Текст книги "Earth Logic"

Автор книги: Marks Laurie

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“She’ll be at the gate at any moment,” Clement finished for him.

Ellid grunted with dismay, but Cadmar’s face lit up.

Clement said, “What will we trade the storyteller for?”

Cadmar said, “If a woman claiming to be the G’deon shows up at our gate, do you really think I’ll bargainwith her?”

Clement sat in a chair, tore open a roll, and made herself take a bite. Even fresh from the oven, the bread was dry and tasteless.

Cadmar said, “You thought it would be so complicated. But all we have to do is kill her.”

Frowning worriedly, Ellid looked at Clement. Although Ellid was an inadvertent ally, unused to this alliance, she already seemed to have learned that it was Clement’s job to contradict Cadmar.

But what could Clement say to him? Her son was dying, Kelin was dead, those children in the garrison would never see their homes again. Why was her heart still torn like this? Why not kill the G’deon? Why did she want to make an argument she herself did not believe?

She said nothing. In silence, she ate her roll.

When Garland returned, the room was cold with a recent draft, and Karis was forcing shut the window sash. The plate of dumplings was empty. Garland said accusingly, “You fed your meal to the ravens?”

Karis held up a glittering blade.

“The knife? How did the raven get it?”

Her smile was tight, and her eyes were a bit strange: focused, but also intensely preoccupied. Garland gave her the small bottle of milk he had purchased. She put it into the inside pocket of her long woolen doublet, lay the glittering little blade in her toolbox on the floor, and picked up Emil’s watch. She crossed the room, opened a door, and tossed in the watch. There was a startled exclamation. Emil came out with the watch in his hand, having apparently managed to catch it before it met its demise. He said, “Are we out of time? Or merely out of patience?”

“I’m going to the garrison now,” Karis said.

He blinked at her, rubbed his eyes, and blinked at her again.

Wild‑eyed and gaunt with weariness, Medric came out of the room. Glancing in, Garland saw the glyph cards arranged carefully on the floor. Karis said to Medric, “Tell me how you read the storyteller’s glyph pattern.”

“So our torture is finally to end? Well, what shall we decide this pattern means, Emil?”

Emil looked very unhappy. “If we could have some semblance of certainty!”

“Pretend that you’re certain,” said Karis.

“We believe we need to kill someone, and we are only guessing who. Wouldn’t you rather we could be positive?”

There was a silence, but not a particularly long one. Karis said, “I have with me a very small assassin. Who shall I kill?”

Clement finally brought herself to say reasonably, “If the woman isthe G’deon, she may not be easy to kill. Isn’t that right, Gilly?”

“Not easy,” said Gilly morosely. “And certainly we would not be wise to try.”

Cadmar said, “But we are soldiersand I don’t see why this storyteller’s scars convince you of anything other than that she’s had a dangerous and lucky life.”

“A recovery from paralysis,” said Clement. “Regrown body parts.”

Cadmar snorted. “Impossible.”

“Well, general, that’s exactly my point.” Doomed to keep repeating the arguments that Cadmar would not ever become able to hear. Clement said, “This Lost G’deon may be able to do anything!”

“But we don’t know that.”

“If we let her demonstrate her power so that we become certain, then it will be too late to negotiate,” she said impatiently.

“What would you have me do?” His voice, gaining volume again, had also gained an edge of sarcasm. “The first woman who tells me she’s the G’deon, should I bow to her and give her the keys to the garrison?”

Clement cried recklessly, “General, if she is the G’deon, you’ll wish you had!”

Cadmar loomed over her, his face flushed red with anger.

Fists clenched, Clement forced her voice to plead rather than shout. “Talk to her first,” she said. “General, just talk to her first.”

“General!” The gate captain looked in the door. His expression was one of bafflement.

Cadmar’s big hand clenched Clement’s shoulder painfully. “What is happening at the gate?”

“General, three people are asking to speak to you. One is that cook who deserted some years ago.”

