My memories of those days are distorted, like images seen through a badly ground magnifying lens. Faces came too close, sound was shocking, and light pierced my eyes. I didn’t recognize the room. There was a window opposite my bed and bright winter light shone directly in my face. There were other beds in the room, and all of them were occupied. I heard coughing, retching, and feverish moaning. My own life had vanished. I did not know where I was.
“Please. Pay attention.”
There was an orderly by my bed with an open notebook in his hand. His pencil was poised over it. “Concentrate, Cadet. The doctor demands that every patient answer these questions, no matter what condition he is in. It may be the last important thing you can do with your life. Did you touch a Speck?”
I didn’t care. I just wanted him to go away. Nevertheless, I tried. “They threw dust at us. Right at us.”
“Did you touch a Speck or did a Speck touch you?”
“Rory stroked her leg.” I thought of that, and my memories spun me back to the sideshow tent. I saw the woman’s mouth soften as he caressed her. I opened my own mouth, longing to kiss her.
A voice shattered the image. “So you’ve told me. Six times. You, Cadet. You…” He flipped over a page and likely found my name, “Nevare Burvelle. Did you touch a Speck or allow a Speck to touch you?”
“Not…really.” Did I? In a dream, I had done far more than touch a Speck. She had been lush and beautiful. No. Fat and disgusting. “It wasn’t real. It didn’t count.”
“That won’t do. Yes or no, Cadet. Did you have carnal contact with a Speck? Don’t be ashamed. It’s too late for shame now. We know that several other cadets bought time with the Speck woman. Did you? Answer me, yes or no.”
“Yes or no.” I echoed the words obediently.
An exasperated sigh. “Yes, then. I’m putting down yes.”
Dr. Amicas’s guess had been correct. It was Speck plague. It went against all we knew of that disease for it to strike so far west and during winter. Conventional wisdom at the time said that it flared up in the hot dusty days of summer and died down during the cool wet days of fall. But all the other symptoms matched, and Dr. Amicas, who had seen the disease firsthand, was adamant from the beginning about his diagnosis. It was Speck plague.
Those of us who fell to the first wave of illness were fortunate in a sense, for in the early days of the plague, we got good care. The first circle of cadets to sicken was composed only of those who had visited the freak tent. I have a hazy recollection of a rumpled and unshaven Colonel Stiet striding up and down past our beds, loudly denouncing us as perverts and saying we would all be dishonorably discharged for having unnatural relations. I remember Dr. Amicas pointing out that “Numerically, it simply isn’t feasible that all these lads had relations with the same female on the same night. Even if she’d lined them up like ducks, there simply wasn’t enough time. I’m including your Caulder in that line, of course. For him to become infected so swiftly, he, too, would have had to have congress with her.”
“How dare you think my son could be involved in something like this? How dare you even suggest it? One of the cadets who dirtied himself with that striped whore passed the illness on to my boy. It’s the only possible explanation.”
The doctor’s voice was tired but insistent. “Then, unless you are saying that your son had abnormal relations with one of these cadets, we have to admit the plague can be spread by means other than sexual contact. In which case, perhaps only a few of the cadets had intercourse with the whore.”
“They’ve admitted it! Half a dozen of those new noble vermin have admitted it!”
“And as many of your fine old noble sons have owned up to it also. Stop haranguing me, Colonel. How the disease got started is no longer a priority. Stopping it is.”
The colonel’s voice was low and determined. “We never had Speck plague in Old Thares before. Is it a coincidence that the first time we have young men patronizing a Speck whore, we get an outbreak? I don’t think so. The city officials who banished the freak show don’t think so either. Those who patronized the diseased whore are as guilty as the circus that brought her to town. And they should be punished for what they have loosed upon all of us.”
“Very well,” the doctor conceded wearily. “You occupy yourself with thinking about how to punish them. I’ll try to keep them alive so you’ll have someone to punish. Would you please remove yourself from my infirmary now?”
“You haven’t heard the last of this!” the colonel promised angrily. I heard him storm out, and then drifted off into my fever again.
Dr. Amicas’s plan to quarantine the Academy and confine the plague there was doomed to defeat. No walls or gates could contain or hold out the enemy that had descended upon us. The reports of sickness in the city were multiplying before the first day of lengthening daylight was over. As it was with the Academy, so it was with the city. Those who had visited the freak show tent were the first to fall ill. But it spread rapidly to their relatives and caretakers, and outward to others. Families such as Gord’s who had left the city for the holiday heard the tidings and did not return. Families trapped within the city closed the doors to their houses and waited inside, hoping against hope that the contagion had not already infiltrated their homes. The circus and the freak show were rousted from the city, but the Specks had inexplicably vanished by then. Their keeper was found dead, choked on his prod, which had been forced down his throat.
Two days after I fell ill, the second wave of plague swept through the Academy. The infirmary was overwhelmed. There were not enough beds to hold the afflicted, not enough linens and medicines and orderlies. The doctor and his assistants did what they could to take care of the cadets suffering in their various dormitories. There was little outside help to be had, for the Speck plague was raging through the city by then, and all the doctors who dared to treat the ill had far more work than they could handle.
At the time, I knew nothing of that, of course. On the second day of my sickness, I was moved to a bed in the infirmary, and remained there. “Lots of water and sleep,” was Dr. Amicas’s first advice. I’ll give him this; he was an old soldier and knew well how to take action even before the command came down. He recognized the plague and treated it as such from the first outbreak.
He’d seen Speck plague before, and had even contracted a mild case of it when he was stationed at Gettys. Knowing what he knew, Dr. Amicas did the best he could. His first recommendation, that we drink lots of water, had not been a bad one. No medicine had ever proven efficacious against Speck plague. A man’s own constitution was his best resource. The symptoms were simple and exhausting: vomiting, diarrhea, and a fever that came and went. Day would seem to bring a slight recovery, but with night our fevers rose again. None of us could keep food or water down. I lay on my narrow cot, drifting in and out of awareness of the ward around me.
My cognizance of those days was an intermittent thing. Sometimes when I was awake the room was brightly lit and other times it was dim. I lost all sense of the passage of time. Every muscle in my body ached, and my head pounded with pain. I was hot, then shaking with cold. I was constantly thirsty, no matter how much I drank. If I opened my eyes, I felt as if too much light were in them; if I closed them, I feared to slip off into fever dreams. My lips and nostrils were chapped raw. I could find no comfort anywhere.
