“I see,” Karis said.

“In much the same way, Norina makes it possible for you to live within your cage. And so long as she helps you tolerate captivity you never will break free. You’ll have no reason to try.”

“Shaftal’s Name!” Karis sat up abruptly.

Now ends our friendship, Zanja thought.

“Oh, you are dangerous,” Karis said.

She settled back onto her elbows, and in the heated silence the accuser bugs suddenly began to shrill. After a long time, she said, “Norina has insisted that you be left in ignorance, lest you do something disastrous. But now it seems that you have done something disastrous because of your ignorance.”

“Names of the gods! What have I done?”

“I can’t tell you–that’s Norina’s business. But I think I will point out to her that to continue to leave you in ignorance seems, at best, ill‑advised,” Karis said. “And to treat you like a servant seems ridiculous, since you will not–cannot–act like one–except as a kind of play‑acting. And to send you away has proven impossible since no matter how far you go I continue to hold onto you in spite of all advice and common sense. Norina insists that I must not–cannot–simply call you my friend. I am a smoke addict, and she is a Truthken. Only an idiot would trust my judgment over hers. So tell me what I am to do, Zanja, for I am at a loss.”

Zanja said, “Why don’t you seek the advice of a seer? It just happens that I know one, and–”

She had to stop, because Karis had begun to howl with laughter. Nonplused, she waited for Karis to recover from her mirth, which had a certain bitter edge to it, for she seemed almost to be sobbing by the end, and had to wipe her tears on the tail of her shirt. “You have no idea–” she gasped.

“No idea at all,” Zanja agreed.

“I’m sorry,” Karis said. “Tell me about your seer. Tell me how you met.”

“I met Medric on Fire Night,” Zanja began. “Emil had sent me to find Annis, who had gone rogue after the Sainnites torched her family’s farmstead, and my search brought me to Wilton, where I found her. But along the way, something began to happen to me, and I began to do things that made no sense …”

But at least one thing she had done did make sense. She opened the pouch that held her glyph cards, and shook out from the bottom, where she had nearly forgotten it, the pendant of green stone and silver wire. “That day I bought this for you, though I had no reason to even imagine that I would see you again. I thought I had lost my mind. I was starting to remember things in a way that seemed insane. But perhaps it was, after all, a kind of prescience. When the veil between present and past tore apart, so also did the veil between present and future. I hadn’t lost my mind; I merely knew something I had no business knowing.”

She put the pendant into Karis’s hand. “You see, now I have given you the pendant. I look forward to someday understanding how everything I did that day makes as much sense as buying this pendant did.”

Karis seemed dumbfounded, and said not a word as Zanja resumed her tale, but lay back in the grass with the pendant in her fist, resting against her breast, until Zanja had described her last sight of Emil standing in the middle of the road, and then fell silent.

Then Karis said, “Name of Shaftal, it does make sense. Norina has been wrong–wrong from the first moment I sensed your presence in Shaftal. Zanja–” She swallowed. She was breathing as though she had run a race. “Yes, I do want to speak to Medric, very badly.”

“I can bring him to you. Unless I’ve sorely misjudged him, he would make himself easy for me to find. He wants nothing more than to do some good in Shaftal. It doesn’t bother you that he’s half Sainnite?”

As Zanja talked, Karis had gotten to her feet. Now, she gazed down at Zanja, and her face seemed very far away, and shadowed suddenly as her height blocked out the sun. “What is it exactly that you think I am?” she asked.

Zanja stared up at her. The people of the Juras tribe were yellow‑haired, blue‑eyed, extremely strong giants. But Karis’s Juras mother had been a Lalali whore. “Your father would have been a very big man,” she said.

“And a Sainnite.”

“No doubt. I suppose that would matter to some people.”

“To some people, it is the most important thing about me.”

“Well, Karis, you know some tremendous idiots.”

Karis leaned over, and took hold of Zanja with both her hands, and set her on her feet. “So long as you’re not one of them,” she said, and Zanja saw that she was smiling.

Beyond the inn‑yard and the inn, behind the kitchen, grew an undisciplined garden where climbing roses and fragrant herbs tangled into a blooming thicket, over which bees operated in a hum of industry. The beehives stood at the garden’s edge, nearly half a dozen of them. Bees bumped into Zanja and Karis as they walked across the flight path, their feet crunching in the dried bee corpses that littered the ground. Zanja followed Karis into the tangle of roses, and Karis in turn followed a path to a lathe house overgrown with rich, green vines. The door had fallen off its hinges. Within, Norina lay upon a bench in a mossy shade garden planted beside a spring. The bubbling pond was filled with sodden wooden crates that contained bottles of milk and wine, kept cool by the cold water. The shade garden seemed damp and almost chilly compared to the sun‑sodden outdoors. Norina lay on her side with her head pillowed on one arm.

Zanja hesitated at the doorway as Karis knelt beside Norina and lay a hand upon her gravid torso. She smiled so sweetly that Zanja wondered how anyone could remain angry with her. Even Norina could be cajoled, for after a moment her scarred face creased with a rare smile. Bits of sunlight that came in through the lathwork speckled them with sparks of brilliance.

Leaning upon the rotting door post, Zanja saw how it must always have been between them: bound by an affection sturdy enough to survive all the disagreements and power struggles that were inevitable between two such willful women.

They talked in low voices, then Zanja heard Karis say, “Are you certain you want to know?”

Norina opened her shirt and Karis put a hand inside to feel her belly like the midwife or healer she would no doubt have been, had the elements in her blood been less radically out of balance, and had the story of her life been less out of true. “It’s a daughter,” Karis said. “Ready and restless to come out of there. And a vigorous child she’ll be–how could she not be?”

“How indeed?” Norina grumbled. “Conceived by an earth witch’s meddling–” Norina buttoned up her shirt. “It’s been a bittersweet year,” she said heavily.

They both were silent then, until Norina said quietly, “Karis, it’s a terrible position you’ve put me in. Ten years ago, when I offered to help you, I never offered to be your jailer.”

“You’ve given me ten years I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Nori, I want you to tell Zanja what you’re afraid she’s done.”

Norina sat up. “No, Karis, I told you …”

Karis looked over at Zanja, who would be just a shadow against the blaze of sunlight. “Zanja, come here.”

The grotto smelled of mold and rotten wood, but it certainly offered relief from the heat. Zanja used her porringer to dip some water from the spring; it was so cold it made her teeth ache. She brought some more for Karis, who drank it with the air of one accustomed to doing as her caretakers told her. Karis said, when Zanja had squatted on the ground beside her, “Since Norina refuses to talk, perhaps you would talk to her instead. Tell her about Fire Night, and about Medric.”

Zanja told her tale again. When she had finished, there was a silence. Norma gazed into Zanja’s face as though she were reading and re‑reading an unexpected letter and could not decide if the news it contained was good or bad. Then she put her head into her hands.