CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BOXED

Dasie kept her word. I had expected that she would quickly depart Kinrove’s encampment after she had freed the dancers. I still believe that was her original plan, but discovering Soldier’s Boy had changed it. She stayed, and she schemed with us for the next ten days, as both Soldier’s Boy and Kinrove grew fat again.

It was alarming to me how quickly Soldier’s Boy regained both his girth and his magic at Kinrove’s table. I do not think he could have fattened his body so quickly on any other foods. Kinrove’s phalanx of feeders gathered, cooked, and served the foods that were most powerful for our magic. Soldier’s Boy ate almost constantly. That he did so with evident enjoyment, even relish, only made me angrier at him. He consumed the food of the Specks that would most quickly restore his magic, and all the while, he plotted with Dasie against my own people.

Kinrove, poor man, had become a guest at his own table. Dasie had broken his power. Despite how quickly he regained most of his flesh, Dasie dominated him, not just by iron but with her unpredictability. In bringing iron swords into his encampment and attacking other Great Ones, she had done the unthinkable. All feared her. Kinrove’s extended kin-clan kept their distance from the Great Man’s pavilion, I think out of fear of what Dasie might do to Kinrove if they appeared to threaten her. His kin-clan provided for us, food and drink and tobacco, and his feeders served us, but Dasie was the commander of our days, not Kinrove. Dasie had a proprietary air toward not only Kinrove’s feeders and possessions but toward the Great Man himself. She did not say that she intended to use the Great Man’s powers for her own ends, but she did not need to. Her cavalier attitude said it all.

Yet Kinrove had his own small triumphs and seemed to relish them. As he had predicted to Dasie, some of his dancers stayed. The majority left. They rested, ate, and regained the strength to travel, and then, over several days, they departed from his encampment to seek the winter grounds of their own kin-clans. A good part of Dasie’s force departed with them, to help them journey home. Some of their guides were brothers or daughters or other kin, who had joined forces with Dasie as a way to bring the stolen relatives home. Others had no relatives among the rescuers, but left on their own or in small groups.

Olikea took Soldier’s Boy on a brief walk in the fresh air on the morning after Dasie’s attack. I watched some of the dancers depart. Most were thin, a few emaciated. The faces were lined, their eyes haunted as if they had just wakened from a terrible dream and were not yet free of its grip. I’d seen expressions like those before, on the faces of the penal workers forced to endure the terrors of the forest on a daily basis. I recalled my own experience of “breaking a Gettys Sweat.” They had danced to send that paralyzing terror and draining sadness down to Gettys. It had been horrible for us to experience it, but for it to come to us, these dancers had had to experience it first. I wondered that Kinrove and his magic could demand that of anyone he cared about.

Stranger still to contemplate were the dancers who stayed. I caught only a glimpse of them. They were a small group compared to the throng who had danced before, perhaps no more than three dozen. They hunkered together around the dais where their drummers had set the rhythm, and Kinrove’s own feeders brought them food and drink. Other feeders massaged their legs with oil and rubbed their backs. The eyes of those dancers were haunted but also determined. They reminded me of elite troops, taking a rest before joining the next bloody battle. They fought the intruders, at great cost to themselves, but it was a cost they paid willingly.

Someone had to pay the costs to win a war, he thought to himself. He turned to Olikea. “I have an errand for Likari. An important errand. You must give him whatever of Lisana’s treasure you think he will need. Send him back, quickly, to the coppersmith’s tent. I only hope he has not left the Trading Place yet. Likari must purchase for me as many of the basket arrows as the smith has to sell. And the resin, the stuff the smith said to put inside the baskets. Send him quickly, within the hour. Tell him that when I need them, I’ll ask for them.”

“What for?” Olikea demanded, but Soldier’s Boy only replied, “Do as I ask, but tell no one else.” He left her to find and send the boy, and returned alone to Kinrove’s tables. His words had filled me with dread, but not even I could pry from his mind what his complete plan was.

Before that day was out, I heard first a single drum thumping, and then others taking up the tempo. The horns joined in, and even through the thick leather walls of Kinrove’s pavilion I heard the thudding of their bare feet on the dust as they pounded out the magic that held Gettys in thrall.

Dasie heard it, too. She was at table with us, eating as heartily as any of us. She had, I noted, grown rounder of face since first I had seen her. Her iron bearers, three warriors with swords, were seldom far from us, but did not come close enough for the iron to be painful. One stood by the door flap of the pavilion. As long as he was there, no Great One dared approach it without Dasie’s express permission. Two more stood against the wall of the pavilion, stationed where Dasie could always see them and they could watch her. At any sign of danger to her, all knew, their orders were to attack and slay both Kinrove and me. She lifted her head when the drums first sounded, and held still as the beat grew stronger. After the dancers had begun their circuit, she heaved a great sigh and motioned to one of Kinrove’s feeders to put more meat onto her platter.

“No one can save a man from himself. Or a woman,” she said wearily.

Kinrove set down his cup. “Those men and women are saving us,” he said. There was a touch of defiance in his voice.

“They have protected you for years,” Soldier’s Boy agreed, to Dasie’s annoyance. Then he added, “But their protection of you is not complete, and the intruders have found a way to defeat it. They drug their slaves so that their senses are dulled to the magic you send. That is how they were able to push past the magic and into the forest to cut more ancestor trees this summer. They will use those slaves far more ruthlessly than Kinrove drives his dancers. Unless we stop them before spring frees the forest from snow, they will cut deeply into our ancestral groves this coming summer.” In his mind’s eye, I knew he saw Lisana’s little tree. How vulnerable she was, compared to the forest giants. Her tree’s grip on the forest floor was tentative; it still fed mostly through the root structure of her old tree. He had to protect her.

I shared that goal with him but, unlike Soldier’s Boy, I was not willing to sacrifice every soul in Gettys, and any who might come after them, to guarantee Lisana’s safety. I wondered if Dasie was, and resolved that at some point I would find out.

Dasie set her own cup down with a thud. “Unless we stop them? Did you not say to me that you would stop them? But your words were an empty lie, weren’t they? You don’t know how to stop them. But I do. With iron. With the same iron they have turned against us. Iron is the answer.” She looked around, smiling at the shocked silence that her words had wrought. “Oh, yes.” She nodded to their horror. “Iron. Pistols and long guns. I have traded for some, and I will acquire others. I have a plan. It will require the cooperation of all the kin-clans. All the furs the People take this winter will be traded only for guns. There is one among the intruders, a traitor to them, who will make this trade with us. And when we have the guns, we will turn them on the intruders. They will know what it is to fall when iron balls rip through their flesh. If our magic cannot bring them down, then we will turn on them the very weapons they have used against us. What do you think of that, Intruder Mage?”

Soldier’s Boy set down his mug with a great thump, as if to outdo Dasie’s gesture. “I think you are a fool,” he said deliberately. “You have accused me of mouthing empty lies. Now I accuse you of saying stupid things. Bring iron among the People, and we will not be the People anymore! Bring iron, and we will not need to fear that the intruders will kill our ancestor trees. We will do it ourselves as we walk among them. Bring iron into our villages, and do you think any children will grow to be Great Ones again? Do as you suggest, and we will not have to worry about the intruders anymore. We will have become the intruders, and we will kill ourselves.”

Dasie’s face had reddened as he spoke. By the time he finished, her mouth was pinched white in the middle of her face, but the rest of it was scarlet, save for the dark specks that patterned it. She gripped her glass so tightly I thought it would shatter in her hand. I think it had been a long time since anyone had spoken so harshly to her, let alone told her she was stupid. She had probably thought that no one would dare to speak to her so. I wondered if we would survive Soldier’s Boy’s rudeness. Olikea stood with her breath bated. Likari was frozen in the act of offering more food. I think their thoughts were as mine. But Soldier’s Boy seemed strangely still when I touched his mind, as if he were playing a game and awaiting his opponent’s next move.

For a moment, she was so enraged she could say nothing. When she finally found words, they were the dare of an angered child. “If you think you can offer a better plan, then you should do it now, Intruder Mage! And if you cannot, then I think you should be the first of the intruders to die! I will not wait and wait for you to speak the wisdom you claim to have. Out with it! What is your great magic that you will loose on them?”

Soldier’s Boy remained strangely calm. At a gesture from him, Likari set down the platter of meat that he had been offering to him. Soldier’s Boy leaned close to the lad. “Bring to me now what you bought for me at the market.” As he ran off to obey, Soldier’s Boy drew himself up straight, as if to be sure that all eyes were on him. When he spoke, his voice was soft. I knew the trick. The others leaned toward him silently, straining to hear what he would say.

