Текст книги "Fire Logic "

Автор книги: Marks Laurie

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“I’m hardly in a position to refuse–”

“Well, that’s a bit halfhearted,” Norina said.

“There’s no point in lying to you.”

“That’s true, but this little drama is for Karis, not for me.” Norina glanced at Karis.

“She’s satisfied enough.” She took Zanja’s arm, and propelled her back to the bench and to Karis, who got up and fiercely embraced them both.

Norina said, “You were going to let me leave.”

“And you were going to go.”

They examined each other rather cautiously. For the length of their friendship, Zanja thought, Norina had been reading Karis back to herself like a book read to a blind woman. Surely she must have been unnerved to look up from her reading and find the other chair empty and the door standing ajar.

Zanja said, “You’re afraid that Medric knows of Karis, even though I told him nothing?”

“She created you,” Norina said, “just like she created these blades we carry, just like she created the ravens. So she is in you, and when Medric met you, he met her as well. It may take some time for the small bit of truth he’s seen to become a whole, but if he’s the seer you say he is, then it will happen.”

“So I must find him, just as Karis says.”

“Well, I must consult with Mabin before we do anything.”

“You know that won’t work,” Karis said. “Giving birth will lay you up for a while, and you won’t even be around to consult with anyone. And if Mabin forbids us to contact him, as I’m sure she will, what then? You know that Zanja won’t stand quietly by while Mabin’s assassins hunt Medric down.“

“Good luck to them,” said Zanja. “That man has already outsmarted the smartest commanders in Shaftal. But no, I don’t owe Mabin any loyalty. Medric, however, deserves all the help I can give him.”

Norina said, “Unlike both of you, I still answer to the councilor, and will until I die. So what am I to do?”

“Go ahead and write her a letter,” Kans said. “Tell her what we’re doing, but don’t ask permission.”

“She won’t be happy. She’ll say you’re overreaching yourself, and she’ll blame me.”

Karis said, “Oh, I’m sure she will. But you can endure it.”

Chapter Twenty‑one

“Don’t send that letter!”

Awakened by Medric’s cry, Emil put an arm around him. Sometimes, when Medric became restless in his dreams, Emil could soothe him without awakening him. But Medric turned away, mumbling urgently.

The sky had clouded over. A summer shower would give relief from the dust, thought Emil. He got up to check the oilcloth that covered the trunks of books in the back of the wagon. When he returned, he found Medric sitting up in the tangle of blankets, fumbling frantically for his spectacles.

“We’re running out of time!” Medric looked around himself rather wildly.

“Are you awake? Or still asleep?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t see.”

Emil found his spectacles for him. Medric peered up at him and said, “I’m awake.”

Five days they had been traveling lazily, following the wagon down the dusty road, holding hands. It was summer, and all across Shaftal, Sainnites and Paladins were desperately killing each other. Emil knew this holiday of his could not last long, but still he asked, “What are we running out of time for?”

“Zanja is looking for me,” Medric said. “She needs us both, more urgently than she knows. But we can’t leave the books. How much further do you think we have to go?”

“Four days travel, or thereabouts. Where is she?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Medric disengaged himself from the blankets. “I’ll tell you if I can see a map.”

Emil fetched the map and lit the lantern. When he sat down, Medric leaned against him. Emil tucked him close and kissed his head.

“Maybe we can just ignore everything,” Medric suggested.

“I don’t believe that’s an option you’ll find in Way of theSeer.” Emil kissed him again, and unfolded the map. Medric pointed. Emil asked, “Strongbridge? What is she doing there?”

“Being a hinge of history.” Medric sighed. “Oh, well. The letter’s going to be sent, and nothing I can do will stop it. If I could, maybe it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.” He studied the map. “I suppose that to find me, Zanja will go to where she knows I was last, and wait for me to come to her. She’ll wait a few days, and eventually work her way to Haprin, for she knows I shipped my books there, doesn’t she? And then she’ll be able to find out that you and I left together, and perhaps even which way we headed. So she’ll guess where we’re going, because she’s been to your shepherd’s cottage before, and come after us.”

“She will,” Emil agreed, stunned by the simplicity of it. So this was how Rees Company had been systematically slaughtered, one person at a time. It was best not to think about it.

Medric rolled up the map, and blew out the lamp. “After we’ve secured the books, we’ll turn back and go to her, and meet her on the road somewhere. Now we can sleep.”

