Fire Logic

Zanja said, “You wanted to meet me?”

“In my dream you were an owl with feathers of fire. You flew back and forth over the rooftops, dripping flames onto the houses. They caught like tinder behind you. Are you truly a seeker after wisdom?”

The garrison was burning in the glass of his spectacles. He had known it would burn, and had not warned his people. The Sai

Zanja sat down in a chair. She did not holster her pistol; neither did she point it at him. “You let me burn down the garrison.”

“It was the only way I could get you here. I need to ask your advice.”

“Advice?” Zanja lay back in the chair and laughed like a madwoman, and could hardly make herself stop. When she had gotten herself under control, she wiped her face with her hands, and found them wet with tears. “Well, why shouldn’t a lunatic give advice to a seer?”

“My vision has been too small,” he said. “And now I think I have begun to see at last, I see most clearly my own corruption. How can I redeem myself?”

“Redeem yourself? In whose eyes?”

He gazed at her, his face flickering with flame. “In the eyes of my mother’s people. In the eyes of Shaftal.”

“Your mother is Shaftali?”

“My mother was Shaftali, and my father was Sai

A breeze came through the open windows and the air was thick with smoke. Still, Zanja sat contemplating a glyph she could not read. Was this danger? Or was it opportunity?

It was danger for certain if she delayed much longer, and this young man’s books would be nothing but ashes if he didn’t get back to work. “I can’t answer your questions,” she said.

“Not right now, perhaps.” He stood up. His long, fair hair was caught back with a blue ribbon. He pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. “There’s a grove of trees just north of the city. I’ll be waiting for you there in, oh, five days, at high noon. If you decide to send an assassin instead, I’ll know. Still, I’ll be there, and I won’t hold it against you. You must make your decisions just as I must make mine.”

“You know perfectly well that I won’t send an assassin.”

“In five days you might come to your senses.”

Zanja had gotten dazedly to her feet and picked up the satchel of explosives. A

“Zanja.”

He smiled again, less tentatively this time. “Zanja, I dreamed that we were friends.”

“That would be some other world you dreamed of.”

“Yes. But you are the one who travels between the worlds, are you not?”

He was not much taller than she, and when she found herself caught within his gaze, it meant neither capture nor dominance, but a stare between befuddled equals. At last Zanja spoke, and not exactly to him: “The gods have quite a sense of humor.” So she left him, and went down the stairs and out into the garden, where the air was choked with ashes and the brays of terrified horses and the raw shouts of voices scoured by smoke. But now she could not remember exactly what she was doing here, or even who she was or why she had wanted to burn down the garrison. She had crossed a border. And now she was lost.

She found A

“Emil will kill us for this night’s work,” A

“Yes, I am in trouble.”

They had neither food nor drink, except for water dipped out of a stream and a couple of handfuls of watercress. A

“I have an idea,” A

Zanja put her head in her hands. “Of course.” A

It took more than a day for them to find South Hill Company, encamped at the Fens Overlook, a rise of land on the northern tip of the river plain, that was protected from armed incursion by a marsh on one side and a particularly tangled woodland on the other. The company was too far from Wilton to have seen the rockets explode, but not too far to see the smoke that still lay in a haze across the river valley. Emil, having already received a report from his spies in Wilton of the garrison fire and the wonderful explosions that preceded it, was in a quiet fury. His spies had told him it was wizardry, but Emil had not doubted that it was A

Normally, Emil was not one to vent his anger in public, but he berated A

Zanja could not sleep, though she was so tired her thoughts kept blanking out, like candles snuffed in a gale. She wandered restlessly until she found herself at the very edge of the fen, which bubbled and stank in the afternoon heat, while a flock of geese uttered shouts of outrage at an outsider that had intruded on their peaceful foraging.

Zanja spread her glyph cards out and stared at them. The Woman in the Doorway: unmade decisions or ambivalence or even lack of courage left her standing there upon the doorsill. Paired with the Raven, it was Karis. Paired with the Owl, it was Zanja. The Man on the Mountain: solitude, contemplation, far‑seeing. By itself, it was Emil, Zanja’s commander and friend. Joined with the Box and the Flame, it was Medric: dreamer, destroyer, bespectacled book‑hauling boy with a blue ribbon in his hair. Zanja realized vaguely that she had a headache. The cards swam before her vision as if they were swirling in a whirlpool. She could not see the pattern; pieces of it were missing. She shuffled frantically through the deck, tossing down cards at random: Sorrow, the Book, the Sword, the Guardian, the Cave, the Lover, and at last the Madwoman.