Текст книги "Fire Logic "
Автор книги: Marks Laurie
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Norina sat down upon a battered, three‑legged stool that might have been older than the sagging stone walls within which they sheltered. Zanja said after a while, “I envy you your vigor.”
The preoccupied, battle‑scarred face turned as if surprised to find her a living being and not just a problem to be solved. She said, “You’ll recover faster than seems possible, and you’ll feel the effects of Karis’s immoderate generosity for years to come. What is your name again?”
“I am Zanja na’Tarwem. I was Speaker for the Ashawala’i, but now my people are all dead.”
After a long silence Norina said, “We have heard of the massacre of the Ashawala’i. You’re the only survivor that we know of.”
“Perhaps there were others, but I expect they would have killed themselves. Pardon me–if I am to answer your questions, I want to know who is asking them and why.”
Norina said, “The speaker for the Ashawala’i by tradition has the G’deon’s ear. Where did you serve as a diplomat, with the House of Lilterwess fallen?”
“I looked out for my people’s interests in the northern border towns. Why is it your business?”
Norina looked up from her hands. The sardonic expression that the scar gave her face seemed much more pronounced. “You certainly are as incessantly polite and courteously insistent as any diplomat. But if you had a weapon your hand would be on it, am I right?”
Zanja said softly, “No, Norina, I would never signal my intent so carelessly, and so sacrifice the advantage of surprise.”
Norina looked amused, as a wolf is amused by the antics of the rabbit she chases. “Tell me how you came to be in the Sainnite prison.”
Zanja could play the game no longer. Wearily, so that the angry woman would leave her alone and let her sleep, she answered her questions as well as she could, considering how little she could remember of the events that Norina seemed to find most interesting. With months of pain and solitude and near insanity lying between this present moment and the massacre of the Ashawala’i, it seemed a distant event in someone else’s life. She had become a ghost, and now Karis’s hand upon her heart had raised her from the dead and brought her forth into a new world, a new body, a new life. The past seemed irrelevant.
As she struggled to remember those horrible, distant events, she gradually became unnerved by the dissecting quality of Norina’s gaze and the weird accuracy of her sharply honed questions. And then, looking up impatiently as Norina asked a third question about something Zanja had twice told her she did not remember, she realized that the unnerving quality of Norina’s gaze was not wholly unfamiliar to her.
She interrupted herself, and said, “We have met before.”
“Really. How long ago?”
“How long has it been since the fall? Fifteen years?”
Norina opened her mouth, then closed it again without asking a question. Zanja had actually managed to surprise her.
Zanja said, “It was my first year to travel with the Speaker, my teacher. Do you remember, in the charterhouse, early in the morning, he was talking with Councilor Mabin? You came in to tell her you were ready to leave. You gathered her papers for her. I stood over by the tea table, watching you, unable to determine what you were. But the Speaker told me later that you are a Truthken.”
Norina said indifferently, “Mabin and the Speaker were arguing.”
“No, it was a cold but courteous conversation.”
“I had just taken my vows.”
“But you had no earring.”
“It was just a few pages of paper.”
“I remember thirty sheets, at least. I have wondered since then if she was writing her famous book– Warfare, is that its title?” Zanja added, forestalling Norina’s attempt to quiz her on further details, “You were dressed in black. There was a brisk fire in the fireplace. The sun was just rising.”
Norina said coldly, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your memory.”
Zanja had thought it might help her cause to remind Norina of their common history. Now, she realized that she only had done herself harm, though she was too stupid with exhaustion to understand how, or why.
Her bowl was empty, and she wished it full again, but with meat and potatoes this time, and some fruit and cheese besides. If not for raging hunger she would have fallen asleep where she sat.
Norina finally said, “Your history is not important. I am charged with Karis’s protection, and you have come in like a snake under the walls I’ve built around her.”
“Karis chose to walk out beyond those walls.”
“It was no choice. Fire attracts earth, and like all earth elementals Karis is particularly drawn to broken things that only she can fix. Certainly, you were sorely broken.“
Zanja looked up at the Truthken then. “If I had done this to myself just to trick her out of hiding, then you would be right to kill me, for I would be an abomination.”
