Clement said, “Actually, the horses are uncomfortably crowded because the stable is now the barracks for the soldiers displaced by Cadmar’s arrival. We’ve cleared the soldiers out of your room, too, and I think I’d better put you to bed. You’re uglier than ever,” she added affectionately.

“You’re crabbier,” said Gilly hoarsely. “For a moment I thought you were going to clout him.”

“What does he think, that I’ve saved a clean uniform to wear for his arrival? The laundry hasn’t been rebuilt, and I gave Ellid half my clothing, since hers was burned.”

“You’ve been free of Cadmar for two months. You’ve got nothing to complain about.”

They moved down the road, Gilly leaning heavily on her arm, at more of a shuffle than a walk. The horses were led past them in a clatter of shod hooves on cobblestone. Behind them, Clement could hear the gate captain shouting orders. “I wouldn’t clout Cadmar,” Clement said. “His fists are twice the size of mine.”

Gilly chuckled, then coughed wretchedly.

Gunshots. Clement flinched. Fearful cries. She said loudly, “What is written on those pieces of cloth those people wrap themselves with? Did you notice?”

“It was names.”

Someone was screaming. Apparently, injuries had not been entirely avoided. “Gods of hell,” Clement muttered.

“Some veteran you are,” said Gilly dryly.

“Why don’t they give up and get busy breeding more children? It doesn’t take any particular effort!”

Gilly looked at her. “It’s not children they want,” he grated. “It’s those particular children. No, never mind–you’ll never understand it.”

She took him to his room and put him to bed. She told him about Alrin’s attempt to sell her child to Cadmar, but she could not remember why it had ever seemed funny.

Chapter Thirteen

In those days before autumn mud, Norina Truthken observed some remarkable things, and commented on them to nobody. She was famous for her acerbic tongue and quick temper: brutal weapons in the control of a subtle mind that no one underestimated more than once. In those days, she found herself exercising that subtlety without the weaponry, and though she saw much worth commenting on and even criticizing, she merely watched in silence.

Dust gathered in their half‑abandoned house; what vegetables had survived in the neglected garden went ungathered; their storerooms that should have been filling up for the long winter lay empty. Wherever Karis had gone, she had taken the household concerns with her, and had a neighbor visited their home he would have concluded that they were soon to become burdens on their community.

Karis also remained silent: present in her ravens, but speechless. She had removed herself beyond Norina’s ability to know her truths, yet that very act of removal signified to Norina a truth that the fire bloods could not perceive. They saw rejection and refusal, and perhaps even Karis herself thought that her absence meant anger. Fire bloods see in the heat of passion and imagination, and air bloods see coldly, clearly. Sometimes that dispassion was a distinct advantage.

Emil wrestled with himself in a way that was painful to watch. As commander of South Hill Company he had regularly sent friends to their deaths, but he and Zanja had an intimacy that could not be described as simple friendship, and to kill her with his own hand would kill him as well. This Norina saw, and as she watched him work his slow way to acceptance of this unacceptable, mad plan, she knew that in the end to fulfill his role would literally break his heart. Yet Norina held her tongue.

Medric, as always, was more enigmatic. Flippant and sorrowful by turns, he read his books of history frantically, looking for a fact or story that would trigger his insight and give him the broad vision that might explain their actions to themselves. So seers always spend their lives, seeking a perfect understanding that inevitably eludes them; some finally fall into madness, while others realize at last that their purpose lies not in the unachievable goal, but in the seeking of it. Medric was terribly young, still in his mid‑twenties, and perhaps he was too young to bear such a personal burden for the hopes of his friends. He grew haggard from forgetting to eat and sleep, and Emil and Zanja were too preoccupied to look after him. Norina started bringing him bowls of porridge and supervising while he ate, though he complained about her miserable cooking. She watched him flounder like a fish caught in the jaws of destiny, and wondered whether he would change his shape before he was swallowed. She made no comment, though.

Zanja waschanging, and this was the most remarkable thing Norina found to watch. If ever Norina, in all her skeptical life, had been tempted to believe in divine intervention, it was during those weeks of harvest as she watched Zanja’s metamorphosis. Zanja, oblivious to the changing season, appeared to be writing a book. Norina glanced at her work one day, and found that it was a collection of Leeba’s favorite stories, mixed in with other stories that Norina had never heard: more complex stories, stories that Leeba would love in a few months, or a year, or several years. One of these was an exceedingly strange tale of a woman who murdered herself to save her daughter’s life, and how her daughter never forgave her for it. Norina could imagine reading that story to Leeba one day, though she could not imagine how the world around them might have changed by then.

Except for her work on the book for Leeba, Zanja seemed–not aimless, for she was too quiet for that–but distant, waiting. Examining her, Norina saw a mindless preoccupation, like a caterpillar starting to weave a silken coffin around itself, or a bear getting ready to bury itself in a winter’s grave. But that peaceful purposefulness was always threatened by a pain as intense as Emil’s. Zanja called herself a crosser of boundaries: her gods had named her so. And every boundary crossing, she said, was a death. So she was accustomed to dying, and knew how to go about it. But she who had endured such terrible losses in her life could not endure any more, and so she kept pretending to herself that when she died, her lover, her child, and her dearest friends would not be lost to her. It was an extraordinary act of self‑deception: the kind of magic that fire bloods excel at. Norina was there when that self‑deception failed, and Zanja began to weep.

She wept for days. And then she took the dagger Karis had forged for her, and laid it on the bed she and Karis had shared all these years, and she roughly bound the pages of her book with a leather seam and set the book aside, and, as the apple harvest began, she started to go out walking, from before sunrise to past sunset. Every night, when Norina saw her at supper, she saw a woman who had become a little less familiar. And still Norina did not talk about what she saw, to Zanja or to anyone.

A letter came from J’han, much dirtied by its hand‑to‑hand journey, that told of births attended, bones mended, and lives ended, and finished with a sentence that his raven had begun to talk to him, occasionally. Norina wondered if she would ever see him, or her daughter, again. So even she lived through the harvest season in a state of loss, but she was never bewildered by it. She had never hesitated to sacrifice passion to principle; she was an air blood and she knew no more rational way to live. So, like Zanja, she was uniquely qualified for the task that lay before her.

Even as Zanja began the process of transforming herself, Medric and Emil began to discuss, painfully at first but with increasing fascination, how to make that transformation permanent. Fire logic is the logic of insight, of seeing in symbols and stories and events more meanings than an entirely sane person could see. To turn that seeing into an act of magic was rarely done, and there were no rules for how to do it. As the two scholars talked, their plans inevitably became convoluted. To enact in ritual a symbolic understanding was complicated. Soon, as Norina expected, they asked her to take a role in the ritual, and so she was able to start making plans of her own.