“Well, I don’t know allthe particulars.”

“That was Karis’s wife?”

“Her tormentor,” said Medric. “Her champion. Her poet. Her captive.”

It appeared he could indefinitely continue with this contradictory list, but he was distracted by the arrival of two more people: a gray man, who looked like the breath had been knocked out of him, supported by the most terrifying woman Garland had ever set eyes on.

Medric hurried to grab both the man’s hands in his. “What happened?”

The frightening woman, having settled the gray man on a stool, said, “They dropped a box of books. He tried to catch it, of course.”

“You can’t be killed by the books! After all you’ve done for them!”

The gray man, despite his obvious pain, managed to laugh.

“Maybe we’d better find J’han,” said the woman.

With a worried glance at the baking bread, Garland fled the kitchen in a panic. In the hall, extremely muscular people, Karis among them, were heaving crates towards the stairs. In the back bedroom, Garland found J’han, already awakened by the racket and mostly dressed. “There’s a man in the kitchen who’s having trouble breathing,” Garland said.

“Bring that box, will you?” J’han sprinted down the hall in his stocking feet.

Leeba slept in her little twig bed, with the lizard nearby in his own bed, and the rabbit smothered under a blanket, with only a torn, cotton‑leaking foot showing. Garland shut the door quietly: the longer Leeba was not underfoot, the better.

“Get out the foxglove–it’s labeled,” said J’han, the moment Garland entered the kitchen. “Emil, lie down on the floor so your heart won’t have to work as hard. Is that water heating on the fire?”

“The pain is passing,” said the gray man.

“Sorrow is killing you,” grumbled J’han. “For that I have no cure.”

Garland said, “J’han, I can’t read.”

The terrifying woman turned her gaze on him. Garland set J’han’s chest of medicines rather hastily on the table, and tried to think of an excuse to run out of the room again. Was the cornbread cool enough to feed to the ravens?

Medric opened the box, and plucked out one of the tin canisters, and showed Garland the handwritten label. “Foxglove,” he read. “Poison. Say, isn’t it time that Leeba learn her letters?” He added to Garland in Sainnese, “Take deep breaths, brother. It will pass.”

The terrifying woman said in a cool voice that slashed Garland’s ears like a razor, “I am Norina Truthken. Who are you?”

Medric clasped Garland’s hand. “The truth,” he prompted him. His hand was still cold from the snow, and soft, a scholar’s hand, but there was a strength in it, too.

“Garland. A Sainnite. A cook.”

The terrifying woman said, “I’ll stay out of your kitchen.”

“What?”

The woman laid a hand on J’han’s shoulder and the healer, shockingly, pressed his cheek against it. And then she went out, and even from the back seemed dangerous. As soon as the door was closed, Garland’s panic fled.

“She has a strong effect on people,” said J’han. “But I guess we’ve all gotten immune to it.”

Medric brought J’han the canister, but J’han waved him away. The gray man raised a face as gaunt and stark as Karis had looked when Garland first met her. But there was a kindness in him, and Garland immediately began to think of what to feed him. Tea, he thought. This man needs tea, and a lot of good, hot bread, perhaps an entire loaf. Then some real food. “Surely that pot’s about to boil,” he said, and opened the tea tin.

The gray man said, “Ah, Medric, my dear, once again you were right.”

“Emil,” said Medric reprovingly, “I’m always right.”

“Right about what?” asked J’han, his fingers still pressed to the pulse in Emil’s wrist.

“About Garland. Medric dreamed him into our kitchen.”

All eight loaves of bread were eaten, and Garland also cooked two more pans of sausage before the cold‑sharpened appetites were satisfied. Karis, carrying a sausage that was wrapped in a thick slice of bread, had gone down the mountain again, this time to fetch grain and hay from a distant farm for the exhausted draft horses. By the time she returned, the three drivers had fallen asleep by the parlor fire. Leeba had awakened to sit in Emil’s lap for a while, as he recounted the highlights of their journey. Then she had played with Medric, a game that seemed to have no clear rules and involved a great deal of running around. Garland had started more bread dough and a pot of beans, and was rolling out the crust for a meat pie when Karis finally came in. Ice shattered from her jerkin as she pulled it off to hang near the hearth. Her moth‑eaten gloves must have dissolved, for her unprotected hands were white with cold. Garland gave her a cup of hot tea to hold.

No one spoke. Norina and J’han appeared from the bedroom where they had been unpacking a crate, but Norina leaned on the door frame and did not come into the kitchen. Emil rested in a twig chair brought in from the parlor, his face pale with exhaustion, though he had turned down Garland’s offer of his own bed. All of them had been waiting for Karis, but now that she was here no one spoke. After she had drunk her tea, Garland gave her the half loaf of bread and the sausages that he had hidden away for her, and she uttered a sigh of gratitude. Garland said, “You’ve done three days’ work this morning, and no doubt you’ll spend the afternoon making chairs and beds.” For these travelers, despite their extraordinary quantity of baggage, had not transported a stick of furniture with them. Karis said, “Well, carpentry is easy work. Wood is so willing.” Garland pulled up a stool to the table, and gave her the butter and the butter knife.

She sat down and buttered her bread with intense concentration as everyone, even Norina, lounging in the doorway, watched her. Garland had given Leeba some pastry dough and the rolling pin and it appeared that her poor lizard was becoming a lizard pie.

“But there’s other work,” Karis said, mouth full. “Like healing Emil’s–” she glanced inquiringly at J’han.

“Heart,” he said.

Emil said, “I do not ask for healing. What I need is your forgiveness.”

Karis set down her bread. “You’ll accept both,” she said, “or you’ll get neither.”

Emil said flatly, “Karis, I don’t forgive myself.”

With the small knife that usually dangled, along with a number of other small tools, from her belt, Karis had speared a sausage. But she eyed the sausage without interest, put it back on her plate, then stood up and went to Emil, and, with an abrupt, heavy movement knelt at his feet.

He looked at her blankly. She lowered her head to rest on his knee. His hand lifted as of its own will, to stroke the wild tangle of her hair. She said, her voice muffled, “Did Zanja think I wanted her dead? Because I did not stop her?”

Norina said from the doorway, “What did you hope she would think?”

Karis raised her head. “That I was trying to be worthy, maybe.”

She sat back on her heels. Garland could see only the back of Karis’s head, her exceptionally square shoulders, her arms at her sides with her hands apparently resting on her thighs. But whatever Emil saw in her face brought the life back into his. “You let her go?” he said, amazed. “Karis? You let hergo?”

“Not very gracefully.” Norina’s tone was cool, but when Karis glanced at her, Garland thought he understood a little of how rare and difficult–and satisfying–it might be to win a Truthken’s approval.

“You knew?” cried Medric at Norina, outraged. “You let us think Karis was angry? And you knew all along that she was–”

“–merely devastated,” Norina said.

Karis said quietly, “You know I loved her. And I let her die. What kind of person would do that?”

Garland, attempting to fill the pie crust with meat and vegetables without looking at his hands, saw a quiet descend on all of them.