“There is no afterlife for a Speck without a tree?”

He shook his head impatiently, as if he could toss me and my foolish questions out of his mind by doing so. “There is. But not what we could share if we were both in trees.” He was making his way down the path toward the stream as he spoke. It felt strange to him to be walking along in the daylight, all alone. All the People had departed, and the not-silence of the living forest had flowed back in to take their place.

I grasped what he told me without any further explanation. “Your spirit would go on, but without the sensations of a body. And Lisana would be somewhere else. What you want is to live on, where she is, with the illusion of being in that world corporally.”

“I wouldn’t call it an illusion. Isn’t it what you would choose if you could? A tree’s life to be with someone you love with all your senses?”

“I suppose I would.” I considered it for a moment, and wondered if Amzil would still want to spend even an ordinary life with me. Useless to wonder. I did not even have that sort of a life to offer her. “But I sense there is more. What else did Lisana tell you?”

“What we have both known for some time. That divided as we are, you and I are useless to anyone. The magic isn’t working, or at best works only halfway. When Lisana divided us so that I could stay with her and be taught, she never anticipated that we would remain divided.”

“No. As I recall, she intended that I would die of the plague.”

“I was to have the body and you were to become part of me,” he corrected me.

“I don’t see the difference. Isn’t that what we are now?”

“No. You oppose me. Just as I opposed you when you sought to be fully in command.” For a moment, he seemed invisible to me, caught in thoughts of his own. Then, reluctantly, he said, “We were supposed to become one. I was to absorb you, your knowledge, your attributes of character, your understanding of your people. We would have been one merged person, completely integrated. And the magic would have had access to both of us, and it would have been able to achieve its goals.”

“But I killed you instead.”

“You thought you did. And I resisted being absorbed by you, just as you have resisted becoming part of me. But until we are one, the magic cannot work. It moves by half measures, more destructive than if it did nothing at all. Lisana is convinced of this.”

“She knows this?” It seemed to me there was a difference between being convinced and knowing.

“She knows it,” he replied, but his words had taken too long in coming. I didn’t believe that Tree Woman was certain of this. We had crossed the bridge. He sat down again on the same rock where we had spent so much time the night before. It was just as uncomfortable now as it had been then. A thin spring sunlight filtered down through the trees. He closed his eyes and turned his face up to it, enjoying the warmth on his face.

“You’re guessing,” I accused him.

He gave a harsh sigh. “Yes. I am. So? Nothing else has worked. I think we both need to give way and accept it.”

“What are you proposing?”

“I’m proposing that we drop all walls. Become one. Completely.” The sunlight, feeble as it was, was already making his face tingle. With a grunt and a sigh, he stood and moved into the shelter of the trees. It was chilly there, but his skin was no longer exposed to direct sunlight. He found a mossed-over log and sat down on it.

I suddenly divined what had conquered him. “Lisana wants us to be one.”

“Yes.” He ground his teeth together and then said, “She sent me away. She told me that until we are one, I can no longer come to her. She…she rebuked me harshly that I had not yet made you a part of myself.”

“So I should drop my walls and let you absorb me. So that you’ll be able to use the magic fully, to kill or drive my people away so yours can live in peace. So that you can be with Lisana.”

“Yes.” He gritted out the word. “Become part of me. Let the magic work through us as it was meant to. Accept what we are, a man of both cultures. Neither side is innocent, Nevare.”

I could not argue with that.

Into my silence, he added, “Neither of us is innocent. In the names of our peoples, we have done great wrongs.”

And that, too, was true. I sat, the spring day all around me, and considered what he proposed.

“How do we know which one of us will retain the awareness?” I asked him bluntly. Privately, I wondered if he would offer this “merging” if he was not already confident it would be him.

“How do we know it will be only one of us? Perhaps, together, we become someone else. A person who has never existed before. Or the person the boy we were would have grown to be.” Idly he peeled a layer of moss from the rotting log. Beetles scattered, scuttling over the rotten wood and hiding again in the moss.

“I could become the person I was meant to be before I was sundered.” I spoke thoughtfully. My father’s soldier son. I’d take back the ruthlessness that Soldier’s Boy had stolen from me, the capacity to steel myself to do the awful things that war required of a soldier.

He laughed aloud, amused. “Could not I say exactly the same thing? Did not I feel the same sundering when you parted from me and went back to our father’s house and then off to that school? Do you think I don’t feel exactly as you do? I had a childhood. I was raised a Gernian and the son of a new noble. I remember our mother’s gentle words. I remember music and poetry, fine manners and dancing. I had a softer side once. Then I had an experience with Dewara that changed me profoundly. And Tree Woman took me under her guardianship. I watched someone else walk off with my body. But I never stopped being I and me to myself. I never became some other. You so obviously believe you are the legitimate owner of this body, Nevare, the only one who should determine what I do in this world. Can’t you grasp that I feel just the same way?”

I was silent for a time. Then I said stiffly, “I see no resolution to this.”

“Don’t you? It seems obvious to me. We let down our guards and stop resisting each other. We merge. We become one.”

I tried to think about it, but suddenly the answer was too clear before me. “No. I can’t do it.”

“Why won’t you at least try it?”

“Because no matter how it came out, it is intolerable for me to think about. If we become one, and you are dominant, I cease to exist. It would be a suicide for me.”

“I could say the same to you. But that might not happen. As I said, we might simply become a whole, a different person in which neither of us dominates.”

“It would still be intolerable. I cannot imagine a person who had any of my ethics and could tolerate the memory of what you did at Gettys. Those acts were completely reprehensible to me. I cannot accept them as a part of my past. I will not.”

He was silent for a time. Then he asked quietly, “What of your acts of war against the People? Your cutting of Lisana’s tree? You were the one who told the intruders how to overcome Kinrove’s magic and cut our ancestor trees. Was that not killing the People?”

They were trees, not people. The thought washed into my mind, but died, unuttered. It wasn’t true. When the trees had fallen, the spirits within them had moved on. My actions had been just as responsible for deaths as Soldier’s Boy’s had. Neither one of us had bloodied our hands; we had let others do that for us. But the deaths I had caused were just as unforgivable as the slaughter of the soldiers. The lurch of heart that gave me, as the acid realization ate into my soul! And Epiny had told me that the tree cutting would soon resume, if it had not already. I realized it was the result of two half measures of magic; I had told the commander at Gettys how to drug his laborers to get around the fear magic of the forest. And then Soldier’s Boy, with his bloody raid, had energized them with enough hate to make them decide to push on despite any fear or despair they felt. Together we had brought those deaths down on the People. And together we had made possible the slaughter at Gettys. If we had been one, could any of those events have happened? If Soldier’s Boy had had to feel my emotions, would he have been able to commit the atrocities that he had? If we had been one, would I have been better able to stand up for myself at Gettys and demand that I be heard?