OH! HOW COULD I think that? Wormy was his own human.
As I was mine. I’m human, I told myself, and repeated: human.
The skirmish ended. Each ogre wound up with a meat strip, although ShuMM had three.
SSahlOO broke his stick more or less in half and held out the smaller bit. “For you.”
His rival broke his strip in half, too, and extended the bigger portion. Instantly, SSahlOO switched hands. My mouth watered.
I’m human! I thought.
What would happen if I took from each of them? Another fight between them, or would they attack me? Was I supposed to take from only one, and what would it mean if I did? Would that be like accepting a proposal? Would Lucinda turn me back?
My patient moaned.
The end of a meat strip stuck out of her mouth. She had bit down on the wrong side.
SSahlOO said, “Choose one of us.”
I dived on the satchel and ran, pulling out the meat packet as I went, tugging off the string, stuffing a strip in my mouth, tossing another behind me to slow the chase, gobbling one more, imagining how I looked, picturing both the merchant Master Peter and Wormy watching me.
This time I raced for half an hour, eating and dropping meat strips every several minutes, alternately hearing panting and fighting behind me. Finally, pain in my legs slowed me, and the others caught up. I held out the remaining meat strips in surrender. ShuMM took them and made me empty my carpetbag to prove there were no more.
Then it stuffed the strips into the neck of its bearskin tunic and let me have everything else. It set off through the forest at a less bruising pace.
SSahlOO took my elbow and pulled me along. “I never tasted anything as good, EEvEE.” He smiled at me, his wooing continuing. “Or felt so full.”
EEnth said, “Beautiful and useful.”
We trotted into the night, ending my seventh day as an ogre. Fifty-five left. So few! And yet, mixed with dread and fear was hope. Now I might learn what I needed to know to return to Jenn and to Mother. And, maybe, even to find love and release.
Eventually, the trees thinned. The ground softened and would have slowed my feet if SSahlOO hadn’t been tugging me on. We emerged into a flat landscape of reeds and an occasional stunted tree.
The Fens. I saw no one, but I knew more bands must live here. We continued another quarter mile and stopped. Though nothing looked homelike, this seemed to be home.
“Can you get more sticks?” ShuMM asked me.
“You should say yes,” SSahlOO prompted. “You can stay with us if you say yes.”
I doubted I’d survive here on my own, and I could do it. All farmers smoked meat. “I want two things in return.” I named my first condition: they give up killing creatures that had speech—humans, elves, gnomes, and giants. I’d be a thief, but I’d save lives.
“Not the creatures’ beasts, too?” ShuMM asked. “Not everything you don’t eat?”
EEnth said, sounding smug, “We don’t eat adult gnomes, either. Too tough.”
Somebody said something with the word lahlFFOOn in it.
“No.” I knew they wouldn’t agree if I reduced them to eating squirrels and rabbits. “Just talking beings.”
ShuMM considered. “All right.”
I wondered if they kept their promises. “And teach me to be persuasive, especially to humans.”
No one expressed surprise that I couldn’t persuade. Evidently, my oddness had ceased being unexpected. We struck an agreement, and thus began my sojourn with the ogres.
The band’s territory covered an area about the size of Mother’s house and backyard, cramped for seven creatures (including me) who couldn’t abide one another. If I crossed the border—marked by gnawed bones—someone always pulled me back in, because bands attacked other bands for trying to expand their plots. We could leave only to hunt.
Our bit of land was distinguished by a stunted willow tree and a broad stump that stood almost as high as my waist. No grasses or reeds grew, defeated by our feet and our skirmishes. Under the tree, the ground dipped into the shape of a shallow bowl—our shared bed, because, much as we despised each other during the day, we craved closeness in slumber.
I was no different. I remember waking in the middle of the first night and relaxing back into sleep only after feeling someone’s foul breath on my cheek.
We had no shelter. When it rained, as it did for an hour or more daily, we huddled under our tree, which was losing its leaves. We rarely had a sunny day. A mist that rose from the soggy ground kept us swathed in fog.
It was a meager existence, but I didn’t pity my fellows or hate them any less than I had when I was in human form. They stayed together purely to hunt. Friendship didn’t exist. Words turned into squabbles and squabbles into brawls. SSahlOO and EEnth were the ogre equivalent of polite to me, but only because each wanted a mate.
Worst of all, I was only slightly less combative than the others. If they rolled on the ground in combat six times a day, I rolled five. In two out of five of the skirmishes I was fighting to keep SSahlOO or EEnth away. The rest were my temper getting the best of me. The cause could be anything or nothing.
They used no weapons, although I was sure they could have taken an arsenal from the human soldiers who were sometimes their victims. I asked SSahlOO about this.
“We should use swords?” he said. “But when I beat EEnth—as I always do—I gloat, which is the best part. If I ran him through, he’d merely die, and I’d eat him. He wouldn’t be there anymore for me to thrash again.”
The only good aspect of being with them was that I could still be a healer, or at least a dentist. AAng’s tooth pain vanished in a day, sooner than it would have in a human. The two others with toothaches let me treat them, and neither needed to lose a fang.
By the second day, I learned to tell male from female, and I discovered the personality of each ogre, generally by noting who was most horrible in some way or other: who constantly mocked the others, who started the worst fights, who was greediest. ShuMM, a male, was cruelest in a fight. We all went limp when he attacked.
After a week, and with forty-eight days left to change back, I became fluent in Ogrese, effortlessly, as if the words had always lived in the back of my mind. Persuasion, the skill I needed, they called zEEn, both noun and verb. The meaning was closer to herding—herding emotion—than to persuading, though persuasion was part of it.
