“Just like that? Just left?”

“Yes.” She sat down in Dasie’s empty chair. Her eyes had gone distant, and despite the warmth of the fire, her skin stood up in bumps on her arms. She rubbed at herself as if she were cold. “It was a summer night when the summoning came. It was—oh. I think it was eight years ago. My family was gathered around the fire. Our mother had been singing us a story-song, one that both Firada and I loved to hear, about a silly girl shaking a nut tree. In the middle of the song, the summoning came. We all felt it. It was like a chill up my back, or the crawling when your skin wishes you to scratch it, or perhaps thirst. One of those feelings that comes from the body, not the mind. My mother just stood up and began to dance. Then she danced away, down the path into the night. We watched her, and then I felt it coming over me. And I was just a little girl, and all I could do was stay near my father, saying, ‘No, no, I don’t want to dance, I won’t go.’ It took all I had within me to say I would not go. That summoning lasted a full night. It was like watching the wind tear leaves from a tree. The magic blew through our kin-clan, and some held tight, but others were torn away from it. And off they went. We called after them, begging them to come back, but none of them did. A little boy, no more than two, toddled after his mother, screaming. She didn’t even look back. I don’t think she heard him, or remembered that he existed.”

“And did you, did you ever see your mother again?” I knew he didn’t want to ask the question, and knew also that he felt he must.

Olikea snorted. “What good would it do?” She leaned toward the fire and pushed in a piece of firewood that was on the edge. Then she spoke quietly, as if confessing something foolish she had done. “I did see her, once.

“Wherever Kinrove goes, his dancers go with him, always dancing. It was during the autumn moving time, when all of us use the hidden way to come back to the ocean side of the mountains. Kinrove’s folk passed our kin-clan, and with them went his dancers. All were forced to give way to him. He called himself the Greatest of the Great, and before Dasie threatened him with iron, he could do as he wished. So all stepped aside for his kin-clan and his dancers to pass. And I sat and I watched, and I saw my mother. It was terrible. She danced fear, and it was all over her, like a stink clinging to a rotten fish. Her hair hung in mats and her body had gone to bones, but she still danced. Not for much longer, I do not believe, but that afternoon at least, she still danced. She danced past Firada and me, and never once let her eyes linger on us. She did not know us or remember us. She had become her dancing. She was like the road slaves that the intruders use to build their road, but at least they know they are slaves. She did not have even that.”

I felt Soldier’s Boy try to dismiss it, but there, at least, some of my sensibilities prevailed. He said quietly, “I am sad to know that you lost your mother that way.”

“It was hard,” Olikea admitted with a sigh. “Firada and I were both young still, with much to learn about being women of the People. The rest of our kin-clan took care of us; a child is always welcome at anyone’s hearth. But it was not the same. I listened to other mothers teach their daughters, telling stories of when they themselves were young. Firada and I lost all those stories when our mother danced away.” She paused. “I used to hate Kinrove. I did not think that anyone, not even a Great One, should have so much power over us. That day when Dasie held a sword to him and forced him to free the dancers, I hated her. Not because she did it, but because she did it too late for my mother and me.”

Did Soldier’s Boy wonder the same thing that I did? Why, if they had hated a Great One like Kinrove, had both Firada and Olikea sought out such men to become their feeders? She seemed to hear my unvoiced question.

“When I took you in and began to tend you, I thought that I would create a Great One of my own, one far greater than Kinrove. One greater than Jodoli, for Firada, I saw, did not have the same ambition that I did. I thought you would be the one to surpass Kinrove and become the Greatest of the Great. I believed you would find a way to drive the intruders away forever, and end Kinrove’s dance.” She hesitated, and then said quietly, “Before I met you I even dreamed it. I thought the magic sent me that dream, and when I first sought you out, I believed it was because the magic told me to do so.”

She left the chair and came to sink down to sit on a cushion near Soldier’s Boy’s chair. She leaned her head against my thigh. Soldier’s Boy stroked her hair. I wondered what had passed between them in the months that I had been gone. Olikea seemed milder and more tractable.

“What do you believe now?” he asked her gently.

She sighed. “I still believe the magic sent me to you. But I have come to see it differently. I believe that I am caught in the magic just as you are. It cares nothing for my ambitions. I will tend and serve you and you will tend and serve the magic.”

“I have said that Kinrove should send a summoning.”

“I heard you say it.”

“It will fall on our own kin-clan.”

“I know that also.”

He didn’t ask her what she thought of that or felt about it. That would have been a Gernian question. He waited for what she might decide to tell him. She sighed heavily. “I like what your power has brought me. I fear the summoning. But I know it has never taken a feeder, so I am safe. I do not want to see any of our kin-clan summoned. I do not like that you call for it. But it was the year for our kin-clan to endure the summoning. I think that, even if you had never existed, it would have come to this. So I do not blame you for it. But I feel a secret shame. I wonder if I am able to face the summoning because the magic has given me so much through you that I no longer care what it might take from someone else.”

I am not certain what Soldier’s Boy felt about her thoughts, but I had a definite twinge of uneasiness as I wondered what my presence here had done. I suddenly saw my coming as the trigger for a long chain of events, with distant results that I’d never be able to imagine, let alone compute. Was that what magic was? I wondered. Something that happened by such a convoluted chain of events that no human could have predicted it from the initial event? Was that the force that we called “magic”? The question twisted in my mind. Strike a steel against flint, and the first time a spark jumps, it seems like magic. But when the spark jumps every time, we add it to the list of things we can force the world to do. It became our science, our technology. A spark put to gunpowder would explode it. A lever could always levitate more than I could lift. But magic, I thought slowly, magic worked only when it suited magic to work. Like a badly trained dog or a strong-willed horse, it obeyed only when it wished to. Perhaps it rewarded only those who obeyed it. For some reason, that idea frightened me.

A stronger question rose in me. I wanted to push it at Soldier’s Boy but refrained. If he knew I was aware and stirring again, I suspected he would box me in once more. At the mere thought of that, cowardice overwhelmed me. I kept my question to myself. Had Lisana had a clear image of what would happen when she claimed me for the magic? Had the magic taken me and given me to her to train? Or had she taken me, thinking she could train me for the magic? I suddenly wanted a clear answer to that question. My mind whirled with questions. What had first put me in the path of the magic? Dewara. But my father would never have known Dewara if he had not shot him with an iron ball and destroyed his magic. Had that event also been the will of the Specks’ magic? Was I merely a link in a chain of events so intricate that no one recalled the beginning of it or foresaw the end? If that was true, where had it actually begun? Would it ever end?