resolve formed in me slowly. I needed to stop the road, not just to preserve Tree Woman, but for the sake of both peoples. I needed to make building the road an impossible task so that King Troven would either give up the idea, or would completely reroute his road far to the north, through Mendy and the Fort. Once the King had diverted his energies to that route and pass, Gettys as a military encampment would lose much of its value. It might be abandoned altogether. And that might be the end of the clash between Gernians and Specks. Perhaps we could go back to peaceful and sporadic trading; or perhaps it would be even better if all interaction between my peoples ceased.
I felt like a curtain was rising in my mind. The time for trying to reason with either people was gone; it was time for me to simply destroy the road. It was a very rudimentary strategy, but I still felt a lift in my spirits to have devised it. I felt a bit foolish as well. Why had I not found this determination before now? The answer to that was easy. Even if I now knew what I wished to do, I had very few ideas of how to implement my plans. There was small sense in planning to do a task that seemed impossible. Impossible for any ordinary man with ordinary means. But I was no longer an ordinary man, was I? I’d given way to the magic and accepted this task. I, Nevare Burvelle, was going to destroy the King’s Road.
It was why I’d been given the magic. Lisana and Jodoli, the Speck Great Man I’d met, had both insisted that my task was to turn back the intruders, the Gernians. They had told me that the magic had chosen me, had made me a Great One for that very task. The conclusion was inescapable. I was to use the magic to stop the road.
The only thing I still didn’t know was how.
The magic had been growing in me, like a fungus overtaking a piece of fruit, since I was fifteen years old. For several years, it had skulked beneath my awareness. Only when I left home to go to the Academy had I become aware that something strange lurked within me. And only after I’d contracted Speck plague and survived it did the magic begin to change my body so radically. It had cloaked me in the fat that had made me an object of ridicule and disdain and hampered not just my physical life but my military career. Yet in all the years that it had possessed me and changed me, I’d only managed to use it for my own ends a few times. For the most part, it used me.
It had used me to spy on my people, to better understand ‘the intruders’ and how they might be fought. It had used me to spread the Speck plague in our capital city and all through our Cavalla Academy, destroying a whole generation of young officers. It had used me again to know when best to strike in Gettys, so that the entire inspection team of officers and nobles from the West might be wiped out.
Every time I had managed to use the magic, even with the best of intentions, the magic had found a way to turn it back on me. Both Lisana and Scout Hitch had warned me against trying to use the magic for my own ends. About the only thing I’d learned about how the magic was actually wielded was that it flamed in response to my emotions. Logic could not wield it, nor could wishful thinking ignite it. It only boiled through my blood when my heart was completely involved. When I was angry, or frightened or seething with hate, then the magic came to me without effort, and the urge to use it became well nigh irresistible. At any other time, attempting to bend it to my will was impossible. It bothered me, and not a little, that logic rather than emotion was prompting me to turn the magic against the road itself. Was not that a very Gernian reaction to a Speck problem? But perhaps that was why the magic had chosen me. Still, if I was going to use magic to stop the road being built, I would first have to find the heart to do it.
I turned my head and looked towards Lisana’s stump. I thought of how I had nearly killed her, and what it had meant to me to discover that she was still alive. I thought of the sapling that had once been a branch, and how it rose from the fallen trunk of her tree. I’d seen that happen before. Nursery logs, they were called, when a row of branches on a fallen tree took to growing as if they were trees. But in Lisana’s case, only one tree was rising from her fallen trunk. And if the road came through here, there would soon be none at all.
I held that thought as I walked down the hill towards the end of the road. It was steep going until I found the deer trail that cut across the face of the hill. I followed it down and the canopy of the forest closed over me once more, creating an early twilight. I walked in that gentle dimness, smelling the sweetness of the living earth. Life surrounded me. I had slowly come to understand that in my months of living by the eaves of the forest, but only today did the thought form itself clearly in my mind. All my life, I’d been accustomed to thinking of life as things that moved; rabbits, dogs, fish, other people. Life that mattered had been life like me, life that breathed and bled, life that ate and slept. I’d been aware of that other layer of life, of the still but living things that supported it all, but I’d thought of it as the lower layer, as the less important stratum of life.
Empty prairie was for ploughing or grazing; land that was too poor for farming or cattle was wasteland. I’d never lived near a forest like this, but when I’d come to one, I’d understood why it existed. The trees were to be taken for lumber. The land had to be cleared to become useful. The idea that forest or prairie or even wasteland should be left as it was had never occurred to me. What good was land until it was tamed? What good was a piece of earth that did not grow wheat or fruit trees or grass for cattle? The value of every bit of land I’d ever trodden, I’d reckoned in terms of how it could benefit a man. Now I saw it with the eyes of a forest mage. Here life balanced as it had for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sunlight and water were all that was required for the trees to grow. The trees made the food that fed whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, and became the food that replenished the soil when their leaves fell to rot back into earth. This working system was as refined and precise as any piece of clockwork ever engineered by man. It worked perfectly.
But the road would break the clockwork of the forest system just as surely as an axe blow could shatter a fine watch. I’d seen the damage from the ridge and I’d seen it up close when I’d visited the road’s end. It wasn’t just the trees they cut to make a clear path. It was how the road builders made all the same in their path. Every dip in the earth was filled level, every rise cut to grade. The different layers of rock and gravel that made up the roadbed were inimical to the flow of the forest life. The road was a barrier of deadness bisecting the forest heart.
The swathe of death was wider than the road itself. Streams were diverted into culverts or blocked off. Brooks pooled and swamped land they had once drained and fed. The cut of the road severed roots beneath the earth, crippling the trees to either side of it. The construction slashed a great gash in the forest roof, admitting light where all had lived in gentle dimness for generations. The edges of the road were a crusty scab, and the road itself was like blood poisoning creeping up a man’s veins towards his heart. Once the road had cut its way through the forest and across the mountains, the forest would never be the same. It would be an entity divided, and from that division, other roads and trails and byways would spread out into the forest as if the road had its own anti-life network of roots and tendrils.
Men would make more paths, with trails and byways branching out from them. Beneath that ever-spreading network of roads and paths and trails, nothing lived. Could death grow? I suddenly perceived that it could. Its spreading network could cut the living world into smaller and smaller sections, until no section was large enough to survive.
I’d reached the bottom of the hill. There was a stream there, and I paused to drink long of its cool, sweet water. The last time I’d been here, I’d come only in spirit, and Epiny had been with me. Epiny. For a moment, I thought of her, and for the moment, I was Nevare again. I hoped she would not mourn me too deeply or too long. I hoped her sorrow over my supposed death would not affect her pregnancy. And then I blinked, and those feelings and thoughts receded from the forefront of my mind. I became once more the forest mage, intent on my task.
I had to stop the road. I had to be ruthless. I had the power if first I could bring it up to strength.
It
