“Oh, no, he must have none of this,” Wurta said quickly as her eyes followed the direction of his snuffling. “I will have something else brought for him right away. And some washwater? Yes.”

She hastened away to fulfill those errands while Soldier’s Boy leaned forward and hesitantly lifted the ladle from the pot. He touched it to his lips, and then took a mouthful. It did not taste awful. He swallowed it and waited, anticipating a bitter aftertaste. Nothing. No, there was something, a perfumy tang. Not unpleasant, but not something I would ever associate with food. It rather reminded me of the food served to us at the Academy. There was a lot of it, but none of it tasted so delicious as to make one long for more.

Likari stopped his sniffing and suddenly sagged back onto the bed. If the sound of his muffled snores were an indication, he had fallen into a new depth of sleep. Olikea looked relieved. She turned her attention back to Soldier’s Boy. “Perhaps you should begin eating while it is still warm and fresh,” she suggested. So saying, she came and ladled up a bowlful of the stuff and set it before him.

Soldier’s Boy ate it. He ate the next three bowls of it as well. It was warm and not unpleasant, though the perfume began to be annoying. Olikea, watchful as ever, offered him a bit of the fish and some bread. It cleared his palate of the soup, and when he was finished she served him up another bowlful of the stuff and he attacked it manfully.

About a third of the way through the cauldron Wurta shepherded in a team of feeders with a large pot of aromatic salve, food for Likari, and a washtub and several pots of warmed water. She smoothly suggested that Olikea wake her son, wash him, and then feed him. While she was doing that, Wurta proposed that Soldier’s Boy would accompany them to where he could be treated with the salve that Kinrove had had them prepare. Olikea looked doubtful at this, but Soldier’s Boy put her mind at ease. “I am well able to speak for myself in how I am cared for. But I do not wish to entrust Likari to anyone else but you. Take care of him. I am sure I will be back soon.”

“I should be taking care of you. I am your feeder,” she said, but her voice held no conviction and her eyes kept moving toward her son.

“So is Likari. Tend to him for now. If I require you, I can send for you.”

“As you wish,” she said with relief, and even before Soldier’s Boy had left the tent, she had moved to Likari’s side.

Soldier’s Boy followed Wurta and her assistants. They took him to a steam hut. It was small and tightly built of branches plastered over with earth. Inside, a big copper kettle boiled over a fire pit. All of them stripped before entering the hut, and once they were inside, with the door shut tight behind them, the heat and steam were close to unbearable. “First,” Wurta told him, “we must open your skin, so that the salve can soak into you.”

This involved him sitting in a chair while heavy cloths were dipped in the boiling water. The feeders allowed them to cool enough so that they could wring them out, and then immediately began to wrap him in them. They were not scalding, but hot enough to be unpleasant. Soldier’s Boy gritted his teeth and endured the treatment. When they removed the cloth, his skin was a bright scarlet by the firelight. His specks showed dark against the redness. The feeders went to work quickly, rubbing the salve into his flesh. As quickly as they covered his skin with the slippery stuff, they wrapped him afresh with the hot steaming cloths. Between the heat and the minty pungency of the salve, he felt giddy. The meal he had just eaten coiled and squirmed in his belly. He began to fervently wish that Olikea were there, to protect him from Kinrove’s feeders.

I agreed with him. “They will kill you with this treatment,” I warned him. “Listen to your heart beating. You can scarcely breathe for the steam and the stink. Tell them to let you go; they’ll have to listen to you. You’re a Great One. You have what you came for; Likari is restored to you. You should leave and take him and Olikea back to the kin-clan. Let us find another way to solve our problem.”

It was getting hard for him to breathe. The air was hot and the pungent aroma of the salve seemed to only make it worse. Yet he said, “I will do whatever I must—”

And the words died on his lips. For the briefest moment, he breathed music, not air. It lifted him weightlessly; he felt himself rise with it, float on it, towed away from the bonds of earth and up into the air.

Just as abruptly, he was back in his flesh, and fighting, not for air, but for the music he had breathed but a moment before. “—to regain Lisana.” He finished his thought in a hazy voice. He opened his arms wide, trying to bring the music back.

“Do you feel that?” Wurta asked in wonder.

Several of the others murmured awed assents.

“He will dance,” Wurta said, but her tone conveyed far more than her words. “Kinrove spoke true. When he is one, he will be a river for the magic. The dance has already found him. We must hurry to be sure he consumes the rest of the food he will need.”

But it was already too late.

They led Soldier’s Boy from the steam hut, still swathed in the hot wraps that held the herbal unguent against his skin. As we emerged from the darkness into the forest light, he took a deep breath of the clean, cool air that greeted him. And the blood that flowed through his body turned to music. He began to dance.

The feeders cried out in alarm. Two seized his arms and tried to restrain him, shouting, “No, not yet, not yet! You are not prepared!” Someone else shouted, “Tell Kinrove! Run, run!” and yet another one cried out, “Fetch his own feeder! He may listen to her.”

When Olikea came running, I heard her voice. But Soldier’s Boy did not. He was caught up in a rapture of sound and movement, far past drunkenness, deeper than unconsciousness. I shouted for him and then reached for him as one might plunge an arm into a deep, cold lake to retrieve a comrade who had fallen overboard. But I could not reach him. No part of us touched anymore, and that realization terrified me. Instead of uniting us, Kinrove’s magic seemed to be separating us even more completely.

Olikea rushed to him and seized his hands. “Oh, I should not have let them take you! I should not have listened to you at all. Nevare, Nevare, stop, stop dancing. Come back to me!”

But he did not. Instead, he tried to pull her into the dance with him. He gripped her hands and dragged her along as he stepped and turned and bowed. Kinrove’s feeders cried out in fear, and four of them seized her and pulled her from his grasp. Then they fought her, holding her back as she shrieked and clawed and struggled to get back to him.

“It will do you no good! He cannot hear you. If you let him seize you, he will drag and dance you to death. Remember your son, remember your boy! Stay here and care for him!”

I caught only glimpses of that struggle. Soldier’s Boy’s eyes were wide, but he did not look at any of the people. He saw the trees and the shifting of light through the young leaves. He saw the fluttering of a single leaf, and his shaken fingers echoed it. He felt a light movement of the breeze on his face, and he danced backward, airily wafted on it. Like many a heavy man, he had strength in his legs beyond what one might expect. His movements were graceful and controlled; the unguent seemed to have loosened and oiled his muscles. He shifted, turned and lifted his hands to the sky, mimicking the rising steamy smoke from the sweat hut. From his half-closed eyes, I caught a glimpse of Kinrove, supported by two of his feeders. Dismay sagged his features.

“It is too soon. Only half of him dances! I do not know what will happen now. Show me the kettle of food. How much did he eat?”

Olikea had sunk to her knees, still weeping and wailing. Behind her, I glimpsed a very thin Likari, a blanket clasped around his bony shoulders, trying to hurry to his mother. When the boy saw me, a thin wail escaped his mouth. Pointing and weeping, he, too, sank to his knees. My only comfort was that at the sound of his voice, Olikea had turned. She caught her breath and then crawled to her son. When he would have risen and staggered toward me, she caught him and held him in her arms. At least he was safe from Kinrove’s mad dance.