I rose with the next dawn, famished, my mouth dry and sticky. My body stank with my own sweat. I crunched through my last two potatoes raw, for my hunger would not wait for me to cook them. I heated what water remained in my barrel, washed myself, and got dressed in my other clothes. My head no longer hurt.

I went down to the spring. There I found the shallow prints of bare feet at the water’s edge. So Olikea had ventured that far in trying to lure me back to her. A spike of desire pierced me. I longed for her warm willingness and the mindless pleasure she could wake in me with her body and her food.

No. Fervently and abruptly, I decided to end all my interaction with the Specks. I was not a Speck and I could not save them. This magic had been forced onto me. I didn’t like what it allowed me to do or what it did to me. I would be prey to it no longer. Let it punish me as Buel Hitch had said it would. I no longer cared. With equal vehemence, I rejected my own people. I no longer wished to have anything to do with any of them. Even the thought of Spink and Epiny could not lure me back to being a soldier and a Gernian. I would end my life here, I decided, in this role of gravedigger. I could not save either people from their own foolishness. The best I could do, the only thing I could do, was to bury them. So be it.

In that frame of mind, I went to my tool shed and began to dig a fresh grave. I knew there would soon be bodies aplenty to bury. I might as well be prepared. I dug it with professional competence, a good deep grave with straight sides and plenty of room to lower a coffin. As soon as it was finished, I drank more water and went right on to dig the next one.

The thought of going to town and reporting that someone had shot me and stolen Clove and my wagon came briefly to my mind. I pushed it away. I found I no longer cared for anything much except my gravedigging. I found that my only thought on the subject was to hope that Clove was well treated by whoever had him now. I went on digging. I tried not to recall how the magic had felt as it had rushed out of me. I didn’t know who had shot at me. Did that mean the magic could not target them with my anger? I feared what I had done, and then felt furious with myself for thinking about it. It wasn’t my fault, I angrily declared to myself. I hadn’t sought the magic, and I’d never wished for it. Those who had imposed it on me were to blame for all of this. Not I. I pushed the nose of my shovel deep into the turf and ripped out another shovelful of earth.

Neither Ebrooks nor Kesey came to the graveyard that day. I missed them, but I was glad they hadn’t come. I would have liked their casual companionship if I could have looked at them and not wondered how soon they would die. I wondered if plague was already prowling the streets of town, or if the people were still intoxicated both with Gettys tonic and the thought that the road was moving forward again. Even now, I was sure the heavy saws and axes were biting deep into the flesh of the ancestor trees.

That thought made me ill, and for a wavering moment I was outside my body, reaching up to distant sunlight as I felt the inexorable severing of my connection to the earth and all it had been to me. I felt both the breeze that shivered my leaves and the deep vibration of the blades gnawing through me. A love of life deeper than anything I had ever felt rang through me, coupled with the anguish that it would end so suddenly. I jerked my awareness away from the magic’s greedy clutches. I didn’t care, I told myself fiercely. It was only a tree, and a Speck tree at that! But even that denial showed me how deeply I’d changed my way of thinking. Sickened and shaken, I dragged my thoughts back to my work. I drove the shovel deep into the earth again.

I worked until there was no light left in the day and then returned to my cabin. There was little left in my pantry, but I made a meal off the last end of the bacon, a few vegetables from my garden, and some hearth bread. After my day’s work, it was less than satisfying, but I sternly told myself it was enough.

And then the long night stretched before me. I had nothing to read nor any way to occupy my mind. For a time I sat and stared out my window and tried to empty my mind. Despite my efforts, my thoughts returned to the looming plague, the felling of the ancestor trees, and my determination that henceforth I would be a part of neither people. After a time, I took down my soldier son journal and made the longest entry that I had written in some weeks. I poured my thoughts onto the paper, and when I had finished, I felt almost at peace. I waited a few moments for the ink to dry, and then leafed back through it. The entries I had made at the academy now seemed shallow and boyish, and the sketches I had made of my classmates were the scribbles of a child. As I paged through the leaves of the books, the entries grew longer, and the thoughts more considered. I’d been lax in my duty to be a naturalist as well as a soldier. There were few sketches, and other than an attempt at showing how the specks were placed on Olikea’s hands, they were all of plants I’d seen. The soldier son journals I’d seen at my uncle’s house had been terse accounts of battles and journeys over difficult terrain. In contrast, mine looked like a schoolgirl’s diary. I closed it.

“Nevare.”

Olikea’s call was a whisper on the night wind. I tried to pretend I’d imagined it. But it came again and with more urgency, like a doe’s mating call.

“Nevare.”

Against my will, I felt stirred. I knew exactly where she would await me, in the trees just behind the spring. I gritted my teeth. She would have a basket of food with her, I knew. My will began to crumble. What would it matter if I went to her one last time? Didn’t I at least owe her an explanation? After all, it was not her fault that I was caught so harshly between our peoples. Hurting her served no useful purpose; in a way, it was giving way to the magic, to let it force me to be cruel to her.

I had almost convinced myself; indeed, I was rising to go to her when I heard a sound that stood the hair up on the back of my neck. Hoofbeats. A horse was coming up the road to the cemetery at a canter. In a rush of wariness, I was sure it was someone coming to kill me. My attackers would know I had lived because no one had found my body by the road. They’d want to be sure I was dead before I could step forward to accuse them. I suddenly saw how stupid I’d been not to go to town to report the assault and the theft. If they killed me now, there would be no one to accuse them. They’d go free and I’d be dead.

I pulled my window shutter closed and fastened it. In two strides, I reached my door and slammed the bar into place. I took my disreputable weapon down from its hooks and checked the charges I’d prepared for it days ago. I readied a load and waited silently, the muzzle pointed at the door. Ears straining, I heard someone ride up to my door and then dismount. An instant later, someone pounded on the door. I kept silent. I didn’t want to kill anyone unless I had to.

“Nevare? Are you in there? In the good god’s name, open up! Nevare?” Spink rattled the door loudly and then gave it a good kick. For a moment longer, I sat still and silent. “Please, Nevare, be there!” he cried out, and there was such despair in his voice that I relented.

“A moment,” I called, and set my gun aside and unbarred the door. The moment I did, Spink came pushing into my cabin. He seized my forearm and exclaimed, “Are you all right, then?”

“As you see,” I told him, almost calmly.

He slapped his hand to his chest and breathed out heavily. I thought he was being dramatic, but when he straightened up, his face was pale save for two bright spots on his cheeks. “I thought you were dead. We all thought you were dead.” He tried to catch his breath and failed. “I left Epiny caught between hysterics at the thought that you were dead and fury that you had been so close and alive all this time and I never told her. Nevare, I am in such trouble at home right now because of you that I could kill you, except that I am so glad to find you alive.”