down the circling steps seemed endless. My calves screamed with cramp. Twice I nearly fell, and the second time, I bloodied the heels of my hands when I caught myself on the wall. I felt sick and dizzied. I felt angry, too. I was not crazy and I resented how I had been treated. I did not know if I should blame the blindness of the other people or the foreign magic that had polluted me and taken me for its own. What was real? What was illusion?
For the moment, the battle for control that I’d had with my other self had subsided. There was no comfort in that. When I’d previously confronted him, I’d been able to set him apart from me, to comprehend him as ‘other’ to myself. There was no such separation now. He permeated my being, and I recognized him as comprising the harder parts of my soldier self. Had Tree Woman deliberately chosen those parts when she had seized a lock of my hair and jerked a core out of my awareness? I stole a cautious peek at that part of my self, as if I were peeking at an adder in a box. I was both fascinated and repelled by what I glimpsed. There were the bits of myself that I’d lacked in my first year at the Academy. He was the one who had enabled me to take my petty vengeance on the new noble sons. He had fierce pride and recklessness and daring. He was also ruthless and single-minded in what he would do for his people. The frightening part of that was that it was not to Gernia that he pledged his loyalty, but to the Specks. I’d been imagining that I’d reintegrated him into myself. Now I wondered if the flow were not the other way; was he absorbing my knowledge and memories for his own ends? He’d had a goal, up there near the Spindle, one that I still didn’t grasp.
I suddenly decided it was time to leave.
The guide seemed to have calmed his customers on the way down. As I followed the path back through the ancient city, I saw that the teacher and her charges had dispersed throughout the ruins. The easel woman was hard at work again. One of the women with a sketchbook was drawing the other as she sat picturesquely beside a tumbled wall. I passed them all, enduring their glances as I did so. Something nagged at me, some task had been left undone, but I recognized that concern as belonging to my other self. Nevare only wanted to be away from that place.
As I drew near to the base of the Spindle and the shabby little shack there, I saw the guide again. He leaned in the shade against the wall of his pathetic house and watched me come. I could see him trying to decide if he would say anything to me or would let me pass unchallenged. His furtive glances told me that he both despised and feared me as a madman.
I heard voices. As I passed the edge of the bowl in which the Spindle rested or spun, I glanced over the rim. The boys were there. This time, his two companions gripped his legs while Jard lay, belly down, in the slanting cup of the bowl. His knife was busy again. Large letters proclaimed that Jard had been there. Ret’s name was in the process of being added. All three were so intent that they didn’t see me staring at them. I looked at the guide and our eyes met across the distance. His face paled with fear. I smiled.
‘If my illustrious ancestors had carved this, I’d protect it from young vandals,’ I advised the half-breed sarcastically.
He narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to respond. But before he could, one of the boys holding Jard’s legs yelped, ‘It’s that crazy fat man! Get out of there, Jard!’ At the same moment, he helpfully let go of Jard’s leg as he sprang away and fled, intent on saving himself from my supposed insanity. Jard, supported now only by Breg’s grip on his other leg, gave a wild yell as he suddenly slid deeper into the bowl. He flailed his arms wildly, seeking a grip on the smooth surface and finding nothing. Breg, surprised by Ret’s desertion, was himself tugged to his knees at the edge of the bowl. ‘I can’t hold him!’ he wailed. I heard a tearing sound and saw the fabric of Jard’s trousers starting to give way.
In two steps, I reached the rim of the Spindle’s bowl. I flung myself to my knees and reached to grab Jard by the knees. He screamed and kicked at me, evidently thinking I intended to tear him from Breg’s grip and let him plunge headfirst into the Spindle’s well. I didn’t. I hauled him back to the lip of the bowl. He jabbed his knife at me, still struggling against his rescue. My blood seethed with anger at his insolence. I seized his wrist and slammed it flat against the stone of the bowl. His knife flew free. An instant later, I had dragged him back over the edge and to safety. I released him and tried to stand up. Magic was singing triumphantly through my blood. Something was happening, something vast and not of my volition, but of my doing all the same. The forest mage within me laughed wildly, victoriously, and then slid back into the leafy shadows of my subconscious. I could not discern what his victory was, and then I did.
Even as the other tourists were running towards me, and Jard fled sobbing to his teacher, I watched his knife sliding down the bowl towards the unseen depths at the centre. As the bowl became steeper, the knife slid faster across the polished stone. When it entered the darkness of the centre, I felt my heart stand still.
The half-breed had seized my hand and was pumping it while stuttering out his thanks and apologizing for misjudging me. The fool. I heard Ret shouting to the rapidly gathering tourists that, ‘No, it’s all right, he didn’t try to hurt Jard, he saved him! Jard nearly fell head first into that hole. The man pulled him out.’ Jard was sobbing like a small boy as he clung to his teacher. I alone seemed to hear the terrible grinding noise at the edge of the worlds. The blade of the knife had wedged beneath the Spindle’s tip. I knew that tip existed, deep inside the well the magic had drilled for all those years. The vast momentum of magic met the iron knife and wedged against it. The Spindle ground to a halt. I felt the moving magic foul and tangle, thwarted by a small iron blade. I sank down and pressed my brow to the edge of the stone bowl. It was like the death of the windwizard all over again, but this time I could not claim innocence for myself. What had I done? What had the forest magic done through me?
‘Best leave him alone!’ I heard the guide say. ‘I think the man just wants to be left alone.’
Then all sound halted around me. Like the harsh kiss of a sandstorm the harnessed magic of the plainsmen suddenly burst free and scattered. For a blink of my lifetime, I swear the world went black and still. Raw power abraded my senses and engulfed me. I struggled to stand, to lift my arms to defend myself from it.
When time started up again, I seemed once more to have fallen behind the rest of the world. The guide had rounded up his tourists and was herding them back towards their wagon. Several of them glanced back at me and shook their heads, speaking quickly to one another. The knife-boy was already sitting on a wagon seat. Ret said something to Breg and they both hooted with laughter. Jard’s brush with death was already a joking matter for them. They had no idea of what had just happened.
The flash of anger I felt subsided before I even felt its heat. Surely the sun had moved in the sky? I gave my head a small shake and let my clenched fists fall to my sides. My arms ached. My nails had left deep red indentations in my palms. I had no idea how long I had stood there. I did know what my Speck self had done. The Dancing Spindle no longer danced. The magic of the plainspeople was broken. I found Sirlofty. It was all I could do to clamber onto his back. I held to the horn of the saddle as I kicked him into a lope and fled that place. The driver of the wagon shouted at me angrily as I passed his team on the steep trail. I paid him no mind.
By the time I reached the road again, I had almost recovered. The farther I went from the Spindle, the clearer my head became. The forest mage inside me ceased his chortling and grew still.
Evening fell, and I pushed Sirlofty on, journeying through the dusk to make up the time wasted in my foolish detour. I wished I’d never left the road. I tried to stuff what I’d discovered back into the darkness, but it rode with me now. I shifted in my saddle and felt it slip under me. Gently I reined Sirlofty in; I dismounted as if I were as fragile as an eggshell. With a feeling of ineffable sadness, I tightened the cinch on my saddle.
It was the first time in my life that I’d ever