“I know the start of it will please you, Dasie. For it begins with killing. It must,” he said. His voice was so gentle, it almost hid the razor’s edge of his words.

“No!” I shouted inside him. I suddenly knew what was coming. Why had Epiny ever spoken such prophetic words? He paid me no heed.

“It begins with killing,” he repeated. “But not with magic. No. And not with iron. Our magic will not work in their fort. And whatever iron we might use against them, they would use triple that against us. And with experience, which we do not have. We must use a force that fears neither magic nor iron.” He looked around at his audience, as if to be sure he had them. With exquisite timing, Likari had arrived. His arms were filled by a doeskin-wrapped bundle. Soldier’s Boy let the boy continue to hold it as he folded back a corner of it and drew out one of the basket arrows. He held it up. “We will use fire. We cage it in this arrow. And we will use ice. We will attack them in the winter, with the fire that their iron cannot stop. And the fire will expose them to the cold that iron cannot fight. Magic will take us there, and magic will bear us away.

“But that will only be the beginning.”

He had them now. He smiled at them as he gave the arrow back to Likari. He saw there were only a dozen in the boy’s bundle, but kept his disappointment from showing as he turned back to his audience.

“Kinrove has always been right about one thing. Killing alone will not drive them away. And you have been right about another thing, Dasie. We must bring war to them in terms they understand.” He smiled, first at the one Great One and then at the other, and I admired how he drew them closer with his acknowledgment of them. “The intruders must know, without mistake, that the deaths come from us. And we must not kill ALL of them. Some few must be allowed to survive. Perhaps only one, if he is the right one. Someone of rank, of power, among them.”

Outrage returned to Dasie’s face. He ignored it. “That one becomes our messenger. We send him back to his king, with our ultimatum. A treaty. We offer not to kill them if they abide by the rules we give them.”

“And what rules would those be?” Dasie demanded.

“That,” Soldier’s Boy said quietly, “we will determine. Certainly one rule would be that no one might cut any tree that we say must be protected. But it might be better, perhaps, to say that they may not even venture into those parts of the forest.”

“And they will leave their wooden fort forever and never come back!” Dasie added with satisfaction.

Soldier’s Boy shrugged slightly. “We could say such a thing to them. But if we did, it would make them less likely to abide by our treaty. And it might foster discontent among the People.”

“Discontent? To know that we were finally safe from the intruders? To know that our lives could resume peace and order?”

Soldier’s Boy smiled unpleasantly. “To know that the trade goods that so profit us each autumn would no longer flow through our hands.” He reached out casually and set his hand on the back of Olikea’s neck, as if in a caress. “Let alone to bedeck ourselves.” About Olikea’s neck were several strands of bright glass beads that I had given her. Strange, I thought, that Soldier’s Boy noticed her ornaments when I myself scarcely gave them a second glance.

Dasie refuted him with disdain. “We had trade with the West long before we had Gettys like a scab on the land. Long before they tried to cut a way into our forest, we had trade.”

“And we welcomed it!” Soldier’s Boy agreed affably. “But after we massacre every Gernian and tell them they must never build a home near Gettys again, nor enter our forest, how many traders do you think will come to us? What do we have that they must get from us and only us? For what will they risk their lives?”

Dasie was silent and sullen, pondering this. Then she burst out with “They have nothing that we need! Nothing. Better to drive them from the land and make ourselves free of their evil and greed.”

“It is true that they have nothing that we need.” Soldier’s Boy put the slightest emphasis on the word. “I am sure that no one here carries a flint-and-steel for fire-making. No one here has tools of iron in his home lodge. A few wear beads and gewgaws, garments or fabrics from the west. But you are right, Dasie. We do not need them for ourselves. All the garments that my feeder brought with her to the Trading Place she quickly traded away to those other traders who came from across the salt water. They seemed to think they needed what she had brought. She made many excellent trades with them, for things that she thought that she needed. But I am sure you are right. Once we have left behind the trade goods of the intruders, we will find other trade goods, of our own making, and trade just as profitably as ever with those who come from across the salt water. They will not ask us, ‘Where is the bright cloth that we came so far to obtain?’ Doubtless they will be happy to trade only for furs.”

Silence did not follow his words. Dasie was still, but whispered words ran like mice along the edges of the room. Hands furtively touched earrings or fabric skirts. No one dared to raise a voice to tell Dasie she was wrong, but that torrent of whispering told her what everyone knew she didn’t want to hear. Trade with the intruders was essential if the People wished to continue trading with those who came from across the sea. Game meats and hides, leather and furs, lovely objects carved from wood would buy them some things, but the traders from beyond the salt water were most eager for the trade goods from the west.

Soldier’s Boy delivered the killing blow. “I am sure that few among us would miss tobacco. And we will find other things to trade with the other folk who come to the Trading Place. When they discover we no longer have tobacco from Gernia, they will not sail away in disappointment; we will find something else they desire.” He spoke in an offhand voice, as if this would be the simplest thing in the world to do.

Dasie’s scowl deepened. One of the feeders had placed a stack of crisply browned cakes at her elbow. She seized one and bit into it as if biting off the head of an enemy. When she had finished chewing and swallowed, she demanded, “What are you suggesting, then? Why bother to attack them if we are not going to drive them away forever?”

I felt the muscles in Soldier’s Boy’s face twitch but he didn’t smile. “We attack them and kill enough of them to let them know that we could have killed them all. And we attack them in an organized way that makes them think that we are like them.”

“Like them?” Dasie was getting offended again.

“Like them enough that they can understand us. Right now, they treat us as we treat rabbits.”

Dasie made a sound in her throat. Yet another simile she didn’t appreciate.

Soldier’s Boy spoke on implacably. “We do not think that we should go to the Great One of the rabbits and ask his permission to hunt his people. We do not say to ourselves, ‘There are the lodges of the rabbit folk. I will stand here and call to them before I walk among them, so they know I come peacefully.’ No. When we want meat, we hunt the rabbits and kill them and eat them. If we wish to walk past the burrow of a rabbit, we do. If we wish to build a lodge where the rabbit burrow is, we do not ask the rabbit’s permission or expect him to take offense if we do so. We do not care if he takes offense. Let him go somewhere else, we think. And we do as we please with the place where he was.”

“But they are just rabbits,” Dasie said.

“Until you see a rabbit with a sword. Until rabbits come in the night to burn down the lodge you have built. Until the Great One of the rabbits stands before you and says, ‘You will respect my people and the territory of my people now.’”

Dasie was still frowning. I suspected that Soldier’s Boy had chosen a poor technique for presenting his idea. “Rabbits do not have Great Ones,” she pointed out ponderously. “They have no magic. They do not follow a leader and take a common action. They cannot make fires, or talk to us and demand our respect.” She spoke scornfully as if pointing this out to a slow child.

Soldier’s Boy let half a dozen heartbeats pass. Then he said, very softly, “And that is exactly what the intruders say of us. That we have no rulers, and our magic is not real. That we have no potent weapons, nor the will to use them. They do not imagine that we will ever demand that they respect our territories, because they do not think that we have territory.”

“Then they are stupid!” Dasie declared with great confidence in her opinion.

Soldier’s Boy gave a small sigh. I think he wished that he could agree with her. Instead, he said, “They are not stupid. They are, in fact, very clever in a way that goes in a different direction from what we think of as clever. While our young men go forth to hunt, to build lodges, to begin their lives, their young men are sent to a place where they spend all their time learning how to make all of the world their territory.”

Dasie narrowed her eyes. Obviously, she didn’t believe him.

“I have been there,” Soldier’s Boy said into the skeptical silence. “I learned there what they teach their warriors. And I learned how it could be turned against them.”

Cold fury welled in me. Would he turn what he had learned at the Academy against us? Two, I thought, could play at this game. I hardened my heart to his treachery and listened to every word he uttered.

“They do not respect a people who do not live in a fixed place. They do not respect a people who follow their own wills instead of living by the commands of a single ruler. They will not treat with us or believe that we claim the territory we claim until we convince them that they have been deceived, that we are, in fact, very much like them.”

Dasie shook her head. “I will not waste time with these deceptions. I wish simply to go down to them and kill them. Slaughter them all.”

“If all we do is slaughter them, then more will simply come after them.” He held up a pleading hand to halt her objection. “First, of course, will come the slaughter. But in the wake of that, the few who survive must be told that we have a ‘king’ of our own. Or a ‘queen.’ They must believe that there is one person who can speak for us. And with that one person, they will make a treaty, like the treaty they made with the far queen who defeated them. Boundaries will be set, new boundaries that fence them out of our lands. And rules of trade.”

