Later, after a chilly bath of water splashed from a stream, with her poorly laundered clothing drying in the hot breeze, and her bitten arm, blistered feet, and raw hands bandaged and salved, Zanja let herself enjoy the illusion of rest and comfort. She was asleep in a patch of sunshine when Emil woke her. His drawn face, dirty clothing, and even the staff on which he now leaned, reminded her how desperate their situation had become.

“That bite in your arm isn’t festering, is it?” he asked.

“No, Emil.”

“That’s fortunate, I suppose. Jerrell tells me that the surviving Paladins are going to fall ill or succumb to one or another infection if they don’t get some rest and a few decent meals in them.”

“I ate some bread.”

He responded with a flash of his old humor. “That’s practically a feast. And you’ve slept, what, an hour or two? That should be more than enough.”

“What do you want of me?”

“I want you to find Annis, but it can wait until tomorrow.”

“You don’t know where she is?” Zanja had thought of Annis in passing, but had been willing enough not to think of her too long. Her name had not been on the list of dead or injured, so she assumed there was no reason for concern.

“No one knows where she is. Her family, though, is one of the three that has disappeared. Her home is burned, they tell me. When she came in from her experiments, she would have heard all this. I am a bit concerned about what she might do.”

Zanja got to her feet–stiffly enough, but apparently with enough grace to win her a glance of unabashed envy from Emil. This grueling journey had all but crippled him. “There are others who know her haunts better than I.”

“None of them are fire bloods who have been her lover.”

She muttered, “Nothing escapes you, does it?”

“By the land, I wish that were true!” He put a hand upon her shoulder. “Listen: you need a place to shelter out the winter. To partner with the daughter of an established farm family can only be to your benefit. But if it turns out you have to bring her to me at the end of a rope, do you think you could?”

“I’d rather not.”

“If you had to?”

She said reluctantly, “Yes.”

“Good.” Emil added, rather bitterly, “But do hold onto what shreds of decency you can.”

The next day, Zanja made her way to Annis’s family farm. There, the black, burned‑out walls of seven buildings gaped like the jaws of corpses. All around them spread lush fields of knee‑high grain and white‑blossomed potato plants. Zanja stood at the edge of an orchard, where a din of insects made the voices of the man and woman walking through the field seem very far away. Zanja had been watching them for some time. They had walked from building to building, looking in at the tangles of charred wood contained by each stone shell. Once, they ventured inside, but came out again quickly, coughing and wiping away tears. Now they walked meditatively through the fields, pausing sometimes to discuss something vehemently, with sweeping gestures that seemed to include the entire landscape.

As they drew close to the orchard, they spotted Zanja and stopped short in confusion. She stepped briskly out into the field, taking care to avoid trampling the seedlings, but stopped at a distance so they would not be too frightened of her, and bowed. “I am Zanja Paladin of South Hill Company, a friend of Annis’s. You are her kinfolk, yes?”

The two of them clutched each other in dismay, but the woman said cautiously, “Everyone in South Hill is her kin.”

They looked enough like Annis that it seemed certain all three of them had a parent in common, but then the South Hillers seemed peculiarly indifferent to ties of blood; what united them into families was the land alone. Now that Annis’s family was gone, the land they had farmed was an orphan, an event as rare in South Hill as the orphaning of a child. This event presented the entire community with a problem: Who was now obligated or entitled to tend the crops? This must have been the problem this brother and sister had been pondering.

The man said, “South Hill Company should have no interests here. Where were you when the farm was burning?”

“We were chasing the enemy and burying the dead,” Zanja said.

“I hear you were off on a hare‑chase, tearing down Darton Bridge for no good reason when you should have been here.”

The woman jerked his arm roughly, and he fell into sullen silence.

Zanja said, “Please, if you see Annis, would you tell her that I’m looking for her? I’m worried about her.”

Both the farmers seemed startled at the suggestion that someone might actually care for their eccentric sister.

“I’d like to look at the buildings. Would you mind?”

The siblings did not respond. Zanja walked over to the remains of the commonhouse. Portions of the walls remained standing, though the roof had collapsed in a crazy tangle of charred timbers that filled the interior. Cradles had hung from those rafters. Now the acrid stink of destruction seared Zanja’s lungs, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

and pain ballooned in her skull as she stumbled through the fierce heat of the flames where people were trapped and screaming and she followed the rhythmic signal of a newborn’s cry: the na’Tarwein infant she had last seen in a basket beside her sleeping mother. And the blazing fire swam in her vision, now close and now far, hot enough that it seemed her flesh must cook upon her bones, and she stumbled through smoke, walking on embers, following the sound

“Madam!”

and the infant’s voice fell silent and as Zanja stumbled up to the na’Tarwein clanhouse the roof collapsed and the roar and pressure of flames drove her away, wheezing and reeling in a daze of pain and horror

“Madam Paladin!”

The farmer spoke with sharp impatience, but when Zanja turned her face, she stepped hastily backwards. Zanja put a hand to her face and found it wet, not with blood from her head wound or a dead Sainnite, but with tears. “Some of them burned alive,” she said.

The woman took another startled step backwards. “But we have not found any bodies.”

“In my own family.” Zanja rubbed the side of her head, where the rough terrain of a scar crossed her scalp. Until this moment, she had forgotten that, bleeding, dazed, scarcely even conscious, she had walked through the burning village hoping and failing to save just one life from the disaster, a single child.

“Your family?” The farmer said. “Are you from Rees?”

“I’m from the northern borderlands. We have Sainnites there, too.” Zanja dried her face with a corner of her headcloth. “What are you and your brother going to do?”

“Well, as for me, I can’t endure to see this good crop go to waste. But my brother wants to cry for justice at the gates of the garrison.”

“Justice? Does he think this crime was done by a civilized people?”

The brother said angrily, “The Paladins are much too busy to occupy themselves with something so trivial as justice. So there is no law left in South Hill, except the law of the Sainnites.”

“Law? You are at war!”

Zanja parted from the farmers with cold civility, and traveled through the woods towards the powder cave. Her anger at the man’s stupidity burned itself out, and ashes remained: a fire‑gutted village, a corpse‑scattered, charred cornfield, the coarse laughter of the Sainnite butchers halfway across the valley. Zanja, weaving through the mists, falling over the bodies of her friends, seeking Ransel among the dead, so that she could lie down beside him, and cut loose her soul from its bindings.

The Ashawala’i also had never realized they were at war.

Chapter Fourteen

At least one keg of gunpowder was missing from the powder cave. Zanja waited there until a summer downpour had lightened to a mist, then she traveled east in dead of night and slipped into the river valley under cover of darkness. She lay in a copse until dawn. Every time she closed her eyes, pain blossomed in her healed skull, her heart began to pound, and she saw flames.