But when Emil awoke at dawn, Medric was still awake, and had spent the night pacing back and forth, watching the clouds gather and then disperse without issuing a single drop of ram.

Karis came home again to Meartown, to the furnaces and the forges and the teams of gigantic horses hauling wagonloads of ore from the nearby mines. Because Meartown was less than a day’s foot journey from Strongbridge, Norina had reluctantly let her go as she had come, alone. Norina had her own journey home to make: to her first home, the seaside village far on the southern coast, to the rambling house in which she had been born, and where her older sister now ruled, a benign matriarch by all accounts.

The region of Mear was a place of hostile, stony hillsides and occasional, straggling trees, home to many kinds of mice and the foxes and hawks that ate them, but unfarmable and, except for a few places, too barren even for sheep. In spring a few tiny flowers bloomed among the stones; in winter the snow blanketed the land and blew into drifts taller than Karis could reach. Yet, for hundreds of years Meartown had thrived in the middle of this wasteland, its fires stoked by coal mined from the same hills that the iron came from; all its other needs came in by wagon. The road to Meartown was like a heart’s artery, and there was no road better laid or maintained in all of Shaftal. All summer long the road crew wandered that road, filling potholes and replacing stones; all winter long that same crew worked the snowplows.

The barren land inspired a barren kind of love, an intellectual and passionless appreciation for its empty spaces and harsh, stony ridges. By day, the sky was brown with coal smoke, and she spent most of those days within the gray city of the forges. Hemmed in by stone and metal, she longed for green and living things. She sighed as she walked into Meartown that afternoon and waved a hand at Mardeth, who collected the gate toll from outsiders. “So you’re back,” Mardeth called. “Have you eaten today?”

Karis sat down by the town well and ate the lunch that the inn had packed for her that morning–more of those dumplings that had made Zanja cry, there by the river.

Present yet absent, Zanja moved across the countryside like a spark of light through darkness. If Karis had shut her eyes and started to walk, she would have walked directly to her side. With her whole being, she yearned to do that very thing.

In Strongbridge, Karis had bought Zanja an ugly, hammer‑headed, evil tempered horse. With one touch, Karis had won the willful horse’s abject devotion. The horse, who she named Homely, proved himself a sturdy mount, with an easy, light gait and an eagerness to run that Zanja did not always rein in. She had left with most of Norina’s equipment: her saddle, her spare shirt, her cooking gear, and her maps. Zanja had never seen such beautifully drawn and detailed maps, though many of the details made no sense to her. They were judicial maps, Norina said, copied from an original that still survived in a secret archive. But Norina had overwritten the maps with her own notations, which had been incorporated when the map was re‑drawn by an artist who could not resist ornamenting what blank space remained with drawings of boats, trees, castles, and the like. The maps had been re‑drawn perhaps a dozen times since Norina first began carrying them, and now she admitted that even she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing the roads from the welter of detail.

Following obscure but direct routes, along byways and cowpaths that are usually known only to locals, Zanja traveled east and then south, and in six days hardly saw a single soul. Not until she drew close to Haprin and camped for a few days just over the hill from the main road did she even have a conversation–with an enterprising farm girl who visited every day to sell her eggs, bread, and milk. With nothing to do but wait and think, Zanja found herself sorting through the events of her life as though they were glyph cards, picking and choosing which ones had significance, and deciding what that significance would be. She had not spent such a peaceful time since she could remember.

At last, she roused herself to go into Haprin and make inquiries. A watch woman at one of the warehouses was much taken with her, and for the price of a dinner told of a bespectacled young man who had slept beside his shipment for some days before he was joined by an older man, and they left with the trunks, by wagon, headed for the ferry. Yes, a man with hair going gray, his face creased by wind and sun, but definitely not a farmer. “A Paladin,” said the watchwoman, who by the end of the meal was speculatively stroking Zanja’s knife‑scarred hand.

“I don’t suppose he had a limp.”

“Yes, he did. But a night with that young fellow did him a world of good.”

“You amaze me,” Zanja murmured, more amazed, in fact, than she let on. Though the friendly watchwoman was appealing enough, Zanja disappointed her hopes, and went back to her solitary camp, to gaze up at the brilliant stars and think of Karis.