“Rules of trade?” Dasie was listening to him now.

“To make them greedy,” Soldier’s Boy said. “And to assure us of the tobacco we need for the trade. With only one intruder will we trade. That one we will make wealthy. It will be in his best interests to remain the only one we trade with. We will choose someone strong, someone who will hold the others at bay for us, and will obey our rules for the sake of keeping a monopoly on trade with us. Greed will protect us better than fear.” He paused and smiled at her grim face.

“But first, there must be fear.”

She slowly returned his smile. “I think I begin to understand. Their weakness becomes our strength. Their greed will be the leash that holds them back. It is, I think, a good idea. Together we will plan this.” Her smile grew colder, wider. “And the first part we will plan is the slaughter.”

Soldier’s Boy gestured to Likari and the boy filled his plate. Olikea appeared with a flagon of beer. He scarcely noticed that they tended him. I was a mote of despair, suspended inside him. He had considered his plan well. If he could carry it out, I judged that it would work. He ate some of the meat and then said to Dasie, “The massacre is actually our simplest task. The intruders have long ago lost all wariness of us. They deem us no more threat than the mice that scamper through the stable, and pay as little attention to us. Kinrove’s dancers will strive to keep them demoralized and fearful. It is a pity that more of them did not stay to create a stronger magic”—and he paused delicately—“but Kinrove will have to make do with those he has. In the days and nights before our attack, we will have him increase the power of his magic; when we attack, the intruders will already be exhausted and dispirited. They will almost welcome our killing them.” He smiled and drank.

It was too much for me. I gathered all my awareness and fury, sharpened it into a point, and with all my strength, tried to unseat Soldier’s Boy from my body. I know he felt my attack, for he choked briefly on his beer. He set his mug down firmly on the tabletop. He spoke internally, to me only.

“Your time is past. I do what I must. In the long run, it is for the best, for both peoples. There will be a slaughter, yes, but after that, the war will be over. Better one massacre than year after year of eroding one another. I have weighed this long, Nevare. I think it is a decision that even Father would understand. And I cannot permit you to interfere. If you will not willingly join me, then I must at least keep you from hindering me.”

He boxed me.

That is how I thought of it then and how I recall it now. Imagine being imprisoned in a box with no light, yet no dark, no sound, no sensation against your skin, no body, nothing except your own presence. I’d experienced it once before, briefly, when he had been unconscious. The experience had not prepared me to endure it again; rather, it had only increased my dread. At first I did not believe what he had done. I held myself in stillness, waiting for the absence of all things to pass. Surely there would come some glimmer of light, or dimming of shadow, some whisper of sound, some whiff of scent. How long could he completely suppress half of himself?

That brought an unpleasant thought to me. Had I ever done this to him? When I thought I had absorbed him and integrated him back into myself, had he hung in this senseless internal dungeon? I did not think so, I decided. This, I felt, was a very deliberate act on his part. He sought to render me harmless. Down here I could not distract him. Did he suspect that I’d slipped away from him before and dream-walked on my own? Was that what he feared? He should. Because if ever I was in a position to do so again, I would immediately get to Epiny to warn her of the impending attack on Gettys.

Time, as I have mentioned before, is a slippery thing in such a place. Are hours moments or moments hours? I had no way of knowing. When my first period of internal ranting and shrieking passed, I tried to calm myself. The measuring of passing time seemed to me to be of the utmost importance, and I tried to give myself that comfort in any number of ways. Counting only led to despair. The mind counts faster than the lips, and even when I deliberately slowed my count, I realized that reciting an eternity of numbers only deepened my hopelessness.

It was the most solitary of solitary confinements that could exist. Men went mad from isolation; I knew that. Despite the suffocating lack of otherness that surrounded me, I held grimly to my sanity. He could not, I told myself, suppress me forever. He needed me. I was part of him, as surely as he was part of me. And a time would come when I could slip free of him and dream-walk to warn Epiny. Unless the time for such a warning had passed all usefulness. I veered away from that thought. I would not think what I would do if I emerged from this only to find Gettys destroyed and everyone I cared for slaughtered.

I found other ways to anchor myself in time. I recited poetry I’d memorized for various tutors. I worked math problems in my head. I designed, in excruciating detail, the inn I would have built at Dead Town if I’d stayed there with Amzil. I walked through every step of it, sparing myself nothing. I forced myself to raze old buildings. Mentally, I moved the old lumber out of the way, one load at a time. With a shovel and a pick, using string and sticks, I leveled a building site. I built myself a crude wheelbarrow and with it hauled gravel for a sturdy foundation. I mentally computed the number of cubic feet of gravel my foundation would require, estimated the size of a barrow I could push, and relentlessly forced myself to imagine each trip, down to the shoveling in of each load, the pushing of the barrow, the dumping of it, and even how I would spread it with my shovel. Such was my obsession, and my effort to stay anchored in the world.

And when my inn was built, I thought of how I would bring Amzil and the children there and surprise them with a snug, clean home of their own. I’m afraid I imagined an entire life there with her, gaining her trust, building our love, watching her children grow, adding our own to the brood. It was mawkish, a schoolboy fancy that I embroidered over and over, yet when all other diversions failed, I could taunt myself with thinking of her and pretending a life of shared love.

Not all the time, of course. No one could have lingered in that endless emptiness and stayed completely rational. There were times when I railed and threatened, times when I prayed, times when I cursed every god I could name. I would have wept if I’d had eyes to weep, I would have taken my own life if it had been within my power to do so. I tried every way that there was for a man to escape himself, but in the end, I was all that there was, and so I had to come back to myself.

I plotted a hundred revenges. I shouted to his unlistening ears that I would surrender myself if only he would allow me to stop existing in this vacuum. I found a deep faith in the good god and lost it again. I sang inane songs and made up new verses for them.

I did all those things not for a hundred years, but for a hundred centuries. I became certain that Soldier’s Boy had died long ago, but that somehow I continued to exist among his slowly decaying bones. I lived in a place beyond despair. I became stillness.

I do not know if it was because I stopped trying to exist or because he forgot to fear me. Tiny bits of sensory information began to drift down to me. It did not happen often; I could not conceive what “often” would mean anymore. A sour taste. A brief scent of wood smoke. Likari’s giggle. Pain from a cut finger. Each tiny bit of sensation was something to be pondered. I did not rise to them like a fish snapping at bait. I was too worn down for that. I let them drift down to me, where I considered them without haste.

One brick at a time, a wall can rise. One small experience at a time, life and awareness came back to me. I felt like a toad emerging from hibernation, or a pinched limb slowly tingling back to life. A conversation was falling all around me in disconnected bits.

“The horses are essential.”

“Then they’ll have to learn, won’t they?”

“Find a way to carry fire, then. Clay pots nested inside of one another, perhaps. And carry the oil separately. That would be less showy than torches.”

For the first time, I caught a soft mumble that could have been another voice. I savored it. Soldier’s Boy spoke again.

“No. Find someone else to do that. These men must remain here. They have to concentrate on what they are doing.”

“I know it’s heavier. Aim it higher than the target you want it to hit. But be careful. It must hit the wall high, not arch over it. We don’t have many. We will give three to each of our four best archers.”

“Drill is essential. It’s boring, but it’s essential. If we attack as you suggest, then the intruders will still see us as a disorganized horde. Ranks and precision will convince them that they have finally incurred the wrath of the Great Queen of the Specks, and that she has sent her army against them.”

I did not open my eyes. I had no eyes. I became aware of Soldier’s Boy rubbing his eyes, and when he was finished and opened them again, an immense vista of detail unrolled in front of me. Color and shape and shadow. I could not at first interpret it all. There was so much, it was overwhelming, painfully so. Was this what it was like the first time a newborn child beheld the world? I held myself back from it, keeping my distance as if it were a fire that might burn me with its intensity. Very, very gradually the scene resolved itself around me.

I was indoors, in a place I didn’t recall. It was a comfortable place. There were woven rugs on the floor, wall hangings, and comfortable furnishings. I sat in a sturdy chair with cushioned arms and a well-padded seat, comfortably close to an open hearth. Near my elbow was a laden table. An open bottle of wine was flanked by a steaming roast with near-bloody slices of meat coiling from the side of it. Roasted round onions were cozy with thick, bright orange baked roots. A loaf of dark bread had been cut into thick slabs and a pot of golden honey rested beside it with a large spoon sticking out of it.