Of course it would be the cook, thought Clement wildly.

“He says one of the people with him is Councilor Mabin. And the other he introduces as the G’deon of Shaftal.”

Cadmar’s not inconsiderable strength was crushing Clement into her chair. “What do they want?”

“The cook says they are here to make peace.”

Cadmar snorted. “Captain, have someone fetch Gilly’s horse. Tell those people that I am coming. Do they have weapons?”

“I don’t see any, General, but I haven’t searched them–they’re still outside the gate, of course.”

“Don’t let them in. And Captain, let your soldiers be prepared for action.”

“We are always prepared,” said the captain stiffly.

As he left, Cadmar explained to Gilly, “I need you to translate.”

He was going to talk to the Lost G’deon.

Perhaps, thought Clement, we mightyet survive.

It’s a little late to be wishing I’d never heard the sound of Karis’s ax that day,Garland thought, as he stood beside Karis at the garrison gate. Or he should have left these odd people the day the raven first talked to him, when Karis gave him money and told him to go his way. But he had fallen in with them instead, and now here he stood, with a half dozen guns and crossbows trained on him by the armored guards in the towers.

“Ridiculous!” said Mabin, stiff and impatient at Karis’s other side. “How much weaponry do they think it takes to kill three unarmed people? Have they no skill, or art?”

She was comparing them to the stylish Paladins, Garland supposed. Certainly, these armored killers seemed no more subtle than an angry bear or a deadly avalanche. But he could not imagine why Mabin found this fact surprising or worth commenting on. Perhaps, he thought, she was covering up her fear. He did not find this reassuring.

Since announcing she was going to the garrison, Karis had hardly spoken at all. Now she waited silently, with a gloved hand gripping one of the gate’s iron bars, as if she were about to utter a disparaging comment on its workmanship. She gripped the iron a bit too hard, though. Garland could see the tense muscles swelling under her coat’s heavy wool.

The dozen guards inside the gate, who bristled with guns, blades, and other weapons, and stood in a formation that seemed poised to go barging through the gate, snapped themselves into rigid attention. “The general is coming,” said Garland shakily.

Karis looked at him and then, very lightly, lay her left hand reassuringly on his shoulder. “The war is over, Garland.”

“I don’t think these soldiers have heard that news.”

“A big man, isn’t he?” commented Mabin skeptically as General Cadmar strode into view, with several soldiers trailing him, and his crippled Lucky Man riding behind on horseback. “Which one is his lieutenant?”

“That hungry woman,” Garland said.

Mabin peered through the gate at the rigid, hollow‑eyed, weary woman, who kept a few reluctant paces behind her superior. “Hungry,” she agreed. “And worried. Very worried.”

By contrast, the general, though he kept his face schooled to an expression of grim severity, showed no sign of having suffered lately. “He is complacent at his good fortune,” said Mabin, with no little sarcasm. “He can hardly wait to see us die.”

Karis’s hand had tightened on Garland’s shoulder. He glanced at her worriedly, for his frail courage was entirely propped up by hers. She was breathing too fast, her face was pale, her expression startled and dismayed. She stared at Cadmar.

“Karis?” said Garland.

Mabin glanced at Karis. “What is it?”

Karis pressed her lips together and gave a slight shake to her head. The general was approaching, his people holding a few paces back. Lieutenant‑General Clement was staring at Karis now, seeming to share her mysterious startlement. Baffled, Garland turned his attention to the general who so many years ago had demanded that Garland cook badly. His glance passed over Garland without any sign of recognition. “General Mabin,” Cadmar greeted his old adversary.

Mabin looked distinctly disgusted.

Garland said in Sainnese, “General, this is Karis, the G’deon of Shaftal.”

The bottom half of the gate was solid iron, but, like Karis, the general was so tall that the metal shielded less than half his body. The iron bars divided his upper body into vertical segments: gray uniform under a heavy coat of wool‑lined leather, a furrowed face that may once have been handsome. Karis’s thicket of hair curled manically while his was straight and thinning, but his hair may have once been bronze like hers. Karis had his broad shoulders. He had her big hands. They stood eye to eye, and those eyes were blue, an eye color scarcely ever seen in Shaftal outside the southern grasslands.

