“What will you do?” she asked him in a voice full of dread.

He shifted away from her. Some part of him was shamed. “Whatever I must,” he replied in a determined voice.

“Tell me,” she demanded.

“You will not like it.”

“You do not like it! I can feel that. But you will do it. And if you can do it, then you can tell me what it is you plan to do.”

Now he sat up, pulling his body away from hers. I suddenly knew that was a fair measure of how distasteful he found the task he had planned. He could not speak of it while cradling the body of the woman he loved. “I will attack them, just as they have attacked so many others.”

“Without warning?”

“They have had years of warning. They have not heeded it. Besides, my force is not so great that I can afford to give them warning. Alarmed, they could stand against us, perhaps even best us. So, yes, we will attack them without warning.”

“Where?” she demanded. She was determined to hear the worst of it. “Will you attack them while they are working on their road? Will you attack the slaves, poor creatures with no weapons and scarcely a thread to their backs?”

He turned away from her and looked across the valley. “No,” he said, and all life was gone from his voice. It held only death. “We will attack the town and the fort. At night. When they are sleeping in their beds.” He turned back to her before she could ask her next question. “All of them. Any of them we can kill. I do not have a large enough force that I can begin by being merciful.”

A very long silence passed. “And when will you do this?” she asked at last.

“As soon as we are ready,” he replied coldly. “I hope that will be before the end of winter. Dark and cold can be our allies.”

“She will still be heavy with child. Or perhaps recovering from birth, with a newborn at her breast.”

Soldier’s Boy grew so still at her words that his stillness held me as well. Slowly, slowly it came to me that Lisana spoke of Epiny. I tried to reckon the time backward and could not. Was she a mother already?

Soldier’s Boy answered a question that Lisana had not asked. “I cannot care about such things. He did not care about such things among my people, when he had the upper hand.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Look at what he did to you!” Soldier’s Boy exclaimed with long-banked anger.

“He didn’t kill me,” she pointed out quietly.

“He nearly did.”

“But he didn’t. And he tried to stop the cutting of the ancestor trees.”

“He was feeble at it.”

“But he tried.”

“That isn’t enough.”

“And he brings you to me now, when you could not come by yourself.”

“What?”

She cocked her head at him. “You did not know this? You do not feel him, holding you here? I thought you had made your truce with each other. But for Nevare reaching toward me, we could not touch now.”

“I—he is here? He spies on us! He spies on my plans!”

He made a swipe at my presence, and for an instant, all was silence and blackness.

“No!” I cried out voicelessly and fought back. I fought back with a savagery far beyond any physical confrontation I had ever been in. It is impossible to convey how much I abhorred the idea of being boxed once more. “I would rather be dead. I would rather not exist. I would rather we both ceased to exist!” I clung to his awareness, refusing to let him shed me. He tried to pull his consciousness free of me. I responded by turning abruptly away from Lisana and sealing him off from her. Suddenly, he was sitting up in his bed, staring wildly into darkness, bereft of her.

“No!” he shouted in his turn, rousing feeders. Beside him, Olikea sat up in alarm. “Nevare? What is it? Are you ill?”

“No. Leave me alone! All of you! Leave me alone!” Olikea’s gentle touch was the last thing he wanted, and he could not bear the concerned scrutiny of the feeders who had rushed to his side.

“Shall I light lamps?”

“Is he hungry?”

“Does he have a fever?”

“A nightmare. Perhaps it was just a nightmare?”

I suddenly glimpsed just how little privacy was left to him in his wonderful life as a Great Man. Intruding hands touched his face and neck, seeking for signs of fever or chill. Lamps were already being lit. I took advantage of their distracting him and made more secure my grip on his awareness. “You cannot banish me,” I told him. “I will not let you. And while you fight me and try to box me, I promise you, I will not let you see Lisana at all. I will keep her from you. This was my body and I will not be pushed out of it. You and I will come to terms now.”

“Leave me alone!” he bellowed again, and I was not sure if he spoke to his clustering feeders or to me. They fell back from him in dismay. Olikea seemed affronted, but she turned her temper on the others.

“Get back from him. Leave him alone. All he did was to shout in his sleep. Let him go back to sleep and stop bothering him!” She literally slapped at hands until the confused and still-sleepy feeders moved away from him and back to their pallets. He was relieved until Olikea put comforting arms around him. “Let’s just go back to sleep,” she suggested.

Her warm embrace felt completely wrong. He shrugged free of it. “No. You sleep. I need to sit up and think for a time. Alone.” He swung his feet over the side of the bed. I was still firmly attached to his awareness and thus knew how out of character this was for a Great One. He rose from his bed and walked to the hearth. To the feeder there, he said brusquely but not unkindly, “Go to sleep. I will tend the fire for a time.”

The poor confused man rose, not sure if he had displeased the Great One somehow. Obediently, he retreated to an empty pallet at the far end of the room. Soldier’s Boy pushed his big chair closer to the hearth and then sat down in it. Olikea lay on her side in the bed, staring at him. He looked into the flames.

“What do you want?” He didn’t speak the words aloud, only to me.

“Not to be crushed.” That was only the barest tip of what I wanted, but we had to start there.

He scratched his head as if he could reach inside and tear me out. It felt foreign to me; my hair had grown long, longer than I’d ever worn it. “I want to see Lisana,” he countered.

“We might find an agreement there. But only if I am allowed to visit Epiny, too.”

“No. You would warn her of my plans.”

“Of course I would! Your plans are evil.”

“No more evil than the road,” he retorted.

“The road is evil,” I agreed, surprising myself. I think it shocked him. He was silent for a moment. “I tried to stop the road,” I pointed out to him.

“Perhaps. But you failed.”

“That doesn’t mean that slaughter is the only option left to you.”

“Tell me another one, then.”

“Talk. Negotiate.”

“You tried that already. Until there is a slaughter, no one will seriously negotiate with us.”

When I could not think of an immediate response, he pushed his advantage. “You know it’s true. It’s the only thing that will work.”

“There has to be another way.”

“Tell me what it is, and I’ll try it. Your feeble negotiations didn’t work. Kinrove’s dance held them at bay but it only buys us time. The magic hasn’t worked. What else am I to do, Nevare? Let the road come through? Let the ancestor trees fall, including Lisana’s? Let the Gernians destroy everything that we are? Would you like that? To see Olikea working as a whore, to see Likari a beggar addicted to tobacco?”

“No. That’s not what I want.”

He took a long, deep breath. “Well. At least there seems to be a few things we agree on.”

“And many that we do not.”

He did not respond to that. And when his silence stretched longer, I knew that he had no more idea of what would become of us than I did.

We spent the rest of that long night staring into the fire, looking for answers that were not there.