Water Logic (36 page)

“I am traveling south. I found a water witch at Otter Lake, and he pointed me towards the sea people. At Kisha I determined where the ocean tribes live, and then my glyph cards pointed me southward . . .”

She didn’t feel hungry but used the stew as an excuse to avoid meeting his sharp stare. When she couldn’t avoid looking up he was still looking at her without any particular friendliness. “Have I done something wrong?”

“You’re a charlatan!”

She let the spoon drop back in the stew. He had tricked her into believing he had not discovered her. Her prescience had failed to warn her. And she could not even explain why she had done what she had done.

“You seem to think I’m a rustic at a fair,” said Tadwell. “Are you going to offer to tell my fortune now?”

Zanja could only hope that her face had not betrayed her terror. “No, Tadwell, people who let others choose their way for them are fools. I only use glyph cards to enhance my little insight, and sometimes they make my decisions clearer—especially when it is a direct question such as what direction to take.” She took out her card pack and hunted through the pile until she found the one that had determined her direction: South, the Herder; with its grassland goatherd singing ecstatically to the stars. “It was a simple answer.”

“But is it good?”

“If not, I’ll ask again.” Wanting to discuss the glyphs and her preoccupation with them as little as possible, she continued her account, pretending that Tadwell’s accusation had not practically stopped her heart in her chest. “The people who live on the coast south of here are the farthest south of the ocean tribes.”

Tadwell’s spoon scraped the bottom of the clay bowl. “Those people are great sailors and boat builders, and they often trade with passing ships. But they don’t wander far, and the don’t appreciate visitors. They send a Speaker to the House of Lilterwess only when there’s something to complain of, and they’ve had nothing to complain of in my lifetime. Why is their witch meddling in Shaftali history?”

“I’ll tell you when I know.”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“Ravenous,” said Zanja. She discovered that she was.

“I wonder,” said Tadwell as she attacked the rich stew, “If I were to ask how to resolve this Basdown problem, would the cards give you insight?”

Zanja lay her hand on the card pack. It lay passive under her touch. “Not at all,” she said. But then there popped into her head the glyph illustration that had so frustrated her the night before. “A dog. It is completely integrated into the landscape, part of a complex interrelationship of interdependent elements.”

“What?”

She was already wishing she had silenced her impulse to speak. “It’s a glyph I’ve seen but that isn’t in my pack. It just came to me, but you must ask a glyphologist what it means, for I don’t know.”

“One of the Paladins will be familiar with it.”

Zanja was not merely dismissed to continue her hunt for the water witch, but was even given a fresh supply of food. Arel walked down the highway with her, well into the afternoon, until they reached a big, busy farm within sight of the road, where a couple of short-legged, self-important dogs came out to keep an eye on them. Arel said, “That’s High Meadow Farm. Tadwell was here two days ago. That family killed a neighbor shortly after snowmelt.”

“I know someone from High Meadow.”

“Is your friend temperamental, unforgiving, and shortsighted?”

“The exact opposite.”  Zanja’s gaze lingered on the dogs, who had lain in a patch of sunlight, grinning cheerfully at the visitors, bright tongues lolling. “I wonder what Tadwell will do.”

“Stay and find out. Why are you in such a hurry?”

“I dare not linger.”

Arel gave her a hard look, and she sighed. “I wish I could tell you everything. But I will say that I’m trying to outrun trouble—trouble I brought upon myself.”

“To run from that kind of trouble is always a mistake.”

“It’s honorable to face consequences and dishonorable to run from them. Yet I am running. The thing that’s driving me is more important than honor.”

She clasped his hand. “Farewell, my brother.”

She left him, and did not look back.

Three days later, she reached the abrupt eastern edge of Shaftal and for the first time set eyes on the sea.

Part Four: Sea Change

Chapter 27

Emil yanks open a sticking window sash and calls, “Raven!” Emil’s raven, never out of hearing, dives down from the gable in a vertiginous, curving swoop.

Karis is far away, and yet she staggers and falls to her knees. The Paladins whose onerous duty it is to watch over her leap out of the wagon where they have been eating a midday meal of bread and cheese. She gestures at them: keep away. Now that the raven has settled on the windowsill, Karis is able to stand up and go to the nearby stones that lie like giant broken teeth at the base of a steep hillside.

