“What could I do to stop you?” he demanded of her. “I have seen far more of the Jhernians than you have. Like Kinrove, I think what you do is madness. You will stir up the hornets’ nest and all of us will be stung. I think I will do what Kinrove does; I will do all I can to protect my own kin-clan, and hope that the rest of the People can care for themselves.”

Despite being at her mercy, he spoke to her as if she were a small, selfish child. His disdain was not lost on her. “When I have driven the intruders away,” she said to him through gritted teeth, “then I will send for you. And you will come to me and thank me and beg me to forgive you for how wrong you were. I think you may be surprised, when I put out the call for warriors ready to defend our lands, how many of your folk will answer that call. Many of us are sick and weary with waiting and waiting and waiting for someone to drive them away.”

I thought he would be wise and keep silent. Firada was at his side now. She held a cup to his lips and Soldier’s Boy watched enviously as he drank deeply. When he lifted his face from the cup, he drew three deep breaths. Dasie had started to turn away when he spoke to her. “They have always come to our lands, Dasie. The intruders are not newcomers here. Go to the elders if you do not believe me. Dream-walk to the oldest of your kin-clan and ask. Always they came, at high summer, to trade with us. In times past, before they built their Gettys Fort, we let them come into the mountains and some even journeyed as far as the Trading Place. How else do you think they came to know of it? It was only when they tried to build their road through our Vale of Ancestors that we had to stop them. If you kill the intruders, even if you kill every one of them at Gettys Fort, do you truly believe no more will come? Can you be so childish, so simple as to believe that killing them will drive them away forever?”

Anger froze her face into a grimace. She leaned forward to glare down at him. “I will kill as many as I can kill. And if more come, then I will fight them, and I will kill them. And if others come behind them, then I will kill those others. How many can there be? Eventually, they will stop coming. Or I will have killed them all.” She lifted her gaze from Jodoli and turned it on me. “It isn’t that hard to kill them. I’ll show you. I’ll start with this one.”

She stalked toward me like a heavy-bodied cat intent on prey. The iron sword pointed at my chest still held Soldier’s Boy immobile, not with its threat so much as by virtue of the metal. Sweat ran in trickles down my back and side. He felt light-headed, dizzy, and nauseous, and yet Soldier’s Boy focused on marshaling his magic against the iron. His reserves were dwindling dangerously. Both Olikea and Likari had ventured out from the line of servers and feeders still herded up against the wall. Olikea looked both angry and frightened. As Dasie strode toward me, Likari broke away from his mother with a shout and ran to stand between the advancing mage and me. He looked at the iron sword, sensing the terrible toll it was taking on me, and then spun back to face the oncoming woman, panting with terror.

She scarcely spared him a glance. “Out of my way, boy.”

“No. Stop! He is our Great One! I am his feeder. I cannot allow you to kill him. You will have to kill me first!”

He didn’t speak it as a threat, but merely as a statement of what all knew to be true. Any feeder would lay down his life to protect his Great One.

She stopped. “Step away from him, lad. He has deceived you. He is not of the People and he doesn’t deserve your loyalty, let alone your death.”

“You are wrong.” Soldier’s Boy panted out the words.

“Be silent!”

He ignored her command. “Kill me, and you go against the very magic that made you what you are.” He did not speak the words smoothly, but gasped them out, a few at a time. I could taste blood at the back of his throat. He could not resist the iron much longer. “You throw aside a tool, a weapon, crafted by the magic. If you kill me and then go to do battle with the intruders, you will lead your warriors to slaughter. They will fall, by the dozens, by the hundreds. The intruders will be angered against you, and they will bring thousands against you. Without Kinrove’s dance to hold them back, they will flood up like water rising from an angry river and fill your forest with death.”

“Be silent!”

“You threaten us with iron! Where did you learn that? Do you think they will not shoot iron into your body and destroy your magic? Do you think that the People will survive when the Plainsfolk did not? The intruders defeated the Plainspeople with iron and with bullets, and if you wage war in the same way they did, then you will meet the same fate.”

Her fury built with every word he gasped out. She swelled like an angry cat as she stood before us. She seemed to be groping for words or perhaps for the surge of will to murder him.

He spoke quietly, a whisper now, fading with his strength. “But I know how to drive the intruders back. That’s why the magic made me. It takes a stag to know how to defeat another stag in a battle of clashing antlers. No matter how brave or strong, a seal cannot fight that way.” He drew a breath and swallowed with effort. “I know how to turn their own ways against them. Kinrove’s dance cannot stop them.” He paused, drew breath. “You cannot kill enough of them to stop them.” He panted, drew a deep breath. The world was black around the edges. “But I know how. Don’t kill the only Great One who knows—” His words spiraled away and his head wobbled on his neck. Blackness closed in around us. I could not see, and the sounds I heard came from far away. My hands and feet tingled and were gone. Soldier’s Boy was unconscious, and I was cut adrift from my body’s information in a floating blackness.

That shrill keening was probably Likari. A woman was shouting, and possibly it was Olikea, but it might have been Dasie ordering Soldier’s Boy to tell whatever secret he knew. I could still feel the iron; it was dangerously close to us. I wanted to flee this body, go to Lisana for help, dream-walk to Epiny, do something, but both his magic and his physical strength were so depleted that I was trapped there. Trapped and aware, while he was blissfully unconscious of the imminent death that hovered. I waited, torn between anticipation and dread, for the iron blade to rush into my chest. I didn’t want death; but in the moments before he had collapsed, Soldier’s Boy had threatened me with the only thing that seemed worse right now: complete dishonor. He had offered to become a traitor for Dasie, to turn my knowledge of my own people against them.

Time changes when one is deprived of one’s senses, but not one’s consciousness. I felt as if I spent years in that hellish suspension, torn between hoping he’d die and fearing he’d live and condemn me to be a traitor. Hours passed, or perhaps days. In a desperate bid for my honor, I tried to take my body back, but had no idea of how to do so. I could not feel my hands, my feet, could not open my eyes. I could not feel my heart beating or time my own breathing. A terrible thought came to me; perhaps he had died, but not taken me with him. Perhaps his part of my mind was gone and my body already stilled and starting to stiffen, and I’d been left behind in the unlife that wasn’t a death, either. If I’d had a mouth or lungs, I would have screamed. Instead, I did something that surprised me; I prayed.

Not to the good god, but to the god of death and the god of balances. I prayed to the god who had demanded of me either a death or a life. “Come and take me now!” I begged him. “Take this, death or life as it may be, and be satisfied. I give it to you freely.”

There was no response, and in my boundless darkness, I wondered if I had just committed a blasphemy against the good god, and if this was what it meant to be godless.