When I first arrived at the infirmary, Oron had lain in the bed to my left. The next time I awoke, he was gone and Spink was there. Nate was in the bed to my right. We were too miserable to talk; I could not even tell them of my dishonorable discharge or that they were soon to be culled as well. I drifted between dreams that were too sharply real to give me any rest and a nightmarish reality of foul smells, groaning cadets, and misery. I dreamed that I stood before my father and that he did not believe I was innocent of the false charges against me. I dreamed that my uncle and Epiny came to visit me, but Epiny had the deformed feet of the chicken woman. When she blew her little whistle, it made cackling sounds.
But the most unsettling moments were neither fever dreams nor sickroom glimpses. For me, there was another world, deeper than the fever dreams and far more real. My body lay in the bed and burned with fever, but my spirit walked in Tree Woman’s world. I watched my other self there, and recalled clearly the years I had spent with her since first she had seized my hair and pulled me up and into her keeping. My true self was a pale ghost floating in their world, a party to their thoughts, but nothing that they feared or considered at all. In that world, my topknotted self had been her student for many years, and now I was her lover. Daily, she had taught me the magic of the People, and daily she had strengthened me in that magic and made me more real in her world. We had walked in her forest and I had learned the irreplaceable value of her trees and wilderness. Her world had become mine, and I had come to see that no measure was too extreme in the war to protect it.
And in her world, I loved her with deep and real passion. I loved the voluptuousness of her flesh, and the deep earthiness of her magic. I admired her loyalty and determination to preserve the People and their ways. I shared her dedication to that cause. In those dreams, I walked beside her, and lay beside her, and in the sweet dimness of the forest night, we made the plans that would save our folk. When I was with her, all was clear. I knew that I had pleased her when I had made the sign to the Speck dancers to “loose” the magic. I knew the performers had not been captives at all, but the most powerful dancers of the magic who could be spared from the People. They had come seeking my soldier’s boy self. They had used that “me” as a compass heading, to find the place where the intruders raised their warriors. And when they had found me, my other self had taken my hand and made the sign, and they had let fly the dust of the disease.
Powdered dung. That was what it was. It was a disgusting magic to my Gernian self, and as natural as breath to Tree Woman’s assistant. It was well known to the People that a tiny measure of powdered dung from a sick person ingested by a healthy child would make the child sick, but only in the mildest way, and never again would the child fall prey to the deadly flux. But in quantity, as they had discovered, the dust could sicken an entire outpost of intruders, cutting down their warriors and women alike and exterminating the workers who slashed the road through the forest’s flesh.
In her world I accepted, without question, the further mission I would fulfill. I would enter the flesh of the soldier’s son. I would undergo a change and become him. And I would spread the dust of death, not just through the great house where they raised their warriors, but also throughout their stonewalled hives, and even to the crowned ones who ruled them. Thus would I be the magic that turned the intruders back and saved the People.
All this I knew so clearly when I wandered outside my feverish body. Each time I came back to my tortured flesh as my true self, I was weaker. Each time, vestiges of that other life and the knowledge of that world ghosted through my fevered brain.
On my third day of sickness, I rallied briefly during the day. Dr. Amicas seemed pleased to see me awake, but I did not share his optimism. My eyelids were crusted and raw, as were my nostrils. The lingering illness made all my senses preternaturally sharp. The coarse sheets and wool blankets were a torment. I rolled my head toward Spink. I wanted to ask him if Oron had recovered, but Spink’s eyes were closed and he was breathing hoarsely. Nate was still in the bed to my right. He looked terrible. In a few short days the illness had sucked the flesh from his bones and the fever appeared to be devouring him from within. His mouth hung open as he breathed and mucus rattled in his throat. It was a terrible thing to hear, and I could not escape it. The day droned past me. I tried to be manly. I drank the bitter herbal water that they brought me, vomited it up, and then drank the next draft they gave me. There was nothing to do except lie in bed and be sick. I hadn’t the strength to hold a book, and could not have focused my eyes if I did. No one came to visit me. Neither Spink nor Nate was well enough to talk. I felt that there was something important I had to tell someone, but I could not remember what it was or whom I was to tell.
I told myself that I was growing stronger, but as the sun faded into night, my fever returned. I plunged back into a sleep that was neither rest nor true sleep. My dreams swirled like winged demons round my bed, and I could not escape them. I woke from a dream in which I was trapped in the freak tent to find myself in the dimmed ward. I sat up and discovered that Spink had no hands or arms, only flippers. When I tried to get out of my bed, I found that I had no legs. “I’m dreaming!” I shouted at the orderly who came to hold me down. “I’m dreaming. My legs are fine. I’m dreaming.”
I woke from that nightmare, shivering with cold, to find that my head was resting on a pillow full of snow. I tried to throw it off my bed, but Dr. Amicas came and scolded me, saying, “It will cool your hot head. It may break the fever. Lie back, Burvelle, lie back.”
“I didn’t give liquor to Caulder. I didn’t! You have to make the colonel understand. It wasn’t me.”
“Of course not, of course not. Lie back. Cool your head. Your fever is burning your brain. Lie still.”
The doctor pushed me back into the cold softness of the fat man’s embrace. “I used to be in the cavalla!” he told me. “Too bad you can’t be a ranker like me. You can’t be anything now. Not even a scout. Maybe you can be a fat man in a sideshow. All you have to do is eat. You like to eat, don’t you?”
I sat up suddenly. The softness of the cold pillow had wakened a brief connection of memory. It was night in the ward. Dim lanterns burned, and in the beds, shadowy figures tossed. I held tight to what I knew, desperate to share it, to avert my future betrayal of my people. “Doctor!” I shouted. “Dr. Amicas.”
Someone in a doctor’s apron hurried to my bedside. It wasn’t Amicas. “What is it? Are you thirsty?”
“Yes. No. It was the dust, Doctor. The dust they used. Dried and powdered shit from a sick man. To make us all sick. To kill us all.”
“Drink some water, Cadet. You’re raving.”
“Tell Dr. Amicas,” I insisted.
“Of course. Drink this.”
He held a cup to my mouth. It was pure, cool water and I gulped it down. It soothed my mouth and throat. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” And I fell back, through fever dreams of an endless carriage ride into that other world.
Tree Woman shook her head at me. We were seated together in a little bower of flowering bushes, not far from the edge of the world. She smiled kindly at me as she warned me, “You are not strong enough yet. Be patient. You need to consume more of their magic to walk with strength in their world. If you try too soon to cross back with him, you cannot master him. He will betray you.”
We were sitting together in the eaves of a forest. A soft rain was falling. She had brought me a leaf, folded like a cup. In it was a thick, sweet soup, warm and delicious. I drank it and licked the residue from the leaf as she looked on approvingly.
