“It’s a story that the Speck tell to their children,” I said, and then wondered how I had come by such knowledge. “I think it’s to teach them that some tasks are so important, they cannot be ignored. Someone will do them.”

Amzil raised her eyebrows me. “And your telling it makes it all the stranger,” she said with even greater disapproval. A short time later, she sought her bed with the children, and I rolled myself in my blankets to sleep before the fire.

That night I dreamed of the Tree Woman’s forest. I walked alone down paths where once we had walked as a couple. It was autumn in the forest and the leaves on the deciduous trees were turning. I had never seen such a spectacle. In the area of the plains where I had grown up, there were groves of trees along the river or following the streambeds. In autumn, their leaves turned a soggy brown and hung on the branches until the frost and falls of snow took them down. Never before had I experienced walking in a forest where the leaves had gone yellow and gold and scarlet. When I lifted my eyes, the brilliance of their color against the bright blue autumn sky was shocking. The leaves had already begun to forsake the trees; there were drifts of them across the path, and as I waded through them they rustled around my feet. There was an incredible smell in the air, a rich odor of decomposing leaves and fresh rain and the promise of a sharp frost in the night to come. I felt alive, and in the strange clarity of that dream I felt that this life was larger and brighter and sharper-edged than in my waking world. I was going somewhere. I could not have said where, and yet I was hurrying to get there, eager to arrive. I went down a hillside through a forest of white-trunked birches with golden leaves fluttering in the autumn breeze. At the bottom, I came to a swampy place where high-bush cranberries dandled their translucent scarlet fruit below palm-sized leaves that had gone red with the frost. Willows grew there, and their long narrow leaves had gone a different shade of red. I cupped a scant handful of the fruit and tasted it. The berries burst in my mouth with the sweet of summer ending and the sharp tang of winter yet to come. I chewed the seeds as I walked on, deeper into her world.

Her world it was. I came to her at last, supine on the earth. My sword had bitten deep into her trunk, and she had fallen, just as a tree would have crashed to earth if most of the trunk had been severed. The stump of her body stood and her torso had fallen beside it, but that torso was still connected to the stump by a thick bend of bark. By that, she lived. She was somehow a great tree and she was an immense woman, with all the attributes of both. She had stretched her length out on the forest floor when she fell, a glorious statue toppled from its pedestal. Her torso and head melded with the fallen portion of the tree. The mass of her hair ranged from glossy curls around her face to flowing tresses that merged with the rough bark of the trunk beyond her head. Like a nursery log, a sapling was sprouting from her, a slender tree growing up from between her breasts. The felling of her tree had created a clearing in the forest canopy. Light spilled from above to warm the earth. A host of plant life had sprung up around her. I knelt beside her, knees cushioned by moss and leaves. I took her hand. “So I didn’t kill you. You didn’t die,” I said with gladness.

She smiled up at me. “I told you. Such as I do not die in that way. We go on.”

Cautiously, I set a hand to the smooth bark of the slender sapling. “This is you?” I asked her.

She put her hand over mine, closing my fingers around the growing trunk. “It is me.”

Wonder caught me. Life pulsed in the sapling. Skin to bark, I could feel her magic at work as she transferred her power into the new life springing up from her bosom. Even in that place, a shiver of awe ran over me.

She had shifted her gaze to speak to me. Now she looked up at the infinite blue sky above us. Her long hair coiled and looped around her head like a corona. “Soldier’s Boy, you know you have a task. It was given to you by the magic. I know what the task is. You are to save us. But only you know how you are to accomplish that. That was why the magic was given to you. Not so that you might amuse yourself, but because you are the one who would know what you must do to accomplish your task. With power comes responsibility. You understand this.” Her voice was gentle but her words were absolute.

“Of course I do,” I said readily, though until that moment, I do not think that I had.

“You must come to where the destruction is. See it for yourself. Then tell me how you will defeat it. It is my weakness that I hunger to know these things. When I walked in the world that you now tread, I was a curious woman. Even here, even now, that curiosity remains. I know the magic, I trust the magic, and still I want to know. Will not you tell me?”

“When I know for myself what it is that I must do to defeat the end of our world, then I will tell you. I promise you that.”

She relaxed more deeply into her mossy couch. Ferns had sprouted around her where she had fallen. The fallen leaves of autumn had drifted around her supine form, cushioning her curves with their gold. I cannot describe how glorious she was. When I looked on her, I saw her as a Speck would. She was not fleshy, but lush; her rounded belly, her voluptuous breasts, the softness of her face all spoke of a time of plenty, of fruition and harvest. “I hold you to your promise, Soldier’s Boy. Do not tarry. There are others, less patient than I, who think that a swifter solution must be reached. I have told them of you, in dreams and visions. Nonetheless, they will soon take steps of their own to rid our lands of the invaders. They say that the dance has failed. They say it is time to use the intruders’ own ways against them.”

A deep foreboding rose in me, tainting my dream. I smelled smoke, and the fallen leaves suddenly became sodden and black and rotting. I sank into them. All around me, the forest became a cemetery of snaggled stumps and bare, oozing earth. The tree woman sagged into a rotting corpse. Her lips, mottled with mold, tore as she spoke her last words to me. “The magic was not given to you to use for yourself. Be wary of that temptation. Tarry no longer, but come to us. Our need is great.”

And then she was gone, flesh and bones sinking into a swamp of rot that was not the healthy compost of a living forest but the stink of too many dead things left heaped in a pile. I tried to get away, but my feet and legs sank into the muck. I struggled wildly, wallowing deeper. It reached my thighs, and with infinite loathing I felt it close around my loins and lap against my belly. I tried to open my eyes, knowing that I dreamed, but no matter how I contorted my face, I could not waken myself. I gave a sudden wild cry of absolute despair.

I think my own shout awakened me. It was small comfort at first, for I was sprawled in mud and leaves and surrounded by ghostly stumps. Rain was falling all around me. I was wet, cold, and completely disoriented. How had I got here? The moon glided briefly from the shelter of the clouds and granted me a gray wash of light. I staggered to my feet and wrapped my arms around myself, shivering. I was barefoot, and my clothes were coated with mud and dead leaves. My hair, long grown out of a soldier’s cut, dangled wet on my brow and dripped into my eyes. When I pushed it back from my face, I smeared my forehead with muck from my wet, gritty hands. I cursed myself for an idiot for making it worse. I stumbled back through the storm and the treacherous stump field to Amzil’s door. It was closed tight, with the latch string pulled inside; I wondered if I’d shut it behind me when I went sleep walking, or if Amzil had wakened to a draft and closed it.

I wanted to pound on it and gain swift admission to the dry fireside. The thought of waking not only Amzil but also her children dissuaded me. Reluctantly, I sought the shed. I was glad we’d tightened up the roof. It was dry inside, and Clove’s huge body radiated warmth into the small space. In the darkness, I found the saddle blanket and made a rough bed for myself until dawn. Then I rose, cold and stiff. I took Clove out and hobbled him in deep grass near the river’s edge so he could graze. I went for a walk along the riverbank until I was sure that Amzil would be awake. Then I returned to her cottage.