I was not. The music ran in my veins like boiling water seething down a pipe. It hurt and exhilarated at the same time. For me, the sensation reminded me of being whirled around and around by my older brother when I was small. It dizzied me and I could not focus my eye on any object. There was also the same sensation of imminent disaster. When Rosse had gripped me by wrist and ankle and flown me around and around, I had always known that if he lost his grip, I’d have bruises. But I’d also known that sooner or later, my brother would tire and would attempt to land me gently. That was what had allowed me to enjoy the experience.

With Soldier’s Boy’s dance, there was no promise of respite. I could not find him in the densely twined music and dance. He had merged with it, become one with it rather than with me. I became even more aware of my body, or the body that had been mine. My lungs worked like bellows and my mouth was already dry. In a seizure of music, Soldier’s Boy danced. He turned and spun; he made small leaps off the ground, and then bent low and swayed, a tree caught in the wind. I felt that with every step he took, he retreated from me and ventured deeper into the music’s power.

I caught a spinning glimpse of Kinrove in the chair that had been brought out for him. His face was grave, but his hands moved with Soldier’s Boy’s dance, almost as if he were conducting it. Did he command it? There was a chilling thought. Soldier’s Boy’s eyes had closed to slits. I focused on the little I could see. Most of it was sky, or a brief image of tree trunks. Olikea, tears on her cheeks. One of Kinrove’s feeders scratching her nose. The wall of the steam hut. Kinrove, weaving his fingers as his hands danced with me.

On and on Soldier’s Boy danced, until he no longer leapt but shuffled and wove. After a time, it was a struggle to keep his head up or to lift his hands. Blood throbbed painfully in his feet and all the muscles along his spine shrieked that they had been torn loose from their anchorage. But on we danced.

I had to stop it. Whatever Kinrove had believed this dance would do, it wasn’t accomplishing it. I was more separate from Soldier’s Boy than ever and it was destroying the body that housed us. Breath rasped in and out and his heart thundered in his ears. Veins pulsed in his calves. I stopped trying to see out of the eyes and turned my attention inward, seeking for Soldier’s Boy.

His consciousness was all but gone. I could find no sign of his awareness of himself as something separate from the dancing magic. I groped deeper, following the magic and the dance that seethed through him like a river in flood, a frightening thing to behold. “Soldier’s Boy!” I shouted at it, wondering where he was in that rush, or if he had already melted into it completely. I dared not touch it. I wondered if I could seize control of the body now that he no longer consciously possessed it. Perhaps, if the dance magic had stolen him completely away, I could possess my body again.

That thought gave me a surge of hope such as I had not felt for months. I readied myself, as best I could. There was so much to take control of, and I felt I must seize it all at once. My hands and arms, my shuffling feet, my bobbing head—how did anyone ever manage to control so many pieces of a living body at once? For only a second I marveled at that thought.

Then I felt a sudden red lurch of pain in my chest. Soldier’s Boy staggered three steps to one side, and I thought we were falling. But he fetched up against a tree, clung there grimly for a moment, and then, as his heart steadied its thumping, he once more pushed himself free to stand upright and then to dance. It was then that I knew he would dance us to death. I spread myself out and attempted to inhabit my body once more.

It was the strangest sensation, as if I had flung myself onto the back of a galloping horse. I was there suddenly feeling the muscles move, feeling the jabs of pain from my abused feet. The body was mine, and not mine. I danced on, awkward and jolting, like a marionette whose strings have been seized by a child. I planted my feet, but my hands and arms flapped and waved. If I focused on holding them still, then my head wagged wildly and my errant feet began to slide sideways. Suddenly it was an all-out struggle between me and Soldier’s Boy as to who would control it. I felt him there, not as the twin of my mind, but as the body’s will. I clenched my body’s teeth and curled my hands into fists and held them there. I tightened the screaming muscles all along my spine, forbidding them to twist or sway or bow. I bent my arms into my chest and embraced myself, bent my head down to my chest and held it there. With a surge of resolution, I folded my legs under me. I crashed to the earth, falling hard, but still keeping my control. I rolled myself into as tight and still of a ball as my flesh would allow. I shouted stillness into myself and then realized my mistake. No, not my breath, not my heart. I pulled breath after deep breath into my lungs and tried to calm my leaping heart as if it were a wild creature I strove to soothe.

“Be still, be still, be still,” I whispered to every part of myself.

And that was how they caught me.

I had no sense of becoming one with Soldier’s Boy. I felt no encounter with some “other self” hidden in my flesh. Instead, I was besieged by a decade of memories and thoughts. They were mine, they were his, but they had belonged to both of us, and I had always been aware of my twin lives and experiences. I had always been me, never Soldier’s Boy, never Nevare, always me. Carsina had broken his heart as much as mine, and I had longed for Lisana just as deeply as he had. I loved the forest and he wanted to make his father proud. It was me the mob had tried to murder in the streets of Gettys, and I had every right to hate them for it. Those were my trees that they were trying to cut, the wisdom of my elders, and it infuriated me that no one would listen to me.

I rose slowly from the ground. My body settled into place around me. I was home. I was complete and all I had been meant to be. I was the perfect vessel for the magic and ready now to take up my task. Oh, but it was no task, it was joy. The magic and the music of that magic coursed through every vessel in my body, prompting me to the dance. My hands floated at the ends of my arms. I lifted my head and felt the music pull me taller. I moved with grace and beauty, dignity and purpose. I danced twice round Olikea and Likari, binding my protection round them. My hands wove, shaping a life for them. Then I moved to Kinrove and stood before him, meeting his eyes as I danced my independence of him. His hands might move and weave, but they were only his part of the dance. They did not control me. I turned my back on him, snapping the gossamer threads that had bound me to his magic. I opened my arms to the forest, and beyond it, to the wide world and all it contained. I opened my heart and my eyes and my mind, and I danced away from those who had been watching me. I had a task to do.

I danced out of the world and back into it, into its truer deeper form. Place no longer bound me, nor time. Instead, I moved through the magic, called by a series of unfinished tasks.

I returned to the Dancing Spindle. It was still; I had seen to that. I had engineered that the iron blade would fall to become a wedge beneath the tip of that magic artifact. But I had not finished that task. The Spindle still stood, and it still strained against the blade that bound it. How foolish of me. The very first time I had seen it, I had wondered at it. How could such a large spindle of stone remain balanced on such a tiny point? How could it not fall? The Gernian engineer had not been able to find an answer to that riddle, but the Speck mage knew it. He could see the filaments of magic that flowed from the tip of the spindle and shot off into the spirit world I had visited with the Kidona shaman all those years ago. Dewara had known.