“Gods of hell!” breathed Garland in disbelief.

Cadmar glanced blankly at him.

In Shaftalese, Garland said to Mabin, “He is her father.”

“Well, what do you have to say?” said Cadmar impatiently in Sainnese.

Mabin said, “Tell the general he’ll wish he’d been less careless with his sperm!”

Karis said, very quietly, “What difference does it make? Just tell him why we’re here, Garland.”

What differencedoes it make? Garland looked back at Cadmar. How could this dolt not see what stood before him? Cadmar had carelessly, indifferently, obliviously spawned his own salvation, the bloody fool! All he had to do was recognize what a great and terrible thing he had done!

But Garland, dizzy with wanting to shout at the man, desperately holding back the horror that lay behind his anger, forced himself to say, “General Cadmar, Karis G’deon and General Mabin are here to make peace with the Sainnite people.”

Looking amused, Cadmar gestured to the crippled man, who rode his horse up to the gate. The Lucky Man gave Karis a sharp, inquiring glance: the look of an intelligent man who desperately wished for the answers to the questions he could not ask. But, in stiff Shaftalese, he said, “Madam, the general wishes to know your terms.”

“Karis,” she corrected him. “Gilly, willhe make peace? On any terms? Or is he just playing with us?”

The ugly man looked like he wanted nothing more than to honestly answer her question. But he was on the Sainnite side of the gate’s iron bars, and that fact meant he had long ago traded his freedom for security. He said to Cadmar, in Sainnese, “She asks if you are sincerely interested in making peace on any terms.”

“Will the Paladins lay down their arms?” asked Cadmar loudly.

Garland translated.

“What is this, a duel of questions?” said Mabin. “Is giving a straight answer a sign of weakness?”

“I’m afraid it is,” said Garland.

Karis said, “Lucky Man, tell him that when the Paladins no longer need weapons, they will lay them down. Will the Sainnites lay down their arms?”

“Will the Shaftali people acknowledge the Sainnites as their rulers?” Cadmar countered.

Karis looked into his hard, mocking eyes. “Do you truly believe that people can be ruled?” she asked in amazement.

While the Lucky Man translated, Garland heard Mabin say, “This is just a game to him, Karis.”

“I need to be certain that it’s hopeless!” Karis said.

The general seemed to find Karis’s most recent question disconcerting, or perhaps merely irritating. “You offer me nothing!” he said. “Why should I make peace?”

“I am offering you something: a choice. I will make peace with you, General Cadmar. Or I will make peace without you.”

Mabin, who had been nonplused when Karis gave her the identical choice, seemed much amused by Cadmar’s bewilderment. Then, the general uttered a harsh, mocking laugh, and gestured–at the pistols and crossbows overhead, at the bristling soldiers that surrounded him. “You threaten me?”

“Surely the person who needs no weapons is far stronger than the one who does,” said Mabin. Perhaps it was a Paladin maxim. Garland was not certain who Mabin meant to address, but the Lucky Man translated her words, and Cadmar no longer seemed amused.

Karis said, “I will not give you this choice again. Will you make peace?”

Cadmar said, “You give me no reason to choose!”

Karis said to Mabin, rather blankly, “How could I possibly give him a reason?” Then Karis glanced deliberately at the tired, desperately attentive woman who stood several paces away, but well within hearing. “Reasons are created by the reasoner!”

The lieutenant‑general looked jolted, and half opened her mouth as if to protest that a soldier, whose job is to obey orders only, certainly has no use for reasoning.

The Lucky Man’s translation was distracted and awkward. Cadmar glared impatiently at him.

Mabin was saying to Karis, “If the general is incapable of making his own reasons, he’s incapable of making peace. Is that what you’re thinking?” Karis nodded. “That’s a pretty piece of air logic, Mabin said dryly.