“And there the puzzle lies.” Norina stood up and took the bowl, and returned in a little while with meat and roast potatoes, an apple and a piece of cheese. Little wonder some people become convinced that Truthkens can read their every thought as clearly as though they had been spoken out loud. “J’han thinks I am insane,” Norina said, “and he asked me to warn you that rich food will give you the gripe. You should tell him tomorrow that it did, even though it won’t.” She gave Zanja her eating knife, a valuable Mearish blade with an edge of startling sharpness, and sat with her booted feet stretched out to the fire while Zanja wolfed down the food.
Zanja had swallowed the last of the cheese and was struggling to keep her eyes open when Norina said quietly, “I wish I could make you my ally in protecting Karis, but we are at cross‑purposes. No–” she held up a hand to forestall a protest. “I know you are virtuous and honorable and ready to die in her defense. I know that you have given her your loyalty, and that there is no truer friend than a fire blood. But your visions and passions and moments of insight would be like poison to her. So I have no choice except to keep you away from her. I don’t expect you to be willing.”
Zanja said, “I don’t understand.”
Norina sighed, and for a moment she seemed almost troubled. “I don’t know how to explain it in a way you could accept. Karis is vulnerable and irreplaceable. You are an unpredictable visionary. With vision comes risk. Therefore, you must be kept out of her life.”
“Karis wants me.”
“Karis wants much that she cannot have. And you would do well to remember that Truthkens are executioners.”
Chapter Six
Zanja awakened to pale light filtering through window shutters, and to the hushed crackling sound of cinders cooling in the fireplace. She had fallen asleep where she sat the night before, upon the hearth, naked, with a second blanket that she did not remember being tossed over her. Karis still slept restlessly among twisted blankets, with her legs hanging out over the end of the bed, but Norina was gone. Zanja used the chamber pot and considered the clothing–Norina’s clothing, she assumed–laid out nearby for her to wear. The linen shirt and drawers would be worn next to the skin. The underclothing tied with laces, but the woolen outer clothing, both tunic and breeches, fastened with horn buttons. She then discovered buttonholes at the tops of the hose, and had to undress again, so she could button the hose to the underdrawers. She tottered across the bedroom in this warm but peculiar attire, and opened the door to the kitchen. There, in the light spilling through an unshuttered window, J’han Healer sat yawning at the scarred kitchen table with a reed pen in his hand. Bowls of dried herbs, a mortar and pestle, and a beautiful brass scale lay within his reach.
“You can walk!” he exclaimed.
“Not well.” Zanja stumbled to the hearth, where her knees gave out.
“There’s porridge already made; will you have some?” J’han tucked the pen behind his ear, and got up to serve her, following the porridge with warm milk and honey, several slices of buttered bread, and an infusion of herbs to build up her strength. He brought over a bucket of small green apples, and set it within her reach. “Have you had enough to eat?”
He had put so much effort into feeding her that it would have been cruel to tell him she was still hungry. He returned to his seat at the table, where he weighed and measured herbs into folded paper packets, and sealed them with wax. Though the healers, once renowned hospitalers, had become hunted wanderers after the fall of the House of Lilterwess, this one, at least, seemed to have found more than a home for the winter, for he and Norina had briefly awakened Zanja in the middle of the night as they made love in the kitchen.
He did not speak to Zanja again until she began to halfheartedly tear apart the mats in her hair. “Let me help–I’ll get a comb.”
So she leaned her head weakly upon his knee, and he seemed happy enough with his task, employing every trick Zanja had ever heard of to keep from resorting to the scissors, even before she explained, in response to a question, that her hair was uncut because among her people shorn hair is the mark of the outcast. She liked him all the more when he did not seem troubled that she wept as he worked, and she would even have thought he had not noticed, except that he commented later, “Someone you loved must have once combed your hair.”
“My brother Ransel,” she said. “He was killed near summer’s end.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. My brother used to comb my hair too. It’s been years since I saw him last.”
The healer had gotten up once to tend the fire, when the bedroom door opened suddenly, and Karis crouched through into the kitchen, red‑eyed as a crapulous drunk. She dazedly examined the room as she fumbled with shirt buttons. Her wandering gaze chanced across Zanja’s face, and paused.
“Try a swallow of this,” the healer said. He had leapt to his feet, and offered Karis an earthenware flask.
“J’han,” Karis rasped in her smoke‑ruined voice.
J’han looked startled, as though he had not expected her to know his name.
She sipped from the flask, and lifted a hand to her throat.
“Those with Juras blood have such beautiful voices,” the healer said.
