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bowed
over the dish. The black powder floats on top of the drops of tea. She mixes,
but the powder doesn't mix in. "Zanja," she says.
She drops the pen. Grainy drops of tea and specks of ink powder spatter
across
the Paladin's wrinkled paper. Her head has come up in a peculiar manner, not
in
her usual slow way. Her eyes are not right.
"Karis?" says Sevan.
Karis steps in the wrong direction, into the table. The table breaks. It
cracks
into pieces, and the pieces clatter to the stone floor. It is noisy.
"Karis!" says Sevan. She is clasping, is trying to clasp, Karis's arm. The
Paladin has slammed open the door. "Karis!" says the Paladin. His voice is
loud.
She has ruined his paper. His pen is rolling across the floor.
He is trying to clasp her arm. Karis does not breathe. Her eyes are not
right.
She looks at the wall. She steps into the pieces of the table, and they
shatter.
The Paladin tries to clasp her. "Karis! What is wrong?
She breathes. "Zanja," she says. "Her knives."
She turns. The door is there. She steps through it. Now she is gone. The
Paladin
is gone. The baby is crying in the hallway. Clement remembers that one of the
babies is hers. She remembers that she loves him, but can't remember what
that
means.
"Bloody hell!" says Sevan.
"I never saw her break a table before," Clement says. "She spilled ink on my
trousers."
Sevan breathes. "We must follow them, General, to find out what is happening."
Once again, Karis has failed to follow a plan. It is not reasonable.
Chapter 29
Seth had always avoided looking directly at the oceanùit made her queasy.
When
she had taken her occasional holidays by the sea, what drew her was the
mystery
of that unknown land, so close by yet so beyond her reach, where monstrous,
beautiful, alien creatures lived in ways she wanted to understand. She would
wander the beach, seeking the clues the water scattered there: a shell, a
carapace, a scuttling creature, a peculiar corpse. She cut dead creatures
apart
to see how they worked: various fish, mollusks, once even a sea dog. And if
she
could force herself to glance at the sickening waters, misery might be
rewarded
by a glimpse of a great fish like the one within whose skeleton she lived,
with
her oilcloth roof spread on the rib cage and her cooking fire tucked in the
jawbone.
Atop the cliff's edge south of Basdown, Seth and Damon ate breakfast
together,
him looking out towards the fog-shrouded sea, her looking towards the
scraggly
undergrowth. They had been walking since dawn and were more than ready for
their
oatcakes and cheese.
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As long as the two of them had traveled together, Seth had been seeking in
Damon
a useful way to understand his people. But instead, he had ceased to be a
Sainnite and had become a flower farmer loved by a Ten-Furlong woman who
eagerly
awaited his return. Even now, with Basdown behind them, and with Damon as
eager
as a hunting dog to catch their prey, Seth saw him as a flower farmer, not a
soldier.
"What are you looking for?" she asked him.
"Sainna."
"It isn't there."
"Which way is it, then?"
"It's so far away it isn't there at all."
"Huh!" He continued to peer in the fog, though.
Karis had said the Sainnites were Shaftali. Perhaps she had not been talking
of
their status at all. Perhaps Karis, too, would only see that Damon was, or
should be, a flower farmer. Perhaps the truth Seth longed for was a truth
Karis
had already told all of them. But what could be done with this understanding?
How could it be made into a plan?
"Do you want to go to Sainna?" Seth asked.
"I have heard that the entire land is a garden," said Damon. "I have heard it
is
always in bloom. To see thatùwhat an adventure, eh?"
"An adventure? A sea voyage?" Seth shuddered.
"Then I come back home, with many flower seeds!"
"That would be a fine dowry!"
Seth had to explain what a dowry was, and then Damon replied in wonderment,
"You
think my farmer wants me for a lifetime? She wants a child of me?"
"Of course she does. Even without flower seeds from Sainna."
Damon seemed too amazed to respond.
They had been trailing Jareth for several days. Although the assassin had
previously lived for many weeks in the Barrens, he was an incompetent
travelerùnot only did he frequently wander into dead ends or stretches of
rough
ground and dense brush, but he had only once found drinking water. Twice,
Damon
and Seth had come upon cold camps, where Jareth had collected abundant
firewood
but had not managed to light it. Damon declared that they were tracking an
imbecile.
"Or a city man," Seth had replied. "He knows how to lay a fireù just not a
fire
in the open, with damp wood. And he doesn't seem to be carrying dry tinder."
"Because imbeciles think that tinderboxes grow in the woods!"
Seth, preoccupied with deciding what to do, what to think, which way to go,
and
how long they could travel before dark, had hardly noticed the jest. Then it
jumped her, and she had burst out laughing.
When the chase began, Jareth had been nearly a day and a night ahead of them,
but they gained ground quickly. Once Seth realized he was inept, she could
use
her own aptitudes to take shortcuts past Jareth's wrong turns, for, like most
earth bloods, Seth was never lost. By now, they had made three camps to his
four, and when the landscape prevented them from seeing far ahead, they had
begun to walk with caution, lest they encounter him as he doubled back on his
trail, having gotten himself lost or tangled up again.
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