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“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.Advertisement

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.

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“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.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE SUMMONING

By dawn, I think we were resigned to what should have been obvious from the start. We were bound together. One might dominate over the other for a time, but neither of us would ever willingly surrender to the other. Our loyalties conflicted, but at least Soldier’s Boy could take comfort in the fact that I did not wish to see the end of his people and their way of life.

I had no such consolation to fall back on. In this, I felt he was more my father’s son than I was. He saw his plan as a military necessity, the lone remaining solution to driving the intruders away from the ancestral trees. My sole weapon to hold him back was that without me, he could not reach Lisana. That seemed a feeble weapon to me, but it was all I had. So we sat together, two men confined to one body, each possessing an ability the other desperately wanted.

He dared to try to bribe me. “Don’t fight me. All I ask is that you don’t try to fight me. And in return, I will see that when we negotiate the peace, it will be the Burvelle family who is named as being in charge of trade with the Specks. Eh? Think on that. It will be a rich monopoly for the family.” pqdm.com