Soldier’s Boy had been outside. Had he been reviewing the troops? Mud crusted my boots. Someone crouched before me, taking them off my feet, his head bowed to his task. One of the feeders who assisted Olikea with my care, I suddenly knew. His name was Sempayli, and he had come to my service from another kin-clan because he wanted to serve the Great Ones who would strike back at the intruders. A number of men and a few women had come to me that way. Dasie had been right about that. There was a deep discontent stirring among the Specks. Things were changing too quickly for the older folk, and the younger folk felt affronted by the intruders’ assumptions. Many felt it was time to strike back, and hard.

All that information poured into me in an overwhelming flood. I could scarcely digest it, but there was no respite. Life was happening all around me, unpausing and constant. All I could do was try to catch up. Soldier’s Boy drank red wine from a crystal glass, and for a long moment, the twin sensations of taste and smell ruled me. Heavenly, heavenly wine.

Across from me, Dasie was enthroned in a similar chair. Her feeder was kindling a pipe for her. The Great One had grown. Her belly and thighs and bosom were burgeoning curves that spoke of her wealth and comfort. That realization came to me so naturally that I did not at first recognize it as a Speck interpretation. My mind fluttered round it like a moth around a flame. They saw the lean, muscled folk of Gettys as the result of hardship and unnatural strife. Such bodies were the result of people who lived against the world rather than with it. They did not relax and accept the bounty the world offered them. They did not recline with one another in the evenings, making music or having soft talk. They constrained their deprived bodies with restrictive clothing and tight belts and snug shoes, and punished themselves with endless activity. They forced themselves to go out in the harsh sunlight and the cruel cold, as senselessly as if they were animals rather than humans. They seemed to rejoice in the harshness of life, restricting themselves from the enjoyment of food, sex, and plenty.

As if in reaction to the stinginess they inflicted on their bodies, they demanded largesse everywhere else. A trail through the forest created itself as folk traveled from here to there. A trail was as big as it needed to be for the traffic on it. Only the intruders would think that they needed to enlarge a trail with axes and shovels and wagons. Only the intruders would build a crust of dwellings over the lands so that they could winter in a place where the snow fell thickly and cold was a crushing blow. Only the intruders would rip all plants and trees from a space and then open the skin of the earth and force new plants to grow in precise rows, all the same. The Specks would never understand a folk who chose hardship over comfort, who insisted on tearing a life from the land rather than one flowing over the world and accepting its plenty.

It was like seeing a stranger across a crowded room and actually “seeing” him before recognizing him as an old friend. All that I accepted about my own people, all our values and customs, were, for that moment, peculiar and harsh and irrational. If a man had enough to eat and plenty besides, why should he not be fat with enjoyment of his life? If he did not have to work so hard that life leaned the flesh from his bones and put muscles on his limbs, why should he not have a softer belly and a rounder face? If one had the good fortune to be treated well by life, why should it not be reflected in an easier body?

For that skewed moment, I saw the Gernians as a nation of folk who sought difficulty and strife for themselves. They built roads to enrich themselves, to be sure, but did they ever enjoy the riches they accrued? No. It appeared suddenly that riches only became the foundation for seeking ever more difficult tasks, and often on the backs of those that life had not favored. I suddenly recalled the road workers, those poor souls forced to labor on the King’s Road both as penance for their crimes in Old Thares and as payment for the land they would receive when they’d worked off their sentences. The Specks, I suddenly knew, regarded them with bottomless pity and horror. This was the only life those poor beings would ever know, and the intruders condemned them to live it in privation and want, knowing only work and discomfort. Viewed like that, what we did was monstrous. The Specks had no way of understanding that we considered it justice that our king punished them for crimes they had committed and a special mercy that he offered them a reward for that labor. A false reward, I thought sourly, remembering Amzil’s tenuous existence.

I came out of that reverie to awareness of myself as Nevare. I felt as if I’d been fished from the depths of a cold dark pond and revived. For a time all I could do was hover behind Soldier’s Boy’s eyes and revel in my own existence. Gradually I found my footing in time and place as well as in my self. Time had passed. I struggled to learn how much.

I was in Lisana’s old lodge, but it had been refurbished with Speck luxury. The rugs underfoot and the hangings on the wall were trade items, as were the gleaming copper pots and heavy china dishes and crystal glasses. The bed in the corner of the room was a welter of thick furs and wool blankets. The garments that Soldier’s Boy wore now had been tailored to his ease, and were all in shades of forest greens and browns. His wrists were heavy with gold bracelets; I felt the weight of earrings dangling from my pierced earlobes. His increased girth and Dasie’s were marks of their standing among the Specks. Their feeders had feeders of their own now. The People held them in high esteem and their lifestyle reflected it.

I felt in vain for the vibration of iron anywhere in the room. If Dasie felt the need to threaten him anymore, it was not with iron. Their postures bespoke two warlords taking counsel together rather than a dictator and her hostage. My mind groped back to the words I had awakened to. The Great Queen of the Specks? I considered her through Soldier’s Boy’s eyes. Yes. And he was her warlord. So they were beginning to consider themselves.

The double irony was not lost on me. To save the Specks, they were becoming a mirror of the intruders they sought to drive away. Dasie with her weapons of iron, and Soldier’s Boy with his army in training. Did they think they could ever step back from those things, once they had used them?

The other prong of irony was as sharp as any iron blade as it stabbed me. Here it was, the golden future I’d been promised as a child. I was living it. I was the leader of a military force, serving a queen, with the wealth appropriate to my station and a lovely woman at my beck and call. Olikea had just come into view. She did not carry the dishes of food, but with her hand gestured to those she wished cleared away and where the fresh ones should be placed. I suspected she had chosen my wardrobe, for her own mirrored it, rich browns and delicate greens. She resembled Firada even more now, for her body had filled out to rounder, gentler curves. The feeder of a Great One reflected his status with her own. My gracious lady, and at her heels, the son of the household: Likari in a green tunic and leggings with soft brown boots on his feet. His glossy hair had been bound back with ties and beads of green, and his smooth cheeks were round with shining health. Soldier’s Boy’s eyes strayed to the boy and I knew his fondness and pride. Then his attention darted back to his conversation with Dasie. She was protesting.

“I listen to my warriors. They are still mine, you know. You train them, but it is to me that they bring their concerns. They are tired of rising early and standing in lines, bored with all these practices at moving together, at the same speed, doing the same thing. How does this help us to defeat the intruders? Will they stand still while we walk in lines across the field to attack them? Are they so stupid? Is that how they fought their wars?”

“Actually,” Soldier’s Boy confirmed for her, “they do. But no, we will not march on Gettys in formation. Eventually, though, when we show ourselves to the Gernians, they must see not a Speck raiding party but the Speck army. I’ve told you this before, Dasie, over and over. We have to become an enemy they can recognize. When the time comes, the warriors must dress alike and move in unison, controlled by one commander. That is power that the intruders will recognize. Only then will they respect us.”

“So you keep saying. But I do not like that we become, every day, more and more like the people we wish to drive away. You say our warriors must run faster, be harder of muscle and keener of eye when they use their bows. My people say to me, ‘we are strong enough, hardened enough to fish, to gather, to hunt. Why does he push us so?’ What am I to answer them?”

“You should answer them that, for now, they must do more. They must be harder and more ready than the warriors we will face. The hunt does not demand as much of a man as standing battle does. During a hunt, a man can rest or he can say, ‘It is too much work for that much meat. I will hunt something smaller,’ and let the prey run away from him. But in battle, the man who turns away becomes the prey. No one can stop because his arms are weary or his legs shake with strain. It stops only when your enemy is dead and you are still alive.

“It is good to say, we are brave and strong, but I have lived among the intruders. And those we will face will be brave and strong and well trained and desperate. I hope to take them by surprise and lay waste to them all before they can react. But I cannot promise you that. Once roused, they will be quick to organize themselves. They will not flee before our advance but will stand firm, for they will know they have nowhere to flee. They will shoot at us in volleys, for the men who are reloading their weapons will trust their comrades to protect them while they do so. That is the strength of an army, that the strength of your comrade’s arm protects his fellow as well as himself. And they are experienced. They will know, when we attack, that if they do not fight back strongly enough we will slaughter them all. They will fight like only the cornered fight—to the death and beyond. Even when they know that victory is irretrievably gone, they will stand and fight.”

“You speak of extremes. The warriors are ready to fight as hard as we must fight to win,” Dasie asserted.

“Are the warriors ready to die to protect their comrades, in the hope that their fellows will win?” Soldier’s Boy asked her quietly.