The raven—Karis—watches Emil pace from window to worktable, where an old book lies in carefully dissected pieces: boards, spine, and page signatures. “Emil,” she says to him. “I need your counsel. I need your resolve.”

But the raven says nothing. When the Paladins killed her raven to save Clement, that injury had been terrible. And when the assassin in Basdown managed to kill another, it had been worse. Now the surviving ravens cannot speak.

Emil says, “Karis, I know something that I shouldn’t withhold from you. But I’m worried about how you’ll react.”

“Oh, for land’s sake!” Karis mutters.

“I don’t know if you can even hear through your ravens anymore. Perhaps I’m just a dotty old man talking to a bird.”

Medric utters a muffled laugh amid the bookshelves. “Oh, she can hear you.”

“That’s something, anyway.” Emil sits at his table. He leaps up. “Should I tell her?”

“How dreadful for you,” Medric says, “to have to trust our G’deon’s judgment!”

“And how dreadful for her, to have to trust herself!” He sits again. “How ever did I manage, Medric, before you arrived to transform every dark moment into absurdity?”

Karis notes the easing of the worry lines in his face. “It’s a good thing I can’t talk to you,” Karis says. “For nothing I would say could make you happy.”

Emil says, “Karis, your very clever wife has managed to send me a letter, by putting it in the spine of
Gerunt’s Decision
. She must have remembered that book was on my table for me to mend. The letter is no longer in her handwriting—the librarians discovered it several times in the last two hundred years. Then one moved it to a new printing of the same book, because the original was beyond repair. The letter’s entire history is carefully noted here—every librarian who found and read the letter has made a record of it.”

He opens a protective folder, and Karis endures vertigo again as the raven flies to the back of Emil’s chair. The many-times-recopied letter had cracked on its fold lines as Emil opened it, and now it has been pasted onto a fresh page. Karis gazes at it through raven’s eyes, her hands covering her own.

Emil reads out loud:

Emil, my dear friend: I have been abducted by a water witch. For over a month I have been trying to discover how to get home again, and I am writing this letter in Kisha, where the students—most of them—are preparing for examinations. I have met some people Medric will yearn to hear about: Tadwell G’deon, the current Speaker for the Ashawala’i, and a student in Kisha named Coles. But I dare not write of them.

Medric utters a theatrical groan. Emil says, “She doesn’t even say why!”

Medric replies, “Oh, it’s because I warned her to be careful.”  He adds, as if talking to himself, “She’s met the Speaker? That’s a worry . . .” His voice becomes a distracted mumble.

Emil continues to read:

I have journeyed again to Otter Lake, where I found the Otter Elder waiting for me. His tribe didn’t even live there yet, but he looked exactly as he looked when he helped us save Karis. He told me to find the water witch who brought me here in the first place, and do whatever she wants me to do. She must then send me home to you, to
preserve the pattern
.

“She underlined those three words,” says Emil. “I am not certain why.”

He continues:

The witch I seek may be found by you also. I believe that she lives with a tribe, as the Otter Elder does—a
water tribe of the coast. Maybe Karis can seek her.

My dear brother, tell Karis this—if it proves impossible for me to come home, I have promised Tadwell that I will leave Shaftal. He fears what I might accidentally do, though I have been careful, as Medric warned me to be. If I must, I will travel over the western mountains, for I have always wondered what lies beyond them. So tell her to seek in the mountains, or beyond them, for my blades. And say to her, to everyone, that if I am dead, I will die yearning for our accidental, marvelous family—my beloved wife, my dear brother, my impatient daughter, and all my daughter’s very peculiar parents.

Emil rubs his eyes. “That’s all—except for the librarians’ notations: ‘Who wrote this letter?’ ‘Who are these people?’ ‘Why do we continue to replace this letter in the book?’ Karis, if you discover Zanja’s blades, if you become certain she’s dead, come home, I beg you.”

