Water Logic (14 page)

Mari sat in a chair by the hearth and nursed the baby while under her direction Zanja lit a candle and found bread and butter. It seemed a poor household, without even a spice cupboard or tea tin, and Zanja cut herself only two slices of the coarse bread, though she could have consumed the entire loaf.

She returned to the hearth to find Mari looking curiously at the glyph cards. “This one would be you.” Zanja touched a finger to a damp, blurry card. “You can’t read it now because the ink was washed away but the glyph was ‘Nurture’ and it had a drawing of a nursing mother sitting by the fire, just like you. It’s a very lucky card.”

“Perhaps you’ll tell my fortune when the cards are dry.”

“I’m not a fortune-teller.”

“What are you, then?”

Hadn’t Zanja answered this question already? She said, “What is this place?”

“This is Vinal’s Farm, and we fished you out of the River Corber, down by the bend. Long Bend, most folks call this place.”

Zanja knew of no place known as Long Bend. “Is this the north bank, or the south?”

“The south, of course.”

“How far away is Watfield?”

“Watfield?”  The baby uttered a complaint. Mari switched the infant to her other breast, and there was peace again. “Oh, I guess you mean Waet’s Field? Upriver, on the north bank? I’m not certain, though.”

“Why not?”

Mari seemed puzzled. “We don’t know them. And it’s not easy to get across. In this flood—”

“Flood! The ice hasn’t even broken up yet.”

“It broke up fifteen days ago.” Mari’s shy glance was more than a little bewildered. “Have you forgotten the entire season?”

“No, I remember it clearly: a cold winter and a late spring.”

“You’re a bit addled from your accident, maybe. It was a warm winter and an early spring.”

After a moment Zanja asked, “Is the bridge out at Lit Narrows?”

“Bridge?” said Mari. “There’s no bridge. Just the one to the west, for the highway. I understand it’s a long way from here.”

Zanja gazed a long time at the glyph cards. They were warping as they dried, and she finally roused herself to turn them over. Perhaps her confusion and lethargy was from a head injury. She felt her skull but found no bleeding or swelling. Perhaps the cold and shock of nearly drowning had so confused her that she now remembered facts about Shaftal that were not true. But was her entire life not true?

She said, “You’ve never heard my name? Zanja na’Tarwein?”

“Oh, we don’t hear much of the border people here in the Midlands. They stay in their own place, I guess, just like we do.”

“I’m Karis G’deon’s wife!”

“Karis G’deon?” said Mari. “Well, I’m sure he’s worried about you.” Her voice sharpened. “Tadwell G’deon died so young? This is dreadful news!”

No matter how remote the farmstead or how reclusive the farmers, any six-year-old could recite the names of the G’deons and the years of their service. Tadwell had died old, after thirty-eight years as G’deon. That had been some two hundred years ago.

As Zanja set forth from Vinal’s Farm, the light was rising though the sun was hidden. The fields surrounding the farm were mud, churned up by frost, not yet dry enough to plow. The track Zanja followed, which Mari assured her would take her to the riverbank, did not go north at all, but due west. Yet the river did appear, though in the wrong direction, and it was not frozen, but sloppy with flooding on the near bank. Even though Zanja could see that its big bend folded it back on itself, so that the water lay to the west instead of to the north, and its east-flowing water turned northwestward, she persisted in feeling that she stood on the north shore with Watfield to the right of her. She walked to the left in a direction she kept telling herself was southwest, with the sprawling river usually in sight though she had to climb to high ground to avoid the flood.

All day the landscape remained unfamiliar. Zanja’s disorientation persisted until midday, when the landscape began to seem less alien, and her reversed sense of direction abruptly righted itself. She must be near the farm where she and Seth had gotten the dogs. She believed they had crossed this brook, though it had been frozen then. Now she should see an orchard. But the slope that yesterday had been planted with apple trees today was uncleared woodland.

Finally, Zanja felt certain she had passed the place she had fallen in. Unable to cross the flood, she continued along the south bank, fighting her way through wild woods now, until at midafternoon she stood directly across from Watfield.

Watfield was a perfect site for a river port, with the flood plain on the south bank, and the north bank safe on higher ground. The sun had burned through the clouds, and Zanja should have been able to see the city’s clutter of docks and peaked slate roofs even at this distance. But on the far shore the cleared land was scattered with farmsteads. Watfield wasn’t there. Where Zanja looked for a city there lay only a field that belonged to a family named Waet.

