“Silence!” he hissed and struck at me. I made myself small and avoided the blow. I was getting better at dodging his attacks. Like a mosquito, I buzzed and sang in his ears, only to vanish when he angrily slapped the side of his head.

From my silent concealment, I watched in satisfaction. I had shredded his dream of Lisana and left him only cold reality to consider. I’d seeded his thoughts with all his failures. His stillness became a morose silence. For the first time since the raid on Gettys, he had stillness and time to think. He could no longer hide from his musings. Time and silence gave him nothing else to think about.

He reviewed the night of the battle over and over. He considered what he had done wrong, the situations he had failed to plan for, the instructions he had not given to his troops. Whenever I could impinge on his thoughts, I pushed my own memories at him: the sentry falling, his throat sliced. The wounded Specks squirming and crying out on the snowy earth after the ambush, and how he had ridden away. The soldiers who had died as they tried to escape the flaming barracks, slaughtered like cattle in a chute. I slid my thought across his like a knife blade across skin. “It was a cowardly way to kill soldiers. They had no chance to fight at all.”

He shouldered my thoughts aside. His tone was mocking as he said, “Do you still think war is a game, with rules and limits? No. War is killing the enemy. It wasn’t about a ‘fair fight’ or any of your strange ideas of honor and glory. Honor and glory! War is blood and death. It was about killing as many Gernians as we could and losing as few of our own as we could. It was about destroying a nest of vermin. Don’t try to make me feel guilty over exterminating the intruders. If you want to saw on my nerves, think instead about how I failed my troops. Chide me for what I should have done to save the warriors of the People. Rebuke me that the walls of Gettys still stand, not that fewer long guns would peer over the palisade at us.”

I kept silent. He would not bait me into discussing his failures. I could taunt him over what he had done and what he had neglected, but that would only be instructing him in how to improve the next time. I ignored him and sank into my own retreat. It was abhorrent to think that this ruthless butcher was actually a part of me—the dominant part right now. I did not want to acknowledge my attachment to him at all. I retreated into my own darkness, to mull over the things that “I” had done that horrified me still. The murdered sentry, the slaughtered troops—The worst, I think, was recalling Spink’s face in that moment of recognition. What must he think of me? And if he had known me, had others? It ate at me that I could know nothing of the aftermath of our attack on the fort.

Had Amzil and her children survived? Had Epiny and her babe? And if they had survived the fires and the attacking Specks, then what was their life now? Cold and starvation?

My thoughts turned over and over to the night I had dream-walked to Epiny. I worried that she was taking the laudanum, and tried to make sense of her rambling confessions to me that night. She had sent my soldier-son journal to my uncle, but it had fallen into my aunt’s hands and she had done something with it that related to the Queen, something that threatened the reputation of the Burvelle name. I put that unsettling thought together with the idea that it had been Soldier’s Boy prompting me to write so much in that journal, far beyond the diary that a soldier’s son would be expected to pen. He believed he had been obeying the dictates of the magic when he did so. If that were true, what did it mean to me? Had I written more in there than I knew? How could my journal and what it contained be a part of the magic’s plan to drive the Gernians away from the Speck lands? The rock he had mentioned was almost certainly the one I had given to Caulder. How could that matter to the magic? I could make no sense of that and there was no one I could ask. Soldier’s Boy himself did not know why the magic had prompted him to write so much, nor why it was imperative that he leave the journal behind when he fled to the mountains. There was no one I could ask.

Save, perhaps, Lisana.

“Lisana.” Soldier’s Boy spoke the name aloud, and I wondered if he were aware of my thoughts or if his had touched me. Now that I put my attention on him, I realized he was again pining like a schoolboy for her. Thoughts of her were what held him immobile in his bed and kept him from wanting to interact with the others. He simply wanted to be still and think of her. He thought that she alone could offer him the comfort and understanding he craved. To all others, he must stand firm as a Great One, even when he felt he had failed them in every way. Only with her could he be honest about his confusion and fear. I felt him reach for her then, a magical groping that went in a futile circle and came back to himself. He could not find her; could not touch her, sense her; could not dream-walk to her. That ability had stayed with me. “The magic gave you Lisana. And what did I get?” he asked bitterly.

“Apparently, the ability to kill people and feel absolutely nothing. Or to witness a death, such as Dasie’s, and be unmoved by it.”

Something, I felt something there, something he hid before he responded to me. “Oh. So you will mourn Dasie, too, will you? She knew her risks. She had no love for us, and all but laughed when Likari was summoned to the dance. But I forget. You do not have the spine to hate your enemies. So do not let that stop you. Mourn her, and mourn the men who were glad to murder you when they had the chance to do so as a cowardly mob. Is there anyone you do not weep for, Nevare? Will you sigh over the rabbit that is simmering in the pot right now?” A pause and then, “Truly, you should have been your father’s priest son. Or better yet, his daughter, always wailing and snuffling her nose in a handkerchief.”

“I sigh for Likari,” I said quietly and viciously. “Likari, whom you condemned to death by dancing. Dancing takes a bit longer than slitting a man’s throat, but I’m sure it works just as well in the long run.”

He struck me then and I felt it. “I hate you. I hate that you were ever a part of me.”

I set my will and endured his blow. I think it shocked him that I could. “The hatred is mutual,” I informed him coldly.

A sudden coldness flowed through him, a hatred so strong that it nearly froze me. “While you live in me I will never enjoy any part of my life. I see that now. Always you will be there, sniping and criticizing me. Always there will be a weak Gernian conscience whining at me.” He paused and announced, “I will find a way to kill you.”

“You can try,” I retorted, my anger masking my fear. “It seems to be what you always attempt. Kill anything that opposes you. Kill anyone who makes you think. So kill me if you can. I suspect that if you destroy me, you will destroy your last link with Lisana. And that, I think, would only be just. She is not like you, Soldier’s Boy. She has a heart. She should not have to associate with a conscienceless murderer like you.”

“No worse than you, Nevare Burvelle. Or will you deny that you tried to kill, not just me but also Lisana? You even believed you had succeeded. But you had not. And now it is my time.”

I waited, expecting a blow or some final words from him. Instead, I received nothing. Some time passed. He stirred in his bed and instantly his feeders surrounded him. No Gernian cavalla officer, no matter how high his rank, would have allowed underlings to tend him as assiduously as Soldier’s Boy’s feeders did. They flocked around him, offering him food, drink, clothing to wear, and slipping shoes on his feet. They tended him as if he were the King of Gernia, and he accepted it as his due. I wondered that he could stand being cosseted so.