Free Water Logic by Laurie J. Marks

coiled beneath the ice, poised to break forth. “None of us are,” she added. “You, for example: your great accomplishment of the day is that you’ve convinced your stubborn wife to wipe grease off her face and change her clothes.”
    Zanja laughed. “I’ve done other things. I told all those volunteers that you were grateful for them staying up all night, and that you’d tell them yourself except that you were still asleep. And I have arranged to get you some watchdogs. Or rather, I allowed Seth to arrange it.”
    “Watchdogs?” said Karis. “That seems too simple. But—” She didn’t finish, but slowly began to smile.
    “I like Seth,” Zanja said.
    “I like her, too—she’s like me, only sane.”
    Zanja leaned lightly against Karis, which was like leaning against a tree that happened to be warm, if not particularly soft, and Karis put an arm around her. “I do blame you,” Karis said.
    “I know you do.”
    “Loving you is an incredibly complicated and dangerous business.”
    “You may be up to the task, though.”

    The visit to the imprisoned assassin gained nothing, as Emil had predicted. Karis healed his broken arm, and he cursed her, calling her a pretender and an impostor even as she used the power of Shaftal to snap his shattered bones back into place.
    Karis said to him, “Without my permission Harald G’deon vested me with the power of Shaftal. Then I did not exercise that power for twenty years, until councilor Mabin accorded me the right to do so. So in what way am I a pretender? Or are you blaming me for the fact that my mother was an innocent who fell into harm, and my father was a Sainnite who lay on her without caring to learn her name? Is it possible you think I’m at fault for my parents’ actions, though I never knew either one of them? Or do you think you blame me for having been forced to do sexual service to my father’s people when I was just a child? Or that I somehow chose to become addicted when they insisted I take their drugs? I’m just trying to understand why you are cursing me like this.”
    The man offered no answers. Perhaps in his mind the foulness and contamination of the Sainnites was a real thing, like the murky mess below the hole of a privy, or the stinking putrefaction of a wound, which must be cut out before healing became possible. To convince the man that his belief was merely a metaphor, and a false one at that, was the work of the Truthken he had forbidden from his presence. Karis did not attempt it.
    “You seem determined to die,” she said. “What would you have us say at your funeral?”
    “Say that the people of Shaftal are sheep,” he said. “You have promised them healthy children and good harvests, and so they are following you. The destruction of Shaftal’s heritage, the thousands of dead, the widowed husbands and wives, the parentless children—they’re willing to forget these crimes. But we are not.”
    “What justice do you have in mind, imposed on whom? And what difference would it make in the end?”
    “Shaftal would be cleansed!”
    “By killing all of us? Those like me, begotten by indifference or rape? The Shaftali-born Sainnites who have done nothing but help the cause of Shaftal? The people raised to be soldiers who were never given a chance to learn another way? The children of half Sainnites? The babies in arms?” Karis paused. “It seems like a lot of killing. But when we are all dead, you’d still be unsatisfied with what is left, and because you would be so accustomed to killing anyone who displeases you, you’d start killing each other. What a hell you’d make for yourselves—I’m half-tempted to let you have it!”
    After they left him, they walked back to their bedroom, as sound of the city’s clocks tolling the hour sounded faintly and then were echoed loudly by the clock in Norina’s law school. When they were alone and Karis was changing her clothes, Zanja said, “I was wrong: you are suited for your