The aroma of cooking fish coaxed me slowly out of a very deep sleep.

I came out of it clutching a peculiar dream. I’d been sitting in my father’s study. He was in a dressing gown and slippers, seated in a cushioned chair in front of an autumn fire. His hair was neatly combed, but in a way that made me think he had not done it himself. There were slippers on his feet; it was the guise of a man who had not been outside the house in days. On a table near his elbow was a bowl of late apples; their fragrance had perfumed the room. My father’s face was bowed into his hands, and he was weeping. His hair had gone gray and the hands that covered his face were ropy with tendons. He seemed to have aged a decade in the single year I’d been gone.

He spoke to me without looking at me. His voice sounded odd, the words badly formed. “Why, Nevare? Why did you hate me so? I loved you. Fate made you the only son I could truly claim as my own, the only one who would follow in my footsteps as a soldier and a cavalla officer. You alone could have won glory for our name. But you threw it all away. You shamed me and you shamed yourself. Why? Why did you destroy yourself? Was it to spite me? Was it because you hated everything I was? What did I do wrong? How did I fail to inspire you? Was I such a poor father to you? Why, Nevare? Why?”

The questions were like a driving rain, relentless and chilling. They soaked me with guilt and confusion. He was so miserable. So hurt and vulnerable, so profoundly hopeless in his sorrow.

“I did everything I could think of to make you want to change, Nevare. Nothing moved you. Even when I took your name and home from you, you never once said that you wanted to try again. You never once said you were sorry for what you had done! You never came back. Did you hate me so badly? Why, son? Why couldn’t you just be what you were born to be? Why couldn’t you have taken what I’d earned for you, and enjoyed it?”

In that dream, I was mute. I was not even sure I was really there. Perhaps I watched him through a window. Perhaps the window was in my mind.

I woke confused. The fragrance of apples had changed to the aroma of fish, and I was cold, not warmed by a fire. My father would not weep for me; he had driven me away. I rubbed at my sticky eyes. My head still hurt, but not as badly as it had. I was hungry and very, very thirsty. I opened my eyes. Olikea had returned. She’d built up the fire. On stones beside the coals, two fine fat fish were baking. Food. Light. A bit of warmth. All good things.

But as I took a deep breath and tried to sit up, I realized what else had changed. My fever was gone. The sores still itched abominably, and when I scratched, one loose scab peeled away under my nails. But my fever was gone. I sighed heavily. “Is there water?” I heard myself ask hoarsely.

“You’re awake! Oh, good. Likari, bring water.”

The boy was no longer sleeping against my back, I realized. He came into the light, bringing the water skin with him. “I kept watch while you slept,” he told me proudly.

I smiled. But when I tried to thank him, I abruptly became aware that I was not the one in charge of the body. Soldier’s Boy smiled at him with my mouth and felt kindly toward the boy, but he did not utter the words of thanks that I would have said. Instead he nodded at him and took the water skin from his hands and drank heavily of the cold, sweet water.

I pulled my awareness apart from his. As I did so, I felt that he knew I had separated from him again. His smile widened. Because, for a time, I had merged with him and had not fought him. I had not even been aware that I existed separately from him for those minutes. “I’m feeling stronger,” he said aloud, and I cringed, thinking that he aimed the words as much at me as he spoke them toward Olikea and Likari.

I held back from him, silent and observant, as Olikea finished cooking the fish and portioned it out. They all ate greedily, scarcely letting the fish cool before gulping it down. When it was gone, Olikea proudly produced a double handful of a viscous-skinned fungus. It wasn’t shaped like a mushroom, but instead had a fingered structure. In the barely flickering firelight, they looked yellow. The appearance repulsed me but Soldier’s Boy took a deep breath of their enticing odor.

“Mage’s honey,” Olikea named it proudly. “Very nourishing to the magic. Never before have I seen it growing in such quantity. It was on the wooden lip of the spill for the fish trap, all growing in a fringe. This will replenish your strength and put you on your feet.”

Both Likari and Olikea were still hungry, yet neither of them showed any desire to share this food. Instead they watched intently as Soldier’s Boy picked up one of the gelatinous structures and set it on my tongue. My physical reaction to it was immediate. I felt a shiver run over my whole body; my skin stood up in gooseflesh and the hair rose on my head and on the backs of my arms. An instant later, I actually tasted the mage’s honey. It was named for its color, not its flavor. The taste was not unpleasant, but it was not memorable either, offering only a faintly musky flavor. As Soldier’s Boy chewed it, it had the texture of an overcooked jelly. It was not appetizing. But when he swallowed it, the shiver that I had experienced on my skin was repeated, but as a quivering throughout my entire body. The sensation was so intense that I was not sure he enjoyed it. Yet he picked up another of the fungi and put it on my tongue.

The sensations were sharper and more prolonged with each one. At the fifth one, I thought I heard Olikea mutter, “See how he glows with power now!” but I did not pay much attention to her, so completely did the sensations absorb me.

When every bit of it was gone, I sat shivering. My senses were painfully alert to every sort of stimulus, but my awareness of touch was overwhelming. It seemed to extend beyond my skin like a cat’s quivering whiskers. I noticed the movement of air currents in the cavern, felt the striations in the rock beneath me, and even sensed the disturbance of the air caused by an insect flying past me. As I sat there, the acuity of my senses only increased. I could see in the darkness with a clarity of vision that surpassed my ordinary sight in daylight. At the same time, a restless energy crawled through me and over my skin, demanding that I be up and doing something, anything. Soldier’s Boy rose abruptly. “It is time to travel,” he announced, and my own words sounded like trumpets in my ears, not just when he uttered them, but when their previously faint echoes returned to me.

“Fill up the water skin, roll the blanket, and gather our things,” Olikea urged Likari in an excited voice. “We will quick-walk now, I’ll wager.”

So charged with energy was he that it was difficult to wait for them. I think Olikea sensed his restlessness, for she caught at my arm as I rose and clung to it, bidding Likari, “Come, come quickly, and take his other hand.”

The boy came at a run and seized my free hand as if his life depended on it. Perhaps it did. The magic rippled through me like fire in my veins.

In four steps we burst forth from the dark and dank cavern into daylight and a brisk wind. The day was heavily overcast with fat gray clouds, but the light was still shocking. Soldier’s Boy halted, dazzled, and only when both Olikea and Likari tugged hard at my hands before stopping did I realize the momentum we had had.

When Soldier’s Boy glanced back, I could see the opening of the cavern we had left as a tall crack in a jagged rock face. We stood on a beaten pathway on a hillside covered in tall, yellowed grass and fading gorse. Ahead of us, the trail wended its way down into a sheltered valley thick with evergreens. In half a dozen places, plumes of smoke drifted up past the treetops, only to be quickly swept away by the fresh breeze. A swift-flowing river from the mountains behind us divided the valley; even at this distance, I could hear the river’s voice, deep and greedy. It ran a steep course downhill, and stones moved with it, grinding and grumbling. Its waters were white with rock dust. It cut through the valley like a cleaver. In the distance, the sun was coming up over a sparkling bay at the river’s mouth. I had never seen such a dazzling vista. “Is that the ocean?” Soldier’s Boy asked dazedly. I shared his question, wondering if I were beholding the final destination of the King’s Road.