Chapter 9

Living in uncertainty is what makes the marvelous possible, Emil had said to Clement more than once. That night, in the bitter cold of the barn, surrounded by sleeping soldiers, with the snowfall extinguishing all sound, for a little while Clement understood why Emil, a man of extraordinary rationality, could subscribe to such a mystical philosophy.

“We think the past is over,” said the raven, speaking Medric’s words. “To us that’s fact. But by water logic, the past is present.”

“You know as little of water logic as I do,” Karis snapped. “You’re reciting from a book.”

“Reading, actually—the book is right here on my lap,” said the seer. “And it’s a good thing I know how to read.”

Emil said, “Medric, please don’t test Karis’s temper tonight. Has Zanja been taken by water magic? Say yes, or say no.”

“Yes,” said the Medric-Raven.

“A water witch is meddling with my business, and you didn’t see fit to tell me?” Karis said in outrage.

“No.”

Medric seemed to have given his entire answer. By the dim lantern light Clement saw Emil lay a hand on Karis’s forearm. “I assume you’re unwilling to explain why, or you would have done so already. But will you tell us where, or what?”

“She lies not too far from here, in a cottage on the south shore, near a horseshoe bend of the river, where there’s an old man who’s blind and knits. She’s been mostly drowned and nearly frozen, but to her that’s not much worse than a hiccup.”

“There’s no such place,” Karis said. “And she certainly isn’t there.”

The Medric-Raven said, “No, not now. But two hundred years ago there was. And she is.”

Their dreary wait for daylight became an impatient one. Karis wanted to travel north to find a water witch she had met once in a border tribe, and she and Emil argued about the wisdom and practicality of this venture. With Zanja gone, he pointed out, no one in Shaftal could even speak the Otter Elder’s language, even if the old man was still alive. And he reminded her, several times, that an air witch was trying to assassinate her. “Zanja will find her own way back to you,” he said. “After six years with her, how is it possible you don’t trust her to do so?”

At dawn, Herme rousted his company and set them to work at clearing snow. The farmers served pot after pot of porridge, as quickly as they could cook it. By the time the sixty of them began the march to Watfield, columns of sunlight supported a cracking ceiling of clouds. They walked from sunlight to shadow to sunlight, and weary people grumbled in two languages that they didn’t know whether to sweat or shiver.

Clement found Seth with the dogs at the rear of the column, plodding wearily in the trampled snow. They walked together for half the morning without saying a word to each other. Once only, Seth glanced sideways at Clement, and her expression was so full of contradictions that Clement could make nothing of it.

Emil walked ahead with Saleen, and Karis spent most of the journey in the very front, doing the hard work of trampling a path in the fresh snow. Eventually both of them fell back. The dogs pushed up to be near Karis and she rested her big hands on their heads. The dogs grinned up at her, seeming very pleased by her approval.

“I like that captain of yours,” Emil said to Clement. “His name is Herme? Can he read and write? Does he speak Shaftalese?”

“No, no, and no. And you can’t recruit him to the Paladins. He’s going west with me, to be a new garrison commander’s lieutenant. It will break his company’s heart to lose him, though.”

Seth looked at Clement sharply. “You’re going west?” she said.

“I must. I have a problem there that only I can resolve.”

Emil said, “The Paladin irregulars have always avoided direct attacks on the garrisons because it would take too many people and too much heavy artillery. What will it take for you to break into a garrison by force?”

“You Paladins were wise with your resources,” said Clement. “It would require a battalion, at least, and a great deal more time than I have.”

“And I don’t want armed battalions marching the countryside again.”

“I’ll bring only thirty people—a commander and five lieutenants for each garrison. And no weapons.”

“But the mutineers won’t open the gates and let you in,” Emil said, “no more than our own rebels will open their own gates to Karis. To do so would be an admission they were wrong, and it’s both too late and too early for that.”

“You think you know Heras, Emil, but you only know her as an enemy. You don’t realize Heras is my superior in every way: more subtle, more determined, more ruthless. My promotions were gained by patronage, while hers were gained by worth. So she has told me, more than once.”

“She’s a stupid woman, whoever she is,” Seth muttered beside her.

