“I won’t.” I put my arms around her. I kissed her. “I’m staying with you,” I promised. Our mouths were so close I felt her breath against my lips. I felt her tears cling to my cheeks. Another streak of pain raced down my back. I cried out, but held tight to Lisana. Another stripe, this one right next to the first. And another.

They came in a methodical flogging now, one after another, each agony laid down next to the previous one. I could not control my response to it. The body I had imagined for myself in Lisana’s world had a bloody ruin for a back. The blood streamed down my legs, and I trembled with the pain, but held on to her. There was nothing else I could do, no way to defend myself from the greedy flesh-stripping birds that attacked me in another world.

It went on for a very long time. When Lisana could no longer hold on to my body because of the damage it had sustained, when I had sunk to my knees, moaning with pain, still she stood by me, weeping and gripping grimly the handful of hair on the top of my head.

The first time I had ever met her, when we had come together as adversaries, I as Dewara’s champion and she as the guardian of the dream bridge, she had seized me in the same way. And when I fell into the abyss, she had kept that grip, and jerked out of me a core of my person. She had kept that piece and it had grown to be Soldier’s Son. But what would happen to me this time, neither of us knew. I did not even know if I would be torn from her world. Perhaps, when Orandula was through with his torment of me, he would let me go, and I could heal and be with her.

A grimmer thought came to my pain-encrusted mind. Perhaps the torment would never end. Perhaps this was what the Old God meant by taking my death from me. That even after my life was over, I would know no peace. It seemed too cruel a fate to contemplate; could anyone, even a god, do such a thing?

For the first time since the torment began, Orandula spoke to me. “Of course I could. But that is not what we agreed upon. You told me I could take your death. And I will.”

“Please! Mercy,” I begged.

“But I am not the god of mercy. I am the god of balances.”

“By the good god, please stop!” I begged him.

“I do not know this good god. Truth to tell, I sometimes think he is whatever god is giving you what you think you want. And thus perhaps all of us take turns being your good god.”

“Then be the good god to me now,” I begged. All I could feel was pain. Sunlight on my leaves was gone, Lisana holding my hand was gone, even her grip on my hair had vanished. There remained only me and the eternal punishment of this god. “God of balances, balance this, this justice you claim from me with the mercy I beg.”

Another searing stripe of pain. Was this the flogging I’d escaped in that other life? Did this pain now balance the pain I hadn’t had then? It was a senseless question.

Orandula seemed detached from what he did to me. “Balance justice with mercy? But surely justice can be balanced only with injustice.” Words tumbled and bumped in my head. If mercy was not justice, was it an injustice when mercy was given?

Beaks were rummaging in my guts, snapping and snipping, pulling out bits of this and that, tugging them away.

“Please.” In all the world, there was only Orandula left to speak with. “Please, make it be over.”

I had not known I was going to beg for that. But there it was, the words were out of my mouth.

“Very well,” the god replied. And I knew darkness.

Darkness. Absolute darkness. But not peace. My body was bathed in pain. The skin of my face, my arms and legs, my back and belly, all stung as if badly burned. That was it. As thoughts re-formed in my head, I realized what had happened. I’d been sunburned. Dewara had left my body exposed to the sun and I was burned all over. I remembered it now. Soon I would open my eyes, and find myself back in my bed, at home. My mother would be weeping by my bedside while my father kept watch.

I was going back to the beginning of it all. Back to where I could choose differently, live my life over. I would not make the mistakes I’d made before. I’d be strong and more aggressive. My father would be proud of me. I’d be an officer in the King’s Cavalla. My mother and siblings would not die of a plague that I’d let loose upon Gernia. The old god had taken me back to where it had all begun, to when Dewara had sent me to do battle against Tree Woman and I had failed. Had that been a death? Was that the death the old god had taken?

“You are not even remotely correct,” Orandula observed. There was amusement in his voice. Overhead, I heard the shifting of a heavy body in a tree’s branches. Then it lifted off with a flapping of wings that faded almost immediately. I listened intently. He was gone. Where was I?

I could see nothing, but I could hear. The ringing silence resolved itself into night insects singing their endless songs. Cautiously, I explored my other senses. I smelled and tasted blood. Pain hummed all around me, but I had specific pains, too. I’d bitten my tongue badly. My head pounded. My innards felt wrong, as if my guts had settled into a new and strange arrangement. I sorted out my agonies and knew that I was sitting upright. I tried to move, to shift even my leg, and cried out at the fresh pain it woke. I went back to stillness.

The darkness was an overcast night. It passed very slowly, and it was some time before I realized that the blackness was nothing more terrifying and dreadful than night. The coming of the dim dawn as sunlight flickered down through the canopy of the forest brought its own terror, however. I could see, and what I saw sickened me.

I sat where the Specks had left me. The beaks of the carrion birds that had torn the flesh from my body had shredded my bindings as well. I was naked. Shreds of rotting flesh surrounded and enthroned me. My decomposed body was a slimy scum on the earth around me. Pale roots networked through it. But that was not what horrified me.

What remained of my body was a monstrous thing. The layer of skin that covered me was so thin that I could see through it. As the light grew stronger, what I could see became ever more horrifying. Red muscle, white tendons, dark veins. Knobs of bone and gristle showing through in my hands. My breath came and went in short, trembling bursts. I wondered for an instant what my face looked like and then was glad I could not know.

As the sun grew stronger, it brought light and color into the world. My body became even more hideous. I turned my eyes away from it and looked around me. There was Lisana’s tree, lush and healthy. And when I turned my eyes up, my own tree towered over me, twice the size it had been when last I saw it. I was grateful for its thick leafy shade, for I feared what the sun could do to my nearly skinless body. The surface of my body stung all over like a skinned knee.

I moved cautiously, lifting my hands, not wanting to look at them but looking all the same. After a time, I stood. My bare feet protested. They barely had skin, let alone calluses to protect them. I was very careful as I picked my way through the fallen branches and other forest debris to reach Lisana’s tree. I stood looking up at it. “Lisana?” I asked softly.

There was no response. But it was more profound than that. I sensed nothing that could have responded. I set both my hands to the trunk of her tree. I didn’t like the sensation. The skin on my palms and fingers was new and thin. I pressed my tender hands against the roughness of her bark and feared I would tear what little skin I had. Nevertheless, I put my brow to her bark as well. “Lisana?” I called aloud. “Lisana, please, reach for me. I cannot feel you.”