“It’s hopeless. By any logic.”

The Lucky Man had not missed this interchange. As he summarized it in Sainnese, he tried to soften it. But the general turned on Karis. “Incapable? Because I choose not to bow my head to a rabble of dirt‑grubbing peasants? Because–”

Garland, beginning to translate, noticed distractedly that Karis’s often‑mended glove had worn through again in the palm. Her soot‑black skin showed through in patches framed by frayed red yarn as she lifted her left hand from his shoulder, took hold of the thick iron bar, and bent it neatly aside like a green twig. She reached through the gate, and took hold of Cadmar by the collar. The heavy wool of his uniform ripped like paper.

The general’s big hands pounded helplessly at hers. His shout became a gurgle.

The lieutenant‑general cried sharply, “Hold!”

The silence and stillness that reigned there at the gate was a wonder. The fascinated, horrified soldiers stood rigid as stone, unable to shoot lest they injure or kill the general by accident. Then, Lieutenant‑General Clement stepped forward. “Clement!” cried the gate captain. The Lucky Man grabbed for her shoulder, but missed. She heedlessly put herself within reach of Karis’s other hand, and said, “Let him go. Please. I beg you.”

Karis said, just as calmly, “Only a fool picks a fight with a blacksmith.”

Another maxim, thought Garland wildly. This one was probably from Meartown, where fistfights were said to be rare.

The lieutenant‑general put her hand on the arm that was strangling Cadmar to death. She said reasonably, “Your strength came from him, though.”

“He left me to become a smoke‑addicted child whore in Lalali. What strength I have certainly did not come from him.”

Cadmar struggled again in Karis’s grip. She tightened the garrote of his collar, and he stopped, his eyes starting to glaze.

Garland looked at the lieutenant‑general. She seemed only distantly aware of Cadmar’s desperate, humiliating position. She seemed to be thinking of something else–something painful enough to make the soldier’s mask slip off her face. She said, “My people have forgotten how to take responsibility for a child, Cadmar among them. It is true.”

Karis gazed at her steadily, patiently, as though she were waiting for a wild bird to make up its mind to alight on her finger.

Clement said, “But do you want to be the kind of person who would murder her father because of his carelessness?”

“I will not murder your general for that particular carelessness,” Karis said quietly. “His personal failings are no longer important.”

Garland knew what Karis really meant, but Clement looked expectantly at her, as though she thought she had won something.

With her right hand, which had not let go of the gate, Karis bent another iron bar casually out of the way. The lieutenant‑general, either very brave or very well‑disciplined, did not flinch or draw back out of reach. Karis reached into her doublet and then put her hand through the bars of the gate. She offered Clement the bottle of milk. “This is your son’s life,” she said. “Give it to him, Clement.”

Clement’s ungloved hands were numb with cold, but the bottle was warm from the G’deon’s breast. Clement closed her hand around the bottle and then she jammed it into her pocket.

She had been precisely, deliberately, irresistibly coerced, and she knew it.

The G’deon said, very gently, “I’m sorry for what I’m about to do to you.” She released her hold on Cadmar’s throat. He stumbled back, gasping for breath, then opened his mouth in a raw shout of rage.

Karis gazed somberly at him through the twisted bars of the gate. The iron lay between his fist and her.

Clement had stepped forward to steady him, but that courtesy only brought her within range. I should have known better,she thought, just before his massive fist smashed into her face.

When Clement’s vision cleared, she found herself sprawled on ice and cobblestones. There was a lot of shouting. She was dragged aside like a sack of turnips. Something clattered lightly on the stones. She reached for it, but could not quite seem to grab hold of it. It was farther than she thought, then closer. Finally, she grasped it, and examined it with puzzlement.

A piece of a shattered crossbow bolt.

She lifted her head and peered at the guard tower. Her vision swam–but those dismayed shouts concerned her.