In Strongbndge, after Karis had gone to her room to smoke and then sleep under the watchful guard of Norina’s tireless assistant, Norina and Zanja had shared a fine supper. As was inevitable, Norina commented on how well Zanja was comporting herself, and particularly complimented her efforts to keep secret the fact that she was in love with Karis. The Truthken was not as unsympathetic as Zanja had feared she would be, but neither had she held back the facts, both about how Karis had been brutalized in Lalali, and about how smoke irrecoverably destroys sensation. The unpleasant conversation certainly had helped to cool Zanja’s ardor.

But she lay now, thinking of Karis’s big, gentle hands stroking her injured thigh. That touch had ruined her, she thought wryly, for now she wanted nothing else. She could only hope, as she had promised Norina, that she would recover quickly.

The next day, as she rode down the main road to the ferry, Karis’s raven dropped out of the sky onto her shoulder. “Something is wrong!”

A startled farm family that shared the road with her drew back, staring fearfully.

“What do you mean?” she asked the raven. “Did Karis send you to me? Did you see something from the air that I should know about?”

The raven uttered a strangled caw, as though he had half forgotten how to talk. “It is Karis,” he managed to say. “Something is wrong with Karis.”

Zanja never got on the ferry.

Seven days later, in an evening that had turned suddenly cool after sunset, Zanja rode up to the Meartown gates. The stars had come out, and the gate was closed: a gate of iron forged in the form of ivy climbing a trellis, with spear‑shaped leaves tipping the gate’s top, edged, no doubt, with sharpened steel. Though Zanja had allowed Homely regular rest, she had scarcely slept, and now she saw the beautiful, deadly gate with a terrible clarity of exhaustion and panic. Not since the night of the frogs had she been forced to function in spite of such horror. “Something is wrong!” she shouted at the cranky old woman who came too slowly out the metal‑hinged door of her stone house. The town stank of dust and coal.

“Stop ringing the cursed bell,” the woman said, holding her ears. “The town’s children are asleep.”

Zanja made her hand stop pulling the bell rope. Her exhausted horse had not even jumped at the noise of the ringing.

“And come back in the morning,” the woman said. “You can sleep by the road there. There’s a pump so you can water your horse.”

“I’ll climb the gate if I have to, and come pounding at your cottage door.”

The woman said dryly, “This is Meartown. We know how to make a gate here.”

She started to turn away, and Zanja shouted at her back, “Do you know Karis? Do you know her best work? Look here!“ She thrust her dagger through the gate’s bars. ”She doesn’t give these blades to many people, does she? For pity’s sake, look at me, look at the raven on my shoulder. I am her friend!“

The woman took the dagger from Zanja’s hand, scrutinized it, and gave it back. “You do have a fine blade,” she said doubtfully. She peered through the gate at the bird on Zanja’s shoulder. “And a strange pet.”

“Mardeth,” the raven said, the first word he’d spoken in many days. “Help her.”

“Shaftal’s Name!” The woman snatched up the key at her waist and unlocked the gate. Zanja all but fell through as it swung open. “You’re not the one I expected,” Mardeth said.

“I’m Zanja. Norina’s pregnant.”

“Well, blessings upon her,” Mardeth said automatically. She examined Zanja, then stepped forward to take Homely’s reins. “You’ve had a bad time of it. Come in and take a bite to eat, before I show you the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house. You’ll be needing your strength, won’t you.”

Zanja followed her, too dazed with hunger and weariness to protest or demand an explanation. It wasn’t until she sat in the woman’s kitchen with the teakettle starting to hiss and some bread and cold meat before her that she thought to wonder why the gatekeeper might have been expecting Norina to come frantically ringing the gate bell in the middle of the night. She nearly leapt up and ran out to the yard, where the woman was watering the horse and giving him some hay, but she made herself eat instead. She’d be needing her strength, Mardeth had said.

Mardeth came in, and cut her a piece of pie. “Your horse isn’t in too bad shape. Leave him with me tonight, and I’ll have him shod in the morning. Looks like you’ve been keeping him in oats but not feeding yourself. Are you out of money?”

“I’ve got enough for the shoeing.”

“As if the blacksmith would accept a single coin from you. I’ll send around to the other mastersmiths and take a collection to help you on your way. We were getting ready to send out some people ourselves. It’s taken us this long to figure out that she’s not somewhere nearby, off her head or injured somewhere. Six days we’ve been scouring the countryside. What’s the matter with you?”