She was startled. “But you say that our plan is good. That Kinrove’s dance will have demoralized the protectors of Gettys, that we will fall on them when they are full of sleep and confused. You have said we will slaughter them.” She paused, her anger and indignation building. “You promised this!” she accused him.

“And we will.” He replied calmly. “But some of us will die. This we have to admit, going into this battle. Some of us will die.” He paused, waiting for some sign that she accepted this. Her face remained stony. He sighed and went on, “And when a warrior is injured, or when he sees his brother fall, dying, he cannot then decide that the price is too high to pay. Each of them must go into this battle thinking that if he must die for us to win it, then he will. It is the only way. This is what I am trying to teach them. Not just how to quickly be where I tell them to be, not just how to obey an order without conferring with one another or arguing. I must build them into a group that has a focus and a goal, a goal that is more important to each of them than his own life. We will not have more than one chance to do this well. The first time we attack them, we must wipe them out. It is our only hope.”

Dasie lowered her chin to her chest, thinking. Her eyes were closed to slits as she stared into the fire. At last she said in a soft, sad voice, “This is worse than Kinrove’s dance. In the dance, they gave up their own lives to protect us. But now you tell them they must kill, and yet must still give up their own lives. I thought to save my people from such things. You are telling me I have only plunged us even deeper into it.”

“And I have more to say.” Soldier’s Boy shifted slightly in his seat. “You will not like to hear it. But I know it is true. We need to support Kinrove in his dance. He has complained to me weekly that he does not have enough dancers for the magic to work well. He is bitter, saying that you broke his magic for the sake of your personal feelings, and now that you require it to work, you demand more of him than he can do. He says he needs more dancers, if he is to send fear and sadness not just to the edges of the forest, but deep into Gettys. And that is where we need it to be.” He paused and then looked at the fire as he said quietly, “We must allow him to summon more dancers.”

She looked at him incredulously. “Can you say this to me? When only three months ago, I took iron into his encampment to free the dancers? Don’t you understand at all why I did that? His dance was destroying us; the price he demanded to hold the intruders at bay was too high. It had torn the fabric of our families, and our kin-clans. I stopped the dance so that the People could go back to living as they used to live. What is the point of what I did if now I say to my people, ‘You must not only submit to being summoned to the dance, to dance until you die, but you must be willing to take death to the intruders and perhaps die there as well.’ Where is the peace and tranquility and return to the old ways that I promised them?”

I scarcely heard his response. Three months ago? My eternity of isolation had only been three months? Listening to them, I had feared I eavesdropped on an ongoing war council. I now knew, with a surge of hope, that Gettys had not yet been attacked. There was still time to stop this. How to stop it, I was not yet certain. But I had time, if only a small amount.

Soldier’s Boy was talking to her, low and earnest. “Before our people can go back to being what they were, to living as they have always lived, we must free ourselves of the threat from the intruders. So, yes, we must change, for this small time, yes, we must subject the People to these things. In order to save them.”

“In order to save them, I must permit Kinrove to work a summoning on our own people? I must let him turn the magic on the People again?”

“Yes.” Soldier’s Boy spoke heavily and with regret.

“You are certain that this is your counsel to me?”

I thought I heard a trap in her words. Either Soldier’s Boy did not or he was past caring. “Yes.”

“Then so be it.” She heaved herself out of her chair and stood. The scarlet and blue robes that she wore fell into heavy folds around her. Her feeders came immediately to stand at her side, ready to assist her should she require it. “Bring my wraps,” she told them. “And have my bearers ready my litter. We quick-walk back to my lodge tonight.” She turned back to Soldier’s Boy and grumbled, “It makes no sense that you insist on living here. It is a hardship on everyone that you are so far from every winter village.”

“Yet here I must be. And many of my kin-clan have seen fit to come and join me here.”

“Yes. I have seen that. A second little village of your kin-clan grows outside your door. And it is good that they are here. That way, when the summoning falls on them, you will see it.”

I shared Soldier’s Boy confusion and foreboding. “Falls on them?”

“Of course. I shall tell Kinrove he may resume his summoning. And your kin-clan was next in line to be summoned. Do not you recall? That was why he had invited your kin-clan’s other Great One to his encampment near the Trading Place. He made that small concession. Before he sent each summoning, he told the Great One of the kin-clan that he would be doing so. That was why Jodoli was there. He agreed to it, as he had been forced to agree to it before. And now, it seems, you have agreed to the same thing.”

Soldier’s Boy was silent. I sensed his reluctance. He did not want the summoning to fall on his kin-clan. He dreaded that Kinrove would take the men he had so painstakingly trained for battle and use them instead for his dance. But having said that Kinrove must have the dancers for the attack to succeed, he had no way to refuse it. How could he say the sacrifice of his kin-clan was too sharp, but that others must pay it? He chewed at his lower lip and then gave a fierce shake of his head. “Very well, then. Let Kinrove send a summoning. It must be done. Those who dance are warriors of another kind. And the sooner the threat is removed, the sooner all warriors can put down their arms or cease their dancing.”

“As you wish,” she said, as if she were conceding something to him. Her feeders were all around her now, swathing her in woolen wraps and a heavy fur cloak. I heard men’s voices outside the lodge, and suddenly the door opened, admitting a blast of wind and driven rain.

Soldier’s Boy gave an exclamation of dismay. Dasie laughed. “It’s only rain, Great One. If you do as you propose, we will face snow and the great cold of the winter in the west lands.”

“I will face it when I must,” he retorted. “I do not need it blowing into my lodge right now. Soon enough I must endure it, and then I will.”

“That you will,” she replied. She pulled a heavy hood up over her hair. One of her feeders was immediately there, tugging it forward and securing it around her face. Dasie had grown in girth and importance. I had not recalled her having so many attendants at Kinrove’s pavilion. She strode toward the open door. The moment she was through it, Soldier’s Boy made an exasperated gesture and a young man rushed to close it behind her. A woman piled more wood on the fire to replace the warmth that had been lost from the lodge.

“Do you think that was wise?” a shaky voice asked beside him. Soldier’s Boy turned to look at Olikea. She was offering him a mug of a steaming liquid. Her eyes were very large. Her lower lip trembled; then she firmed it into a pinched line. He took the mug from her.

“What choice did I have?” he muttered unhappily. “We must endure what we must endure. It is not forever.” Then, “Have you seen a summoning before? Tell me of it.”

Olikea looked grave. She spoke carefully, more carefully than she had ever spoken to me. Plainly her relationship with Soldier’s Boy was far different from how she had near-dominated Nevare. “I wish you had asked me what a summoning was like before you told Dasie they must be resumed. I would have urged you to try anything else before letting Kinrove call dancers from our kin-clan again.”

“Just tell me how a summoning comes,” he responded irritably. His anger covered a lurking fear that she was right. Small and silent, I rejoiced in my ability to once more read what he felt and know what he knew. Tiny as a sucking tick, and as secret, I clung to his mind.

Olikea spoke slowly and with reluctance. “The summoning has been a part of my life for as long as I can recall. Kinrove rotated them among the kin-clans. There are twelve kin-clans, so with good fortune, the summoning only fell on us once every eight years or so. He tried not to summon more than once a year, or so he said, but it is more often than that. He had to keep enough dancers, and—” She hesitated and then said bitterly, “And when people danced themselves to death, they had to be replaced.”

“What happens in a summoning?” he asked her uneasily.

She looked away from him. “No one knows just when it will come. The magic comes over everyone. It is like feeling sleepy or hungry. It comes and it plucks at you, asking you if you want to join the dance. It asks everyone. Some can say no. Last time, I said no. Part of me wanted to go, but a greater part did not. I do not know why I was able to say no to the dance, but I could.” She fell silent, staring into the flames of the fire. Her eyes narrowed and her voice went flat. “My mother could not. She left us and went to Kinrove’s dance.”

“Just like that? Just left?”

“Yes.” She sat down in Dasie’s empty chair. Her eyes had gone distant, and despite the warmth of the fire, her skin stood up in bumps on her arms. She rubbed at herself as if she were cold. “It was a summer night when the summoning came. It was—oh. I think it was eight years ago. My family was gathered around the fire. Our mother had been singing us a story-song, one that both Firada and I loved to hear, about a silly girl shaking a nut tree. In the middle of the song, the summoning came. We all felt it. It was like a chill up my back, or the crawling when your skin wishes you to scratch it, or perhaps thirst. One of those feelings that comes from the body, not the mind. My mother just stood up and began to dance. Then she danced away, down the path into the night. We watched her, and then I felt it coming over me. And I was just a little girl, and all I could do was stay near my father, saying, ‘No, no, I don’t want to dance, I won’t go.’ It took all I had within me to say I would not go. That summoning lasted a full night. It was like watching the wind tear leaves from a tree. The magic blew through our kin-clan, and some held tight, but others were torn away from it. And off they went. We called after them, begging them to come back, but none of them did. A little boy, no more than two, toddled after his mother, screaming. She didn’t even look back. I don’t think she heard him, or remembered that he existed.”