She had a leaf of her own, laden with the same gooey substance. She lapped it slowly from the cup, licking her lips and smiling. Watching her eat made me hungry for her. There was such plenitude to her, such completeness. She was generosity and richness, indulgence and luxury. In her, nothing was denied. I wanted her again. I wanted to be her, full and rich with magic. She saw me watching her and smiled coquettishly.
“Eat more!” she urged me. “Soon I will show you how to get it for yourself.” She handed me another leaf of the stuff. “Let it fill you. It’s their magic. Isn’t it delicious? Fill yourself with it. Eat and grow full of magic.” She leaned closer to me, offering it, and suddenly it was not sweet. It was foul and thick, congealed like blood, sweet in the rotten way of carrion that draws flies. I jerked back from it.
“I don’t want to be full of magic! I want to be an officer in the king’s cavalla. I want to serve my king, and marry Carsina, and send my journals home to my family. Please. Let me just be what I am supposed to be. Let me go.”
“Easy, Burvelle. Easy. Orderly! More water, here, right away. Drink this, Burvelle. Drink it down.”
My teeth chattered against the rim of a glass. Cold water spilled and dripped on my chest. I pried open my gummy eyes. Dr. Amicas was easing me back onto my pillows. He had two days’ growth of gray and black stubble on his chin and his eyes were bloodshot. I tried to make him understand. “I didn’t give Caulder liquor, Doctor. All I did was bring him home. You have to talk to Colonel Stiet. Or it’s all over for me.”
He stared at me distractedly, then said, “It’s the least of your worries, Cadet. But men seldom lie in fevers. I’ll put in a word for you with the colonel. If he survives. Rest now. Get some rest.”
“The dust!” I blurted. “Did he tell you about the dust? The dung. Dung from a sick child.”
The doctor was pushing me back into my bed. I caught at his hands. “I betrayed us, Doctor. I made the ‘loose’ sign, and by it the Specks knew it was me. They knew they had reached the place where cavalla officers are taught. They loosed the dust and the death upon us. They were waiting for me, waiting for the sign. I’m a traitor, Doctor. Don’t let him become me. He means to kill everyone here, every soldier’s son. And everyone in Old Thares, even the king and queen.” I struggled to push his hands away, to escape the bed.
“Easy, Nevare. Rest. You aren’t yourself. Orderly! I need some straps here.”
An old man in a spattered smock hurried to my bedside. As the doctor held me, he tied a strip of linen around my wrist. “Not too tight,” the doctor rebuked him. “I just want him kept in his bed until the delirium passes.”
“Loose!” I said, and made the sign. The strip fell away from my wrist.
“Not that loose!” the doctor chided him.
“I tied it, sir. Swear I did.” The orderly was indignant.
“Just do it again.”
“Loose,” I said, but I was losing my strength rapidly. I let the doctor push me back into my blankets. I did not try to sit up again.
“That’s better,” he said. “We may not need the restraints after all.”
I tried to hold on to his words, but they were slippery. I slid back into ordinary nightmares. When I awoke, midmorning, I felt relief at escaping them, and exhausted as if I had battled all night long. An orderly brought me water and I drank, relieved to find it pure water with no medicines fouling its clean taste. Dr. Amicas was nowhere to be seen. The bed to my right was empty and an old woman, her face ravaged by drink, was stripping off the linens. I rolled my head the other way. Spink was there, but he slept on, oblivious to the day’s light or the muted bustle around us. Several times I asked after Nate and Oron, but the nurses seemed to know no names.
“They come and go too fast,” one man told me. He scratched his whiskery cheek. “The beds aren’t even cold before we’re moving someone else into them. Everyone who went to that pagan Dark Evening festival is sick. Whole city has it now, I’ve heard. ’Cept for me. I’ve always had a strong constitution, I have. And I’m a good man, blessed by the good god. I stayed at home with my own wife that night, yes I did. Let this be a lesson to you, young fellow. Those that give credence to the dark gods get paid in the dark gods’ coin.”
His words rattled me. The feverish mind is susceptible to suggestion. The words danced around in my brain, eventually colliding with something Epiny had said. Or was it something I had dreamed? Something about not being able to use the magic of an older god without making ourselves vulnerable to it. I wondered if I had sinned by going to Dark Evening, and if this was the good god’s punishment of me. Weak as I was, I became maudlin and tried to say my prayers, only to keep losing my place in the verses.
Later I realized that I never saw that man again. My fever-fuddled mind noticed that the people dumping the slop buckets and bringing water to the moaning cadets no longer moved with the precise air of those trained in the military. There were more women working in the infirmary than I would have expected, and some seemed of less than sterling character. At one point I saw one going through the pockets of a cadet’s jacket as he lay unconscious and groaning in his bed. I had not the strength to lift my hand or voice. When next I opened my eyes, the cadet was covered head to toe with a soiled sheet. The altercation between the doctor and two old men in earth-stained clothes had awakened me.
“But he’s dead!” one of the old men was insisting. “Ain’t right to let him lie there till he stinks, you know. Bad enough stink in here already.”
“Leave him!” Dr. Amicas spoke forcefully but without strength. He looked years older and far more frail. “No bodies are to be removed from this room unless I personally give the order. Cover them, if you feel you must, but let them be. I want at least twelve hours to pass between the time of death and the removal of the body.”
“But it’s not right! It’s not respectful!”
“I have my reasons. Leave it at that!”
The other man abruptly asked, “Is it true what I heard? That a woman was put alive in her coffin, and by the time they heard her pounding on the lid, it was too late? She died on the dead cart, there in the cemetery?”
The doctor looked haggard. “No body is to be removed from this ward without my consent,” he said quietly.
“Doctor,” I said hoarsely. When he did not turn to my voice, I tried to clear my throat. It did little good, but the next time I rasped out “Doctor!” he turned toward me.
“What is it, lad?” he asked, almost kindly.
“Did you speak to the colonel for me? Does he know that Caulder lied about me?”
He looked at me in a vague way that told me he had forgotten the matter that still obsessed me. He patted my shoulder absently. “Caulder is very ill, lad, and the colonel is not well himself. He fears he will lose his only son. This is not a good time to talk to him about anything.”
Then down the ward a man moaned loudly, and I heard a gush of fluid hit the floor. The doctor hurried away from me, taking all hope with him. Caulder would die. No one would ever be able to prove he had lied about me. Live or die, I was disgraced. If I died, my father could bury his shame. If I died, there could be no further dishonor for my father or me.
This time, as I sank into fever, I sank with a will. I turned my mouth determinedly from the cool cup that someone pressed to my lips. I would not drink.
I died.