Ogres couldn’t zEEn one another, but ShuMM, the leader, wouldn’t even let me try. I was unusual, and, if it turned out I could do what nobody else could, he feared I’d oust him as leader. However, because of our bargain, he told the others they could answer my questions.
SSahlOO and EEnth were the only ones who would.
SSahlOO pushed down with a hand. “You sense their fear and find the right tone to make them lower it. They do all the work.”
“Tone is the only persuasion we use.” EEnth yawned. “UNN eMMong jOOl.”
“But how?”
“You felt the elf’s fear, right?” SSahlOO said.
I nodded.
EEnth asked, “Did you feel the air in him around the fear, too?”
I shrugged. I supposed I had. The elf was more than his terror.
SSahlOO smiled as if I were a prize student. “That’s the part you persuade with your voice. You make the air bigger.”
“But before, you said I should push the fear down with my voice.”
His smile widened. “Same thing. Then you tell the human what to think.”
It sounded strange and impossible. And horrible. Nothing belonged to people more completely than their thoughts.
Alas, EEnth’s and SSahlOO’s explanations were just a lecture, like a teacher describing reading without showing the pupil a word. However, ShuMM maintained he’d kept his part of the bargain.
I thought of leaving, but I’d be giving up on ever learning, which was the only route I could think of to be with people again and maybe find love, so I stayed—while counting off days in mounting desperation.
At night I stole from farms and did so alone despite the risk, because I didn’t want ogres to learn about smokehouses or grow used to being indoors.
The first farmhouses began just a half hour’s trot from the Fens and clustered together for safety. A few miles farther, they spread out, arrayed along the road, usually a mile or more apart. Prosperous farms had separate drying sheds; humble ones cured their meat in a lean-to that shared a wall with the back of the cottage.
Every night I had to range farther. Soon I’d have to stay away for more than a few hours, even be absent overnight or longer. I feared what the others might kill in my absence.
Silly to worry, though, because if—when!—I learned to zEEn, I’d leave for good and they’d return to eating what they’d eaten before. This was a troubling argument in favor of deliberately staying an ogre, because I might save more people than as a human healer.
I thought of Wormy, who did his parents’ accounts. Wormy, which side of the ledger, human or ogre, weighs more for the good?
Near the target of my theft I always grew afraid. Without persuasiveness, an ogre had no better defenses than a wolf, and I had several close calls:
On the occasion of my slumber, the sky was already bright when I reached the Fens. No one, not even SSahlOO or EEnth, asked if anything had befallen me. They just took my meat sticks and began chewing.
During the day, we hunted either in the elves’ Forest—without seeing an elf—or along the road, hiding from large parties, because SSahlOO said a single ogre couldn’t persuade more than three elves, gnomes, or humans at once. “We can’t sense their individual feelings when there are more.”
“The six of us,” EEnth said, “can zEEn eighteen.” He didn’t include me, who couldn’t persuade even one.
It dawned on me that even if I learned to zEEn, I’d still be unable to live in a city or a village, because there would be too many people to pacify at once.
A lump filled my throat. What could I accomplish here? If I couldn’t live among groups of people, how would I ever find someone to love? How many charming and honorable hermits lived in Kyrria?
Yet I kept trying, because I could think of nothing else.
In that first week we killed a deer and a boar, of which I partook, because I’d dined on such animals when I’d been human. The band also slaughtered three donkeys, but I stood aside from the killing and, despite my longing, the eating.
Naturally, to take the donkeys, the band had to zEEn their owners. It pleased me to imagine their relief when we left and they realized they were alive.
After I returned from my stealing forays, I slept and often dreamed of healing Master Peter of a dread disease.
On October 10, a cool morning for early fall, I woke up in a panic. This would be my nineteenth day as an ogre. In less than a month and a half I’d be unable to turn back!
I told ShuMM I wouldn’t steal more dried meat until a better method to teach me to zEEn was found. He nodded and sent SSahlOO and AAng off to find a human for me to practice on.
“Don’t eat it,” I called after them. Not it! “Don’t eat the person.”
EEnth said, “UNN eMMong jOOl.”
I was, too. We each took a meat stick. I bit down and remembered—
Wormy’s birthday! He was turning sixteen today. If I were home, I’d close the apothecary and we’d have an outing. Last year, Mother had packed us a picnic lunch, and we’d climbed the Jenn clock tower to eat it. Wormy has an eye for beauty, a knack for describing it, and a deep knowledge of Jenn. We sat in the window embrasure and ate while he talked.
Now, from my changed perspective, I noticed how alike we were, both neat eaters but glad Mother had tucked extra napkins in the basket, both admiring the contrast between the orderliness of Jenn’s streets and the unrestrained countryside beyond.
Our mood—mine, certainly—hadn’t been romantic, just companionable. I treasured the memory.
Wormy—more sociable than I was—had many friends, while my few were patients or former patients. Was he spending today with his friends? Had he visited Mother at all since I left? Certainly he had. He was a kind person.
I hoped he didn’t have a headache or stomach trouble on his birthday.
I hoped he hadn’t forgotten me.
Where were SSahlOO and AAng?
In midafternoon, I finally saw them take shape through the Fens’ mist: two large, blocky figures on either side of a more slender one. I stood at attention, barely breathing, my bones seeming to hum with anticipation. Come. Come closer, human. Teach me what I must learn.
Gradually the forms clarified, and there was Master Peter, dashing as ever, his shoulders burdened with his saddlebags, walking trustfully between them.