“Lieutenant‑General, keep your head down!”

It was very forward, and very thoughtful, of the soldier to shout at her like that. She ignored her, and with some effort got herself on her elbows, knees, and finally to her feet, in a sickeningly spinning world.

The soldier caught her before she fell again.

“I have got to talk to the general,” she slurred.

“Not wise,” the soldier said. “Give it a moment. You’re addled from the blow.”

“Wise?” She looked at her in confusion.

“Gods of hell,” said the soldier. “Why can’t they get the gate unlocked?”

Clement looked at the gate. The captain fought the key in the resisting lock. He shouted an order at the towers. Clement looked up–when would the sky stop that nauseating spin? In the towers, armored soldiers picked up a ladder. It fell apart in their hands. Rungs clattered onto stone. Side supports broke into pieces.

The whole world seemed to be coming apart. Perhaps the guns also lay in pieces. Not a shot had been fired.

Clement wrenched herself out of the stunned soldier’s grip. Cadmar and Gilly had taken shelter against the wall on the other side of the gate. She stumbled across–were the stones actually heaving under her feet?

“Cadmar!” she cried.

He turned. His throat was already bruising purple. His face was red. He had the weird, blank gaze of a berserker.

She shouted at him. “Call after the G’deon! Tell her you’ve changed your mind! Tell her you will make peace!”

The soldier had been right: she was addled. And she was too slow to turn away from his fist. Her nose gave a sickening crack. She went down in snow. She could not pay attention to much of anything for a while. Then, she realized she was suffocating on snow and blood, and began choking and coughing, and then she could breathe.

Her face was a pain so vivid that it cleared all the clutter of fear straight out of her mind.

She felt her pocket. The bottle of milk had not broken. She rested her battered face gently in the soothing, scarlet‑stained snow, and waited for the chaos to end and the bleeding to stop.

Chapter Thirty‑Six

The soldiers and their shattered weapons were trapped behind walls they could not climb and a gate they could not open. Garland strolled away with Karis’s hand again on his shoulder, and Mabin snickering to herself at Karis’s other side.

Emil stepped out of the alley from which he had been watching, and showed them the way down a maze of back roads. They were not escorted by the visible and remarkable Paladins, but by a half dozen ordinary, if somewhat self‑important, townsfolk. These people looked sidelong at Karis, who plodded like a plow horse coming home from the fields.

Near someone’s back garden, Norina paced up and down by a covered delivery wagon. She uttered an exclamation at the sight of Karis’s face. “What happened?”

Karis crawled into the delivery wagon and folded herself up in a corner. Norina gave Emil a significant glance, and followed her in.

“What went wrong?” Emil asked tiredly.

Mabin leaned her head close to his, for the gathered people had anxiously drawn forward. “General Cadmar is Karis’s father.”

Emil glanced sharply at Garland, who nodded a confirmation. “Did she kill him?” Emil asked. “Or not?”

Garland thought that if Karis had killed Cadmar it would have devastated her. And if she hadn’t, it still would have devastated her. In the shadows of the van, Karis’s face seemed like a pale mask. Norina had clasped one of her hands, and was talking to her urgently, with her mouth close to her ear.

“She seemedresolved,” Mabin said uncertainly.

“She killed him,” Garland said.

Emil glanced at him again, inquiringly. Garland held up his hands as Karis had when she put them both through the gate. “This is your son’s life,” he quoted Karis, gesturing towards the right. Then, he gestured towards the left, holding an invisible Cadmar by the throat, speechless.

“This is my father’s death,” said Emil.

Garland put his hands down, feeling extremely self‑conscious. Mabin was giving him a very surprised look, but Emil clasped Garland’s elbow and said, “I knew you were the right one to send in with her.”

They got in the wagon and closed the doors, and were taken on a jolting journey across rough cobblestones. Garland supposed that Norina’s fierce whisper continued to fling itself at Karis’s obdurate silence, but all he could hear was the rumble of the wheels. When the wagon stopped and the door opened, the light revealed a sight Garland had never imagined possible: Karis in a huddle, with her face buried in Norina’s shoulder, Norina’s hand stroking the mad tangle of her hair.

