As they settled together in their bed with Olikea’s warm back to his chest and her firm buttocks resting on his thighs, Soldier’s Boy felt an insistent stirring of lust for the woman, but set it firmly aside. Later, after he had regained some of his flesh, he could enjoy her. For now, he must not expend any effort save to gather and eat food. As for Olikea, she showed no such interest in him at all, and Likari seemed blissfully unaware of any tension between the adults.

For the next two days, that was the pattern. As long as there was enough light to see, Olikea and Likari gathered food and Soldier’s Boy consumed it. They moved twice, following the stream, as Soldier’s Boy systematically harvested and ate every edible item that it could provide for him.

There was a freeze on the third night. There had been twinges of frost before, enough to hasten the turning of the leaves, but that night, the cold reached beneath the forest eaves. Despite the mossy nest and deep blanket of leaves, they all shivered through the night. Soldier’s Boy awoke aching, and Olikea and Likari were both grumpy. In response to Olikea’s complaints, Soldier’s Boy told her, “We will travel tonight. I have regained enough reserves that we will go swiftly. For now, go about your gathering. I will return shortly.”

“Where are you going?”

“I go to the road’s end. I will not stay there long; have food ready for me when I return.”

“This is a foolish risk you take. There will be workers there; they may attack you.”

“They will not see me,” Soldier’s Boy said firmly. And with that as his farewell, he set out.

As Soldier’s Boy had recovered his reserves and strength, so had I. He was still not as immense as he had been, but he had regained flesh and energy. He moved purposefully through the forest. The fallen leaves carpeted the moss. They rustled as he strode through them. As he approached the road’s end, Soldier’s Boy slowed and went more cautiously. For a large man, he moved very quietly, and he paused often to listen.

He heard only birdcalls and, once, the thump and rustle of a disturbed rabbit. Emboldened, he ventured closer to what had been the road. Stillness reigned.

By this hour of the day, workers should have arrived, but there were no signs of them. He moved cautiously along the edge of the road. The greenery I had sent out across it had browned, but the vines and crawling brambles had survived and looked undisturbed. Where I had sent plants to block the culverts, swamps had formed on either side of the road. Insects buzzed and hummed near them.

He came to the shed where the men had been keeping watch that night. It was deserted. He walked through it and found the dice still out on the rough table just as the men had abandoned them. No one had been back here since that night.

“Perhaps it was not a total waste of magic,” he conceded reluctantly. “It looks as if the intruders are discouraged. I do not think they will come back before spring.”

He had turned back into the forest before I realized that he had deliberately spoken to me.

“I thought I was doing what the magic wanted me to do.” I could not decide if I wanted to apologize to him or not. It seemed strange to apologize to myself, and even more so to have to apologize for an action I’d been pushed into taking. I wasn’t even certain that he was aware of what I’d tried to say to him. I thought of the times when I’d thought I’d felt Soldier’s Boy stir inside me, the moments when my thoughts had seemed more Speckish than Gernian. Always, I’d felt that he deliberately concealed himself from me. Now I wondered if he had tried to share his views, only to feel as smothered as I did.

He spoke again, almost grudgingly, as if reluctant to acknowledge me. “The magic was mine, not yours to spend. And the magic speaks to me, not you. You should not have tampered with it.”

He seemed to resent me as much as I did him. It scarcely seemed fair. He was the one who had invaded my life. I reined in my resentment and asked my most pressing question.

“Do you know what the magic wants you to do?”

He grinned hard. I sensed him weighing whether or not to reply. When he did, I felt it was because he could not resist the urge to brag. “Several times, I have acted on what the magic wished me to do.”

“When? What did you do?”

“You don’t remember the Dancing Spindle?”

“Of course I do.” At the Dancing Spindle, actions I had taken had ended the Spindle’s dance forever, and dispersed the magic of the Plainspeople. I knew now that Soldier’s Boy had taken into himself as much of their magic as he could hold and had hoarded it. “But what else? When else did you obey the magic?”

His grin grew wider. “You don’t know, do you? That amuses me. Because at the time, I thought I felt you resisting me. And even now, I do not think I would be wise to tell you the things the magic prompted me to do. There were small things that I did, things that made no sense to me. But I did them. And I kept them from you, lest you try to undo them. You thought you had pushed me down; you thought you had absorbed me and made me a part of you. But I won then. And I’ve won now, Gernian. I will prevail.”

I nearly warned him not to be too certain of that. Then I decided not to provoke him to keep his guard up against me. He spoke no more to me but found and followed the stream to rejoin Likari and Olikea. She was sitting close by the fire, her arms wrapped around her naked body. The day had warmed, but not much.

“Finding food would keep you warmer,” he told her. “This is the last day we shall spend here. We’ll eat, and then sleep until nightfall.”

“There isn’t much left to find here!” Olikea protested, but just then Likari made a lie of her words.

He ran up to me, proudly displaying six silver fish hung from a willow wand through their gills. “I caught them all myself!” he exclaimed. His hands and forearms were bright red from exposure to the icy waters.

“Wonderful!” Soldier’s Boy praised him and rumpled the boy’s hair. The child wriggled like a happy puppy. Olikea took the fish with a sour expression on her face and went to work cleaning them of guts and scales. Soldier’s Boy went back to the stream and began eating water-grass stems. He would have preferred to eat the foods richest in magic potential, but lacking those, he would fill my belly with anything that was edible.

When Olikea returned from her gathering, a hastily woven carry sack held big mushrooms and a quantity of prickly cones. She gave the cones to Likari, and he pounded them on a rock by the stream to shake loose the fat seeds inside them. The mushrooms were thick and dense, with ranks of tubes rather than gills on the undersides of their orange caps. Olikea cut them into fat slices to toast over the fire with the fish.

After everyone had eaten, they all arranged themselves in the moss-and-leaves nest to sleep for the rest of the day. I felt no need for such rest. Instead, trapped behind the darkness of Soldier Boy’s closed eyes, my thoughts chased their own tails in endless circles. What had he done for the magic that I hadn’t even known about, and when had he done it? In dread, I thought of the times I had awakened from sleep-walking to find myself outside my cabin. Had it happened then? Or had it occurred when I was home in Widevale, or even while I was still at the Academy? I recalled how the Speck dancers had come to Old Thares with the traveling carnival. When I had seen them, I had lifted my hand and given them the sign to release the dreaded Speck plague on our capital city. Yes. I could see now that that had been the work of Soldier’s Boy. But what else had he done that I’d scarcely been aware of? Had he influenced my thoughts about my father? Had he precipitated my quarrel with Carsina?

When I decided that wondering about it was futile, my thoughts turned to Epiny, Spink, and Amzil. I wondered if Epiny had reached her home safely, and if she had been able to convince both Spink and Amzil that I was still alive and that they had not failed me. I wondered about the rest of Gettys as well. I was fairly certain that my death would be dismissed easily. I doubted that there would be any serious inquiry into it. Gettys was a town composed of soldiers, penal workers, and former penal workers and their families. The Speck magic flooded the town with alternating tides of fear and despair. It was a place where violence and crime were as common as the dust blowing through the streets. A man beaten to death by a mob would only briefly shock the inhabitants, and no one else would ever know of it. I imagined that the official report, if there were one, would say that a condemned prisoner, Nevare Burv, had been shot to death while attempting to escape.