know I’m not really here. But this is more than an idle dream. I’m using magic to travel to your dreams and talk to you. What I am telling you is real. I’m alive, but I can’t come to you or send for you. And, for now, you must not speak a word about me to Father. Or anyone else.’
‘What?’ A frown wrinkled her brow. The room suddenly wavered around us. Streaks of light broke through my image of it, as if someone had suddenly opened a curtain a crack. Or fluttered her eyelashes as she dreamed. My words had been too sudden, too startling. I was waking her up.
‘Yaril! Don’t wake up yet. Please. Keep your eyes closed. Stay calm and listen to me. You might receive word that I’ve disgraced myself, that I died for vicious crimes I’d committed. You might get a letter from Carsina’s husband. Don’t believe anything he says about me. It’s not true. I’m still alive. And eventually I’ll find a way to come home to you some day. Yaril? Yaril!’
The world disappeared around me, washed away in a sudden flood of light. I’d wakened her. And I had no way of knowing how much credence she’d give to the dream or even how much she would remember on awakening.
‘Yaril?’ I asked desperately of the empty light. There was no reply. Doubtless her waking thoughts filled her mind and excluded any touch I might make upon her senses. I hoped I had not given her too great a fright. Would she dismiss my visit as a bizarrely vivid dream?
I had nowhere to retreat from the light and it seemed painful to me. Magic, I reminded myself, worked best in the night. It was time to go back to my body.
I had used Soldier’s Boy’s magic; he would know that when he awakened, and I suspected he’d keep a tighter watch on me after this. I’d had one opportunity to use the power of dream-walking and I’d made a mare’s nest of it. I could feel my flesh pulling me back towards it and I let myself be drawn back into my body. Soldier’s Boy slumbered on, his eyes closed. I used my ears and nose to deduce what was happening around me. I could smell smoke and hear the tiny crackling of a small fire nearby. Olikea and Likari were speaking softly to one another. Some distance ahead of us on our path, there was another fish trap in the cavern stream. The traps were woven like a basket and set in the stream’s current. Fish could swim in, but finding a way out was more difficult, especially for large fish. There might be fish in it. They were both desperately hungry. They debated softly as to whether one of them should travel ahead to check the trap and then return with fish from it, and then argued as to which of them should go. It was a wearying thing to listen to, a battle between hunger and fear of the darkness.
At the last it was decided that Olikea would go. She warned Likari not to stray too far from me, and to be sure to feed the fire, but only slowly. She would be relying on its light to find us again.
‘Give him water if he asks for it, and do not leave him.’
‘What else should I do for him?’
‘There is nothing you can do for him except to stay near him and give him water when he thirsts. He chose this journey of his own will; he knew what the crystal and the black water would do to him. I do not think he gave any thought as to how it might affect us. But this is what it is to be the feeder of a Great One, Likari. Great Ones do not think of their feeders, but feeders must think only of the Great Ones we serve.’
With that last admonition, she turned and left the little boy sitting beside the tiny fire in the immense darkness. After a short time, he drew close and sat with his back braced against mine, a faithful little guardian. I was impressed with both his obedience and his courage, and touched by his loyalty. He was such a young child to be left alone in the dark, charged to take care of a sick man.
Soldier’s Boy slumbered on in his aching fever-sleep. The not-silence of the cavern settled around us. The little fire made the tiny noises of flames devouring wood. I could hear, if I strained, the distant rush of the stream in its stone channel, and the occasional buzz of one of the lightning bugs as it whispered past us. Likari gave a shiver, sighed, and settled closer against me. His breathing deepened and steadied, and then became the open-mouthed snore of a small boy. Tedium set in.
It seemed all my frustrated mind could do was chew over past events and rebuke myself with my foolish mistakes. I tried to make plans for the future and could not. There was too much I didn’t know. Even if I could seize control of the body right now, it was too sickly for me to go back the way I had come. Go back to what? I asked myself dully.
When I had left Gettys, I had said that I was giving myself up to the magic and would do its will. I thought I had, when I’d attempted to block the road builders from cutting any more of the ancestor trees. Now, bereft of any other distraction, I began to wonder why Soldier’s Boy had been hoarding the magic and what he had hoped to do with it. Plainly my squandering of it had set back his plan. But what had that plan been?
Did he truly know a way to send all the Gernians fleeing from the Barrier Mountains and the adjoining lands? What could he bring down on us that would be so terrible that the military and the settlers would withdraw and the King give up his cherished road? How ruthless was he?
With a lurch, I knew the answer to that. More ruthless than I was. He’d taken my ruthlessness. That was frightening.
I tried to recall who I had been before Tree Woman and the magic had divided me. What would I have considered too extreme a solution to the clash between the Gernians and the Specks? It was hard to think in those terms. His loyalty to the Specks seemed absolute. With such loyalty as his sole criteria, could anything be too extreme? I made my heart cold and stopped thinking of the Gernians as my people; stopped thinking of them as people at all. If they were vermin, how would I drive them away?
The answer came to me, instantly and clearly. The fear and the disease that the Speck had already unleashed on them were merely discouragement. If I were Soldier’s Boy, and I wished to destroy Gettys and make it uninhabitable, I would set fire to it. In winter, when the inhabitants had no place to take refuge. Drive them out of their homes and then pick them off. For an aching instant, I could picture Amzil and her children fleeing through snow, Epiny heavily pregnant or carrying a newborn. They could not outrun an arrow. If the Specks struck with stealth, late at night, they could pick off the fleeing victims at their leisure.
The moment the plan came into my mind, I shuddered away from it. I locked my thoughts tight, praying he had not sensed them. I was already traitor to one folk, showing the Gernians how to drug themselves against the Speck magic to cut down the trees. I would not betray both of them to one another.
I did not think it likely Soldier’s Boy would come up with such a plan. He was more Speck than Gernian. The Speck did not winter near Gettys. It was possible, I hoped, that they did not see constructed shelter in the same way that I did. To discover what he might be planning, I would have to think as he would. I would have to become him. That thought would have made me grin, if I’d had a mouth to call my own. I’d have to become myself to understand myself.
Slowly the truth of that sank into me. Perhaps it was my only strategy. To stop Soldier’s Boy from doing whatever he was planning to do, I’d have to merge with him. I’d have to become him, force him to share my sensibilities, make him see that he could not destroy my people without destroying a part of himself.
The moment I realized the fullness of what I was considering, I rejected it. This scrap of ‘self’ was all that was left of me. If I surrendered it to him, if I lost my self-awareness to become part of him, how could I know if I influenced him or not? I suspected it was an irrevocable act. I feared that in the final analysis, he remained stronger than I was. I’d vanish into him. And I’d never know if I’d saved the people I loved or not.
I determined that I would surrender