Zanja had knocked the pie into her lap and sent the plate spinning to the hearth, where it clanged on the stones like the gate bell, and set the woman’s dog to barking. “She’s disappeared?”

“Yes, of course she’s disappeared. What else are you here for?”

“The raven couldn’t tell me what was wrong. I thought she might be ill.”

“Well now, that’s odd,” the woman said, looking askance at the raven, who paced restlessly along the back of a chair. “Very odd indeed. Not that I know a thing about elemental ways, but they say a witch’s familiar knows everything she knows, and if the raven doesn’t know anything, what does that mean, I wonder?”

Mardeth rousted up a neighbor to let them out the gate and keep an eye on it while she was gone. “Lynton and Dominy live up there a ways.” She pointed into the nearby hills. “Karis has lived with them, oh, for some years. There’s some trees up there, and a bit of a spring, and it seems to make her happy.”

As they hurried up the steep, scrupulously maintained road, Mardeth told Zanja how it had happened that Karis disappeared in the middle of the night, but no one realized anything was amiss until the next evening, when the forge master finally came looking for her at her house. They had wasted all the time since then trying to find her in the environs of Meartown, having assumed that she had come to harm somehow on one of her wanderings. That her harm might have come in the form of a human being seemed not to have occurred to any of them until finally one of the two men noticed a broken door latch in Karis’ room. “In all the years they’ve known her,” Mardeth said, “she’s never broken anything. She can be clumsy as an ox, but she’s never even cracked a teacup. And it was a good, strong, Mearish latch. No, someone must have broken it to get into her room from outside. But why would anyone wish to do her harm? Especially someone from around here?”

She glanced at Zanja and realized she was weeping. “Now then,” she said awkwardly. “I’m sure we’ll find her.”

Something about the image of Karis blundering around a kitchen with a fragile teacup in her hand had left Zanja devastated, and she could scarcely stem her tears even when they arrived at the cottage, where two aged men welcomed them in. They seemed eager when they realized Mardeth was at their door, perhaps even hopeful that she brought good news. But when they saw Zanja’s face, they fell to weeping themselves. “She’s dead, is she?” said one.

“Now calm down, you,” Mardeth snapped. “We know nothing at all, and the stones themselves would defend her from harm. Put on the kettle there, Dominy. This one’s just in tears because she didn’t know until now what had happened. She’ll be all right in a minute, when it’s done sinking in. Now all of you sit down and I’ll make the tea.“

“No, I want to see her room,” Zanja said. Lynton took her down the dark hall through a wide door at the end, and Zanja stood there in the doorway to Karis’ bedroom as the man hurried to light a couple of lamps. The flames illuminated a high, raftered ceiling, high enough that even Karis would not have to worry about banging her head on it, and several pieces of oversized furniture: a chair, a work table piled with books and debris, a settle by the fireplace, a huge, high bed with the linens in disarray, and a double door constructed almost entirely of glass that looked out upon a garden. The old man swung the doors open and showed Zanja the broken latch.

“Was her room in such a mess when you found it? The bed and such?”

The old man shrugged. “No different from usual. We’d come in every few days and clean for her, not that she noticed. She never had time for tidying up, and never lost anything, anyway.”

Zanja sat on the settle. She was learning more about Karis now that she was missing than she’d ever learned in her presence. “Would you leave me alone, please?”

“Of course. Madam.” He touched his forehead, an old‑fashioned gesture of respect rarely seen these days. Not only had they all assumed she was a member of the Lilterwess like Norina, but he, at least, apparently assumed she was a ranking member. He left the room without another word.

The room was still imbued with Karis’s presence. The raven, who had come in with her, flew to a claw‑scarred chair back near one of the windows and fluffed up his feathers sleepily. Faintly, Zanja could hear voices in the kitchen, and the sound of water being poured for tea. She picked up a book from the floor, and spelled out its title: Principles of Clarity. Some of its pages were bent, as though Karis had tossed it impatiently aside. A small pot on the hearth contained a hardened, resinous substance–hide glue, Zanja thought, which would soften when warmed, and harden again when taken off the fire.

Zanja stood up abruptly, and began methodically searching the room. In the trunk were more books and a few articles of clothing, some clean and roughly mended, some dirty and stinking of the forge and Karis’ sweat. The sheepskin jerkin that Karis had been wearing when they first met lay in there, and several pairs of socks, badly darned. The men who looked after Karis were not much good with a needle, apparently.

