Fire Logic (48 page)

Zanja looked up from the uncertain text she was deciphering as someone came into the tavern, and she saw as the door closed that it was past sunset. The people clustered nearest the door shouted in good-natured protest against the bitter wind that came blowing in. The tavern’s convivial cheer grew noisier by the moment, as miners and smelters came in to celebrate another day’s survival at their inevitably dangerous jobs. Zanja closed her book. Her tutor had gone home some time ago.

The door opened again, and Karis came in, accompanied by a half dozen other metalsmiths from her forge. The other smiths lined up to get tankards of ale, but Karis took cider instead, and a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese. She set her burdens onto a nearby table and then mounted Zanja’s table to engage her in a startling kiss, while the people in the vicinity burst into laughter, and the tavernkeeper shouted good-naturedly across the room, “Hey, now, that’s no way to treat fine furniture!”

Karis grinned wickedly. “Greetings, wife.”

“Whatever that means,” Zanja said.

Karis sat down decorously on the bench across from Zanja, and retrieved her cup and plate from the other table. “It means whatever I want it to mean.”

“Well, that’s convenient. What does it mean tonight?”

“Tonight, it means you can share my bread and cheese without asking. I’ve been daydreaming about supper ever since dinner, haven’t you?”

“No, since breakfast. I missed dinner.” Zanja took some bread and cheese.

Karis tasted the cheese, and shut her eyes. “Oh, my.”

Throughout the short months of autumn, Karis had immersed herself in the ordinary, which to her was not ordinary at all. Meartown was a busy, everyday kind of place, and Karis seemed steadied by the straightforward effort of labor. Zanja gathered that she had never worked so hard or so brilliantly, and some of the more perceptive townsfolk had already come to Zanja to ask plaintively whether Karis needed help in setting up her own forge, as though they hazily recognized that Karis’s talent could not be contained much longer in the narrow patterns of her earlier life.

To be the speaker for a single person was a role Zanja did not much savor. She advised these people to talk to Karis, but none of them did. Instead, everyone participated in Karis’s pretense that nothing of significance had been changed. They accepted Zanja as Karis’s lover and apparent dependent, they were puzzled by Karis’s recovery from her addiction, and their labored lives continued unaltered. The mysteries of Karis’s late summer disappearance lay in the past, and now the preoccupations of winter distracted everyone’s attention. Karis seemed to prefer it that way. Zanja alone knew that Karis’s senses had developed far beyond the limits of Zanja’s experience or vocabulary, and that sometimes she could only understand Karis in the same way she understood glyphs or poetry, through the faith and vision and intellectual recklessness which Emil would have called fire logic.

It had been a preoccupied autumn. Love had not so bedazzled Zanja that she did not regret its cost. She had finally ceased to be a
katrim
. What she was becoming instead she did not know, but she found Karis’s joking use of the undefinable word “wife” to be deeply unnerving.

Something in the tavern distracted her: a strange quality to the sound, perhaps. Someone from the forge had come over to engage Karis in a technical conversation that Zanja ignored. She got up to refill her cider cup, listening closely as she worked her way through the crowd. Ale and good cheer had made everyone a storyteller tonight, and although not all the stories she overheard had to do with the metal crafts, she heard nothing extraordinary. “Are there any strangers here tonight?” she asked the girl who poured the cider.

The girl pointed at a corner table which was surrounded three-deep by soot-smudged listeners with tankards in their hands. As Zanja edged her way over, she caught sometimes the tenor of an unfamiliar voice, and spotted a wool-clad shoulder and arm as the speaker gestured.

“What?” someone said, with an astonishment so deep and sharp that many more heads began to turn. “
What are you saying
?”

“I’m only telling you what I have heard,” the voice said, its articulation blurred by drink. “But I heard it from the people who saw it happen.”

The tavern was rapidly falling silent, like a noisy audience that realizes that the play is beginning. Zanja began to work her way back to Karis, but the hush passed her and reached Karis before she did. Karis turned around on her bench, curious, relaxed. Zanja made a glyph with her hands: Danger. Karis leaned forward and rested her chin in one hand, disguising her height, making herself momentarily invisible in a room full of muscular, soot-stained people.

“It was a big woman that did it,” the man said, his voice reaching all the way across the crowded room now. “She came out of nowhere, and knocked Councilor Mabin down, and drove a spike into her heart. And Mabin still lives, that I can tell you for certain. At summer’s end it happened, and her heart is still beating this very day.”

“This is a wild and dangerous tale,” someone objected, and there was a murmur of agreement.

The rest of the people sat in stunned silence, however, some with their drinks half lifted, others staring at each other in disbelief. “That big woman,” someone finally said, “Who is she?”

“Well, Mabin certainly knew who she was,” the stranger said. “And perhaps only Mabin knows the whole story, a story she’s not telling. But
what
is that big woman? That’s what I want to know.”

Everyone spoke then, in a cacophony of wild disagreement. Karis sat without moving, her face slightly pale in the shadows. Zanja knelt beside her and murmured, “If we try to slip out now, everyone will look at you, and at least some of them will truly see you, and put all the pieces together.”

Karis’s ragged hair frayed out into the darkness, but when she straightened up from her crouch, her eyes filled up with light. “Zanja, it’s time for the journey to begin.”

Kneeling beside her, Zanja’s thoughts began to fragment strangely. She thought of how Karis had insisted that they build Homely a paddock up at Lynton and Dominy’s house, rather than stable him in town. She thought of the money Karis had earned in these few months, quite a lot more than had been spent. She thought of the random tools that had begun to accumulate mysteriously under Karis’s table, taken home one by one from the forge. She was not surprised when Karis stood up, and faced the accumulating stares and the rising silence of the tavern.