I came to a place of blowing darkness and emptiness. I peered about me into a dull and perpetual evening. I wasn’t alone. Others milled there, as fortuneless and disinterested as I. It was hard to make out individual features. Faces were blurred and clothing merely shadows, but here and there a detail stood out. A woman recalled her wedding ring, and it shone golden still on an ethereal hand. A carpenter clutched his hammer. A soldier moved past me, the medals for bravery glinting on his chest. But most possessed no distinguishing features, no treasured memento of a life abandoned. I moved among them, with no destination or ambition other than to move. After an indeterminate time, I felt drawn in a certain direction and so I went, giving in to the summoning.
Like water seeking the path of least resistance, I joined the slow river of departing spirits. Eventually I became aware that we were approaching a precipice. Most of the spirits drifted to the edge, lingered, and then simply flowed over, vanishing from sight. I reached the perimeter and looked down. A pool of contained light, glimmering with rainbows, like oil floating on water, waited below. As I watched, a woman drew near. She looked down for a time and then stepped into the emptiness. She drifted slowly away from me, dwindling and losing substance like ink dispersing in water. I could not see if she ever reached the placid pool or not. I contemplated the pool for a time, but was overcome by a strong feeling that it was not for me. No. For me, there was something else.
I drifted along the cliff’s edge, vaguely aware that I was leaving the swirling tide of spirits behind me. Eventually I joined a separate trickle of disembodied folk. We did not speak or look at one another. The bare cliff jutted over another ravine, this one bottomless and empty. A single dead tree loomed over the gathering souls. And a primitive rope bridge, a narrow web of pale twine and twisting green vines spanned the gap. A swanneck driven into the earth secured the end of the fine yellow footrope closest to me. The handrails were of a twisting vine that culminated in the great tree that overshadowed the cliff. A shiver both of recognition and premonition ran through me.
Soldiers had gathered to cross her. Cavalla soldiers. Cadets from the Academy, limping veterans, retired officers. They patiently waited their turns to cross. Cold wind blew past us, and brought to us the distant cries of the living. “Papa, Papa!” someone called, faint and far away. The aged man next to me bowed his head, ethereal tears streaming down his pallid face. It was his turn. He trudged onto the bridge, head bent as if to a wind I did not feel.
I saw Trist in that gathering, and Natred, and Oron. They slowly milled with the others. They did not speak to me or to one another. Silent and gray, they edged forward, interested in nothing except their own slow progress toward death. I calmly realized that was our destination. Like me, they were dying, and here our spirits waited, on the teetering point between death and life. Some lingered here a long time and seemed to resist the draw. Others seemed to decide swiftly, stepping boldly onto the bridge. It was a bridge, I suddenly knew, that did not belong here. Prior to my alliance with the tree woman, it had not existed. She and I had wrought this crossing, twisting its lines from our very beings. I had taken the magic of her people into me and yielded to her the magic of mine. Of these things was this traverse made that lured the spirits of other soldiers like myself to cross. They, too, I suddenly perceived, had touched the magic of her people. “Keep fast,” they had signed over cinches, not knowing that when the time came, the magic would hold them fast as well. Yet as the line of people shuffled forward, I flowed with them, unthinking and unresisting. I, too, would cross. When it came my time, I stepped past the Kidona swanneck that secured the footrope of the bridge and out onto it. I shuffled forward with the rest.
I reached the middle of the bridge before I lifted my eyes to see my destination. A dismal hell awaited us. It reminded me of the logged-off hillside I had passed on my river journey toward Old Thares, but it was not the same place. A massacred landscape of rolling hills lay before me. The sheared stumps before me dwarfed me and reordered my concept of the word “tree.” Giants had flourished here, and were no more. The realm of the forest god had been ransacked and robbed. Cold rain was falling on it, cutting rivulets in its bare flanks. The still-smoldering mounds of slashed underbrush and branches glowed a dark, evil red. Steam and smoke rose from them. The passage of boots and teams of horses had trampled what plant growth and underbrush remained into the muddy earth. The crushed vegetation sprawled like slaughtered children. Only on the tops of the hills did trees still stand, and I knew that their reign was soon to end. A crude roadbed snaked toward them.
“Nevare!” a girl called from somewhere far behind me. “Come back, Nevare!”
Once I had known someone named Nevare. I turned my head slowly and looked back the way I had come. Whoever had called me was not there; she had no power to reach me. Other drifting souls were crossing the bridge behind me. Oron was on the bridge, and Natred. Still others milled on the far side. I glanced back the way I had come. I recognized Caulder and then Spink in the waiting crowd. Oh. So they, too, were dying. And they, too, were called to cross the bridge. I turned forward and walked on.
As the spirits ahead of me reached the stripped and barren hillside, they drifted aimlessly. Their purposelessness seemed a form of torment, as if they had had some important destination they now could not recall. Some went toward the jagged stumps of the dead trees and touched them, pressing against them as if they were doors that would not yield. Slowly those ones sank down beside the stumps, liquefying into a thick white soup of fog at the base of the chopped trees. A wisp of vapor rose from each as they vanished. I saw Sergeant Rufet go that way. He melted at the base of a stump, leaving a larger puddle than most of the others.
I saw Tree Woman then, and my other self. She stood at the crest of the hill where a line of unharvested trees remained, her back close to one of the towering giants, and looked down on us. She judged us from that vantage point, but I also knew she could not go far from the living forest. My other self did that for her. He hunted deliberately across the bare hillside among the drifting spirits, his concentration making him far more real than the wandering wraiths. He moved purposefully, a predator among prey.
Tree Woman called encouragement down to him. “Oh, yes, get that one, hurry before he is gone. He had far more power than he knew, far more wisdom. But he had no tree to put it in; the fools never learned to save a place to store their magic. Go, hurry, and consume his magic before it disperses. Your people have little magic to them. You will have to devour many more before you are full. Eat!”
That other self that was somehow still me in spite of the antipathy I felt toward him hurried to obey her. He had grown, and in that place of ghosts, he seemed substantial. He was round of belly, heavy of arm and leg. Leaves were his only garments. His scalp-lock had been smeared with pine pitch and plaited down his back and interwoven with green vines. He rushed to the puddle that had been Sergeant Rufet and dropped to his knees beside it. He scooped up the white liquid before it was sucked into the earth. He used no leaf cup now. Instead, my other self lowered his mouth to his cupped hands, eagerly lapping the thick porridge of what had been Rufet’s soul. For a moment, I was he. I felt the stickiness on my hands and chin, and I felt myself grow stronger for having consumed his essence.
