Epiny swung her head back to look at me. Her lips were parted and she swayed slightly. The whites showed all around her eyes. I’d once seen a horse that had been ridden near to death. She reminded me of that poor beast, as if she stayed on her feet more by sheer willpower than by physical strength. She stared at me for a long time, then looked back at Lisana. Her voice was flat. “Don’t try to deceive me. That’s not Nevare. I know Nevare and that’s not him. You forget that the magic touches me? You forget that I can look at his aura and see that something is very wrong? You can’t cheat me again, Tree Woman. I intend to kill you or die trying.” She stooped down. For the first time, I saw the small hatchet she had used to cut her firewood. Against Tree Woman’s thick stump, it looked ridiculous, a child’s toy. But it was a toy made of iron. Its presence burned against my skin. When Epiny raised it over her head, her teeth bared in a grimace of hatred, Soldier’s Boy acted, springing between her and the stump and catching her falling wrist. He squeezed hard and the hatchet fell from her grip. He caught her other wrist when she tried to rake his eyes with her nails. Despite his wasted condition, he held her easily. Epiny snarled and shrieked at him wordlessly. She kicked out at him; he accepted the blows.

“Her mind is gone,” Olikea opined. She sounded appalled, as if Epiny’s loss of dignity were shameful to her as well. “It would be a kindness to kill her.” She spoke in Speck, her words directed to Soldier’s Boy. The lack of malice in her voice chilled me. She meant it. She thought Soldier’s Boy should put Epiny down as one would a diseased dog. She ventured closer to pick up the hatchet. I feared she would do the deed herself, just sink the shining blade into Epiny’s spine.

“No!” I bellowed. “Lisana, help me! Please! Don’t let Epiny be killed! It will be too much for me to bear!”

I made no sound. I had no command of lips or lungs or tongue. I spoke not in words, but in a flow of thought that dismissed the need for words, just as Epiny and Lisana spoke to one another. They were the words of my heart, voiceless in the world. All I could do was to plead and threaten. I was helpless to stop what was happening. My hands held my cousin helpless and waiting to be slaughtered.

Lisana looked at the scene before her. Epiny’s struggles against Soldier’s Boy had become increasingly feeble. His big hand trapped her thin wrists. She all but dangled in his grip. Behind Epiny’s back, Olikea had raised the hatchet. Likari watched the drama with the rapt attention of a small boy staring at the unintelligible behavior of adults. The hatchet began to fall.

“Epiny!” I cried out mutely. A stray beam of sunlight moved on the blade as it traveled.

My impotent threats had not moved Lisana. Soldier’s Boy looked at her stump; again, I had the feeling that I was seeing Lisana in a different way from him.

“If I help kill my own cousin, I’ll go mad! My hatred for him will be unending. Can Soldier’s Boy serve the magic while a madman gibbers in the back of his mind?”

When Tree Woman slowly shook her head at me, my heart sank. She spoke.

“Stop.”

Now that I knew what such magic cost, I saw the effort go out of her. Tree Woman’s presence dwindled when she spoke, but for me, it had the desired effect. Olikea’s resolve failed. She lost her grip on the hatchet. It tumbled to the ground behind Epiny. Soldier’s Boy did not release his grip on my cousin, but he set her back on her feet. She twisted one wrist free and folded that arm across her belly, in a gesture that was both supportive and protective. When he released her other wrist, she staggered a few steps away from him and then burst into tears. With both arms, she cradled her pregnancy. She didn’t look at him, but past him at Tree Woman’s stump. “Why?” she demanded of Lisana. “Why did you do this to Nevare? Why my cousin, why me? We were innocent of any crime against your people. Why did you reach all those miles to take him hostage to this fate? Why?”

Lisana stiffened. Her presence wavered for a moment, then seemed to grow stronger as she gathered her reserves and retorted, “Blame the Kidona, not me! He is the one who took your cousin and tried to make him a warrior to use against me. I, I was the one who had mercy. I could have just stripped his soul from his body and he would have died in all worlds. If I had not thought to offer him to the magic, he would have been dead all these years. The magic chose to keep him. Not I. I didn’t know its reasons. But the magic chose him and now it has taken him. You’d best accept that, Jhernian woman. Just as he must accept and become whole to the magic. Nothing is going to change it. What the magic takes, it keeps.” Perhaps only I could hear the old resignation in her words. She, too, had been chosen and kept by the magic. She, too, had never lived the life she had imagined for herself.

“Please,” I thought to Lisana, hoping she still had some influence with Soldier’s Boy. “Please. Let me talk to Epiny. Let me send her home. Let me have that small comfort before I must bend to the magic’s will.”

Soldier’s Boy was staring intently at the stump. “Lisana?” he asked. There was a world of longing in his voice. He ignored the sobbing woman, and Olikea scowling in puzzlement at them. He stepped up to the stump and put his hands on it. “Lisana?” he said again. He glanced back at Epiny angrily. I felt the indignation in his heart that the Gernian woman could obviously see and speak to his beloved when all he could behold was the stump of her fallen tree.

Lisana sighed heavily. “I’m a fool,” she said. “I know I’ll regret this. Speak to her, then. I’ll help you.”

I had hoped she would do something to Soldier’s Boy, to give me control once more of the body. Either she could not, or she did not trust me that far. I felt the most peculiar sensation, a cold peeling as if I were being skinned away from my life. A moment later, I could see Lisana much more distinctly, and I once more had the disembodied sensation I’d felt when she’d called me from my cell. Speaking to Epiny had been my errand then. Now I looked at my cousin and suddenly didn’t know what to say to her. I could see Soldier’s Boy as Epiny saw him. It was a shock. He wore my naked, sunburned body differently. I would never have stood in that posture; I would never have been so completely unselfconscious of my nakedness before my cousin. Yet, with the fat stripped from my flesh, I saw my face almost as it had been when I had set out for the Academy. Despite the sagging of the emptied jowls, I looked more youthful than I had in the last year. My blond hair was an untidy tousle but with a sickening wrench I could recall that I had been a handsome young man once. The sudden mourning I felt for that lost attractiveness shocked me with its intensity. I had never thought myself vain, but I had enjoyed being a man that girls smiled at. It was a distorted glimpse of the tall, golden cadet that I’d been. It was like a knife in my heart.

Epiny had lifted her eyes to Lisana, and when her gaze fell on my ephemeral self, she gasped. She lifted a seeking hand toward me, as if she would strive to touch me. “Nevare?” she asked.

Soldier’s Boy glared at her and then leaned close to the tree stump. “Lisana?” he pleaded. We all ignored him.

I found my words. I suddenly knew that only the truth could satisfy her, and I gave it to her. “Epiny. Epiny, my dear. Yes, it’s me. I’m here. I’m sorry. I did what I had to do. I used the magic to make Spink and Amzil believe I was dead. I made the entire mob in the street there believe that they’d achieved their goal and beaten me to death. Then I left. It was the only way for me to escape cleanly, the only way to break my life off from yours.”

“But—” Her eyes were wide with shock. She looked from me to Soldier’s Boy in my body and back again.