“You don’t have to convince me she’s ruthless,” Emil said quietly. When Emil became quiet, he was forcing people to put effort into listening, which meant he was angry. “But that woman’s subtlety and determination were greatly reduced when a certain rogue Paladin tempted her dimwitted twit of a seer into turning traitor. When Medric abandoned her, so also did her greatness.”

“Greatness by whose standards?” said Clement. “And is that a prediction or an opinion?”

“You can keep trying to throw me off track all the way to Watfield if you like, though it seems a pointless and exhausting way to spend a morning.”

“What do you want me to say, Emil? That third choice you believe in? I have no idea what it might be.”

“But I can think of an easy way for you to resolve this entire matter.”

“If you let me have a weapon I can kill myself,” Clement said. “That would be easy.”

Seth said, “It would be easier to let that stupid person be general instead of you.”

Clement stumbled over her own feet.

Seth glanced at Emil, as though she feared she had spoken out of turn. But Emil said, “And that’s what you want to do, isn’t it Clement? If Zanja were here, she’d tell you the story of the demon in the wildwood, who terrified all passersby until one of them called it by name.”

“The demon’s name was ‘Fear,’ ” Clement said. “I heard her tell that story in the garrison.”

“Well, then,” Emil said. Whatever target he had been aiming at, he seemed to think he had hit it.

Clement said, “I’ll leave for the west as soon as my people can be ready. A few days.”

Seth said, “You can’t. The weather has changed. Don’t you feel it?”

Clement raised her gaze to survey the landscape. There was snow and more snow as far as could be seen. Her feet and hands were numb, and even when walking in sunlight she felt disinclined to unbutton her coat. But surely the sun’s climb into the sky was surprisingly steep. And where the patches of sunlight lingered long enough, water drops began to fall from the snow-covered tree limbs.

“Mud season,” Karis said. “In just a few days it will start to rain.”

“How long will the rain last?” Emil asked.

“Fifteen days,” Karis said. “More or less.”

“Thirteen,” said Seth.

They conferred, but Clement, engaged in her own calculations, didn’t care about the exact number. She said, “It’s not so difficult, is it, to find someone to predict the weather?”

“Not at all,” said Emil. “A person with a strong earth talent can predict a good twenty days ahead with certainty, and beyond that with less certainty.”

“Are there people like that in South Hill?”

“Three or four of them, at least. Do you think Heras has become able to make weather her ally? Perhaps a prisoner, or a younger soldier has the gift of weather-wisdom? Still, if she did plan to use spring mud in her favor, it will just delay you, and what’s the benefit of delay?”

“The delay could be as long as forty-five or fifty days if I were to send emissaries first. And then I couldn’t travel to Wilton at all, because I’d have to stay here for the confirmation. With all that time, Heras could consolidate her support among the other commanders.”

Neither angry nor desperate, but weighed down by the heaviness of what lay before her, Clement continued, “But the weather can work in my favor, also. We’ll simply travel in the rain, and I’ll arrive in Wilton while Heras is still assuming I’m too cautious and sensible to take her by surprise.”

“I’ll go with you,” Karis said.

“You will not!” Clement cried. “Don’t you think I have burdens enough?”

“Karis has somehow forgotten again that an air witch is trying to assassinate her,” Emil said. “But now that I’ve reminded her, she will offer you a raven instead, while she remains where she can be protected by these noble dogs, these Paladins, and our Truthken. But I’ll put Mabin, Saleen, and as many Paladins as I can spare under your command, Clement. With Mabin and the Paladins able to demand food and shelter in the G’deon’s name, that’ll mean you can travel light.”

The river, which had veered away, came into sight again, its ice glittering white with new snow except where people and horses worked to plow and smooth the riverbed. Sunshine glared on the south shore. With her eyes shaded, Clement could barely make out the gray haze of a distant, leafless woodland. The docks of Watfield became visible on the north shore, hemmed in by tilting plateaus of river ice. A haze of smoke floated
above the city’s slate rooftops, and now a small crowd appeared at the city’s edge: Paladin’s black, soldier’s gray, the patchwork of many colors worn by citizens. Gilly was not as easy to spot as he used to be, but still he was the only one among soldiers without a uniform. Clement heard Gabian’s joyous cry and felt a clenching in her dry breasts. Some children came flying towards them, a red-coated girl at the lead, who rushed directly to Karis, who caught her and swung her into the air.