Magic. I was filling myself with magic. I would be a great man if I gained enough magic. If I filled myself with the magic, I could turn back the intruders and save the People. For that moment, his ambition was mine, and I understood it in a profound way. I was essential. I was the crossroads. In me, the magic of the People and the magic of the intruders would be combined and joined. From that combination would come the answer. Tree Woman knew that her magic alone could never stop the destroyers. It would have to be mingled with the magic of the intruders, for only a people’s own magic understood that people’s weaknesses well enough to defeat them. The magic of the People could hold the intruders, but it would take their own magic, the magic that lived in their bones and flesh but never truly died, to defeat them completely and send them back whence they had come.
That was Tree Woman’s ambition.
And it was mine, too, while I shared that other self’s awareness. For he loved the People as I had never loved my own kind.
That thought jolted me, and in my distant body, I felt a twitch and a gasp. I think that tiny vestige of life attracted Tree Woman’s attention to me. She had been watching approvingly as my other self devoured Sergeant Rufet. Her eyes scanned the mournful crowd that pushed slowly across the bridge, cattle in a slaughter chute. Then she saw me, still standing upon the bridge. I had nearly reached her side of the crevasse, where, I now saw, that the end of the bridge was secured by a cavalla saber thrust into the stony ground. I knew the weapon. It had been mine. Dewara had shown me how to summon it to his world, and I had. Now it held the bridge fast, anchored my world to hers.
When she saw me, Tree Woman suddenly flung her arms up to the sky. She grew taller until she stood great as any live oak, and then larger still. She soared in size, to fill half the sky over the stripped hill. She pointed toward me, her fingers long as branches. “Go back!” she commanded me in fury. “You are not to be in this place. Go back! Inhabit the body until we are ready!”
What gave her such power over me? She seized me by my hair, jerking me from the trudging queue of spirits and hurling me back across the chasm. I landed on my back, and my eyes flew open and I gasped. Wan daylight filled the room around me, pressing painfully into my eyes. Someone seized my wasted hand and gripped it so tightly the bones rubbed together. “He’s not dead! Doctor, come here! Nevare is not dead!”
The doctor’s voice was more distant than Epiny’s. “I told you he wasn’t dead. This plague sometimes mimes death. It’s one of the dangers. We give up on people too soon. Get some broth into him. That’s about all you can do for him. Then change the sheets on the empty cots. We’ll have them filled again before evening, I fear.”
My fever dreams had been so vivid and strange that for a brief time I simply accepted that Epiny was sitting on a stool between my bed and Spink’s. She wore a stained smock over one of her ridiculous dresses. Her cheeks were red and her lips chapped. Her careworn face and bundled-back hair made her look more womanly than I’d ever seen her before. I stared at her and forgot to resist her as she spooned broth into my mouth. When I began to shiver violently, she set the cup and spoon aside and tucked my blankets more securely around me. “Finishing school?” I said to her. My cracked lips had difficulty shaping the words.
She frowned at me momentarily, and then a sour smile came to her pinched mouth. “Finished with that!” she said, and managed a small laugh. She leaned closer to me. “I ran away. And I went to Dark Evening and had a wonderful time with Spink. And then I went home and told my parents where I’d been. I knew full well my mother would tell me that I was a ruined woman, and ‘damaged goods,’ and all those other quaint phrases powerful women apply to women who don’t fall under their control. But I also knew, because I’d filched the letter, that Spink’s family had already made an offer for me. When she told me no decent man would ever have me now, I set it on the table before both of them, and told them that as it was the only offer they would ever get for me, it was therefore the best and they’d be wise to take it. Oh, what a terrible scene she made.” Her voice went suddenly thick and for an instant she fell silent. I knew her triumph was not free of pain. When she went on, her voice was tighter. “My parents will have no choice except to take it. No one else will have me now. I made sure of it.”
I was puzzled. “Spink said…he never met with you.”
She looked startled, then smiled. She turned away from me and reached out her hand to touch his face. “Such a dear little lie. It probably cost him a great deal to lie to you to protect my ‘honor.’ He thinks quite highly of you, you know. He wants our first son to be named for you. We intend to be married as soon as we can, and to start our family immediately.” And with that sentence, she suddenly sounded as girlishly domestic as any of my sisters. “We will share a wonderful life. I can’t wait. I hope we are posted on the frontier.”
“If he lives,” I said huskily. I had seen past her to the lax body in the next bed. The boyish roundness was gone from Spink’s face. His mouth hung ajar and his breath came and went unevenly. Yellow crust caked around his nostrils and eyelids. He was as unlovely as anything I had ever seen.
Yet Epiny looked down at him with her heart in her eyes. She took his limp hand in hers. “He must,” she said decidedly. “I have gambled everything for him. If he dies and leaves me alone”—she looked at me and tried to hide her fear—“I will have lost it all.”
I turned my head on my hot pillow. “Uncle Sefert?”
“He isn’t here.”
“But…how are you here, then?” The effort of that string of words set me coughing. With a practiced touch that told me she had done this before, she braced my shoulders to sit me up while she offered me water from a cup. She did not answer until she let me down again.
“I came here when the reports began to reach my father of how bad things were at the Academy. Your letter came…the one about Dark Evening and Caulder, and being culled with only a future as a scout now. Father was wroth. He set out immediately to the Academy, but at the gates he saw a yellow banner and guards turned him back. By the time he got back to the house, my mother had had messengers from her friends, warning of sickness in the city that was spreading fast. My mother declared that none of us would budge from the house until the contagion was past. She lived through the black-pox when she was a girl, and still remembers those days.
“I stood it for three days, being shut up in the house with her. When she was not prophesying that we would all die of the plague, she was scolding me for my shameless behavior, or weeping over how I had ruined my chances and soiled the family name. She vowed she’d never let me marry Spink. She said I’d have to live at home with her the rest of my life, a disgraced old maid. You cannot imagine how awful that future would be, Nevare. I tried to explain to her that she was treating me as her mother had treated her, disposing of her like a commodity, for it has become obvious to me that women are most responsible for the oppression of women in our culture. And when I tried to speak rationally to her, and point out that she was only angry because I had seized control of my own worth and traded my ‘respectability’ for a future I wanted instead of letting her sell me off for a bride-price and a political connection, she slapped me! Oh, she was furious when I said that. Only because she recognized it was true, of course.”
She lifted a hand to her cheek, remembering the blow. “It’s her own fault for educating me,” she said regretfully. “If she had kept me at home and ignorant as your family keeps your sisters, I’d probably have been quite tractable.”
Epiny’s words washed over me like waves against a beach. The sense of them faded in and out of my mind. It took me a time to realize she had stopped talking, without, of course, answering my question. I summoned my strength. “Why?”
