“You amaze me,” Zanja murmured, more amazed, in fact, than she let on. Though the friendly watchwoman was appealing enough, Zanja disappointed her hopes, and went back to her solitary camp, to gaze up at the brilliant stars and think of Karis.

In Strongbndge, after Karis had gone to her room to smoke and then sleep under the watchful guard of Norina’s tireless assistant, Norina and Zanja had shared a fine supper. As was inevitable, Norina commented on how well Zanja was comporting herself, and particularly complimented her efforts to keep secret the fact that she was in love with Karis. The Truthken was not as unsympathetic as Zanja had feared she would be, but neither had she held back the facts, both about how Karis had been brutalized in Lalali, and about how smoke irrecoverably destroys sensation. The unpleasant conversation certainly had helped to cool Zanja’s ardor.

But she lay now, thinking of Karis’s big, gentle hands stroking her injured thigh. That touch had ruined her, she thought wryly, for now she wanted nothing else. She could only hope, as she had promised Norina, that she would recover quickly.

The next day, as she rode down the main road to the ferry, Karis’s raven dropped out of the sky onto her shoulder. “Something is wrong!”

A startled farm family that shared the road with her drew back, staring fearfully.

“What do you mean?” she asked the raven. “Did Karis send you to me? Did you see something from the air that I should know about?”

The raven uttered a strangled caw, as though he had half forgotten how to talk. “It is Karis,” he managed to say. “Something is wrong with Karis.”

Zanja never got on the ferry.

Seven days later, in an evening that had turned suddenly cool after sunset, Zanja rode up to the Meartown gates. The stars had come out, and the gate was closed: a gate of iron forged in the form of ivy climbing a trellis, with spear‑shaped leaves tipping the gate’s top, edged, no doubt, with sharpened steel. Though Zanja had allowed Homely regular rest, she had scarcely slept, and now she saw the beautiful, deadly gate with a terrible clarity of exhaustion and panic. Not since the night of the frogs had she been forced to function in spite of such horror. “Something is wrong!” she shouted at the cranky old woman who came too slowly out the metal‑hinged door of her stone house. The town stank of dust and coal.

“Stop ringing the cursed bell,” the woman said, holding her ears. “The town’s children are asleep.”

Zanja made her hand stop pulling the bell rope. Her exhausted horse had not even jumped at the noise of the ringing.

“And come back in the morning,” the woman said. “You can sleep by the road there. There’s a pump so you can water your horse.”

“I’ll climb the gate if I have to, and come pounding at your cottage door.”

The woman said dryly, “This is Meartown. We know how to make a gate here.”

She started to turn away, and Zanja shouted at her back, “Do you know Karis? Do you know her best work? Look here!“ She thrust her dagger through the gate’s bars. ”She doesn’t give these blades to many people, does she? For pity’s sake, look at me, look at the raven on my shoulder. I am her friend!“

The woman took the dagger from Zanja’s hand, scrutinized it, and gave it back. “You do have a fine blade,” she said doubtfully. She peered through the gate at the bird on Zanja’s shoulder. “And a strange pet.”

“Mardeth,” the raven said, the first word he’d spoken in many days. “Help her.”

“Shaftal’s Name!” The woman snatched up the key at her waist and unlocked the gate. Zanja all but fell through as it swung open. “You’re not the one I expected,” Mardeth said.

“I’m Zanja. Norina’s pregnant.”

“Well, blessings upon her,” Mardeth said automatically. She examined Zanja, then stepped forward to take Homely’s reins. “You’ve had a bad time of it. Come in and take a bite to eat, before I show you the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house. You’ll be needing your strength, won’t you.”

Zanja followed her, too dazed with hunger and weariness to protest or demand an explanation. It wasn’t until she sat in the woman’s kitchen with the teakettle starting to hiss and some bread and cold meat before her that she thought to wonder why the gatekeeper might have been expecting Norina to come frantically ringing the gate bell in the middle of the night. She nearly leapt up and ran out to the yard, where the woman was watering the horse and giving him some hay, but she made herself eat instead. She’d be needing her strength, Mardeth had said.

Mardeth came in, and cut her a piece of pie. “Your horse isn’t in too bad shape. Leave him with me tonight, and I’ll have him shod in the morning. Looks like you’ve been keeping him in oats but not feeding yourself. Are you out of money?”

“I’ve got enough for the shoeing.”

“As if the blacksmith would accept a single coin from you. I’ll send around to the other mastersmiths and take a collection to help you on your way. We were getting ready to send out some people ourselves. It’s taken us this long to figure out that she’s not somewhere nearby, off her head or injured somewhere. Six days we’ve been scouring the countryside. What’s the matter with you?”

Zanja had knocked the pie into her lap and sent the plate spinning to the hearth, where it clanged on the stones like the gate bell, and set the woman’s dog to barking. “She’s disappeared?”

“Yes, of course she’s disappeared. What else are you here for?”

“The raven couldn’t tell me what was wrong. I thought she might be ill.”

“Well now, that’s odd,” the woman said, looking askance at the raven, who paced restlessly along the back of a chair. “Very odd indeed. Not that I know a thing about elemental ways, but they say a witch’s familiar knows everything she knows, and if the raven doesn’t know anything, what does that mean, I wonder?”

Mardeth rousted up a neighbor to let them out the gate and keep an eye on it while she was gone. “Lynton and Dominy live up there a ways.” She pointed into the nearby hills. “Karis has lived with them, oh, for some years. There’s some trees up there, and a bit of a spring, and it seems to make her happy.”

As they hurried up the steep, scrupulously maintained road, Mardeth told Zanja how it had happened that Karis disappeared in the middle of the night, but no one realized anything was amiss until the next evening, when the forge master finally came looking for her at her house. They had wasted all the time since then trying to find her in the environs of Meartown, having assumed that she had come to harm somehow on one of her wanderings. That her harm might have come in the form of a human being seemed not to have occurred to any of them until finally one of the two men noticed a broken door latch in Karis’ room. “In all the years they’ve known her,” Mardeth said, “she’s never broken anything. She can be clumsy as an ox, but she’s never even cracked a teacup. And it was a good, strong, Mearish latch. No, someone must have broken it to get into her room from outside. But why would anyone wish to do her harm? Especially someone from around here?”

She glanced at Zanja and realized she was weeping. “Now then,” she said awkwardly. “I’m sure we’ll find her.”

Something about the image of Karis blundering around a kitchen with a fragile teacup in her hand had left Zanja devastated, and she could scarcely stem her tears even when they arrived at the cottage, where two aged men welcomed them in. They seemed eager when they realized Mardeth was at their door, perhaps even hopeful that she brought good news. But when they saw Zanja’s face, they fell to weeping themselves. “She’s dead, is she?” said one.

“Now calm down, you,” Mardeth snapped. “We know nothing at all, and the stones themselves would defend her from harm. Put on the kettle there, Dominy. This one’s just in tears because she didn’t know until now what had happened. She’ll be all right in a minute, when it’s done sinking in. Now all of you sit down and I’ll make the tea.“