Zanja looked at Karis, startled, as if she had not seen her before. She had heard of the Juras, a tribe of giants that were said to dwell far to the south of Shaftal, at the edge of a great waterless wasteland. It was said that the sound of their singing could cause the stars to tremble in the sky. Perhaps Karis’s voice could not be fully mended, but the ghost of its lost richness echoed now behind the hoarseness as she thanked him and then sat down heavily in a chair that was too small for her long frame. With a crease between her brows, she reached down to brush a thumb across Zanja’s tear‑stained cheekbone. The gesture left Zanja speechless.
“Can you eat yet?” J’han asked Karis.
“Chew tongue,” she slurred.
J’han seemed scarcely able to restrain his curiosity, and the corner of Karis’s mouth quirked a bit. “Angry Norina?”
“She is on one of her rampages,” he admitted.
“My fault.” Karis’s big, work‑hardened hands folded together, finger by finger, and she rested her forehead upon this support as though she had much to think about. “Where is she?” she asked after a while.
“She needed to go to Leston.”
Karis raised her head. “Did she sleep last night?”
J’han opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“No,” Karis said for him. “Shaftal protect us.”
Apparently having decided that Karis’s mouth had been released from its paralysis, J’han distractedly served her some breakfast. She ate carefully, dutifully, without apparent appetite. Watching her, Zanja remembered something she had heard once about smoke addicts, but had not heeded because it seemed absurd: that they lived in lack of pain, and die for lack of pleasure. Karis ate as though she had been trained to do it; smoke surely had destroyed her sense of taste, just as it had her sense of touch. And so, Zanja realized with a shock, Karis would indeed be deprived of both desire and agency, since the earth bloods understand through physical sensation. It must have taken an enormous talent indeed for Karis to have healed and rescued Zanja with so little apparent difficulty.
“Is there a place where I can sit in the sun?” Zanja asked.
J‘han had returned to his labors at the table. He said with some surprise, “It’s bitter cold out there.”
“I’ve been in the dark for months.”
“Well, there’s a bench out by the barn. I’ll let you use my shoes, but I doubt you can walk in snow, considering the trouble you had with walking on a solid floor.”
“I’ll go out with you.” Karis fastened her bootstraps, and Zanja put on J’han’s shoes and his doublet of quilted wool that he had worn the night before. On the way out the door, Karis asked for a slice of bread, which she held in the air as soon as the door was closed, and the raven swooped down to snatch it out of her hand.
Supported on Karis’s arm, Zanja made it to the frost‑encrusted bench without falling. The light reflected from the snow was bright enough to make her eyes tear up. She said, “I don’t know how much you remember. But last night I frightened you, and I owe you an apology.”
Karis frowned as if she were trying to remember a dream. “That’s right, you did.”
“I should have explained first what I was doing. It didn’t occur to me.”
Karis sat down beside her. “Smoke and rape go together,” she said, “like bread and butter. It’s a lesson hard to forget, once learned.”
Zanja felt a searing shame, for she understood far better than she should have the attraction of that helplessness. “You never should have taken me with you, and I never should have forced you into it.”
Karis said, “But your oath was good.”
“Of course my oath was good. But how could you have known that? And still, we nearly died of cold.”
Karis closed her eyes to the bright sun, and murmured, “You sound so like Norina, it’s almost funny. And you’re even wearing her clothes.”
Zanja did not find it funny at all, for she might admire Norina’s genius and yet have no desire to imitate it. “She and I know the truth in different ways,” she said. “My way is much more messy: confused and hazardous. I’ll never have Norina’s certainty, but I’ll never want it, either.”
Karis began to laugh, and seemed to find it hard to stop. “Blessed day,” she said at last, wiping her eyes upon her sleeve, “You dismay me. What did Norina do to you last night, to leave you so bitter in the morning? Not that I can’t imagine it, mind you, since I’ve known her half my life.” When Zanja did not–could not–speak, Karis looked over at her and said more gently, “You must have put her in a panic. I wish I could have seen such a rarity.”
“You flatter me.”
“I dared hope that once she’d seen beneath your skin you might become friends somehow. A fond hope, I know; but still, Norina can be a fine friend. She does it in her own way, but she’s appallingly reliable.”
“Did you wonder if we might be adversaries instead?”