Yet another contingent of awestruck citizens had met the wagon at the back of a dry goods shop. Emil firmly pushed the crowd back, and Karis crawled heavily out of the wagon. White‑faced, stark‑eyed, she began to remove a ragged glove so she could properly greet this new group of strangers, but Emil said firmly, “Karis, you’ve done enough. Who’s in charge here? Take us where we’re going, please.”

Walking next to Karis, Garland took part of her weight–not a light burden. Karis asked Norina, “Where’s Leeba?”

“Is there something wrong with your ravens? Emil!”

Emil extricated himself from an intense conversation with Mabin. Norina said to him, “We’ve got to find the ravens somehow, and get them into shelter. And does anyone know exactly where Leeba is?”

“She’s with my children, ice skating,” a nearby woman said. “The pond is over there–see those treetops?”

Emil said, “Send someone to bring Leeba to Karis. And J’han also–he’s with her.”

“I’ll go myself.” The woman left.

Emil picked another member of their escort, apparently at random, who found himself in a very peculiar conversation with the G’deon of Shaftal as she attempted to tell him where the ravens were by describing what the birds could see. They walked down a narrow passageway between buildings, and Karis was saying, “It seems like a big garden, with a fountain in the middle.”

“Is there a red and green house nearby, with a tower? And a lightning rod with a blue glass ball in it?” Apparently, Emil had managed to pick the exact person in their group who knew every minuscule detail of his town’s landscape.

Karis stumbled on a loose cobblestone. Up ahead, there stood an extremely dilapidated house, with a Paladin standing guard at the sagging back gate. They appeared to have arrived at their next destination.

The baby’s girl‑nurse still huddled in the bed, but she was awake, and wide‑eyed with fear. “Lieutenant‑General, I’m sorry–I didn’t know–” The baby lay in his basket, blanket‑wrapped, though the stupid girl had let the fire practically burn out. The girl’s terrified babbling continued, but Clement paid her no heed. She picked up her son and sat down by the cold hearth.

A couple of confused soldiers had helped Clement to her quarters, and now stood uncertainly in the doorway. Clement broke the wax seal on the milk bottle, stuck in her finger, and let a drop of milk fall from her fingertip to the baby’s mouth.

She waited. His mouth moved. She dipped her finger again, and put it into her son’s mouth, and felt the slight movement of his lips and tongue as he sucked.

A drop of blood fell from her nose to his blanket. As she tilted her head so the blood would run down her throat, she noticed the wide‑eyed soldiers. “Escort this girl out of the garrison.”

“I’m not sure we can.”

“If they haven’t got the gate open yet, lower her over the wall with a rope. Tell her to go home to her parents.”

“Yes, Lieutenant‑General.”

The other soldier said sympathetically, “The general’s got a heavy fist, eh? I’ll find a medic for you.”

They left, dragging the sobbing girl, who probably thought she was going to be killed. Clement fed her son from her fingertip. Later, she paused to build up the fire and to boil a clean bottle. She returned to find the baby blinking at her from his basket.

She said, “Well, I’ve ruined my career for you.”

His mouth opened; he sucked her finger hungrily.

She said, more to herself than to him, “So the child creates the parent, eh? Backwards though it seems?” She added, “Listen, little guy. I have to tell you some surprising news: you aren’t going to be a soldier.”

