almost grudgingly, as if reluctant to acknowledge me. ‘The magic was mine, not yours to spend. And the magic speaks to me, not you. You should not have tampered with it.’
He seemed to resent me as much as I did him. It scarcely seemed fair. He was the one who had invaded my life. I reined in my resentment and asked my most pressing question.
‘Do you know what the magic wants you to do?’
He grinned hard. I sensed him weighing whether or not to reply. When he did, I felt it was because he could not resist the urge to brag. ‘Several times, I have acted on what the magic wished me to do.’
‘When? What did you do?’
‘You don’t remember the Dancing Spindle?’
‘Of course I do.’ At the Dancing Spindle, actions I had taken had ended the Spindle’s dance forever, and dispersed the magic of the plainspeople. I knew now that Soldier’s Boy had taken into himself as much of their magic as he could hold and had hoarded it. ‘But what else? When else did you obey the magic?’
His grin grew wider. ‘You don’t know, do you? That amuses me. Because at the time, I thought I felt you resisting me. And even now, I do not think I would be wise to tell you the things the magic prompted me to do. There were small things that I did, things that made no sense to me. But I did them. And I kept them from you, lest you try to undo them. You thought you had pushed me down; you thought you had absorbed me and made me a part of you. But I won then. And I’ve won now, Gernian. I will prevail.’
I nearly warned him not to be too certain of that. Then I decided not to provoke him to keep his guard up against me. He spoke no more to me but found and followed the stream to rejoin Likari and Olikea. She was sitting close by the fire, her arms wrapped around her naked body. The day had warmed, but not much.
‘Finding food would keep you warmer,’ he told her. ‘This is the last day we shall spend here. We’ll eat, and then sleep until nightfall.’
‘There isn’t much left to find here!’ Olikea protested, but just then Likari made a lie of her words.
He ran up to me, proudly displaying six silver fish hung from a willow wand through their gills. ‘I caught them all myself!’ he exclaimed. His hands and forearms were bright red from exposure to the icy waters.
‘Wonderful!’ Soldier’s Boy praised him and rumpled the boy’s hair. The child wriggled like a happy puppy. Olikea took the fish with a sour expression on her face and went to work cleaning them of guts and scales. Soldier’s Boy went back to the stream and began eating water-grass stems. He would have preferred to eat the foods richest in magic potential, but lacking those, he would fill my belly with anything that was edible.
When Olikea returned from her gathering, a hastily-woven carry sack held big mushrooms and a quantity of prickly cones. She gave the cones to Likari, and he pounded them on a rock by the stream to shake loose the fat seeds inside them. The mushrooms were thick and dense, with ranks of tubes rather than gills on the undersides of their orange caps. Olikea cut them into fat slices to toast over the fire with the fish.
After everyone had eaten, they all arranged themselves in the moss-and-leaves nest to sleep for the rest of the day. I felt no need for such rest. Instead, trapped behind the darkness of Soldier’s Boy’s closed eyes, my thoughts chased their own tails in endless circles. What had he done for the magic that I hadn’t even known about, and when had he done it? In dread, I thought of the times I had awakened from sleep-walking to find myself outside my cabin. Had it happened then? Or had it occurred when I was home in Widevale, or even while I was still at the Academy? I recalled how the Speck dancers had come to Old Thares with the travelling carnival. When I had seen them, I had lifted my hand and given them the sign to release the dreaded Speck plague on our capital city. Yes. I could see now that that had been the work of Soldier’s Boy. But what else had he done that I’d scarcely been aware of? Had he influenced my thoughts about my father? Had he precipitated my quarrel with Carsina?
When I decided that wondering about it was futile, my thoughts turned to Epiny, Spink and Amzil. I wondered if Epiny had reached her home safely, and if she had been able to convince both Spink and Amzil that I was still alive and that they had not failed me. I wondered about the rest of Gettys as well. I was fairly certain that my death would be dismissed easily. I doubted that there would be any serious inquiry into it. Gettys was a town composed of soldiers, convict workers and released convicts and their families. The Speck magic flooded the town with alternating tides of fear and despair. It was a place where violence and crime were as common as the dust blowing through the streets. A man beaten to death by a mob would only briefly shock the inhabitants, and no one else would ever know of it. I imagined that the official report, if there were one, would say that a condemned prisoner, Nevare Burv, had been shot to death while attempting to escape.
The knowledge that I was actually the son of Lord Burvelle of the East would have died with Colonel Haren. I was fairly certain that he would not have confided it to anyone else. So there would be no formal notification of my father. I wondered how Spink and Epiny would explain my death to my sister, and if she would pass the news on to my father and Sergeant Duril, my old mentor. I hoped that Yaril would have the strength of will to keep the news to herself. My father had disowned me; to hear that I had died while escaping a death sentence would only vindicate his poor opinion of me. As for Sergeant Duril, he knew how easy it was for soldiers to lose contact with families and friends. Let me simply fade out of his life and his memories, without any knowledge of my shame. I didn’t want the old soldier to think that somehow his teaching had failed me or that I had turned my back on all I had learned from him. Let me be forgotten by them.
And what did I hope for myself? Hope. It seemed a bitter word now. What hope could I have, imprisoned in my own flesh and about to be borne off to the Speck Wintering place? I had no idea where that was, nor could I begin to guess what Soldier’s Boy planned for the future. Obviously he was committed to the magic. He would do whatever he thought he must to drive the Gernians back west into our own lands. How far would he go?
I’d heard rumours of another Speck Great Man, the most powerful one of all. I wracked my memory for his name and then had it. Kinrove. Olikea had mentioned him as someone she hoped I would surpass; I imagined that she hoped Soldier’s Boy would supplant him as the most powerful Great One. Lisana had mentioned him in another way, as had Jodoli. Kinrove was the source of the Dance, whatever that was. For years, he had maintained a magic with it, a magic that was supposed to hold the intruders at bay, maybe even drive the Gernians away completely. But it had not, and now the younger men were becoming restless, and talking of bringing war to the Gernians in a way they would understand. No, I corrected myself. In a way ‘we’ would understand. I was still a Gernian, wasn’t I?
It was hard to pin down what I was any more. I could not even decide whether to think of myself as ‘I’ or ‘he’.
My other self was a frightening mystery to me. I didn’t know what he had already done in obedience to the magic or what he was capable of doing. Well, that wasn’t exactly true, I abruptly realized. He had been capable of turning the Speck plague loose on the Gernian capital city. He’d deliberately infected my fellow cadets of the King’s Cavalla Academy, successfully wiping out half of a future generation of officers. If he could do that, what would he not do? Was this ruthless creature truly a part of myself, an aspect of Nevare Burvelle that Tree Woman had peeled away and infected with the magic? If he had stayed a part of me, would I have been capable of such deadly, traitorous acts? Or would the self that I was now have ameliorated him, balanced his warlike nature with more ethics and philosophy? Was he a better soldier than I was in that he was burdened only with loyalty to ‘his’ people and cause?
Was he the sort of soldier my father