There was a silence. Karis said in a muted voice, “I confess, that is a novelty that hadn’t even occurred to me. I want to ask, adversaries over what? But that makes me sound naive.” She leaned her head back and shut her eyes again, wearing her sadness like an old and familiar shirt. “But if you had wanted to try to control a wild power–” her voice was heavy with irony “–you missed your opportunity when you had my smoke purse in your hand and didn’t take it. So it’s not power you and Norina are adversaries over, and what else is there?”
Sitting beside Karis, with the warmth from her powerful left arm soaking into the wasted flesh of Zanja’s right shoulder, Zanja abruptly found herself unable to answer; unwilling, in fact, to continue down this path of conversation that she had embarked on so boldly. She said, knowing that she had intended to say something quite different, “I have sworn you an oath of friendship, and I have foreseen that I am destined to serve you. But Norina says that my visions and passions would be poison to you, and she threatened to kill me if I don’t stay away from you.”
She felt Karis’s muscles twitch, but when Karis spoke, Zanja heard nothing in her voice to explain that spasm of shock or pain. Without emotion, she said, “Norina often takes it upon herself to teach people their duty.”
So, Zanja thought, I am to lead an empty life.
But Karis continued after a moment, her voice straining, “When I was young, not twelve years old, my master thought that smoke would make me a better whore. He’d gone through great expense to raise me from infancy, because he knew that my mother’s size and strength had made her popular with the Sainnites. But I was such a disappointment to him: willful, disobedient, tearful, rude to the clients. And perhaps, as he realized how large I would grow, he also began to fear my eventual strength. So he made me into a smoke addict, to ensure my compliance.”
Zanja felt Karis’s weight shift, and she turned to find her peering into her face. “What would it take to shock you?”
Zanja said steadily enough, “You found me paralyzed and mutilated and lying in my own shit, yet you never shamed me for it. Surely I owe you the same courtesy.”
Karis looked away, and for a long time neither of them said anything. In her full strength and clarity of mind, Zanja might have been able to interpret this silence, turning its raw material into a thread of her own spinning. But now she could only wait, until Karis took a breath and continued, “That I have a purposeful life now, in spite of smoke, is largely thanks to Norina’s overbearing, cold‑hearted, unscrupulous meddling.”
Zanja said, “You owe me no explanations, Karis.”
“No, I am trying to explain to myself why I would follow her advice in opposition to my own–wisdom.” She paused again, as though astonished to hear herself use such a word. When she continued, it seemed she was arguing with herself. “I know it was wisdom, to save your life. And I would have done it much sooner, if not for Norina’s interference.”
Zanja said bleakly, “But now you will accept her interference once again. And what am I to do with this life, now that you have given it to me? If I am not to serve you, then what am I to do?”
Karis said, “Serve Shaftal, if you must serve.”
“I am just one warrior… .”
“Is it an Ashawala’i habit, to display a false humility? It makes me wonder if you take me for a fool.”
Zanja sat silent, and then, as Karis began to apologize, interrupted her to say, “I am not often admonished for having too little self‑importance. But I might admonish you for the same thing.”
“Oh, I know that I am important,” said Karis bitterly. “Not a day passes that I am allowed to forget it.”
When Norina came into sight, skiing behind the raven that flapped ahead of her like a black rag blowing over the snow, Karis walked part of the way to greet her, and they stood for a long time, leaning in each other’s arms, as though, without the other, neither could stand.
Almost as soon as they ended their embrace, they began to shout at each other. Zanja, able to hear the tone of their voices but not the words, turned again to look at them only when they both fell silent. The sun shone full on Karis’ stark face. Norina, in shadow, seemed grimly resolute. She had taken off the skis, and carried them on her shoulder. Karis bent down and took the satchel Norina had dropped upon the ground. It seemed a gesture of capitulation.
They turned, and started down the snowy hillside. Norina’s head came to Karis’ shoulder, and she took two steps to Karis’s one. She wore a leather doublet over her sweat‑stained wool longshirt; from a distance, it looked like armor. Karis plodded beside her, head down.
“I’m taking Karis away tomorrow.” Norina’s voice was tight with controlled rage. “You’ll stay here for the winter, with me and J’han.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Zanja made no attempt to conceal her irony. She had half‑expected the command, for, much as Norina might hate it, she had no choice except to shelter Zanja. But there was no point in pretending to be happy about such an uninviting prospect as a winter spent in Norina’s company. Little wonder Norina was so ill‑tempered, Zanja realized. Even politeness, which was sometimes the only thing that made human company tolerable, was completely transparent to her.
