among them, were heaving crates towards the stairs. In the back bedroom, Garland found J’han, already awakened by the racket and mostly dressed. “There’s a man in the kitchen who’s having trouble breathing,” Garland said.

“Bring that box, will you?” J’han sprinted down the hall in his stocking feet.

Leeba slept in her little twig bed, with the lizard nearby in his own bed, and the rabbit smothered under a blanket, with only a torn, cotton‑leaking foot showing. Garland shut the door quietly: the longer Leeba was not underfoot, the better.

“Get out the foxglove–it’s labeled,” said J’han, the moment Garland entered the kitchen. “Emil, lie down on the floor so your heart won’t have to work as hard. Is that water heating on the fire?”

“The pain is passing,” said the gray man.

“Sorrow is killing you,” grumbled J’han. “For that I have no cure.”

Garland said, “J’han, I can’t read.”

The terrifying woman turned her gaze on him. Garland set J’han’s chest of medicines rather hastily on the table, and tried to think of an excuse to run out of the room again. Was the cornbread cool enough to feed to the ravens?

Medric opened the box, and plucked out one of the tin canisters, and showed Garland the handwritten label. “Foxglove,” he read. “Poison. Say, isn’t it time that Leeba learn her letters?” He added to Garland in Sainnese, “Take deep breaths, brother. It will pass.”

The terrifying woman said in a cool voice that slashed Garland’s ears like a razor, “I am Norina Truthken. Who are you?”

Medric clasped Garland’s hand. “The truth,” he prompted him. His hand was still cold from the snow, and soft, a scholar’s hand, but there was a strength in it, too.

“Garland. A Sainnite. A cook.”

The terrifying woman said, “I’ll stay out of your kitchen.”

“What?”

The woman laid a hand on J’han’s shoulder and the healer, shockingly, pressed his cheek against it. And then she went out, and even from the back seemed dangerous. As soon as the door was closed, Garland’s panic fled.

“She has a strong effect on people,” said J’han. “But I guess we’ve all gotten immune to it.”

Medric brought J’han the canister, but J’han waved him away. The gray man raised a face as gaunt and stark as Karis had looked when Garland first met her. But there was a kindness in him, and Garland immediately began to think of what to feed him. Tea, he thought. This man needs tea, and a lot of good, hot bread, perhaps an entire loaf. Then some real food. “Surely that pot’s about to boil,” he said, and opened the tea tin.

The gray man said, “Ah, Medric, my dear, once again you were right.”

“Emil,” said Medric reprovingly, “I’m always right.”

“Right about what?” asked J’han, his fingers still pressed to the pulse in Emil’s wrist.

“About Garland. Medric dreamed him into our kitchen.”

All eight loaves of bread were eaten, and Garland also cooked two more pans of sausage before the cold‑sharpened appetites were satisfied. Karis, carrying a sausage that was wrapped in a thick slice of bread, had gone down the mountain again, this time to fetch grain and hay from a distant farm for the exhausted draft horses. By the time she returned, the three drivers had fallen asleep by the parlor fire. Leeba had awakened to sit in Emil’s lap for a while, as he recounted the highlights of their journey. Then she had played with Medric, a game that seemed to have no clear rules and involved a great deal of running around. Garland had started more bread dough and a pot of beans, and was rolling out the crust for a meat pie when Karis finally came in. Ice shattered from her jerkin as she pulled it off to hang near the hearth. Her moth‑eaten gloves must have dissolved, for her unprotected hands were white with cold. Garland gave her a cup of hot tea to hold.

No one spoke. Norina and J’han appeared from the bedroom where they had been unpacking a crate, but Norina leaned on the door frame and did not come into the kitchen. Emil rested in a twig chair brought in from the parlor, his face pale with exhaustion, though he had turned down Garland’s offer of his own bed. All of them had been waiting for Karis, but now that she was here no one spoke. After she had drunk her tea, Garland gave her the half loaf of bread and the sausages that he had hidden away for her, and she uttered a sigh of gratitude. Garland said, “You’ve done three days’ work this morning, and no doubt you’ll spend the afternoon making chairs and beds.” For these travelers, despite their extraordinary quantity of baggage, had not transported a stick of furniture with them. Karis said, “Well, carpentry is easy work. Wood is so willing.” Garland pulled up a stool to the table, and gave her the butter and the butter knife.