“They say that, do they?” I muttered, and instantly wondered if it were true. It would explain so much. I suddenly felt disheartened, and was surprised at how bolstered I had felt at the idea that Olikea was genuinely fond of me. Only a few days ago I had thought I should tell her that I could never truly love her. To hear that she did not love me, either, should not have wounded me. But it did. I felt my pride bleeding.
“There. See how the light breaks through the wounds in the world’s roof, even from the moon. During the day, it is hard for me to come here. My eyes hurt and I grow dizzy. Now, those of us who can hear the elders can only come by night to listen to them. It is hard. We know that even if the Gernians are turned back, it will be generations before the light is banished from this part of the forest and the People can walk freely here again.”
Ahead of us, the trees had become pillars of darkness against faint moonlight. We were coming close to where the King’s Road ended. The whispering had grown louder.
“See this?” Jodoli asked me, and with his toe, he scuffed at a flagged surveyor’s stake driven into the earth. “This is their sign that they mean to cut deeper into the forest. Once before they came into the forest and drove many of these into the earth, in a line that went far up into the mountains. We pulled them all up. But this one, new planted, means that they intend to try again.”
“Yes. It does.” I raised my voice to make myself heard above the muttering of a hundred angry voices. Then my own words sounded strangely loud to me. I looked around in the darkness. “Take me to the elders you spoke of. Let me talk to them, and hear from them how they think this can be resolved.”
“They think there are only two ways. The Gernians must go away. Or the Gernians must die.”
A chill went up my back at his words, but I replied, “Let me speak to them. There must be another way. I know my people well. They will not leave.”
“Then they will die. I take no joy in telling you that,” Jodoli replied. “This way,” he added before I could speak again and led me forward to the very edge of the cut. Jodoli stopped when he was still in the shelter of the woods, but I walked forward as if pulled by a magnet. I stepped out of the forest onto the torn bare earth and looked around me in awe. Behind me, I heard Jodoli’s frantic call of, “Come back! Come back!” I ignored it. I had to see for myself what my king’s ambition had done.
The huge fallen trees were not completely gone, but the pieces that had blocked the progress of the road had been cut to pieces and hauled away. The ground under my feet was yellow with fragrant fresh sawdust that had been churned and mixed with forest soil by the passage of heavy hooves. The stumps had been removed by a combination of digging, chopping, and burning. Nothing remained of them save a sunken spot in the earth. With my back to the forest, the road stretched out before me, a wide avenue of light. I could see that the repairs to the eroded parts of the road had proceeded well. When the inspection team arrived in a few days, they would be shown a stretch of well-constructed road with fresh progress into the forest. Colonel Haren would be proud.
Then I turned my back on the road and looked into the forest. Squarely in the path of the road stood another immense tree. The preliminary bite of the ax showed pale against the dark bark. As yet, it was a small chip out of such a great trunk, less than a mosquito bite on a man’s ankle. And yet that bit of whiteness caught the moonlight and winked back at me, as if sharing an evil joke. Jodoli leaned up against the tree, and the uneven shadows made his dappled body difficult to distinguish from the mottled bark. He had pillowed one cheek against the tree and his eyes were closed, his brow furrowed. Slowly I left the Gernian world of the road and walked back into the Specks’ forest.
“Jodoli,” I said to him when I stood by him, but he appeared lost in thought. Or asleep. I touched his shoulder.
The whispers rose to a roar and then thinned out to a single voice, a man’s voice raised in anguish and outrage: “—and the fear no longer prevails against them. They drug their senses and do not feel it. I have watched them, pale little grubs, burrowing and chewing away at the others. They are gone. Tomorrow I shall begin to die. It will take days for them to kill me. This I know from what happened before. It is too late, perhaps, for you to save me. So I do not ask this for myself, but for those who stand in ranks behind me. Discouragement has not worked. Not even the purification of the fever has awakened them. They dismiss the vision sent to them; they ignore the messengers sent back to them. Only death will stop them.”
“What of the plain-skin Great One? He is large with magic. Is not this what he was supposed to do, to turn back the Gernians?”