“She has asked me to help you find a place,” Norina said.
Zanja glanced curiously, not at Norina, but at Karis, who had pressed her lips together as though she didn’t trust what might come out of her mouth. “A place in what?”
“One of the Paladin companies, perhaps.”
“South Hill Company,” Karis said.
Norina took in her breath and released it. “Karis–”
“The commander has a good reputation.”
“Have you put this matter into my hands or haven’t you?”
Karis replied just as sharply. “Are you going to do as I ask, or aren’t you?”
There was no capitulation here, and Zanja was hard put to sort out which of them was giving orders to whom. She did not know enough about the old Lilterwess rankings, but a Truthken, as far as she could understand, outranked everyone, for in contested matters the law must take precedence. But there was no place in that old system for earth or water elementals; their very rarity precluded the creation of an Order to restrain them. No rule or way existed for Karis to follow, no law that gave Norina dominance. Karis could do as she liked.
“You should think,” Norina said, “of what you’re doing.”
“I have. It makes no sense.”
There was no possible reasonable response to senselessness. Karis could not be physically restrained, either. Norina seemed nonplused.
Reluctant to put herself in the middle of a dangerous disagreement that she did not even understand, Zanja spoke cautiously. “ Serrainim, I beg you not to sacrifice your friendship over so unworthy a cause.”
They both looked at her as though they had forgotten her. Then Norina seemed to come to her senses and said quite prettily, “I beg your pardon. Of course you may not wish to join the Paladins or to concern yourself in any way with Shaftali troubles. What is it you want to do?”
“The Sainnites themselves have made this my war. But my first concern is that Karis endanger herself no further on my behalf. Last night, I placed myself under your command, and so I must agree to whatever you say, regardless of what Karis demands. So the two of you have nothing left to argue over.”
Norina said, with scarcely a hesitation. “Perhaps I might reward your acquiescence.”
At this point in a negotiation, Ashawala’i protocol required endless protests of one’s unworthiness. But such insincerity in the presence of a Truthken would have been absurd.
“Karis?” Norina prompted, with somewhat less exasperation.
“I’ll behave myself so long as you take care of her,” Karis said.
“For what your promises are worth–”
“It’s you who have sworn to make my life possible–”
“And how was I to know–”
“You’re the Truthken!”
Norina threw up her hands. “But you are beyond comprehension!”
It was, Zanja realized, a truly astonishing statement for a Truthken to make. Not until Karis collapsed onto the bench beside her and roared with laughter did Zanja realize it had been a joke.
“It wasn’t that funny,” Norina said after a while. She had leaned against the barn wall, and seemed almost despondent. “It was the truth.”
“And whose fault is that?”
Karis took Zanja’s hand again, not to hold it, but to measure it against her own. “You’re being very patient with us,” Karis said to her, “While we fight like–”
“–A couple of sisters,” Norina said dryly.
Karis glanced over her shoulder. “Loan me your dagger, Nori.”
Zanja had noticed the night before that Norina’s knife could serve as a substantial dowry. Now she saw that her fighting blade would have become an heirloom among Zanja’s people, a blade with a genealogy, passed among the generations of the katrimas lovingly and devotedly as any story of heroism and self‑sacrifice. Norina gave the dagger to Karis, and Zanja would not even touch it until Norina impatiently nodded her permission. It was a subtle weapon of austere beauty, with a blade deceptively slender and of startling substance. The metal had been folded upon itself, over and over, leaving a wavering, overlapping pattern inlaid in its shining steel, like ripples on sand. An extraordinarily skilled and patient metalsmith had sweated over, meditated upon, and lived with that blade, day in and day out, until it welded into the smith’s very dreams and became itself a vision.
“You’re cutting yourself,” Karis said.
Zanja had involuntarily closed her hand around the blade, and it had casually parted the fabric of her palm. It could have sliced all the way to bone by weight alone, and she might never have even felt it. It seemed amazing, impossible even, that the blade had no Mearish mastermark. Surely only in Mear did the smithery exist to produce such a blade. But even a Mearish mastersmith might well have been awestruck by such workmanship, unable to reproduce it or even to say exactly how it had been done.
