“I did wonder what we were hauling a printing press around for,” Karis said to Medric. “But does anyone know how to use it? I doubt it.”

“Oh, you’re as bad as Emil,” Medric said. “It doesn’t matter,Karis. It’s just a machine.You’ll figure it out.”

“Not necessarily. I never learned to cook or sew.”

“Your hands are too big, and you just didn’t like the idea. But you like the idea of printing a book, don’t you?”

She looked at him askance. “I think you’d better get J’han to mix you a potion.”

Leaning on the wall nearby, Garland began to laugh helplessly. He muffled his face in his collar.

“You think,” Karis added, “that we can typeset, print, and bind five hundred books.”

“Emil knows bookbinding.”

“But the typesetting, Medric! It takes years of training!”

“It only has to be readable, though. And we have to do it.”

“Oh, well, if we haveto … ,” she said sarcastically.

“Good!” Apparently having become aware of the cold, Medric huddled, grinning, in his coat. “Emil and J’han between them must know practically everyone worth knowing in Shaftal. We’ll get the books to their friends, and they’ll give them to their friends …”

“We?” said Karis. “How, exactly? In dead of winter? You aremad.”

He nodded so enthusiastically that his neck appeared pliable as a noodle. Karis gazed at him with fond exasperation. “Tell me, master seer,” she said, “We need sledges to move the books, but how can I build sledges without any wood?”

He gestured expansively at the nearby trees.

“Green wood will be too heavy.”

“Well, you’ll think of something.” He yawned so abruptly and prodigiously that Garland yawned with him in sympathy.

“And what of Long Night?” she asked.

Medric looked for a moment like he didn’t know what she was talking about. “I can’t see that far,” he finally confessed. “Too many possibilities, too much unknown. If I knew that Zanja knows she is alive … or if I knew what the creature in her skin is doing … or if I knew anything about her, really …” He seemed, then, suddenly human: crestfallen, his fierce enthusiasm burnt to ashes, his wild certainties revealed as mere guesswork.

“Is it time to send a raven to Watfield?”

“No, no, I think not. Not yet. Restrain yourself.”

“You’re hardly the one to lecture me about restraint!”

“Hardly,” he said agreeably. “By the lands, I am exhausted. I don’t even know why. I’m going to bed now.”

When he was gone, Karis glanced at Garland. “He doesn’t know why he’s tired? One conversation with him and I’m exhausted.”

“You just need some breakfast.” Garland’s face, stiff with cold, felt as if it would crack.

“Will you cook eggs? Should I go down the hill and get us some?”

Garland squatted with his back against the house’s sturdy stone side. “The G’deon of Shaftal wants to walk two miles in the snow to fetch her cook some eggs?”

“Yes.” She stretched her long legs, and her feet reached to the bottom step. “I have no patience, Garland. Zanja liked to comment on her lack of patience, though as far as anyone could see, her patience was supernatural. She could wait with such stillness that she practically disappeared. All the while, she was silently, motionlessly, unnoticeably–exploding.”

Garland couldn’t see Karis’s face. She was looking across the snow’s aching glare. But her big, dirty hands, belying the quiet, steady tone of her voice, had clenched into fists.

Garland said, “The two of you were a bit alike, I guess.”

Karis looked at him. “Let me fetch some eggs. It’ll be another hour in which I won’t go mad. I can stretch it out to two hours, probably, by chatting with the farmers about their livestock. When I get home, you’ll feed me a lot of good food, and only then will I have to figure out what to do with the rest of the day. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough that someone will break something, so I can fix it.” She sighed. “The G’deon of Shaftal?” she said belatedly.

“There’s a lot I don’t understand about that. But these learned people insist that’s what you are.”

Karis said dryly, “I’ve heard that rumor too. But I never gave it much credence. Dowe need eggs?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“A kind man would have lied.”

“One never knows when a Truthken might be listening.”

She tilted her head back to look at him. The corners of her eyes were crinkled with squinting into the sun. “You mustn’t like us, Garland. It’s terribly dangerous. We’ll catch you up in some mad scheme. We’ll make you pack up your pots and abandon that sweet oven, in dead of winter, to trudge about in the teeth of various snowstorms, trying to convince a bunch of bored farmers to read a seditious book.”

“Oh, I don’t mind.” Garland looked at her sun‑brilliant eyes, her weathered skin, the twisted mess of her hair. “To have my own kitchen used to be my life’s ambition,” he added in some amazement. “It was not too long ago.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake. What has that crazy seer done to you?”

Garland tried to think of an answer. He did not think Medric was even to blame.

Karis continued, with an agitation that seemed altogether unfeigned, “We come to you with our weary spirits, our broken hearts, our extremely baffled minds, and you make us biscuits, sausage rolls, jam buns, poached eggs with that amazing sauce, seed cakes, roast fowl varnished with that delicious shiny stuff–”

“Raspberry jam glaze.”

“I walk into your realm, and you hand me something to eat. Whatever it is tastes so good that my fears and worries drop dead on the spot. I sit there with my mouth full, knowing nothing but how good it is. It isn’t food,Garland. It’s sanity.”

Garland picked flakes of dried dough off his hands. He felt quite speechless.

“Don’t change,” she said.

“I’ll stop cooking for you when you stop needing to eat. And I don’t need a kitchen.”

“Is that a promise? I’ll hold you to it.” She was laughing. She had no idea what she had just given him.

Garland managed to say after a while, “Can you explain something?”

“Explaining things, that’s what Emil does.”

“But I have trouble understanding him, he uses so many words.”

She glanced back at him. “He does that to entertain Medric. Words are as good as sex to those two.”

“Oh,” Garland said. Then, as comprehension belatedly came to him, he exclaimed, “Oh!”

She was grinning. “But Emil can be perfectly plain spoken; just ask him. What do you want me to explain? You understand I’ll do it badly?”

“Why is it so important that you don’t take any action, if inaction is driving you mad?”

Garland began to wish he hadn’t asked, after a while. He could see that Karis’s light spirits had gotten heavy, and she was squinting across the yard again, as though she could see through the woods, down the mountain, across the rough landscape of that rocky land, all the way to Watfield. And perhaps, he realized suddenly, that was precisely what she wasdoing. It was a dazzling, unnerving possibility. She said at last, “Imagine you’ve got a tray of food balanced on one hand. And you need to add something really heavy to the tray.”

“A steamed pudding?”

“Yes, a steamed pudding. The only place you can safely put that pudding is in the middle of the tray, right above your hand. If you get it even slightly wrong, the entire meal goes to the floor.”

Garland could almost see it: the shattered plates, the splattered gravy, the flying peas, the dismayed cook, the ravenous diners startled by the disaster. “I’d be very careful where I put that pudding,” he said.

“Well, I’m the pudding.”

“Oh.” There was a long silence. “I do need eggs after all,” Garland finally said. “And I was wondering if you could–” He hastily considered his long list of chores. “If you could sharpen my knives. And don’t you need to figure out how that press works? And where to get some wood for sledges?”