“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.”