As they entered the run‑down, back‑alley house with a roof that seemed certain to leak and a garden that was piled with frozen ordure, Garland could hear a muted commotion of cleaning, of furniture being brought in and the rapid, confident banging of several carpenters’ hammers. They entered a big, crowded kitchen, and Garland was immediately irritated to see how far advanced the cooking had gotten without his help. A survey of the first‑floor rooms revealed that all the bedrooms were in the midst of a frenzy of cleaning, so he told Norina to bring Karis into the parlor. As Garland put together a plate of bread and cold meat and got a pot of tea steeping, J’han arrived with Leeba, followed by a woman carrying two exhausted ravens. In the parlor, Karis held Leeba on her lap, and listened, as though she had no other concerns, to her daughter’s excited account of alphabet lessons, ice skating, and playing with a pet ferret. J’han had gotten Karis’s boots off and was affectionately admonishing her for getting her feet wet.

Garland sat on the stool beside Karis and piled a little mound of cold ham onto a small, slim square of black bread, dabbed it with mustard, and decorated it with transparent sweet pickles. This he rather summarily slipped into Karis’s mouth. Leeba found the operation hilarious and demanded that she be allowed to help. Karis ate passively and obediently from her daughter’s hand. For the first time, Garland could see the lingering ghost of Karis the smoke addict, who had gotten in the habit of cooperating with the people who worked to make her survive a drug that eventually killed everyone who used it. It was a terrible insight.

Garland felt Norina’s discomforting gaze on him, as he piled up more ham for Leeba to feed to Karis. “Careful–don’t let it fall apart,” he said, as the little girl snatched it from him.

“Karis doesn’t likepickles,” Leeba announced when a pickle slice fell to the floor.

“She does so. You’re the one who doesn’t like pickles.”

“The ravensdon’t even like pickles,” Leeba persisted, as Emil came in with another raven. “Open up!” she said severely to her mother, and jammed the food into her mouth.

Garland glanced at Norina finally. The Truthken had done something to Karis–had grabbed hold of her somehow and pulled her back from a cliff she was about to fall over. Now the danger was past, and Norina looked cool and distant as ever, and the hand she rested on Karis’s shoulder was merely reminding her that she was there.

“Emil, that pot on the table should be ready to pour,” Garland said.

Emil had put his raven on the back of a chair. “Bless you,” he said sincerely and began pouring tea. “Do you want some, Karis?”

“No tea,” J’han said. “By Shaftal, she’s going to sleep.”

Karis wiped mustard from her lip. “I am? How?”

“Feet first.” J’han had one of Karis’s big, callused feet in his hands. He reached for the oil that he had set on the hearth to melt and proceeded with a demonstration.

Karis sank visibly into her chair. “The Sainnites–” she began.

Mabin, who had just come in, said, “Karis, give some credit to your people. If Sainnites start tearing things apart, we’ll take care of it. You don’t actually have to solve every single problem with your own hands.”

As Emil gave Mabin a confused look, Norina uttered a sharp laugh. “Are you supplanting me as Karis’s scold? I doubt she can endure two of us, but I’d be glad to find a new occupation.”

“No, thank you. It seems a pointless job.”

Emil went to lean wearily by the fireplace. “Karis, I’m told the Sainnites managed to get two parties of soldiers over the wall, but that the soldiers seem very skittish and are only going through the motions of hunting for us. Every person in Watfield is keeping an eye on them. Believe me, it is safe for you to sleep.”

Karis had shut her eyes. Whatever J’han was doing to her foot seemed irresistible. “I suppose,” she said. “Since they’re got no weapons.”

Emil straightened sharply, and had to steady his teacup in its saucer. “None at all?”

Karis murmured, “J’han, I concede. Your power is greater than mine.”

J’han said, “Leeba, let Karis lie down on the floor. You can help her take a nap, if you want to.”

“Even the edged weapons?” said Emil, as Leeba crawled off Karis’s lap.

“Dull beyond repair,” said Karis. “Even the kitchen knives.”

Garland stood up. “I’ll get some blankets and a pillow.”

But he paused at the door, distressed suddenly by the memory of that tired and hungry soldier, the lieutenant‑general, reeling back from the general’s vicious blow. “Emil?”

Emil was sipping spilled tea out of his saucer. He gave Garland a glance of a sort that had never been directed at him before: not merely inquiring, but respectful. It was unnerving.