Small models of machinery, constructed of slips of wood and amber dabs of glue, cluttered the tabletop. A book lay open to a page of diagrams of waterwheels, but this was no grain mill Karis had been designing. Zanja turned one of the miniature wheels, and watched it operate a thing like a hammer. Another one operated a bellows, of the kind used in the forge. Karis’s model was so precise that it even blew little, rhythmic puffs of air.

Zanja hunted through the room, but though she found Karis’s belt on the floor, with sheathed knife, tin cup and various small tools still dangling from it, she did not find pipe or smoke purse. Zanja checked for loose boards in the floor, felt the stones of the wall, and finally found Karis’ hiding place in the chimney, where a small stone had cracked loose from its mortar. A wooden box was crammed into the hollow behind it and could only be worked loose with great effort. At last Zanja slid open the lid and folded back the oilcloth covering; it was filled to the top with small cubes of smoke, at least half a year’s supply. Since Karis’s kidnappers had not hunted for this supply, they must have brought some with them. Surely a woman who could unlock doors with a touch would easily escape, unless her captors kept her continuously under smoke. She was being poisoned three or even four times a day.

Now Karis would be–had already become–like all the other smoke users. Something was wrong, the raven said, and then he began, inexorably, to become ordinary. The evidence had lain before Zanja all along. Karis was not dead yet, but she might as well be dead.

Zanja began to think again: cold, hard thoughts. She took out her glyph cards and picked out the four glyphs that, among other things, symbolize the four directions. Ten times in a row she plucked the same card from the four in her hand, the one with the glyph that meant “north.”

She fell asleep on Karis’s bed. One of the men came in later, to take the boots off her feet and tuck a blanket around her against the chill. She tried to say something to him about the morning, but he hushed her, saying, “We’ll take care of everything.” One by one, he blew out the lamps.

Chapter Twenty‑two

They brought Homely to her at dawn. He had bitten the man who tried to ride him, and so they led him to her, ignominiously tethered behind a stolid cart horse. His hooves were newly shod, his tack and all Zanja’s gear refurbished, and his saddlebags were filled with food. “Is the blacksmith all right?” Zanja asked Mardeth.

“Oh, he’s used to temperamental horses.” Homely bared his teeth at Zanja, and she had to grab the raven by the feet to keep it from taking flight at the sight of all the people who had come to see her off, but horse and raven both calmed down once she was mounted. Mardeth handed her a money pouch, and Dominy gave her sweet rolls and boiled eggs to eat as she rode. Two or three dozen other people had made the trek to the hollow for no other purpose, it seemed, than to stand around and look at her. Mardeth murmured that some of them stood ready to accompany Zanja, if she wanted them.

“It’s not numbers I need,” Zanja said, though she would have given almost anything to have Ransel, or Emil, or even Norina, at her side. As she rode away, a chorus of good wishes shouted after her. When she looked back, the townsfolk all stood in a forlorn huddle around the two old men, who were still waving their red kerchiefs. Ten years they had looked after Karis, as much as she would let anyone look after her. “Idiots,” Zanja muttered. She needed someone to rage at.

*

At noon, the raven spoke. “Pendant,” he said.

Zanja had been riding cross‑country, following whatever animal trails and streambeds she could find that went more or less northward. She had recently stumbled onto a deeply rutted dirt road. While the horse rested, Zanja searched up and down the stretch of road, sometimes kneeling in the muck that remained from a recent rain storm. Finally, she found it, buried in the mud: the pendant of green stone that she had given Karis beside the river in Strongbridge. A torn piece of green ribbon trailed from it as she pulled it out of the mud. Karis must have torn the ribbon that first dawn, when she started to come out from under smoke, and realized something was wrong, before her kidnappers forced her to smoke again. That was the dawn that the raven had flown to Zanja with his dreadful message.

“You’re watching, aren’t you Karis?” Zanja said, after she had started on her way again, with the raven on her shoulder. “I can’t feel you any more, but at least sometimes you still see me through the raven. I must seem very far away to you, just as you seem to me. Can you hear me now?”

“Yes,” the raven said.

“Can you tell me where you are?”

“Mabin,” the raven said.

“Mabin? Has she been captured also?”

The raven looked at her blankly, and said nothing more.

The countryside remained treeless and desolate, and the road she followed northward seemed to go nowhere, though wagons traveled it often enough to keep the grass from growing in the ruts. Norina’s maps showed empty, un‑annotated countryside.