Zanja said shakily, “It is–an artwork. I’ve never seen its like.” She returned the magnificent blade to Norina, who sheathed it absently, seeming preoccupied with a Truthken’s arcane calculation.
Karis said, “Perhaps you’ll accept a blade like it, as a poor substitute for the friendship we’ll never have.”
Only then did Zanja realize whose vision the beautiful blade embodied, and whose hand had held the hammer that folded that bright molten blade into its final form. “I’ll send it to you by midwinter,” Karis said. “Have you had enough sunshine? I think I might be feeling cold.”
Norina’s bundle contained bread and ham and a pair of new boots that fit Zanja as though they were made for her, though in fact they had been made for Norina. Norina sent J’han away to attend a difficult birth she had heard about while in Leston, and the three of them had a surprisingly peaceable day. Zanja slept and ate for most of it, and once when she awakened upon the kitchen hearth she found herself covered by the sheepskin jerkin, which smelled, she realized now, of coal smoke and the forge. Karis and Norina were chopping vegetables for a ham stew and discussing a book of political philosophy. Norina said something that Zanja could not understand, and Karis burst out laughing and put her arm around her. They stood so for a while, leaning against each other, silent, mysteriously united by ideas, knowledge, and experiences that Zanja did not, and could not share.
The na’Tarweins were infamous for their jealousies, but Zanja had so far managed to avoid that well‑worn path. It seemed intolerable that Karis would leave, that Zanja would spend the winter here with this admirable but unlikeable woman, that these few hours she’d spent with Karis were all she would ever have. Norina was the barrier that stood between them. Unfortunately, thanks to the oath that Zanja had sworn to Karis, that barrier was permanent.
Zanja would have to make a life for herself alone, on the other side of this barren winter. But now she might steal a few more moments with Karis before sunset and smoke took her away, and so she sat up and asked Karis to explain what philosophy was, and what it was good for. That question took the rest of the day for Karis to answer. The sun set too soon.
Thus ended their brief and strange two‑day friendship, for the next morning’s brief and inarticulate goodbyes hardly counted as anything more than empty ritual.
Part 2
Fire Night
Without courage, there would be no will to know.
Without the will to know, there would be no knowledge.
Without knowledge, there would be no language.
Without language, there would be no community.
–MACKAPEE’S Principles
for Community
Who is seen to speak to the enemy must be silenced. Who
sympathizes with the enemy must lose their heart. Who dreams of
peace must dream no more. Those who ravaged the land will be
eliminated: without compromise, without mercy.
–
MABIN’S
Warfare
When I first met my enemy, she was a glyph, and it was I who
chose to read her as my friend. When my enemy first met me, I was
a glyph, and it was she who chose to read me as her friend. So all
people are glyphs, and every understanding comes from choice.
– MEDRIC’S
History of My Fathers People
Chapter Seven
Emil habitually wintered in a shepherd’s cottage in the highlands, a place so solitary and forbidding that he rarely saw another living being, animal or human, between first snow and spring thaw. The cold became tiring, but he never grew weary of the solitude or the silence. When weather permitted, he would walk on snowshoes from one end of the highland to the other, and the austere and terrible beauty of that wild land would take root, and create in him a serenity all the more precious because he knew from experience how ephemeral and fleeting it would prove, come spring. When the wind howled and the falling snow made of the vast expanses a small and restless blank, he stayed indoors and read yet again by candlelight the words of the great Shaftali philosophers until whole passages became as palpable to him as a single word, a single thought. Every moment, every breath of frigid air, every flicker of candle and crackle of ice became precious. For most of the year his life belonged to the law, but in winter, his life was his.
Inevitable spring allowed him one last walk across the frozen water of the Finger Lakes, where he cleared the snow to watch the fish through ice as clear as glass. But as he stood on a rise of land about to turn toward home, he heard the sharp report of cracking ice. So the muddy thaw began.
Some twenty days later, during a break in the rain, he was planting flowering peas along the fence when something, a faint sound or a tingling of the skin, made him turn sharply, to see a pair of riders coming down the narrow from the direction of Gariston. In nearly thirty years as a Paladin he had come to trust his small talent for prescience, which never told him very much, but told it dependably. Knowing he had no reason for concern, he turned back to his pea planting until the travelers had ridden close enough to talk to. The horses were tired and muddy to the belly, for the roads surely had scarcely been passable. One rider looked cross; the other’s face was a closed door.
