Soldier’s Boy turned his head slowly to regard the tree next to him. It was a young kaembra, approximately the same age as the one that Dasie had just joined. Heart thumping, he took one step closer to it. He trod on something under the snow and stepped back hastily. It had not been a branch. Bone. A leg bone.

“It was a big honor they done me. Not a Great One nor a Speck. But her kin-clan knew I had served the magic as well as I could, and so they brought me here and gave me a tree. I never got to thank you, Nevare. So I’ll do it now. Thanks for keeping your word, even after you found out how I betrayed you. Thanks for letting the Specks take my body out of that wooden box and bring me here.”

“Buel.” Soldier’s Boy spoke the name aloud with me. I do not know which half of me was more shocked, the Speck or the Gernian, that my friend and my betrayer lived on here. Soldier’s Boy pulled the heavy mitten from his hand, and set the bare flesh of his palm to the tree’s bark.

“Careful!” Buel warned me, standing as clearly before me as if his bones still wore flesh. “It’s a young tree and I’ve only been here a few months. The tree’s pretty deep asleep, but if it starts to wake hungry, it’ll go for you, just like a snake after a rat. So. Well, look at you. Now who’s gone native, old son? Specks and all.”

Soldier’s Boy spoke to him. “I’m not who you think I am.”

Buel grinned. He didn’t look quite as I remembered him. He was taller, more muscled, and his hair was combed. I suddenly realized that I was seeing his own idealized version of himself. That was a breathtaking insight into Lisana. I might have startled Soldier’s Boy by sharing that thought, except that what Buel said next shocked me even more. He shook his head and the ghost’s grin grew wider.

“Oh, no, old son. Now you’re exactly who I think you are. Maybe even more so.” He cocked his head and then craned it down to look into my eyes, smiling all the while. And I suddenly knew that he saw me, as I was now, but that all that time, he’d been seeing Soldier’s Boy as well. He shook his head in sympathy. “Well, you’re still in a fix and no mistake, my friend. Maybe a worse fix than when last I saw you, though that’s hard to believe. You forgave me, didn’t you? Don’t you?” His smile had faded to an earnest look.

I was at a loss. Had I forgiven him? How could I? He’d killed a woman and made it look as if I had done it. He’d spread the whispers that had turned public feeling against me to the point where a mob had tried to murder me. He’d done it under the duress of the magic. Yet even knowing that—

Soldier’s Boy answered for both of us. “I understand you. Sometimes, when you understand a man that deeply, forgiveness becomes a moot point. You did what you were supposed to do, Buel Hitch. You did the magic’s bidding.”

Buel continued to stare at us. No. At me. Waiting. I spoke within Soldier’s Boy. “I don’t have to forgive Buel Hitch. He wasn’t who betrayed me. The magic did that.”

I felt Soldier’s Boy scowl and knew he had heard me. When Buel grinned again, I knew he had, too. “No matter who did it, Nevare, I’m sorry it happened. But I can’t be sorry for what it bought me. This.”

“You enjoy being a tree?” Behind me, the others were finishing their task. Dasie’s body was encased in the freezing blanket and covered now with a shroud of snow. Her feeders were caressing the snow as if they were smoothing a delicate coverlet over a sleeping child.

“Being a tree.” He smiled. “I suppose that’s one way of seeing it.” He sighed then, not the sigh of a man who is discouraged but rather as a man sighs with satisfaction at the completeness of his life.

“Nevare!” Jodoli called him. Soldier’s Boy turned to look at him, and the Great Man gestured. The others were gathering in a circle about Dasie and her tree. He was expected to join them.

As he walked away, Buel spoke after us, his words intended for me. He was not yet strong in his tree. His voice faded as we moved away from him, but the words he spoke reached me still.

“It’s worth it, Nevare. No matter what it takes from you. No matter what you have to give up. No matter what you have to do. It’s worth it. Relax into it, old son. Give way to the magic. You won’t be sorry. I promise.”

Soldier’s Boy gave a short nod. I held myself still and stubborn inside him. No.

He turned away from the tree and the huddle of snow that still, now that he looked at it, echoed the shape of a man’s seated body trussed to the tree’s trunk. The others were gathering around Dasie’s tree where a similar but much larger mound of snow marked her “grave.” Soldier’s Boy went over to them. As he plodded through the snow, Jodoli joined him. He spoke as if their quarrel had never been, or as if he had dismissed it as insignificant. “It is good that the tree took her in. She chose the tree years ago, when first she knew she would be a Great One, and has visited it yearly, giving it offerings of her blood to awaken it to her and claim it. Still, in very cold weather, it has sometimes happened that a tree does not accept the Great One’s body. Then there is little that anyone can do.”

“What happens now?”

“Now we will sing a farewell to her. Our songs will remind her of who she was, so that as she is taken into the tree, her memories remain strong. Of course, it should be her entire kin-clan here to sing her into her tree, rather than just two of her feeders and a handful of her guard. But we are here. Nevare, we would be very wise to honor her with very long songs, as long as we can sing, of everything that we know about her. Do you understand?”

“I think I do.” He meant it would be politically wise. “I will watch you and then I will do my best.”

“Very well. Let us join them.”

It was as unlike a Gernian burial as I could imagine. We formed a circle around the tree and held hands. This required baring our hands to the cold, as the skin-to-skin contact was deemed very important. A few moments after we had joined hands, I understood why. I could feel the magic flowing through the circle of linked hands with the same sensation of moving current as if we all held on to a pipe with water flowing through it, through us.

Her feeders began the songs, as was their right. It was not a song so much as a chant; it had no melody and it did not rhyme. The first man recounted everything he could recall of her, from the moment he had first met her to his days of being her feeder right up to her death. He chanted until his voice gave out and then on until he could barely croak out the words. When he finally could say no more, his fellow feeder took up the tale, again recounting how he had met Dasie and on through all the days and ways he had served her. He avoided repetition of events that the first feeder had covered. Even so, before her feeders were finished the brief day was ending.

But the cover of night brought no respite. The chant went on, passed from guard to guard to guard, with each fondling his memories of Dasie and trying to recall for the dead woman how she had looked and spoken, what she had eaten or worn, how she had laughed at a humorous event or mourned a sad one. Not all the memories were kind. Some spoke of her when she was a small girl and prone to cruelty to smaller children. Others spoke of her temper as a grown woman. Some wept as they spoke of Dasie and losing her, but as often they laughed or shouted as they recalled memories of her. One spoke in detail of her activities on the day of the battle. I cringed as he spoke of the deaths they had witnessed, and of those she had killed with her own hand. But the guard spared us no detail. All, all must be spoken to preserve it in the dead woman’s memory.

I learned far more of Dasie’s life than I had ever known before. When the telling finally reached Jodoli, Soldier’s Boy was already racking his brain for what he could add. Jodoli spoke of how he had met her when she was a Great One, and told in detail of the night when she had freed the dancers from Kinrove. He spoke of meals they had shared and gifts they had exchanged as Great Ones of the People. He drew his material out by adding details.