Karis said, “I had to make do without Meartown steel, but I don’t think you’d be ashamed of the workmanship. It was a fine spike.”

She picked up her doublet from the bench, and left the tavern, with Zanja behind her. Outside, the stormclouds had begun once again to extinguish the stars. Breathing clouds of white, fastening up their buttons against the cold, they walked briskly away from the tavern. Karis said, “My accounts are all settled. I’ve hinted to the forge-master that I’m leaving. Lynton and Dominy tell me my responsibility for them should not hold me back, for they both have lived well beyond their time already. I’m afraid we’ll have a miserable night’s journey—this storm will drop some snow before it’s done. Is Emil’s cottage big enough for the four of us?”

Zanja’s heart had filled up with fire, like a furnace. “What does one cottage matter, when we have the world?”

Karis tucked her big hand into the crook of Zanja’s arm, nearly dislodging the book she carried there. “Meartown bored you to tears, didn’t it?”

They walked out the gates, greeting Mardeth as always. Only as the gate closed and locked behind them did Karis seem to hesitate. She turned, and looked behind her. “Mardeth,” she said.

The gate-keeper had started to her cottage, but turned back. “What?”

“We’re off to see what we can make of the world,” Karis said.

The old woman smiled indulgently. “Are you, then? Good luck to you.”

“She thinks you’re joking, or drunk,” Zanja muttered.

Beside her, Karis uttered a laugh. “Maybe that’s what they all think.”

Arm in arm, they walked up the hill.

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate in my friends, who read this manuscript again and again, and whose thoughtful responses helped this book and its author to transcend her limitations. I am particularly indebted to the group known fondly as the Genrettes: Rosemary Kirstein, Delia Sherman, and Didi Stewart, whose cappucino-inspired insight saw to the heart of many an incoherent draft, and whose energized and entertaining companionship enspirited me through a long labor. In addition, for commentary, advice, and support in every imaginable form, I am profoundly grateful to Deb Manning, Susanna Sturgis, Wendy Marks, Diane Silver, Gillian Spraggs, Donna Simone, Amy Hanson, Ellen Kushner, and my beloved Deb Mensinger.

About the author

Laurie J. Marks (lauriejmarks.com) is the author of nine novels including the Elemental Logic quartet,
Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic,
and
Air Logic
(forthcoming)
.
She lives in Melrose, Massachusetts, and lectures at the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic novels are available or forthcoming from Small Beer Press:

Fire Logic

“Marks has created a work filled with an intelligence that zings off the page.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(Starred Review)

“Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book. Her characters are beautifully drawn, showing tremendous emotional depth and strength as they endure the unendurable and strive always to do the right thing, and her unusual use of the elemental forces central to her characters’ lives gives the book a big boost. This is read-it-straight-through adventure!”

—
Booklist
(Starred Review)

“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict. Marks avoids the black-and-white conflicts of generic fantasy to offer a window on a complex world of unique cultures and elemental magic.”

—Robin Hobb

“Cuts deliciously through the mind to the heart with the delicacy, strength, beauty, and surgical precision of the layered Damascus steel blade that provides one of the book’s central images.”

—Candas Jane Dorsey

“Laurie Marks brings skill, passion, and wisdom to her new novel. Entertaining and engaging—an excellent read!”

—Kate Elliott

“This is a treat: a strong, fast-paced tale of war and politics in a fantasy world where magic based on the four elements of alchemy not only works but powerfully affects the lives of those it touches. An unusual, exciting read.”

—Suzy McKee Charnas

“A glorious cast of powerful, compelling, and appealingly vulnerable characters struggling to do the right thing in a world gone horribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down until I’d read it to the end. Marks truly understands the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation.”

—Nalo Hopkinson

“Most intriguingly, about two-thirds of the way into the book, the low-key magical facets of her characters’ elemental magics rise away from simply being fancy “weapons” and evoke—for both the readers and the characters—that elusive sense of wonder.”

—Charles de Lint,
The Magazine of Fantasy & ScienceFiction

“An exquisite novel of quiet charm.
Fire Logic
is a tale of war and magic, of duty, love and betrayal, of despair encompassed by hope.”

—
SF Site

Earth Logic

“The powerful but subtle writing glows with intelligence, and the passionate, fierce, articulate, strong, and vital characters are among the most memorable in contemporary fantasy, though not for the faint of heart. Definitely for the thinking reader.”

—
Booklist
(Starred Review)

“The sequel to
Fire Logic
continues the tale of a woman born to magic and destined to rule. Vivid descriptions and a well-thought-out system of magic.”

—
Library Journal

“Twenty years after the invading Sainnites won the Battle of Lilterwess, the struggle for the world of Shaftal is far from finished in Marks’s stirring, intricately detailed sequel to
Fire Logic
. . . . Full of love and humor as well as war and intrigue, this well-crafted epic fantasy will delight existing fans as surely as it will win new ones.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Rich and affecting. . . . A thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political
novel.”

—
BookPage

“
Earth Logic
is not a book of large battles and heart-stopping chases; rather, it’s more gradual and contemplative and inexorable, like the earth bloods who people it. It’s a novel of the everyday folk who are often ignored in fantasy novels, the farmers and cooks and healers. In this novel, the everyday lives side by side with the extraordinary, and sometimes within it; Karis herself embodies the power of ordinary, mundane methods to change the world.”

—
SF Revu

“It is an ambitious thing to do, in this time of enemies and hatreds, to suggest that a conflict can be resolved by peaceable means. Laurie Marks believes that it can be done, and she relies relatively little on magic to make it work.”