The answer now seemed obvious. “She’s waiting in agony for action to become possible.”

Emil said grimly, “Well, that’s why you and I are responsible. Making action possible is fire bloods’ business.”

Over the glyph card he met her stricken stare. Then, without speaking, he put down the Pyre and picked up Unbinding‑and‑Binding. He held it up, reversed. “What must we do to make action possible?”

There was a swirling in the room, like an unfelt wind. Nothing stirred, and yet it was not still. Zanja’s voice spoke, flat and distant. “Cut me free so I can fall.”

“If you are cut free, then you can cross the boundary?” He pointed at the upside‑down owl.

The woman, arms and legs spread wide, was flying. The owl, wings dangling, clung desperately: a helpless passenger. “Will must precede insight,” Zanja’s voice said.

He picked up the card and looked at it himself, upside‑down. His expressive eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Must we act without knowing what we’re doing, or why?”

“We must!Action must become possible! Disaster must not be my fault again!”

It was death, that was the smell. And the smoke of the village burning. Zanja, stumbling among the bodies of the massacred katrim.The dawn mist glimmered now with the rising sun. Her foot crushed an outstretched hand, stuck in bloody mud. A buzzing sound of converging blowflies. Over the roar of flames, a baby cried for a rescue that would never come.

“What is the connection between the past and the present?” Emil asked.

His even voice revealed only his carefully moderated curiosity. But his arms were gripped around her, and he rocked with her, and Zanja’s throat felt like she had been breathing smoke, or screaming. Glyph cards were scattered around and crushed between them. “What,” she said.

“Why do you feel that our present moment is similar to that day six years ago?”

“I feel our doom. I am doing my duty too dutifully.”

“Is Karis like the elders, in your mind? Refusing to exercise power to save her people?”

Emil’s steady questions, Zanja realized, were forcing her forward, out of the grip of memory, into the present moment, into the relief of considering her past from the distance of the present.

“Is it your duty to Karis that you are doing too dutifully?”

She lifted her head from his shoulder, and he released his tight embrace, though he did not entirely let go of her. “I’ve become trapped along with her.”

“Well then, if will precedes insight, what do you think you should do?”

“I have to leave.”

He sat back. “I’ll just unpack these books I’ve managed to collect, and maybe say a word or two to Medric. Shall I talk to Karis also?”

“No. I will.” She took a breath. “I must.”

He helped her up, and steadied her until the dizziness passed. Then, she walked out of the house alone, into the heartless dazzle of the hot afternoon.

Their comfortable though much neglected house was surrounded by fallow fields, where wildflowers bloomed in a tangled riot, and at night the light‑bugs swarmed. The outbuildings were falling down, but the apple orchard, hoed, pruned, and picked by industrious neighbors, provided an orderly front to their otherwise disorderly household. Zanja walked through the orchard in a daze, taking her sense of direction from the clangor of iron on iron, and so reached the forge, where Karis and the two local youths she was teaching to be smiths stepped back and forth between hammer and flame in an intricate, violent dance. Karis wore a sleeveless linen shirt under her leather apron. The muscles of her powerful right arm shone with sweat as she swung the hammer. Three deafening blows and the iron bent itself to her will. The apprentices exchanged awestruck glances. She tossed the draw‑knife she was making into a bucket of water, and the bucket boiled over.

She hung her apron on a hook and came to Zanja. She took her by the shoulders. Sweat dipped from the tips of the hair that twisted on her forehead. Her skin was copper, her eyes agate, her hair a burnished bronze. And her hands on Zanja’s shoulders were like two mountains about to grind each other into rubble.

Zanja could not speak. Her will was lost. When her love for Karis came over her like this, there was no room in her for anything else.

Karis said, “Are you going?”

Her ravens must have been listening at the window. Was she angry at what she had overheard? Bewildered? Or merely resigned? Zanja could not read her. And to reply to her question was impossible. But Karis must have received an answer that somehow radiated from Zanja’s skin into her sensitive hands.

Karis kissed her: a sweat‑salty, sun‑hot kiss. Then she lifted her hands and stepped back.

She had let go.

Chapter Ten

Zanja was standing in a room. It smelled of leather, and oil, and dust. The windows all were ajar, letting in light but no breeze. The glare of sunlight suggested it was afternoon. Zanja was looking at a cluttered shoemaker’s bench. Beside it on a shelf stood a neat row of finished shoes–summer shoes, not the high, heavy boots of winter. Of course it wassummer. Zanja could hear a blurry murmur of voices overhead and the creak of a floorboard under someone’s restless weight. One of the voices sounded rather irritated.

She heard a scrape of leather soles on the wooden floor and turned to find Emil beside her.

“I haven’t been much of a companion, have I?” she said.

“You’ve recited some good poetry,” he said. “Your transliterations of Koles. They’re really quite brilliant. I hope you’ve written them down.”

“How long have I been in this daze?”

“It’s now three days past midsummer.”

Zanja’s shoulders, and the soles of her feet, were sore. These sensations brought memories of walking, of sitting blank and wakeful by a campfire, of a dark but spectacular vista where a distant lake glimmered and a dog barked, far away. Emil had sat awake with her one night, and she had staved off memories of death by talking about the lives of her lost people.

“Where are we now?” she asked.

Before Emil could explain, the shoemaker came down the narrow stairs: a thin, graying woman, hands stained with dye, who squinted a bit at them and seemed none too pleased to find them still waiting. “My mother asks you to come upstairs,” she said disapprovingly.

“Thank you very much,” said Emil. “Would you mind if we leave our gear down here ?”

“Just put it out of the way,” the shoemaker said ungraciously.

Emil led the way up the stairs. Zanja said to his back, “It has something to do with books? Books lost in a fire?”

“Just listen,” he said. “And mind your manners.”

In the plain upstairs parlor, a wasted old woman sat by a bright window with a letter–Emil’s letter of introduction–in her lap. Her arms and face were patched and twisted by ugly, long‑healed burn scars. Her breath rasped in her chest. But her gaze was bright and curious as her visitors came in. “Emil Paladin? I believe I remember you.”

Emil bowed over her hand. “Madam Librarian, I definitely remember you. You are the one who insisted I put on silk gloves.”

“You were to see the Mackapee manuscript. And students never remember to wash their hands before coming to the library. But you never saw the manuscript, did you?”

“I was never a student, either. I’m amazed that you remember me!”

“Those last days of the library, I remember every single moment. What happened to you, after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess?”

“I commanded a Paladin company for fifteen years. And now I am a bit of a librarian myself.”

“Oh, are you a collector of lost books? How many do you have?”

“Many thousands. And one of them is the Mackapee manuscript.”

She gazed at him in amazement, which slowly became delight. “The manuscript survived?”

“It seems to be unharmed. I’m working with a seer, so I’ve found books in some odd places, where people hid them from the Sainnites and then forgot about them. Many of the books are damaged, and I’ve been asking people if they know anyone who could teach me to repair them. Your name was suggested to me, finally.”