The three of them had been reading the cards when the anxious neighbor interrupted them. A three‑person reading was not for the faint‑hearted, for they slowed each other down to the point of tedium with their questions and answers, and with the difficult task of reconciling the multitude of contradictory insights that occurred to them with every new card. Medric was recording the twists and turns of their grueling work, and when he shattered a pen had managed to splatter himself, the room, and most of the cards with ink. In Emil’s absence he had trimmed a new pen and, after reviewing his notes, had started a fresh page. He scribbled on, ridiculously ink‑speckled, undisturbed by Emil’s grumpiness. Zanja offered Emil the bowl of raw, overripe vegetables that she had rescued from the neglected garden. He sat down, took a bite of a rather yellow piece of cucumber, spit it out again, and studied the scattered cards in silence. After a while, he started rearranging them, studying the new pattern, and rearranging them again.

The two of them were at their most maddening, but Zanja was fortunate to be so wrung out that she welcomed even the respite of watching them trap themselves in their own ruminations. She slipped into an exhausted sleep, and when she woke up, Emil was examining Medric’s paper by the light of the window, and Medric was standing over the table, studying Emil’s arrangement of the cards. She had no idea how much time had passed.

“Huh!” Medric exclaimed.

“Ah!” Emil said at the same time.

They looked bemusedly at each other across the room.

Zanja rubbed her gritty, tear‑raw eyes. “Wise men, explain to me my fate.”

Emil said, “With all the questions we’ve asked, we really are asking just three questions: Why must you die? How should this death be accomplished? And what might be the future result if we are successful?”

Zanja glanced at the tabletop. The cards were arranged in three clusters, and each cluster was an answer: an answer that was a poem no less complex or resistant to reading than the poetry of Koles. Though the two men could just as easily have each played the opposite role, Emil had defined the poetic arrangements, and, she assumed, Medric had transliterated them. Zanja said, “To translate the glyphs that answer these questions, one must be analytical, practical, and visionary by turns, just as the questions are.”

Medric gave a loud laugh. “While we slaved away, you saw the answers in your sleep, didn’t you?”

“I feel like my head has been broken. When that happened the first time, I wanted to sleep all the time. But the Sainnites could not withstand the intelligence of my dreams.” Zanja got up rather stiffly to take a close look at the cards. She did not feel intelligent, but the cards’ meaning seemed clear as light, distinct as a voice speaking loudly in an empty room. “Why must I die? Here lies the owl, myself, beset by the past, by the Laughing Man, by war and truth, by unhealed wounds. I cannot fly under that weight, and only death can lift it from me.”

Emil said, “How should your death be accomplished? There I am, of course, the Man on the Hill, who will send you on a journey to the underworld. The Pyre belongs there, but it’s shared with the next pile, so I put the flame card there, to signify transformation as well as insight, and the raven card, which we say is the carrier of truth and you say is death. Your soul only will be consumed; your vacant body will survive, to be filled again somehow by your god. My duty is to empty you; and the card that signifies ceremonials suggests I am to enact your death through ritual.”

Medric said, seriously for once, “Call it by another name, define it as we like, it is still death, and not merely a metaphor. As for the future …” Medric took the owl from the first pile and moved it to the last. “Death‑becomes‑Life: for Karis, who will step through a door; for the Sainnites, who will be subject to the flame. Past‑Becomes‑Future: the old G’deon, I think this means. Harald, who first refused to destroy us Sainnites when it would have been easy to do so. The three of us always assumed it was to keep Shaftali from becoming destroyers, but here we have a card of preservation, which suggests that for all the evil the Sainnites have done, something about us is worthwhile. But the three of us have not named that thing, have we?”

“I have two names,” said Emil. “One is Medric, one is Karis. Oh, I mustn’t forget that cook in the woods. And many more Sainnites whose names I don’t yet know.”

In the silence, they could hear the ravens making a racket in the apple orchard, not warning of another neighbor’s approach, but uttering the harsh shouts of raucous welcome. Emil leaned half his body out the window, shading his eyes from the glare of sun. “I think there’s five ravens now. Yes, I see Norina and J’han together coming up the hill. He’s looking more than a little footsore, as if he never paused to rest during his entire trip from south to north. And Norina is as I’d expect her to be.” He drew his body back into the room.

“Emil… !” Zanja stopped herself, embarrassed that she sounded so beseeching.

But he said, “Medric and I will attempt to explain all this to them.”

Medric seemed inclined to object, but Emil gave him a look so grim that Medric followed him reluctantly out, glancing back at Zanja with an expression of comical terror.

Long before Emil thought to shout at the ravens to send for Norina and J’han, the ravens must have told them to come home and orchestrated their meeting along the way as well. Through the window, Zanja watched as Emil spoke, J’han wept, and Norina raged. She listened as they came into the house and, in the kitchen, Emil built up the fire and hung the teakettle. She went into the kitchen when it seemed the leading edge of the storm was past, but she was not surprised when Norina gave her a look she rather would have avoided, and commented, “So now you have finally found an excuse for suicide.”

Zanja said flatly, “I do not want to die.”

Apparently convinced and at a loss, Norina sat silently on a stool. Zanja had to turn away to escape that disconcerting, unrelenting gaze. Medric abstractedly wiped out the dusty teacups, and J’han looked bleakly around himself, seeking the daughter whose absence left the house achingly silent. His heavy pack, loaded with medicines and instruments of surgery, squatted in the corner, but J’han seemed unable to sit down.

Norina said quietly, “J’han, Karis will not keep Leeba from you.”

“But she iskeeping me from her!” J’han accepted a cup of tea from Emil, but did not seem to know what to do with it.

“You promised Leeba you’d be home by late summer, and she knows the seasons now, so she will not give Karis a moment’s peace.” Norina accepted a cup, sipped cautiously, and added to him, “The less you have to do with this fire blood business, the better. Perhaps you should leave right away, and ask that the ravens show you the way to Leeba. And be insistent.”

“Name of Shaftal,” said Emil, “the poor man is exhausted–”

“If Karis is angry, let’s make certain there’s one person she can’t be angry with. J’han, you think these fire bloods all have lost their minds?”

He looked surprised, for he was incapable of being so judgmental. But then he said, “Yes. All three of them at once. All right, I’ll go.” He swallowed his tea, and Emil went to get him some money. J’han fetched clean clothes and kissed them all good‑bye, Zanja twice, and was going out the door when he paused and said, “But what will I tell Karis if I find her? I am utterly confounded.”

“Oh!” Medric got hastily to his feet and fetched the book box from the parlor. Its pointed warnings to be careful with the contents were obscured by the twine Medric had used to secure it for its journey. “Just give this to her, and tell her to read it.”