He drew up his knees, looking for all the world as if he meant to continue talking to her all day. “Unfortunately, my powers are limited, and whatever I do will have unwanted consequences. Tell me something,” he added abruptly, “Do you feel up to reading the cards?”

“I don’t even know where they are.”

“They’re drying in the sun, like everything else you own.” He fetched them, and counted to see that all of them had survived, warped and mud‑smirched though they were. As Zanja shuffled the cards aimlessly, he asked, “What characterizes the state of conflict between South Hill and the Sainnites?”

Zanja picked a card she’d not studied yet. It depicted a balance, or shopkeeper’s scale. Emil glanced at it and nodded without much surprise. “What would tilt the balance in our favor?” he asked.

Zanja could not choose a card. “Are you thinking too much?” Emil asked after a while.

“It’s as though every card is the answer.”

“So in order to tilt the balance we’d have to alter the entire Universe? Well, try this question instead: What is the most important factor in tilting the balance in our favor?“

Zanja chose a card and tossed it down before looking at it. It was the Owl. “Hmm.” Emil grinned without much humor. “Well now, this is getting interesting.”

Zanja shifted uncomfortably. Her injured thigh ached.

“So tell me, what is the Owl to do?”

Zanja laid down another card without looking at it, then saw that it was the Door. She sighed.

“What will immediately result from this decision that the Owl must make?”

She lay down another card, and Emil gave a small start, but said nothing. The glyph was one Zanja did not know; the picture showed an opening into a hillside.

Emil shook his head, and asked, “What will be the long term result of this decision?”

The last card seemed the most ambiguous of them all: it showed the silhouettes of a ridged horizon, with the sun above, either rising or setting. Emil moved the cards into an organized row and scowled unhappily at them. At last, he said, “Well, either this is a piece of arrant nonsense or a message of great portent. Based on what I see here, I want to say that it appears that you, Zanja, are a crucial factor in events with implications that reach far beyond South Hill. You are in a position where you must make a difficult decision even though you feel you cannot decide. Your decision will result in some kind of grave danger: a danger of spirit of body or both. It may very well lead to death.” He touched the card with the opening in the hillside. “This is the door to the labyrinth, the underworld. It is always dangerous but not necessarily fatal. Now, it is not clear who or what is endangered, but it may be you, or South Hill Company, or something much more important than any of us here. In the end–” he touched the Sun card “–there will be hope or loss of hope. An end of everything or a new beginning. It could go either way.”

Then there was silence.

Emil contemplated the cards. “Surely if this were nonsense I would recognize it. So what am I to make of this?” Then he grinned with a wry amusement. “Or, more specifically, how can I help you to make the right decision?”

“Anyone else would insist–demand–that I explain,” Zanja said.

“But if this is a true reading–and you would have told me by now if it wasn’t–then I have to assume that you don’t feel able to explain. If you don’t feel able to do it, then for me to insist that you do would only complicate your situation when it seems I ought to be making it simpler.” He looked up at her. “I must somehow help you without actually understanding what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Tell me what to do.”

“In truth, I–am at a loss. These portents–they do not explain anything.”

“They tell me that you are caught up in something that’s much more important than you realize.” He turned the Door card so that it was right‑side‑up for Zanja and tapped it with his fingertip. “What can you tell me about this?”

Zanja said, “If I decide wrongly, then you are the one that will be endangered.”

“Me personally?”

“Emil–you have made yourself my friend. How could it not be personal? But it’s difficult to imagine that what happens to you won’t affect South Hill Company, our entire enterprise here, or the whole history of Shaftal which brought us to this point.”

“So. You’ve been avoiding me ever since the night we evacuated Fen Overlook–maybe even longer, since Fire Night. Something happened that I don’t know about.” He clasped his hands across his knee, as though restraining himself from doing something else: hitting her, embracing her; it was impossible to tell. “How can I help you?” he asked again. “Or is it absolution you need?”

“Tell me, in your dream–”

He raised an eyebrow. “You think my dream is relevant to this?”

“What is in the box?”

He tapped a finger on the Sun card. “Hope,” he said. “Or at least the hope of hope.”

“Would you die for it?”

“Yes, I would. So–am I going to die for desire’s sake after all, like every other fire blood since the dawn of time? Should I get my affairs in order? You understand,” he added gently, “I think it’s about time I had something worth dying for, something better than this idiot’s war.”

He held her hand for a while, then offered her a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and picked up the cards that she had let rail. Then he fetched Jerrell, who checked Zanja’s bandage and agreed to arrange for her family to give Zanja a safe place to recuperate, as soon as she could be moved. She gave her another potion to drink. The memory of Emil sitting quietly beside her, cleaning and oiling her pistols for her, accompanied Zanja in her sleep, in her dreams, into the day that followed, and into the night that followed that. It was such a small thing, and yet at the time she most needed it, it gave her a great peace.

Chapter Eighteen

In the silent night, the warm air lay heavy and still, and starlight blurred behind a lingering haze of smoke. Leaning on a staff, Zanja shuffled through the silence where accuser bugs should have shouted from the tree branches. But the trees all had been cut down, and without the intervention of their uplifted hands, the sky pressed down upon the earth like a smothering blanket. Here on the dark plain, the farmers slept by smoldering barns and clenched their fists in their dreams. It seemed the whole world had been put to the torch.

Zanja’s staff scraped gravel. Her foot dragged behind her; her patience wore thin. She had left the Paladin camp as early as she dared, but by the time she reached the grove outside of Wilton she had heard the city bell ring midnight. The grove, of course, had been cut down. She saw no sign of Medric, and sat upon a stump to wait.

She waited, listening to the clock toll out the passing hours. At last, she accepted that he was not coming. All her distress, it seemed, had been for nothing.

She thought she had allowed enough time to reach the camp again before summer’s early dawn overtook her, but her leg had stiffened as she waited, and then the wound reopened as Jerrell had warned it would if she didn’t keep it still. Her leg was bathed in warm, slow‑flowing blood, and a lassitude came over her. So the horizon had begun to lighten when she climbed the steep path through the trees, past the inattentive pickets and back across the boundaries of the Paladin camp.

As she headed for her abandoned blankets, she heard a camp cook bang a pot as the flames of a cookfire began to crackle. It still was dark among the trees. She walked in shadow, careful, worried, wondering what had become of Medric and what she should do now. When Willis rose up from beside her empty bed, she stared at him, stupid as a rabbit in torchlight, unable to imagine what he was doing there, or what it meant.

She heard the others rise up out of darkness where they had been hidden. She let her staff fall, lest they mistake it for a weapon, and held out her empty hands. Contrary to what Ransel used to say, she did in fact know when to give up.