“And did you, did you ever see your mother again?” I knew he didn’t want to ask the question, and knew also that he felt he must.

Olikea snorted. “What good would it do?” She leaned toward the fire and pushed in a piece of firewood that was on the edge. Then she spoke quietly, as if confessing something foolish she had done. “I did see her, once.

“Wherever Kinrove goes, his dancers go with him, always dancing. It was during the autumn moving time, when all of us use the hidden way to come back to the ocean side of the mountains. Kinrove’s folk passed our kin-clan, and with them went his dancers. All were forced to give way to him. He called himself the Greatest of the Great, and before Dasie threatened him with iron, he could do as he wished. So all stepped aside for his kin-clan and his dancers to pass. And I sat and I watched, and I saw my mother. It was terrible. She danced fear, and it was all over her, like a stink clinging to a rotten fish. Her hair hung in mats and her body had gone to bones, but she still danced. Not for much longer, I do not believe, but that afternoon at least, she still danced. She danced past Firada and me, and never once let her eyes linger on us. She did not know us or remember us. She had become her dancing. She was like the road slaves that the intruders use to build their road, but at least they know they are slaves. She did not have even that.”

I felt Soldier’s Boy try to dismiss it, but there, at least, some of my sensibilities prevailed. He said quietly, “I am sad to know that you lost your mother that way.”

“It was hard,” Olikea admitted with a sigh. “Firada and I were both young still, with much to learn about being women of the People. The rest of our kin-clan took care of us; a child is always welcome at anyone’s hearth. But it was not the same. I listened to other mothers teach their daughters, telling stories of when they themselves were young. Firada and I lost all those stories when our mother danced away.” She paused. “I used to hate Kinrove. I did not think that anyone, not even a Great One, should have so much power over us. That day when Dasie held a sword to him and forced him to free the dancers, I hated her. Not because she did it, but because she did it too late for my mother and me.”

Did Soldier’s Boy wonder the same thing that I did? Why, if they had hated a Great One like Kinrove, had both Firada and Olikea sought out such men to become their feeders? She seemed to hear my unvoiced question.

“When I took you in and began to tend you, I thought that I would create a Great One of my own, one far greater than Kinrove. One greater than Jodoli, for Firada, I saw, did not have the same ambition that I did. I thought you would be the one to surpass Kinrove and become the Greatest of the Great. I believed you would find a way to drive the intruders away forever, and end Kinrove’s dance.” She hesitated, and then said quietly, “Before I met you I even dreamed it. I thought the magic sent me that dream, and when I first sought you out, I believed it was because the magic told me to do so.”

She left the chair and came to sink down to sit on a cushion near Soldier’s Boy’s chair. She leaned her head against my thigh. Soldier’s Boy stroked her hair. I wondered what had passed between them in the months that I had been gone. Olikea seemed milder and more tractable.

“What do you believe now?” he asked her gently.

She sighed. “I still believe the magic sent me to you. But I have come to see it differently. I believe that I am caught in the magic just as you are. It cares nothing for my ambitions. I will tend and serve you and you will tend and serve the magic.”

“I have said that Kinrove should send a summoning.”

“I heard you say it.”

“It will fall on our own kin-clan.”

“I know that also.”

He didn’t ask her what she thought of that or felt about it. That would have been a Gernian question. He waited for what she might decide to tell him. She sighed heavily. “I like what your power has brought me. I fear the summoning. But I know it has never taken a feeder, so I am safe. I do not want to see any of our kin-clan summoned. I do not like that you call for it. But it was the year for our kin-clan to endure the summoning. I think that, even if you had never existed, it would have come to this. So I do not blame you for it. But I feel a secret shame. I wonder if I am able to face the summoning because the magic has given me so much through you that I no longer care what it might take from someone else.”

I am not certain what Soldier’s Boy felt about her thoughts, but I had a definite twinge of uneasiness as I wondered what my presence here had done. I suddenly saw my coming as the trigger for a long chain of events, with distant results that I’d never be able to imagine, let alone compute. Was that what magic was? I wondered. Something that happened by such a convoluted chain of events that no human could have predicted it from the initial event? Was that the force that we called “magic”? The question twisted in my mind. Strike a steel against flint, and the first time a spark jumps, it seems like magic. But when the spark jumps every time, we add it to the list of things we can force the world to do. It became our science, our technology. A spark put to gunpowder would explode it. A lever could always levitate more than I could lift. But magic, I thought slowly, magic worked only when it suited magic to work. Like a badly trained dog or a strong-willed horse, it obeyed only when it wished to. Perhaps it rewarded only those who obeyed it. For some reason, that idea frightened me.

A stronger question rose in me. I wanted to push it at Soldier’s Boy but refrained. If he knew I was aware and stirring again, I suspected he would box me in once more. At the mere thought of that, cowardice overwhelmed me. I kept my question to myself. Had Lisana had a clear image of what would happen when she claimed me for the magic? Had the magic taken me and given me to her to train? Or had she taken me, thinking she could train me for the magic? I suddenly wanted a clear answer to that question. My mind whirled with questions. What had first put me in the path of the magic? Dewara. But my father would never have known Dewara if he had not shot him with an iron ball and destroyed his magic. Had that event also been the will of the Specks’ magic? Was I merely a link in a chain of events so intricate that no one recalled the beginning of it or foresaw the end? If that was true, where had it actually begun? Would it ever end?

Whilst I had been pondering, Soldier’s Boy’s life had gone on. Evening had descended, and the household was preparing itself for rest. The dishes had been cleared away. His feeders had brought him a long robe, a sort of nightshirt, and his body had been soothed with scented oils and then wiped clean. His bed was prepared for him. Where once only Olikea had tended him and Likari had aided her, now a full dozen serving folk came and went at their various tasks. Olikea presided over them and left no doubt as to her primacy. Likari mostly made a show of tending him; he was more pet than feeder, but no one seemed to resent that. The Great One obviously enjoyed the boy’s company, and the affection between them was mutual.

The bustle of the evening preparations faded. Soldier’s Boy was comfortably propped in his bed. Likari slept on a pallet at the foot of it and Olikea shared Soldier’s Boy’s bed, sleeping warm against his back. The lanterns in Lisana’s lodge had been blown out; the only light came from the fire in the central hearth. A feeder minding the fire and keeping it burning well through the night was a silhouette against it. Several others settled on pallets at the other end of the room. Outside the lodge, all was quiet. There was the sweep of wind, and the uneven pattering of rain that fell more from swaying branches than from the distant skies above. The central hearth kept the damp and the cold of the winter night at bay. All in all, it was the most comfortable night that I think I’d ever witnessed Soldier’s Boy enjoy in my body. His belly was full, he was warm, and danger was far away, on the other side of the mountains. I had expected him to settle in and slide immediately into sleep.

Instead, he lingered in wakefulness long after Likari’s and Olikea’s breathing had settled into deep slow rhythms. He was troubled. The part of him that recalled my schooling at the Academy knew that he must act based on the needs of the situation. Strategy demanded that Kinrove’s magical dance be strong. To dispense with it now would be like dismissing a third of his troops just before battle was joined. Kinrove’s magic of terror and depression was a steady onslaught against Gettys, wearing the soldiers down and eating away at morale. Soldier’s Boy did not undervalue it, but he dreaded the summoning and wondered uneasily when it would come. It would wreak havoc among the kin-clan and his household. That was inevitable.

He heaved a sigh. He did it for the good of his people. He was prepared to make that sacrifice, but he wondered how much of his willingness came from his drive to preserve the People and their ancestor trees and how much came from the military training of Nevare Burvelle. Would a full Speck, raised only among the People, be able to countenance such a sacrifice? Certain attitudes had infiltrated his thinking like poison in his bloodstream. He knew that what he did was a rational choice, but was it the rationality of a Gernian or a Speck?

Lisana would know.

I breathed the thought toward him. It was a distant whisper wafting against his ear. Lisana could advise him. She had enabled him to attain this position of power and authority. She had taught him all he knew of the People. She would know where that other Nevare began and he stopped.