“Why did I come here? I had to! There were dreadful reports that the infirmary here was overcome with so many sick cadets. After the first scare of plague passed, people began to venture out and the newspapers to print again. The Academy is still quarantined. The plague still rages here, as if it has taken root and will not be satisfied until it has consumed all of you. The city leaders decided to send everyone with the plague here, to keep it away from the general populace. The papers spoke of rows of bodies laid out on the lawns, draped only with sheets and a light fall of snow. They are burying the corpses on the grounds, with quicklime to try to control the smell.
“I came when the paper said that the doctors were allowing the bodies to simply pile up in the halls of the infirmary, and hiring beggars off the streets to fill in for the nursing assistants, who themselves had fallen to the plague. I could not stand the thought of you and Spink here and sick, with no one to look after you. And I knew you were sick because no more letters came. So I left the house in the middle of the night. It took me most of the night to walk here, and then I had to get past the quarantine guards. Luckily, I found a tree with its branches leaning over the wall. I was up and over in no time. And of course, once I was inside, Dr. Amicas had no choice but to let me stay. I’m as quarantined as anyone now. When I pointed out to him that there was no sense in refusing to let me help, he gave me a smock. He told me I could help until I, too, dropped dead of the plague. He’s a sensible man but not a very optimistic physician, is he?”
“Go home,” I told her bluntly. This was no place for her.
“I can’t,” she said simply. “My mother would not let me back in the door, for fear I would bring the plague with me. And under the circumstances, there is nowhere else I could go. I’m not only a disgraced woman, I’m probably a plague carrier now.” She seemed quite cheery about both fates. Then her voice dropped, and she said soberly, “Besides. You need me here. Both of you, but especially you. Whatever it was that hovered over you the last time I saw you has grown more powerful. When I thought you were dead…that was what horrified me. You had no breath I could detect, no pulse at all. You—now do not laugh at me—your aura had faded to where I could not detect it. But the aura of that, that other that is within you had grown stronger. It raged about you like fire devouring a log. I was so frightened for you. You need me to protect you from it.”
No I didn’t. That was the one thing I was sure of. For Epiny to come here, at risk to herself, was the only thing that could have made me feel worse. Bad enough that helping Caulder had condemned me to disgrace. I could die, and my shame would die with me. She would have to live with her dishonor, as would my uncle. A lingering memory of myself as I was in that other world wafted through my mind, like half-recalled perfume. I was suddenly certain that whatever Tree Woman was, I did not want Epiny near her.
She was staring at me, round-eyed. I saw then that she was not well. Little crusts were starting at the corners of her eyes. I should have known from her cracked lips and her red cheeks. She already burned with the fever of the plague. Dr. Amicas had been right again.
She reached timorously to touch my head, and then jerked back her fingers as if scalded. “It comes and goes,” she whispered. “It shimmers around you, weak and then strong. Now it glows above your head. Like flame shows through a sheet of paper before it bursts through and consumes it.”
As she spoke those words, I could feel him. The other self had grown strong. I suddenly saw with his eyes. Epiny was a sorceress, a mistress of the iron magic. He looked at her and gloated, for powerful as she was, she was doomed. As clearly as I could see Epiny herself, I saw the tie of green vine that bound her wrist to Spink’s. I recognized Tree Woman’s “keep fast” charm.
As my true self, I mustered my will. I reached for Epiny’s free wrist and seized it. I pulled on her as she pulled back from me with a little squeak of alarm. “I have to free you!” I whispered hoarsely. “Before it’s too late.” With my other hand, I tried to make the “loose” sign over the twist of vine that bound her. Once the making of that sign had been my betrayal of my people. Now it would free Epiny. But my other self was too strong for me. I could lift my hand, but my fingers would not move as I commanded. He laughed with my mouth, cracking my dry lips.
“Nevare! Let me go! You’re hurting me!”
At Epiny’s cry, Spink took an uneven gasp of air. Then he sighed it out. Distracted, Epiny turned to him. “Spink? Spink!”
I waited. The moments ticked past. He made no indrawn breath. Then, as he gave a final sigh, I heard the death rattle in Spink’s throat. Epiny sank to her knees on the floor between our beds. I still gripped her wrist. She didn’t seem to notice. “No,” she said quietly. “Oh, please, Spink, no! Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.”
He is on the bridge now, I thought faintly. My mouth was no longer mine to speak with. My other self had that now. I wanted to call to Epiny for help. Now that his taking of my body was real, I would have claimed help from anyone who could offer it.
But Epiny did not even look at me. She had begun to rock back and forth, her free hand cupped over her mouth. Her keening still escaped between her fingers. Tears flowed down her face and over her fingers.
I knew when Spink’s spirit left his body. I did not see it go. But I saw Epiny suddenly sit up straight and look at her free hand. I saw the vine tighten on her wrist. Then, as the vine disappeared as if pulled through an invisible wall, Epiny went white. Her mouth gaped and did not close. Linked to Spink by Tree Woman’s “keep fast” charm, her spirit was being pulled into death along with his.
Slowly she collapsed to the floor and became still.
I fought my other self then. Fought him, as I had not before, with fury and hatred and disgust for all he had made me. I tried over and over to make the “loose” sign over their bodies. He kept me from it. To the nurses running toward us, I must have appeared a madman, holding tight to Epiny’s wrist as if I could hold her back from death, all the while grunting and shaking my free hand in the air as I tried to force my fingers to move as I wished them to.
I suddenly recalled the scout’s bluff, all those many years ago. I let my control of the hand go lax, as if surrendering. And when my other self lowered his guard against me, I made a sign over my own grip on Epiny’s wrist. Not “loose.”
“Keep fast!” I managed to say through my cracked lips. And then my body, too, crumpled to the floor as Epiny’s departing spirit pulled me after her.
Closing my eyes in this world was opening them to the bridge and its moving morass of the dying. Spink was on the bridge and had nearly completed his crossing. Epiny floated above him like a tethered bird. She was terrified, and she fought the bond that joined them. Spink did not even notice her. He moved forward, a step at a time.
The bond that linked me to Epiny was thinner and more tenuous. My charm did not have the strength of Tree Woman’s spell. Here, at least, my actions were my own. “Loose!” I said, and made the sign. I found myself free of Epiny, but dead all the same. I was suddenly on the bridge myself. The gathered crowd hemmed me in and blocked my progress. It edged forward, a slow step at a time. I fought the stolid detachment that wished to take me, fought the magic of the disease that had wasted my body. I had come here to do something. Unlike these others, I had willed myself here. I elbowed and shoved my way through the clustering souls.
