Soldier’s Boy’s feet and legs felt swollen, and he ached with cold. Only the magic flowing from hand to hand to hand made the experience tolerable at all. He felt his energy feed it but felt also how it drew strength from every person and circulated it back to him.

It was full dark when Jodoli finally fell silent. Cold had crept and flowed to surround them; Soldier’s Boy felt it was cracking the skin of his face. The hair inside his nostrils had grown stiff and prickly and he could barely feel his feet at all. Worse, he felt that there was nothing left for him to say, yet Jodoli had warned him that he must at least attempt to speak at length of Dasie.

It seemed they had left him little enough to speak of, and yet he acquitted himself well. He spoke of when he had first seen her at Kinrove’s encampment, and what she had said and how she had looked to him. He spoke of her freeing the dancers from Kinrove’s dance, and when he sensed how her guards and feeders loved to hear of her as a hero, he embroidered that moment. He also spoke of how she had hated him on first sight and threatened him, and this, I suddenly knew, was news to many of those gathered there. But as others had done before him, he did not skip or soften any details, not of that first encounter nor even when he was telling of how little sympathy she had shown when Likari had been summoned to be a dancer. He spoke of how they had prepared for the battle, and the moments before they had each parted to their assigned tasks and then how he had seen her, injured and staring, when they met again. He spoke of leaving her with her loyal feeders while he went to fetch a healer, and also of quick-walking her back to the pass where she had died.

And when he came to the end of his telling, the darkness was deep around all of us. Tiny sparkling stars showed overhead in the opening in the forest canopy, and an errant night wind blew snow against our faces. As he fell silent, the greater silence of the forest all around us swallowed us up and held us inside it. The magic still circled through our clasped hands but it could no longer distract Soldier’s Boy from his discomfort. His back and legs were stiff and sore, he was cold, and he was hungry. Worse, he knew that a long quick-walk awaited him before he could hope that any of those discomforts would be alleviated. But the others still stood in silence, holding hands, and so he kept company with them. He sensed they were all waiting but had no idea for what.

Everyone took a step closer to the tree and he lurched forward with them. And another, and another, until they were huddled close to the trunk of the tree and Dasie’s snow-shrouded body. The magic suddenly coursed more strongly through their clasped hands, pulling them close, binding them into one. Darkness vanished, to be replaced with a peculiar light; everyone there glowed with it, and the living trees of the forest were vertical columns of soft light. Every living thing gave off its own measure of it. He felt Dasie, felt her strongly centered in the tree. She was there, every bit of her, every moment of her life, every memory they had shared with her. She was newborn there, laughing with the growing awareness of this new life. Complete and at peace, she dimly gave thanks to us as she vanished into the satisfaction of her joining with her tree.

But there was more. Soldier’s Boy felt everyone there through the clasp of their hands, felt the life in the trees that surrounded them, and even the slow surge of the great earth life beneath his feet. It warmed him and filled him, and eased the sense of loss he had felt. For the time that it lasted, he was one with the forest of the ancestor trees, one with the Specks, one with the People. Tears stung his eyes. He did belong here. These were his people, and when his time came, his tree would be here waiting for him. It would be the second sapling that had grown from Lisana’s fallen trunk. There he would take root among this wisdom and shared life. As if his thought had summoned her, he felt a thread of Lisana in her connectedness to the greater whole, distant in the crowd, glowing with her own special light. He yearned toward her, but a different voice spoke to me.

“You see what I mean, old son? It’s worth it. This is what I can feel, all the time now.”

Soldier’s Boy paid no heed to Buel Hitch’s disembodied voice. Instead, he stretched and reached for Lisana and she toward him. For a long moment, their awarenesses brushed against each other, mingled, and then, like ember logs that fall apart from one another as the fire consumes them, crashed into separateness again. We all stood once more in icy darkness in a black forest. The distant stars could neither light nor warm us, and a cold wind was sweeping through the trees overhead, dusting us with secondhand snow.

“Her tree has taken her. It is time for us to go and leave her to it,” Jodoli announced.

And we did.

When we finally reached Lisana’s old lodge, Soldier’s Boy ate like a starved dog. He spoke not a word to the feeders who had awaited him there, keeping the food ready and the lodge fire burning. He left Olikea to deal with them, went to bed and slept for most of a day. He woke late in the night, got up to piss and drink some water, and then went right back to bed. The second time he awoke, it was daylight and his feeders were astir. They spoke softly to one another as they worked. He thought it might be late afternoon. He lay as still as a fox that has gone to earth and hopes to escape the hounds. He kept his eyes closed and listened to the sounds of the lodge around him, but gave no sign to anyone that he was awake. Every muscle and joint in his body ached. His back was a column of pain.

He did not move at all and breathed as slowly as if he were still sleeping. The bed was warm. His belly was still digesting. He turned his face into the pillow, his special pillow. It was stuffed with down but also contained sachets of cedar bark, dried forest flowers, and leaves. It smelled, I suddenly realized, like Lisana. He lay in her bed, in her lodge, breathing the fragrances that reminded him of her. He was trying to pretend that the sounds he heard were made by her as she moved about the lodge.

“Pretend as much as you like,” I said derisively. “She is gone, dead for all these many years. And you cannot reach her.”

My words shredded his dream of her. He could not regain it. He still did not move.

“Did Dasie’s death teach you nothing?” he thought at me. “When I die, they will take me to a tree. I will become one with the forest of ancients. And once again, Lisana and I will walk side by side.”

I laughed at him. “After all the ways you have failed, do you think the Specks will still honor you with a tree? You are a fool. You are as big a failure to your people as I was to mine. Look at the wreckage strewn behind you. Dasie is dead. Of the handsome young warriors who bravely followed you off to battle, a third did not return. And many of those who did come back are injured and demoralized. Likari has been taken for the dance and Olikea has lost her spirit. Kinrove sees you as his enemy, Jodoli as his incompetent rival for power. The fort at Gettys still stands and you have raised the hatred of the Gernians against the Specks to a boiling point. You have not only failed to improve things, you have made them worse. Next spring, when we return to the forests on the other side of the mountains, there will be no fur traders, but only soldiers waiting to kill you. No trade goods, Soldier’s Boy. No honey, no bright beads, no woven fabric. No tobacco. None for the People to smoke, and none for them to carry to the Trading Place. The long guns will point at the Specks, and all they will trade you are iron bullets for your lives.”