I put his weary mind to thinking of her. I called up my most vivid memories of Lisana and focused on them until I found myself longing for her as much as he did. As he ventured toward sleep, I kept feeding his unwinding mind images and thoughts of her. My tactic worked. He drifted into a dream of her, one rich in sensory details. I joined him there and then, holding a breath I no longer controlled, I pushed us both out of his body and into a dream-walk.

I longed to go to Epiny. I also needed to speak to my sister, to know what was happening to her. I dared not try for those things. But I could focus on Lisana and anchor myself to my memories of her and then emerge from Soldier’s Boy’s dreams into hers.

I do not think she was sleeping. I doubt that she had need of sleep. But I joined her in a place where she was not Tree Woman, bound always to her tree and to her eternal vigilance in watching over the spirit bridge. She was recalling autumn. She sat on a hillside and looked down across a valley filled with trees. Through a hazy fall morning, she studied their changing foliage. A wind drifted through, trailing a train of dancing leaves in its wake.

“How many autumns have you seen?” I asked her as I sat down beside her.

She replied without looking at me. “I stopped counting long ago. This one was one of my favorites. That little birch down there had just become old enough to strike a yellow note among all the red from the alders.”

“She makes both colors brighter,” I said.

It pleased me to see a smile touch the corners of her mouth. She turned to me, and her eyes widened. “You are marked as one of the People now.”

That surprised me. I looked down at my arms and bared legs. She was right. I wore the dappling that Soldier’s Boy had pricked into his skin. I wanted to say something about that, but instead I said, “I’ve missed you so. You cannot imagine how I’ve missed you. Not just your knowledge and your guidance. Your presence. Your touch.” I took her hand. It was small and plump in contrast to mine. I leaned close to breathe the fragrance of her hair. A few moments before, it had been streaked with gray. Now it was a rich brown with only a few threads of silver in it. She closed her eyes and leaned closer to me, shivering as my breath touched her.

“How can you say I can’t imagine how you’ve missed me?” she murmured. “You move in the living world. You have the comfort of other people, the companionship of other women. I, I have only my memories. But now you are here. I do not know how you have managed to come to me, and I do not wish to waste whatever time we have in wondering. Oh, Soldier’s Boy. Just for a time, be here with me. Let me touch you and hold you. I fear it will be the last time.”

I did not hesitate to put my arms around her and draw her near. Lisana was the one place where my sentiments coincided exactly with Soldier’s Boy’s. I no longer cared what had first brought us together. I didn’t care that I could not recall as my own the memories of how we had come to love each other. It was good and simple and true to embrace her. This love I felt for her required no effort on my part. I kissed her pliant mouth and then buried my face in her hair, feeling as if I were finally home.

I had primed Soldier’s Boy to let me escape to her, and I had. Somehow I had brought shreds of his awareness with me. If he knew I was present, he did not struggle against me. Perhaps he thought he merely dreamed of his beloved. I know that the smell and taste and warmth of her drowned the question I had been so desperate to ask her. I was here with her, and now was the only time that mattered.

We were both large people. This was no frantic and athletic coupling. Between two such as we, lovemaking was a stately and regal dance, a slow process of give-and-take. Neither of us was coy nor were we shy. The size of our bodies did not permit those types of hesitation. We accommodated each other without awkwardness, and if flesh was sometimes a barrier, it was erotic as well. It forced us to move slowly; every contact was well considered. Her thighs were thick and soft as I pressed myself against her. The bounty of her breasts was a soft cushion between us. Each guided the other to what was most pleasurable, and I enjoyed Lisana’s arousal as fully as my own. In those moments, I could recall in flashes that she had been his teacher in these matters, and he had delighted in learning his lessons well. As I held her and loved her, I could glory in the soft wealth of her skin. Her fingers walked the dappling on my skin, and in her touch, I rejoiced that I had marked myself as one of her own kind.

All wonders must have an end. A drift of leaves had been our bed. Now we lay sprawled among them. Lisana’s eyes were closed but the smile on her face told me she was not even close to sleep. She was savoring our enjoyment of each other, and the touch of the weakened autumn sun and even the teasing wind that now chased a shiver across her. I laughed to see her shudder like a tickled cat and she opened her eyes. She sighed and lifted my hand to her lips, to kiss my palm again. With my hand still against her lips, she said softly, “I had a fancy the other day. Would you like to hear it?”

“Of course.”

“My trunk has fallen, you know. But I rise again as a sapling from the trunk.”

“I know that. Oh, my love, I am so sorry that I—”

“Hush. Enough of that. It has been said enough already. Listen. The tip of the tree that once was me thrust into the earth when I fell. And now I have felt a stirring there. A second tree will rise from the nursery that my trunk has become. I can feel it growing there, connected to me. Me and yet not me.”

“Just as I am,” I said. I already knew the direction of her thought and liked it.

“When you die,” she said carefully, without malice, for death did not mean to her or to Soldier’s Boy what it might have meant to a Gernian.

I seized the words from her. “When I die, I will be brought to that tree. I will see that it is so, Lisana. That tree, and no other. And we shall always be together. Oh, would that it would happen soon.”

“Oh, not too soon,” she chided me. “You have the task of your magic to complete. Now that you are one, surely you will succeed. But if you died before you complete it—” She paused and her smile faltered a little at the dread thought that followed it. “If you die before the intruders are driven away and the Vale of the Ancestor Trees secured against them, then I fear that our reunion will be short-lived.” She paused, and then sighed, knowing she was letting the concerns of the world intrude on our brief time together.

“I have felt the changes,” she said. “Felt them, but no one has come to tell me what is happening. Kinrove’s power has faded, I think. When his dance stopped, it was like the sudden cessation of a great wind. I had almost forgotten what it was like when only peace filled our valley. For a time, a very short time, I drank it in as one drinks cool water after drought. I told myself it meant that you had solved the riddle of your magic and knew what you would do with your power. I dared to savor the peace that returned to the valley of our ancestors. But it was not for long.”

“The dance started again,” I responded.

“Did it?” She looked surprised. “I have not felt it here if it did. No. There were disturbances of another sort.” She looked down at the hand I still clasped and sighed again. “They are tough, those Jhernians, like plants that when chopped and mangled still send down roots and push up leaves again. Two days after Kinrove’s dance failed, I felt them at the edges of the forest. The next day, they were hunting there. Two days after that, they had mustered their slaves and put them to work, despite the snow on the ground. The poor creatures are near naked as frogs in the cold. I suppose their work warms them. Already, they have undone some of the barrier your magic raised against them.”

“Not my doing, for the most part,” I said, and again I felt it was Soldier’s Boy speaking through me. I let him. I was hearing what I most wished to know. I didn’t like what I was learning, but it was what I needed to know. In the next moment, I liked it even less. “Nevare spent the magic we had so painstakingly gathered. All the magic I had harvested from the Spindle, gone in three short breaths. I still cannot believe it.”

She was quiet for a time. Then she concurred with, “Neither can I. Oh, Soldier’s Boy, are we any closer to a solution? Is your task nearly done?”

He let go of her soft hand and made angry fists of his hands. “That is precisely the problem, Lisana. All that I must do for the magic, I did. Everything that it asked me to do, I accomplished. I gave the rock. I stopped the Spindle. I kept and left the book. All these things I have done, yet the magic has not worked. I do not know any more what it wants of me. Only those three things were clear to me, and I have done them. When I do my tasks and the magic does nothing, what am I to do?”

For a long time, there was silence between them. They reclined together in the loose leaves, and her touch against him was sweet, but it could not free him from his torment. Finally she asked in a soft, low voice, “What will you do?”

He had picked up a red leaf and been considering it. Now he crushed it in his hand and let the pieces fall. “I had thought to gather a great deal of magic, and use it to unite all of the People under one Great One. I had thought that then I would move against the Gernians in a way they would understand. I went to their schools. I know how the Landsingers drove the Gernians from their territory and claimed it back from them. What has worked once, I thought, might well work again. Let them see us as a mighty people with weapons they cannot copy or prevail against.”

“A mighty people?”

He rubbed his face with both hands. “Do you remember the story you told me of the children and the bear? The bear wished to have the fish the children had caught. They knew if they ran, the bear would chase them down.”

“So they spread their cloak between them, to make themselves appear as if they were a single creature larger than the bear. And they shouted and threw stones and ran at the bear. And he fled.”

“Exactly,” Soldier’s Boy told her. “If we can perhaps appear to be a greater force than we are, if we can confront them with a size and a power they don’t expect, then perhaps they will turn and run.”

“That would take time. For years, Kinrove has tried to gather the People into a single unit. With all of his magic, he could not.”

