Read Online Water Logic by Laurie J. Marks - Free Book Online Page A

finally,” she retorted. “Speaking of scholars, what’s wrong with that husband of yours? He hasn’t emerged for three days.”
    Emil said, “Leeba, J’han is looking for you. But I guess you can’t go find him by yourself.”
    “I can too!”
    “Oh, I don’t think so. You’re much too little to find the way by yourself. You should just stay here and wait for him to find you.”
    Leeba could not resist setting forth on a mission to prove Emil wrong. When she was gone, he commented, “I’m afraid that trick won’t work much longer.”
    He sat down at Zanja’s chair, took up the brush, and began painting some glyphs of his own on another strip of cloth. “Something certainly is weighing on Medric,” he said while he painted. “But I don’t know what it is. I’m sure it’s something in the future, not in the past—not even in what happened three days ago. For it may be his business to understand the past, but to be haunted by it is Zanja’s job.”
    “A job, is it?” said Zanja. “Like writing letters is your job?”
    Karis said, “And Medric is avoiding us so he won’t have to tell us what he knows? What exactly is the purpose of having a seer?”
    “Comedy and aggravation,” Emil said. Karis folded her arms. “Don’t glare at me,” he added, without glancing up. “Whatever I do and say at tomorrow’s meeting of the Council of Shaftal will be criticized by everyone in Shaftal for the next hundred years. During these final days it was my intention to do nothing but think about how to make that meeting work. Now I’d gladly kill another assassin if doing so would give me back even one of the days I have lost.”
    Even Karis treated the pending meeting with due seriousness, though without much enthusiasm. “Send Mabin to the funeral instead of you,” she said. “That’ll give you a free day.”
    “But Clement’s visiting commanders will be attending.”
    “I promise I’ll try to impress them enough for us both.”
    Emil set aside the brush, having finished his flag. “Then you’ll have to try to look impressive—and without looking too miserable about it.”
    Karis didn’t reply, and there was a long silence. Months ago, after fifteen years in the nondescript clothing that made him look no different from everyone else, Emil had begun wearing Paladin’s black again. Zanja had found his new appearance surprisingly difficult to get used to: in her mind’s eye he had always been a shabby traveler, climbing wearily to a hilltop, never expecting that spears of starlight would fly from the heavens and pierce his heart. Now he no longer seemed like the Man on the Hill in the glyph illustration, and she didn’t know what he might be instead.
    Karis finally spoke, but on an entirely different subject. “I’m having nightmares about this rogue air witch,” she said. “I keep imagining a person like Norina, but not restrained by law or custom, and not loyal.”
    “It’s a terrifying prospect,” said Emil. “But it’s not today’s problem.”
    “I’m going to talk to that prisoner this morning.”
    “It won’t accomplish anything.” Emil stood up. Zanja took his flag from him to hang it with the others, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Don’t let him hurt her,” he murmured.
    “If you must worry, worry about likely things,” Zanja said. For the prisoner was refusing food, his unset broken arm also was slowly killing him, and even had he been healthy and fully armed he couldn’t have harmed Karis.
    “I am.” Emil left, dressed in pristine black, his ponytail wrapped in black-dyed leather, his three earrings glittering in his ear. Zanja looked at the funeral flag he had written and saw there what she had also read in her own flags: Fear .
    Karis had gone to the clothes chest to study its contents with loathing. Zanja went back to the table and picked up the ink brush. Perhaps if she wrote enough flags she would write herself beyond fear, into insight. But she