Galea’s hands tightened on Kinrove’s shoulders. She leaned down to whisper in his ear, and the mage scowled in annoyance, but listened. He took a deep breath and puffed it out through his lips. But then he said grudgingly, “Kandaia. Go to the dance. Watch for the boy Likari, and when he passes, touch his shoulder and say to him, ‘Kinrove bids you stop and follow me.’”

Olikea gave a cry of joy and clutched at Soldier’s Boy’s arm. “I will tend you as no Great One has ever been tended before. You can speak to me as you wish, use me as you wish, and ever I will still be in your debt.”

“Hush,” he said to her, firmly but without harshness. His eyes had not left Kinrove’s face. With Olikea’s help, he rose to his feet and then said quietly, “Greatest of the Great Ones, will you hear what I have to say? I give these treasures and I speak these words at Lisana’s bidding. She has given a task to me. It is beyond me. And so I come to ask a boon of you.”

“What is this?” Olikea asked in a small, breathless voice.

“What I told you,” Soldier’s Boy replied calmly. “My larger ambition.”

A strange expression wandered over her face. It took me a moment to identify it, and then to my shock I knew it: jealousy. “You came here to do her task, not mine,” she said bitterly.

He turned to her, took her hand, and met her eyes. “I will not speak another word until Likari is given to you.” He turned his gaze to Kinrove. “Given to you, whole and freed of the dance. That is the price of the fertility child. Give back Olikea’s child. Make a child of your own, and someday I hope you will look down into his face and imagine what it would be if a cruel and endless dance stole him from you.”

A flush of anger passed over Kinrove’s face, and I thought to myself that this was not the time to bait the Great Man. Soldier’s Boy had run his head into the noose. Should Kinrove decide to tell his guards to kill us he could easily keep everything we had brought and suffer no loss at all. But Soldier’s Boy either did not realize this or did not care. He turned his gaze back on Olikea and smiled down on her. I could not recall that he had ever before done so. “At least to you I will manage to keep my word. One promise kept in my whole life.”

She opened her mouth to say something but Kandaia had returned, her hand on the shoulder of a skinny lad. For a second I could not recognize Likari. He had gone through a growth spurt. He was taller but thin, thinner than I had ever seen him. His skin and his hair were sweaty and dust clung to him. He stared about the inside of the tent, his eyes dazed and unblinking. Olikea gave a cry. She strained toward the boy, but Galea cried out, “The charm! First the charm, then your son!” I had never heard such ruthless need in a woman’s voice. Kinrove lifted his hand, and Olikea jerked to a halt.

She turned back to confront her tormentors. “Take it!” she shouted furiously. “Take it!” She lifted her arm and would have lobbed the statuette at Galea’s head, but Soldier’s Boy deftly caught it.

He set a steadying hand to her shoulder. “I have what you want. Send someone to take it from my hand. And let her go to our son.”

A small gesture from Kinrove’s hand freed Olikea and she went to Likari in a stumbling run. When she reached him, she fell to her knees and threw her arms around him. He looked dazedly past her, his mouth slightly ajar as he breathed. Soldier’s Boy swung his gaze back to Kinrove. “Free him from the dance,” he said in a low, commanding voice. A feeder had approached him and stood waiting to receive the fertility charm. Another stood gawking at the spread of treasure on the opened blanket.

“He has made his own pact with the magic. I can do nothing about it.”

Soldier’s Boy held the fertility charm in both hands. I felt his magic gathering. “Do you think I cannot shatter this image with my hands? Free him, Kinrove. Release him from your damage, and we will see what ‘pact of his own’ binds him to the magic.”

“Please! Please! Do whatever he says, if only I can have the charm!” Galea added her own plea to his words.

Kinrove puffed his lips out, an expression of both denial and disgust, but he also gave an abrupt nod toward Likari. The boy collapsed into Olikea’s arms. He closed his eyes and went limp. Olikea scooped him up. His thin legs dangled over her arms as, without asking any permission, she carried him to one of Kinrove’s soaking tubs. With her hand, she laved water over his face, wiping the dirt away with her sleeve. Then she carried him to a fire and sat down, holding him in her arms near the comforting warmth. She looked up at Soldier’s Boy. “He sleeps so heavily.”

“It is what he needs now,” Soldier’s Boy told her. He held out the statue and allowed the waiting feeder to take it. The other server knelt and reverently gathered up the corners of the blanket. The man bearing the charm was only a few steps away when Galea rushed forward from her place behind Kinrove’s chair. She did not snatch it from him. Instead, she made a cradle of her arms and he gently deposited the wrapped charm there. As she took it, her entire body seemed to receive it. Her shoulders curled in, her head bowed over it possessively. She looked down at the small carved baby in her arms and smiled as tenderly as if the infant were real. Then, as if she were in a dream, she carried the charm out of Kinrove’s pavilion without a backward glance at any of us. When the tent flap fell behind her, Kinrove spoke.

“All of you should leave now,” the Great Man said in a harsh voice.

Soldier’s Boy turned toward him incredulously. “You said you would listen to my request. Will you break your word in front of all your feeders?”

“I do not trust you,” Kinrove said blackly. “Shall I keep my word to one whose word I cannot trust?” One of his fluid hand gestures dismissed the other feeder with the blanket full of loot. So much for buying Kinrove’s favor. He would take the bribe but not be dazzled by it.

“Nor do I trust you, but you are whom I must deal with. And you must deal with me. Today we must do what we both know is our only solution. I have seen it, Lisana has seen it, and when first I came here, you spoke of it to me. I have tried to do it on my own, and failed. Great Kinrove, I come to join your dance. To dance, as you called it, the dance that has never been danced before. You must use your magic to rejoin the halves of me. When Nevare and Soldier’s Boy are one again, then the magic will be able to use all our resources to fulfill itself. Our sundering is what has blocked our success. Put me back to what I was, Kinrove, and I will let the magic use me.”

Kinrove looked at him for a long, silent time. I was still and small inside him, sick with dread. I had not foreseen this. Why had not I foreseen this? He’d asked me voluntarily to rejoin him. When I’d refused, I’d thought I’d frustrated his plan. Now I saw that he had been giving me a final chance to be a party to what would happen to us. “Don’t do this, Soldier’s Boy!” I cried to him. “Let us walk away from here and talk some more. There must be another way.”

“There is not another way, because Nevare fears and fights to remain separate from me.” Soldier’s Boy spoke the words aloud, to Kinrove as well as to me. “I, too, dread what must be done. I do not think that of my will I can do it; it is like staring into the sun without blinking, or putting a burning brand into a wound that must be cauterized, to let this intruder, this Gernian become part of my soul. I know what must be done, but just as I could not sunder my halves, so I cannot rejoin them. Lisana has told me that you are the only living mage who can help us. So I have come to you to offer gifts and seek your help.”

Kinrove’s upper lip curled in scorn, briefly baring his teeth. For that instant, he looked like a snarling dog. “Now you come, asking this? Now? After my dance is but a shadow of itself, after so many of our warriors died in your ill-planned raid? After you have wakened the hatred and wariness of the intruders against us? Now you ask this of me, when all of my strength, every hour of the day, is barely enough to hold the intruders back from the ancient ones? No longer can I send sadness and discouragement rolling into their den. All of my focus must be only on defending our ancestors. And even so, it is not enough! Daily they press against me, daily they make small inroads. But you ask me to divert my strength and focus it on you, to reunite what Lisana foolishly halved!”