One morning, as Zanja saddled her horse behind the knoll where she had spent the night, a single rider loped past. The only remarkable thing about him was his horse, a luxury Zanja could not have afforded if she hadn’t been given money so generously by friends and by strangers. She continued more cautiously, traveling far to one side of the road rather than upon it. Here and there were sudden fingers of rock pointing at the sky. She noticed, atop one of these, a watchkeep huddled in the shade of a lean‑to that looked almost like a pile of brush, if one didn’t look too closely. Zanja slipped past in the countryside behind him, where the lean‑to blocked his view, and from there she could see the little bell tower upon which he could ring his alarm.

She soon came upon the thing he guarded: a lush green valley much like the valley of her birth, with a small, but busy village at one end–a village with walls, and a sentry at the gate. The valley had been carved out of the earth by a river that cut a deep swath across the countryside as far as Zanja could see in either direction. This river, at least, appeared on Norina’s map, though the valley and the village did not. As she watched the village from the rim of the valley, Zanja realized it was not a village at all, but a military settlement–not of Sainnites, but of Paladins. She had found the hidden heart of the Shaftali resistance; Shaftal’s government in exile.

Both the glyphs and her own judgment pointed inexorably into the valley. Zanja wanted to violently brush away the possibilities that tickled at her skin. Had Karis been kidnapped and cruelly drugged, not by Sainnites, but by the Paladins?

To break into a Paladin stronghold without assistance or even the vaguest idea of where to hunt for Karis seemed insanely foolhardy. She would do it tonight, she decided, and shut her eyes to think.

It was a warm summer afternoon, and the accuser bugs droned their shrill curses down in the valley. Nearby, Homely chomped away at the grass, and the raven, perched overhead atop a pointed rock, cleaned his feathers busily. It was a commonplace kind of sound, like the rustling of paper. In the midst of her dismay, Zanja felt a sudden, unlikely sensation of peace.

When she opened her eyes, the summer sun hung low and red, glaring into her face like coals of a fire. She could still hear the rustling paper sound, but she could not see the raven. She rolled over, groaning, for she had fallen asleep with her back against the pile of rocks. The man sitting nearby turned a page of the book in his lap, nodding and chuckling to himself. His spectacles were glazed red with sunset. “Dear gods,” Zanja said.

Medric looked up from his book. He seemed rather the worse for wear: a rag tied back his stringy hair, and dust covered his drab clothing. “I guess you were tired. Some warrior you are.”

Two additional horses grazed companionably with Homely on the other side of the clearing. She got stiffly to her feet, and found a smokeless fire burning at the other side of the rock pile, where a soot‑black pot stood empty, and a porcelain teapot steeped upon a stone. Emil sat there on his folding stool, just looking up from the book upon his knees. “You’re awake at last. Now we shall have some answers.”

“You’ve left South Hill?”

He closed the book carefully, and wrapped it in a jacket of leather. “It was time I remembered what my life was about.”

“I hope you’re here to help me.”

“Sit down. Despite that nap, you still look ready to collapse.” Emil opened his padded box and took out two teacups. “Why else would we rush up here into the wilderness like madmen chased by rabid hounds, except to help you? Help you do what, by the way?”

Medric sat on Zanja’s other side. “Zanja, I see history rippling away from you.”

Emil smiled affectionately at the Sainnite seer. “Medric is full of wild stories he’s made up from reading too many books.”

Medric said, “It’s not possible to read too many books. To read too few, now that’s possible.”

“Medric says there’s a third road for Shaftal. We–the three of us–are at the crossroads, he says.” Emil offered Zanja a cup of tea. The cup might have been made of flower petals that released a delicious fragrance. Somewhere, Emil had invested in some very expensive tea. She took a sip. Her hands were shaking like any smoke addict’s.

Medric said, “Zanja, where is the lost G’deon? Somehow, she must be saved!”

Emil murmured, “Set that cup down before you drop it. It’s irreplaceable, you know.”

Zanja put the cup on the ground.

Medric said, “I saw her in a dream, a woman like a mountain, but shackled hand and foot, blinded, with her tongue cut out… .”

Emil put his arm around her. Zanja lay her head back upon his shoulder and stared up at the sun‑red sky, which swirled and swam in her vision. “But she is not the G’deon.”

“She is. I know what I dreamed. The land cries out to her to give it healing.”