Jerrell said grimly, “Well, I’ve done both, and I’d say killing a stranger is much easier than chopping off the arms and legs of my friends.”

The raven circling overhead tilted its wings and flew into the sunrise. Perched on the hilltop with his spyglass, Emil reported that the Sainnites continued to retreat. Annis found Zanja, and her excited monologue gave Zanja some relief from thinking. She had time to change her shirt and to settle her stomach with a mouthful of hardtack before the company began again to travel, carrying the dead and wounded, some somber, like Zanja, and some, like Annis, giddy with triumph.

At mid‑day, they stopped to rest and eat. Annis was called away to give her opinion on a faulty pistol, and Zanja sat solitary in the cool shade of a tree, pretending peace for a little while.

Emil limped over with his camp stool under his arm. “Daye says you have something to tell me.” He had taken off his doublet, which had been stained with a distinct arc of spattered blood. He sat heavily upon his stool, and offered Zanja a wedge of cheese to go with her half‑eaten piece of bread. She said, “I speak Sainnese.”

He gave her a startled look, but said half‑humorously, “Of course you do. And what did the Sainnites say?”

“Just before the battle began, I overheard a conversation between the commander and a soldier, the one I killed.”

“The first of three, I hear.”

“The commander was angry, almost as though he had been so confident of his victory that night that he could not believe it had been stolen from him. He said, ‘That seguliswore we would have victory this night.’ Then, he added, ‘He has never been wrong before.’ Then, because he was in such a bad humor, he sent that woman to her death.”

“Hmm.”

Though the days had begun to warm, in the cool woods it remained chilly, and the trees had scarcely begun to leaf out. Emil wore his tattered coat, and Zanja could hear the faint sound of his watch ticking in a pocket.

Emil said, “What is a seguli?”

“Unfortunately, I have never heard that word before. But I think the segulimay be our true enemy–a talented strategist, the same one who gutted Rees Company last year.”

“If he truly has never been wrong before, our little escapade today will surely leave him–and them–a bit unnerved.” For a moment, Emil looked as gleeful as a boy, and then he sobered. “Still, if not for you, they would have found us, and it would have been a massacre.”

“We were lucky,” Zanja said. It would not do for Emil to start relying on her to predict their battles for him. The raven was gone, and Karis would certainly see to it that he never returned.

“We were lucky,” Emil agreed. “It’s the kind of luck we need to survive this summer. I hope that it continues.”

Chapter Ten

The important work of collecting and distributing bread to the scattered company proved as dull and tedious as Zanja had feared. The greatest challenge it posed was that of finding her way–first to the various farmholds that had agreed to supply the bread, then to the various encampments that needed it. The farmholds most often provided great wheels of hard rye bread that kept well and did not crumble easily, but they also loaded her poor donkey with whatever else could be spared from their own or their neighbors’ storerooms: carrots, cheese, sausage, turnips, apples, potatoes, onions, and ham. At least, when Zanja succeeded in finding a company encampment, no one was sorry to see her.

It had become known that Zanja’s prescience had saved the company that night. Although most of the Paladins could not bring themselves to treat her as one of their own, they were courteous enough, though in Willis’s unit the welcome remained particularly cool.

“There you are at last,” Annis said, when Zanja arrived at Daye’s unit with a fresh load of bread. “We’re running low on saltpeter, and I have to go to Wilton. Emil says to bring you with me, and we’ll meet him and Willis along the way.”

The next morning, on the east‑west road just outside the river valley, they found Emil and Willis waiting for them. The road was busy with market day traffic. Willis and Annis, their weapons hidden in their longshirts, became indistinguishable from any other farmer. Emil might have been a rather seedy accountant looking for work. Zanja wrapped her hair in a headcloth, obscured her face with a hat brim, and hoped no one looked at her too closely.

“I want you to learn to read glyphs,” Emil said to her, and produced out of his knapsack a sheet of paper. “I’ve written some out for you.” He pointed. “The four elements, the four directions, the four seasons, the twelve implements.”

Next to each carefully drawn symbol, he had written its name, followed by a brief explanation of the symbol’s implications. The symbols seemed stagnant, their implications arcane and irrelevant. “Why?” Zanja asked.

“Indulge me.”

She felt Willis glowering at her back. “Of course.”

To understand the glyphs seemed like knowledge of the most tedious sort. Each glyph had primary and secondary meanings, and sometimes meant two things simultaneously. Each glyph had a history or special use, and some of them were accompanied by lengthy expository tales that complicated rather than clarified their meaning. In addition, the meanings of the glyphs interacted with each other, so that two glyphs together meant something different from what they meant separately. To fully understand these glyphs might require lengthy study, and the entire system, Emil told her, included a thousand symbols, though he was not certain if anyone remaining alive was familiar with them all. He himself knew about half of them, and had despaired of ever learning the other half.

His passion for this strange, ambiguous method of recording and understanding ideas was as evident as Willis’s and Annis’s excruciating boredom with it. If only out of perversity, Zanja struggled to comprehend what Emil was telling her about the glyphs. The more she came to understand them, the more genuine her interest became.

Wilton was as big as the largest towns Zanja had traded in up in the border country. Located near the junction of two major rivers, it was a warren of narrow byways and sudden plazas, with balconies on opposite buildings a mere hop apart from each other, and a casual attitude toward garbage that left her always on the lookout for dung and debris underfoot or falling from overhead. The rivers brought travelers from far‑flung communities who were riding the current to the seaport and paused here to replenish their supplies and sell some of their wares. Many of these travelers looked no more like a South Hiller than she did, and some of them even resembled her.

“I won’t say you can get everything in Wilton,” said Emil. “It’s not like it used to be, and it’s nothing like Hanishport, where you canget everything.”

“Everything but what you can get in Hanishport’s neighboring town, Lalali,” said Willis. “Of course, in Lalali you’ll be robbed and murdered in the bargain.”

The taverns had set up their tables in the streets, the better to entice the farmers to drink what money they had rather than buy seed or tools or pay their taxes. It seemed a hopeless enterprise, however. This early in the season the farmers come into town for market day hadn’t much to sell, and they all had a pale, winter‑pinched look, and a way of keeping their hands up their sleeves.

Emil and Willis had come into town to talk to Willis’s brothers, who worked at the garrison. Annis left to make some arrangements with one of her chemist friends.

A row of beggars sat against a wall with their empty hands lifted, moaning tales of being reduced to poverty through no fault of their own. Emil tapped Zanja’s arm and pointed at the garish sign that hung over the door. As was common throughout the country, the business folk of Wilton used glyphs to identify their shops. Merchants used only one symbol, the tavern keepers two, which made the name of the taverns amusingly ambiguous. However, the symbols were always represented as pictures: in the case of this tavern a wheel and a hoe.