Karis raises her heavy head from her hands and looks westward, where the mountains rise, too far away to see. Deep below her blistered feet the bones of the earth are gripped by fists of stone. She can follow the line of those bones as far west as she likes—but not now. She looks eastward to where the ocean tears away at the edges of the land. There the hold of stone to bone is weak, as though it has been wrenched loose before and might be so again. That ragged coastline keeps its secrets, even from her. And she, who fears so little, fears to even think of that unstable edge of Shaftal and the vast, dangerous, unknowable ocean beyond it.

If Karis goes east despite her fear, she might be able to bring Zanja back. If Karis goes west, she might find sorrow, and with it might find peace. But she can do neither, for although she has saved Clement, she also may have destroyed her.

“I’m trapped,” she says to Emil, though the raven is once again up in the gable, and Emil has closed the window to protect the books from damp. “I was too merciless and then I was too merciful. Now I’m not even Clement’s nursemaid, as those aggravating Paladins insist on being to me. Instead, I am her puppeteer.”

Zanja dreamed of Emil sitting at his desk, writing a letter by the murky light of an oil lamp with a dirty chimney. She observed him as if from far away, yet she saw every detail: a dissected book, the ink stains on Emil’s fingers. She could read the letter as he wrote it.

My dearest Zanja,

You were much in my thoughts today as I dismantled
Gerunt’s Decision
. I remembered the day the librarians put that book on my table to be rebound, when you and I were working in a peaceful harmony that I now miss dreadfully. You sat upon that rug that had been woven by either your mother or grandmother. Do you know that you always positioned yourself on that rug as though you were a component of the pattern?

I glanced at you as you were thinking about something I had said, and it occurred to me that you were exactly as you should be. I remember that I said that I saw you in the pattern woven by your ancestors, and I wondered what the people of the future would have to say about you. Would they say that you were woven into the pattern of the past just as the pattern of the future was woven from you? I realize now that when I said those words, I was using water logic. I should have paid more attention.

That was the sixty-third day after your return from the dead. The ice has melted, the rains have fallen, and the flood has receded. Yet Medric commented wryly only yesterday, “We’re all drowning in water logic.” And then I cut open the spine of the book, and your letter fell into my hand.

Tonight I can’t sleep for thinking of you and wondering whether or when you will return, or whether, as your letter suggested, we’ll know your fate when Karis finds your weapons.

I want to think of you writing me a letter, or walking among the preoccupied students of Kisha, in that way you have of heeding everything while seeming completely uninvolved. I want to know how you met Coles, and whether he was in fact a poet, or just a man of too much talent and not enough sense, like Medric. I want to be with you when you finally view the sea—not in Hanishport, where most people see it, but from the wild southern coastline, where those broken battlements and crashing waves give sailors the horrors. Yet some clever coastal peoples manage to do it, and surely that requires more than skill and luck—they must have water magic.

Karis has gone to the west, and her ravens have stopped talking. I read your letter to my raven, though, and Medric says she heard it. Now I have sat up half the night writing to and thinking of you. The Travesty is a big, echoing building. Its heart is gone. Come home, my dear, I beg you.

Zanja awoke from sleep and found herself in the place Emil had written about. The night before, when she’d first stood reeling on the cliff’s edge, she saw the starry sky sweep down to join the glowing surface of a restless horizon, and then flow towards her, almost to her very feet. Even in the treeless grasslands of the south, Zanja had not encountered the terrible, vast emptiness that yawned before her here, where it seemed she could take a single step and fall into the watery sky.

By daylight, she could distinguish water from sky, though the water continued forever. In the middle distance the glare of light from the surface dazzled her, but closer to shore she could glimpse the sea bottom, where was rooted a ropy forest of underwater trees. At the surface, their bronze leaves floated in the intersection of water and air. Though the water was churned to froth by the battle between ocean and shore, here the struggle became graceful: the dense stems swayed like lithe dancers with their hands spread to capture the sun. Back and forth they swayed with the rhythm of the swells.

In the tops of those sea trees she saw a splash, and then she saw the face of a creature that seemed to gaze at her with the same curiosity and wonder with which she looked down at it. An otter—many times larger than those she had seen in rivers. They dove and swam among the stems of their underwater forest, then emerged to loll upon their backs, wrapped in seaweed. Zanja felt like she could leap into the water and live with them in their exquisitely beautiful world. Surely such friendly and joyful creatures would welcome all strangers.