Fire Logic

In the middle of a poem, Karis came stumbling groggily over to the smoldering cookfire and half sat and half fell onto the stone chair that Emil vacated for her. Medric finished the poem and looked up from J’han’s book.

“I think I had a dream,” Karis said uncertainly. Had she never dreamed before? She rubbed her face with her hands. “Dreams are like poetry, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Medric said.

“Well, I’m no good at metaphors. I dreamed I was naked and so I started to put on my clothes, but then I looked down and realized that I was putting on my own skin. What does that mean?”

“Oh, my.” Medric closed the book and hastily put on his other spectacles.

Emil, squatting by the coals to pour water into a fresh teapot, set the pot of water down suddenly. “Karis, I’ve been thinking that perhaps the best gift we might give you is a season of solitude.”

Karis looked at him, and finally said in a voice gone blank with shock, “What?”

J’han had been examining her from across the cookfire. Now he said, “Certainly, it doesn’t look like you need me anymore, and Norina and I have already agreed to return to our daughter, to raise her together through winter, anyway. The spring is still an open question, of course, but the sooner we leave the better.”

Karis glanced at Norina, who neither spoke nor looked away. In fact, Zanja realized, Norina had yet to speak a word in Karis’s presence, which surely required an inhuman discipline on her part. “Of course you don’t know what to do in the spring,” Karis said, as though she had not realized before now exactly how much her friends’ decisions depended on hers. She accepted a steaming porringer from Zanja, along with the spoon from her belt, and obediently stuck the spoon into it.

Emil said, “Medric and I can go to my winter home, perhaps. It’s distant, but not so far that we couldn’t visit you if we needed to, or you us. Medric, what do you think? It’s a lonely and wild enough place. Will we get sick of each other?”

“We’d better not. You’re going to help me write my book–”

“I am?”

“–and there’s that library to build.”

“Hmm. Not this year, I don’t think.”

“That’s what I mean,” Medric said. “You are I are in it for some years at least. Karis–”

She looked at him, sullen as though she were the youth and he the elder telling her what to do. “Go back to Meartown,” Medric said.

“Why?”

“Because the most important journeys all begin at home.”

Karis opened her mouth, but said nothing.

Zanja said, “Then we all should come to Meartown. The tribe should stay together.”

They all looked at her in some surprise. Then Medric said, “Tribe? A community, maybe, after Mackapee.”

“No, a company,” said Emil.

And J’han said, “Or a family, perhaps.”

Norina put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from speaking. Perhaps she would have demanded that they found a new order.

“But not yet,” said Emil. “The last thing you need, Karis, is to be surrounded by people who are slavishly waiting for you to tell them what to do with their lives. You must answer your own questions first.”

Karis said mutinously, “So you’re all going to abandon me out here in the wilderness instead?”

Emil said, “Why, yes, I believe we are.”

Medric added irrelevantly, “Slavish? That’s a bit of a hyperbole, isn’t it?”

They argued amicably and finally settled on “obsequious.” Norina seemed to be trying to tear her hair out of her head. Karis glanced at her and said irritably, “What?”

“Eat your porridge,” Norina said.

Karis seemed flabbergasted. “The first words you’ve said to me in ten days–”

“Eat your blasted porridge,” Norina amended.

“You’ll be a rotten mother,” Karis muttered. She put a spoonful of porridge into her mouth.

There is a stillness that comes across the earth sometimes, at dawn, or just before a storm, a stillness as if the entire world lies stu

“Porridge is pretty dull, as food goes,” Norina said.

“Dull?” Karis took another taste. “This is dull?”

Comprehension struck Zanja like a stinging slap in the face. “Dear gods,” she whispered.

“Oh, my,” said J’han.

But Medric gri

Karis scraped the porringer clean. Zanja took it from her and filled it up again with oats and dry fruit, and set it in the coals. Norina stood up without a word, and went to help with the packing. Karis wiped her face with the ragged tail of her shirt. “I think I’m hungry,” she said, as though there were nothing extraordinary about her hunger. Then she looked at the cloth of her shirt, and touched it to her face again. “What–”

Zanja felt the shirtcloth. “It’s soft, the way old shirts get.”

Karis alternately felt her face and the cloth. Then she looked at her callused, soot black hands. “I am alive,” she said. “It feels very odd.”

The flat heath spread out before Zanja, oddly out of kilter. When Zanja looked at Karis, she hardly could endure the sight, and had to look away again. The silence became awkward, and at last Karis said in a strained voice, “Well, I must ask you, since you haven’t volunteered. Where are you going to go?”

Zanja turned, startled, pained that Karis would even think of sending her away.

“Because I’m going with you,” Karis continued.

“I think I’ll go to Meartown.”

“Well.”

“Karis–”

“Be careful,” she said hoarsely. Her attention seemed intensely concentrated, as if she had been rescued from deep water and needed to breathe.

“With your permission,” Zanja said, very carefully, “I’d like to court you.”

Karis uttered a sharp laugh, but even her laughter had no peace in it. “And up until now, what have you been doing?”

“Well, if this whole year has been a courtship …” Zanja paused, and said, “Perhaps it has.”

“I don’t think the earth sent me out to rescue you on a whim.”

“It seemed whimsical enough at the time.”

Karis was smiling, her panic passed for now. But Zanja knew, quite clearly, how uncertain was the path on which she trod.

Zanja said, “I would like to make a suggestion. Take Norina into your good graces again.”

“Have you forgiven her?”

“I will, before I bid her goodbye. She makes amends the same way she goes into battle. Gods help the fool who gets in her way. If you forgive her, we all will be the safer for it.”

Karis uttered a snort of laughter and unfolded herself a bit. “Well, since you’ve gotten in her way before, you know what you’re talking about. Nori!”

Norina came over with J’han’s book of poetry and gave it to Zanja without a word. Without a word, Zanja stood up and gave Norina her seat, and pointed out to her the porridge cooking in the ashes.

Karis said to Norina, “You must be bored with penitence by now.”

“My boredom is only just begi