“And I do not have time. This young Great One, Dasie, has forced my hand. She is the one who destroyed Kinrove’s dance, in the name of freeing our own people. Lisana, she brought iron among the People, used iron against a Great One to get her way. She has threatened me with iron if I try to oppose her. All I can do is take my plan and try to make her a part of it. She is the one, the ‘queen’ that the intruders will see opposing them. And I have told her that we must allow Kinrove to restore his dance. Without it, we have no hope of success in our attack against the intruders.”

She had been watching his face as he spoke, and now her eyes were wide with alarm. “You will attack them?”

“Yes.” He spoke the word in a harsh voice that made it plain it was not his desire but that he would do it. “As soon as we are ready. Kinrove is going to make a summons to restore his dance. I do not know how swiftly the dance magic will be restored. But it must work against the Gernians for some time before we attack; men do not fight well when their morale is damaged.”

She turned her head, looking at him, but I felt she was actually looking for me in his eyes. She confirmed it when she spoke. “This is not something you learned from me, Soldier’s Boy. This comes from Nevare, and the school in the west. Almost I wish you had not taken him into you.”

He gave a harsh laugh. “Yes. It does. We will turn their own tactics against them.”

She looked stricken. “How can you defeat the enemy when you have become the enemy? Soldier’s Boy, this is not our way. And it is not the magic’s way. You cannot say the magic prompts you to do this.”

He looked at her, and then away. I could feel something building in him. His voice was hard when he spoke. “No. I’ve told you. It isn’t the magic’s way. It’s my way. It’s what I am forced to do when I have done all the magic has commanded me, and none of it has worked. Many a night have I lain awake, thinking and thinking, until my brain pounds inside my skull. If the magic will not tell me what it wants, it must be because I already know what I must do. Why, then, did the magic choose me? Because it knew I would go to that school and learn these things, and that I could then turn their own teachings against them.”

“What will you do?” she asked him in a voice full of dread.

He shifted away from her. Some part of him was shamed. “Whatever I must,” he replied in a determined voice.

“Tell me,” she demanded.

“You will not like it.”

“You do not like it! I can feel that. But you will do it. And if you can do it, then you can tell me what it is you plan to do.”

Now he sat up, pulling his body away from hers. I suddenly knew that was a fair measure of how distasteful he found the task he had planned. He could not speak of it while cradling the body of the woman he loved. “I will attack them, just as they have attacked so many others.”

“Without warning?”

“They have had years of warning. They have not heeded it. Besides, my force is not so great that I can afford to give them warning. Alarmed, they could stand against us, perhaps even best us. So, yes, we will attack them without warning.”

“Where?” she demanded. She was determined to hear the worst of it. “Will you attack them while they are working on their road? Will you attack the slaves, poor creatures with no weapons and scarcely a thread to their backs?”

He turned away from her and looked across the valley. “No,” he said, and all life was gone from his voice. It held only death. “We will attack the town and the fort. At night. When they are sleeping in their beds.” He turned back to her before she could ask her next question. “All of them. Any of them we can kill. I do not have a large enough force that I can begin by being merciful.”

A very long silence passed. “And when will you do this?” she asked at last.

“As soon as we are ready,” he replied coldly. “I hope that will be before the end of winter. Dark and cold can be our allies.”

“She will still be heavy with child. Or perhaps recovering from birth, with a newborn at her breast.”

Soldier’s Boy grew so still at her words that his stillness held me as well. Slowly, slowly it came to me that Lisana spoke of Epiny. I tried to reckon the time backward and could not. Was she a mother already?

Soldier’s Boy answered a question that Lisana had not asked. “I cannot care about such things. He did not care about such things among my people, when he had the upper hand.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Look at what he did to you!” Soldier’s Boy exclaimed with long-banked anger.

“He didn’t kill me,” she pointed out quietly.

“He nearly did.”

“But he didn’t. And he tried to stop the cutting of the ancestor trees.”

“He was feeble at it.”

“But he tried.”

“That isn’t enough.”

“And he brings you to me now, when you could not come by yourself.”

“What?”

She cocked her head at him. “You did not know this? You do not feel him, holding you here? I thought you had made your truce with each other. But for Nevare reaching toward me, we could not touch now.”

“I—he is here? He spies on us! He spies on my plans!”

He made a swipe at my presence, and for an instant, all was silence and blackness.

“No!” I cried out voicelessly and fought back. I fought back with a savagery far beyond any physical confrontation I had ever been in. It is impossible to convey how much I abhorred the idea of being boxed once more. “I would rather be dead. I would rather not exist. I would rather we both ceased to exist!” I clung to his awareness, refusing to let him shed me. He tried to pull his consciousness free of me. I responded by turning abruptly away from Lisana and sealing him off from her. Suddenly, he was sitting up in his bed, staring wildly into darkness, bereft of her.

“No!” he shouted in his turn, rousing feeders. Beside him, Olikea sat up in alarm. “Nevare? What is it? Are you ill?”

“No. Leave me alone! All of you! Leave me alone!” Olikea’s gentle touch was the last thing he wanted, and he could not bear the concerned scrutiny of the feeders who had rushed to his side.

“Shall I light lamps?”

“Is he hungry?”

“Does he have a fever?”

“A nightmare. Perhaps it was just a nightmare?”

I suddenly glimpsed just how little privacy was left to him in his wonderful life as a Great Man. Intruding hands touched his face and neck, seeking for signs of fever or chill. Lamps were already being lit. I took advantage of their distracting him and made more secure my grip on his awareness. “You cannot banish me,” I told him. “I will not let you. And while you fight me and try to box me, I promise you, I will not let you see Lisana at all. I will keep her from you. This was my body and I will not be pushed out of it. You and I will come to terms now.”

“Leave me alone!” he bellowed again, and I was not sure if he spoke to his clustering feeders or to me. They fell back from him in dismay. Olikea seemed affronted, but she turned her temper on the others.

“Get back from him. Leave him alone. All he did was to shout in his sleep. Let him go back to sleep and stop bothering him!” She literally slapped at hands until the confused and still-sleepy feeders moved away from him and back to their pallets. He was relieved until Olikea put comforting arms around him. “Let’s just go back to sleep,” she suggested.

Her warm embrace felt completely wrong. He shrugged free of it. “No. You sleep. I need to sit up and think for a time. Alone.” He swung his feet over the side of the bed. I was still firmly attached to his awareness and thus knew how out of character this was for a Great One. He rose from his bed and walked to the hearth. To the feeder there, he said brusquely but not unkindly, “Go to sleep. I will tend the fire for a time.”

The poor confused man rose, not sure if he had displeased the Great One somehow. Obediently, he retreated to an empty pallet at the far end of the room. Soldier’s Boy pushed his big chair closer to the hearth and then sat down in it. Olikea lay on her side in the bed, staring at him. He looked into the flames.

“What do you want?” He didn’t speak the words aloud, only to me.

“Not to be crushed.” That was only the barest tip of what I wanted, but we had to start there.

He scratched his head as if he could reach inside and tear me out. It felt foreign to me; my hair had grown long, longer than I’d ever worn it. “I want to see Lisana,” he countered.

“We might find an agreement there. But only if I am allowed to visit Epiny, too.”

“No. You would warn her of my plans.”

“Of course I would! Your plans are evil.”

“No more evil than the road,” he retorted.

“The road is evil,” I agreed, surprising myself. I think it shocked him. He was silent for a moment. “I tried to stop the road,” I pointed out to him.

“Perhaps. But you failed.”

“That doesn’t mean that slaughter is the only option left to you.”

“Tell me another one, then.”

“Talk. Negotiate.”

“You tried that already. Until there is a slaughter, no one will seriously negotiate with us.”

When I could not think of an immediate response, he pushed his advantage. “You know it’s true. It’s the only thing that will work.”

“There has to be another way.”

“Tell me what it is, and I’ll try it. Your feeble negotiations didn’t work. Kinrove’s dance held them at bay but it only buys us time. The magic hasn’t worked. What else am I to do, Nevare? Let the road come through? Let the ancestor trees fall, including Lisana’s? Let the Gernians destroy everything that we are? Would you like that? To see Olikea working as a whore, to see Likari a beggar addicted to tobacco?”

“No. That’s not what I want.”

He took a long, deep breath. “Well. At least there seems to be a few things we agree on.”

“And many that we do not.”

He did not respond to that. And when his silence stretched longer, I knew that he had no more idea of what would become of us than I did.

We spent the rest of that long night staring into the fire, looking for answers that were not there.