It seemed monstrous to me that a plague could be a summoning, that Tree Woman had sent this sickness upon us to work magic against us. Bad enough that we should die of it; far worse that our deaths should bring us to a place that our beliefs had not made! This was not the sweet rest the good god promised his followers. It seemed cruel that those who had faithfully believed should be deprived of it.
Determinedly I tried to push my way forward through the crowding souls. “Stop!” I called aloud. “Spink! Come back!” He did not heed me. Over his head, Epiny floated, moaning and tugging at the binding on her wrist. Spink left the bridge, stepped into Tree Woman’s domain, and began his slow drift up the desecrated hillside. But at my cry, other spectral faces had turned to me, halting on the bridge to look back at me. I pleaded with them, “Come back. That place is not for you. Return to your bodies. Go back to your loved ones.”
A few wraiths paused, looking puzzled, as if my words had stirred their already fading memories. But after their brief consideration of me, they turned back to their sluggish passage. I had no patience with their delaying me. Heedless of the emptiness below me, I pushed around and past the trudging souls. On the far side, from her post at the top of the hill near the line of trees, Tree Woman pointed at me. I feared she would fling me back into my body, and only let me return to death after Spink and Epiny had perished forever. I seized the guide ropes of the bridge with both my hands and held on tightly, determined to resist.
A strange thing happened to me then. I could feel the magic coursing through the bridge, and recalled that it was made as much from me as it was from Tree Woman. I recognized the yellow strands that were part of its weaving; they were my own hair. I sensed I could draw strength from it, if I only knew how. That other self would have known how. But I did not, and so I could only hold tight to it and resist her in that way. I did sense that while I held to the bridge, she could not expel me from her realm. I began to make my torturous way across the bridge, slowly moving my grip, hand over hand, to cross it. I barely noticed the evanescent beings who gave way to my determined crossing. I passed them, and crept ever closer to my nemesis. “Spink!” I shouted again to my friend as I saw him toiling up the hill, ever closer to Tree Woman. “Turn back! Bring Epiny back with you, to life! Don’t drag her into death with you.”
Spink halted. He turned. Light flickered a moment in his hollow eyes, and for the first time, I saw something that sparkled silver on his chest. Her silly whistle hung there, the lover’s token that he would take even into the afterlife with him. He took a step back toward the bridge and my heart soared.
My other self suddenly reappeared on Tree Woman’s hilltop. He did not move slowly at all. He strode deliberately down the hill, closing the distance between him and Spink. His jaw was clenched, his eyes furious. Tree Woman shouted at him.
“Go back! I can deal with him! Go back! You must keep the body. You must inhabit it to keep it alive.”
He was as stubborn as I was. I had angered him. I could feel within my own breast the echo of his anger. He ignored Tree Woman as he hurried down the hill to take his personal revenge on me. First, he would devour my friends.
I shouted frantically at Spink as I pushed my way through the slowly moving spirits on the bridge. It was useless. Recognition and purpose faded from Spink’s expression after a moment or two of staring at me. He turned as if he had heard someone calling him and began to make his way up the hill toward my traitor self. Spink walked as if captured by deep thought, not even appearing to see where he was going. Epiny was towed along with him. Her face was clenched in irrational terror. “Epiny!” I finally thought to shout at her. “Epiny, hold Spink back. Pull him back; go back over the bridge.”
My words seemed to reach her. Her frightened eyes darted to me and then down to Spink. She was as insubstantial as a butterfly here, a spirit caught between two worlds and belonging to neither. Yet she struggled. She called his name and pulled on the vine that bound them together, trying to gain his attention and bring him back.
My other self scowled. He lifted his eyes to me and our gazes locked. He hated me. He lifted a hand and made a sign, a sign I knew well. “Keep fast,” he signed at the other specters on the bridge, and they halted where they were, blocking me.
Caught between life and death, on the bridge between the worlds, the phantoms froze still, unyielding to my shoving, and trapping me in their midst. I pushed at them, frantically struggling, yet ever mindful that I must keep one hand touching that hellish bridge. Ironically, it was Caulder who immediately blocked my way. His features were as sullen in death as they had been in life. With my free hand I seized him and shook him. “Get out of my way! Go back!” I shouted at him.
And to my horror, a glint of awareness came to his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak to me, but no words came. Terror filled his childish face, and insubstantial tears welled in his eyes, to trickle down his translucent face. It horrified me and drove from me all the hatred and dislike I’d harbored for him. I lifted my hand. “Loose!” I said to him as I made the sign. “Go back. Go back to your life.”
His gaze met mine, and he blinked as if waking from a dream. Then, with a soundless sob, he turned and tried to push past me, to get back across the bridge. The spirit behind me blocked his way. I turned to him. He was a craggy old man in ragged clothes, probably a cavalla veteran living out his last days on the streets of Old Thares. “Loose,” I told him gently, and signed the charm. The old man turned back. I lifted my hand higher and waved it, making the charm over all the spirits halted on the bridge. “Loose!” I shouted at them. “Go back.” At my word, every specter stirred, turned, and began the journey back. I fought my way forward past those who now sought to go the other way. Like a fish battling its way upstream, I shoved a passage through them until I reached the other side.
I came to the end of the bridge, to the saber that anchored it to that place. I looked up at Tree Woman. She returned my gaze with equanimity. As surely as I knew anything, I knew that she was waiting for me to step off the bridge. Once my feet touched her world, I would be in her power. She would be rid of me. And that piece of me that she had stolen, my other self, was still intent on devouring my friend.
Spink was walking steadily toward his doom, trudging up the muddy and ravaged slope, unmindful of what he left behind. Epiny had come to her senses. She spoke to him and fought him, but he moved inexorably on. Somehow that made it more terrible, not less. My other self moved forward to meet him. His hands were already cupped, ready to receive Spink’s essence.
Epiny stepped between them. She no longer fought her bond. She used it to hold herself in place, between Spink and the being who threatened him.
She looked strange in this place. She was a flickering flame of a girl, less substantial than the ghost she tried to protect. I saw my other self snatch at her, and then turn in surprise to his mentor when his hands passed right through her. I understood. Epiny had known the “keep fast” charm, but she had not use it daily as Spink and I had. Their magic did not hold her here; only her attachment to Spink. My cousin seemed unaware of me as I hesitated on the bridge. Instead, she shrieked “Nevare! Please, be yourself! Help us!” at that other creature who wore my features. The look of betrayal on her face as he again snatched at her burned me. She could do nothing here for Spink or me. She would end her existence thinking I had betrayed her.
I reached for the earlier connection I’d felt with my other self. I could feel the magic he’d consumed swelling inside him. He had grown in power and ability and knowledge under Tree Woman’s tutelage. I despised what she had made of that part of me. He was her creature, a traitor to me and mine. He loved what she loved, and would do anything within his power to protect it, with no thought of what it would cost me.
But I was not her creature. And in some strange way, the two parts of me were still bound. I dared not leave the bridge to help them. If I did so, Tree Woman could eject me from this world, and then deal with my friends with no interference.
I focused all my being on that other part of myself. Awareness of him slipped and squirmed through my mind. In flashes, I saw through his eyes, tasted the sweetness that still lingered in his mouth, and felt, too, that eagerness that made him grope toward Spink. My tongue licked his lips. My fingers felt the coolness that was evanescent Epiny as his hands batted through her vaporous form. I could share his awareness but I could not control him.
Epiny battered at Spink, trying to push him back from that world, back onto the bridge. They fought like colliding shadows, darkening and merging where they touched. She raged and wept as she struggled to turn him back, the reality of her cries too harsh and loud in the ethereal place. My other self beckoned imperiously to Spink, and he wavered forward another step, moving right through Epiny. She screamed then, a sound of despair such as I’d never heard before.
I do not know if the sound moved me to greater strength, or if it unnerved that other me enough to break his focus. For a moment my awareness of him was complete. I knew him totally, and as he recognized that, he committed a fatal mistake. His hands moved to protect his weakness from me. His hands covered his waxed and braided scalp-lock.
He fought me for control of his hands. I tried to grab the ridiculous tail of hair, but he closed the hands into fists. Frustrated, I pounded at his head with the hands, but could not deal him a blow of any strength, nor force the fingers to open. Spink had drifted past us now, moving toward a tree stump. Epiny floated after him. She fluttered her hands at his face, but could not halt him. His eyes seemed sorrowful, as if he sensed her, but the expression on his face didn’t change. Sudden inspiration struck me. My other self controlled the hands, but he had done nothing to guard his voice from me. I made him speak.
“Epiny!” I cried. “Pull out my hair! It will free me. Rip out this topknot!”
She heard what I said. I feared that she would think it odd that I bade her attack me, but without hesitation she obeyed me. Or attempted to obey. She flew at my other self. Her assault on him was as damaging as a flickering light. She seized at his topknot of hair, but it did not even stir as her hands passed through it. In this world, she was the insubstantial spirit, powerless against what was physical here. He laughed then, loud and delighted, and reached through Epiny for Spink.
Futile as it was, I knew I would challenge him. The only weapon to hand was the cavalla saber thrust into the earth and securing the footrope of the bridge. It was the same weapon Dewara had once bid me use on Tree Woman. How I wished I had heeded him! I set my hand to it and, with a tremendous pull, tore if free of the earth and stone that clasped it. I intended to make a futile charge at my other self. I did not doubt that Tree Woman would effortlessly fling me back, but I had to try.
The moment my hand jerked the blade from the ground, a peculiar thing happened. As Tree Woman gave a great shout of dismay, I felt strength shoot through me. Iron magic. The magic of my people was in my hand. Tree Woman had let me bring it here, for her own ends. Now I would use it for mine. As the secured rope sprang free, my other self gave a cry of dismay. He lifted his hands to his scalp-lock, for it had come loose and was unbraiding itself.
In that second, I perceived all. I turned back to the bridge. The golden threads of my hair that had twined around Tree Woman’s vines were coming free. They looked almost alive as they uncoiled from the greenery and drifted away in the abyss below. The bridge began to fail from this end. Almost all of the spirits that had turned back had now safely reached the other side. I did not know what they would do there; I did not know if they would return to life or seek the peaceful pool that the other spirits had entered. All I knew was that I would destroy the crossing I had inadvertently created. No others of my fellows would be doomed to come to Tree Woman’s world. I turned back to the bridge and swung the saber furiously, hacking through the vines that made up the other supports. Tree Woman screamed, in pain or fury.
As the bridge parted, unraveling, I heard my other self shriek. I turned back to him, my iron magic heavy and cold in my hand. He sagged like an emptying wineskin, a pale vapor exiting from the spot where his scalp-lock had been. My features faded from his softening face. Tree Woman screamed and strained toward him, but could not reach him. She could not leave the line of living trees. He sagged into a mound of clay and leaves. I felt oddly stronger. Something that had been missing from me for a long time had been restored.
Epiny clung desperately to Spink, her slender diaphanous arms locked around his neck. “Nevare!” She looked from me to the heap on the ground and back again. I saw her struggle to understand and then discard that for a more immediate fear. “The bridge is gone. What will become of us?” she wailed. Spink’s face remained impassive.
“Hold tight to him!” I told her. Sword at the ready, I toiled up the hill toward her. As I advanced on Tree Woman, I warned her, “Send them back!”
She laughed at me. Her laugh was earthy, musical, and rich. To my dismay, I loved it. I loved it, and I loved all she represented. The wild lands and the forests and the great trees were in her eyes. I loved all of her. I suddenly perceived that she was not old, but eternal. She held out her arms to me, and I longed to rush into her embrace. Tears came to my eyes as I spoke. “Let my friends go. Or I’ll kill you.”
She shook her head, and wind rustled through leafy treetops. “Do you think you can kill me here, in my own world? With what, soldier’s boy? That little twig of iron? You stand in my world, in the heart of my magic!” She bent down toward me, and suddenly she was tree and woman, all in one. Her leaves rustled as she swayed down at me. Her branches reached to draw me to her.
“You said it yourself!” My voice came shrill. “ ‘Magic touches back.’ You brought my magic here, through me, and used it. Used it just as I used the magic of your kind. Just as you gained a hold on me when you used my magic, so I think mine has taken power over you!”
On my final word, I sprang to my attack. A saber is not an ax. It has a cutting edge, but for flesh, not bark and wood. I put all I had into the swing, expecting the shock of hard contact. I thought I had a chance of hurting her. Instead, it was like cutting butter. My saber slid through her, and then caught and stuck. I let go of it. It had opened a horizontal gash in her soft belly, in her trunk, in all that she was. She screamed, and it cracked the sky. Golden sap, warm as blood, flowed from her wound and onto the earth. She fell backward from me, just as a tree would have fallen if chopped through the trunk. When she hit the ground, the earth split. Light burst up from it. The goddess of the world had fallen at my feet, my saber still stuck in the stump of her body. I stood over her, looking down in shock at what I had wrought. I had triumphed. My heart was breaking.
Her eyes, deep as the forest, flickered open. She made a final gesture at me. As her hand fell, I was flung from her world.