by Robin Hobb
“The winter will hold them at bay!” Dasie asserted. “That is why I chose to act now. The cold and the snows will immobilize them. We have time, not much time, but some. Time to rally ourselves, time to take up arms and move against them in a way they will understand. How many years have our people danced, and danced in vain? The intruders haven’t left. And they won’t, Kinrove, not while all we do is dance fear and discouragement at them. The fear and discouragement, they have lived with and battled. It has not made them leave. They will leave only when they know that if they stay, they will die. That is the dance they will understand. ”
Kinrove’s voice thickened, and I was surprised to see the glitter of tears in his eyes. “You have killed us all, Dasie. You do not know the Jhernians. They are like stinging ants or angry wasps. You can kill one or you can kill a dozen. You can kill a hundred. But so long as the hive exists, more will come. And they will be angry. I sent them a magic they did not understand, and for years that held them back. If you go to kill them with weapons, yes, that will be a war they will understand. And it is a war they are very, very good at waging. ”
Dasie scarcely seemed to be paying attention to him. I think the demands of her body had temporarily overwhelmed her. I could not even imagine how much magic she had burned to accomplish this. I do know that Soldier’s Boy watched her with avid envy as she walked over to the food tables. She took food from the dishes there and ate, without discrimination or grace, but with only the drive to replenish herself. It reminded me of a horse drinking after a long day’s ride. She made a brusque gesture at one of her feeders, and he quickly filled a pipe for her. He held it for her, and from time to time she took it from him, pulling long draws from the pipe in between mouthfuls of food. For a time, an odd silence held in the pavilion. From outside the pavilion, we could hear chaotic voices, shouted commands, and occasional cries of joy.
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Soldier’s Boy kept as still as a small animal hiding in deep grass. He glanced over at Jodoli. Sweat was running down the sides of his face and he looked ill. His eyes were glassy and his mouth hung open. He looked back at Kinrove, who was weeping openly now.
Dasie turned away from the table at last. She looked around at us all. In her two hands, she held a round of dark brown bread. “What should I do with you?” she asked Kinrove. “I do not wish to kill you. I think that if you will agree to leave off this mad dance, you could still be of great use to your kin-clan. And even more use to me, if you would help me. But I don’t know if I can trust you. I thought of making you swallow a little pellet of iron, or shooting some into your body. I’ve heard that can destroy a Great One’s magic completely. I don’t wish to do that to you. Or to Jodoli. But I have to be sure that neither of you are plotting against me behind my back. If you will not help me, I at least need to know that you will not hinder me. ”
“You have destroyed my dance. ” Kinrove drew a deep, shuddering breath. “My dance is broken. I will need whatever magic I can rebuild to save my own kin-clan. You have condemned the People. I will not have the power to save them. But I will do what I can to keep at least my kin-clan safe. ” He struggled for another breath. Almost reflexively, he glanced toward his feeder, Galea. She stood, hands clasped before her, her face tensed in an agony of fear for him. He took another breath. “Dasie, I will not hinder you,” he said quietly. “I will not permit any of my kin-clan to hinder you. By the magic, I swear this. ”
“Put your swords away,” she said quietly to the men who surrounded him, and they sheathed their weapons. She glanced at Galea. “You may tend to your Great One,” she told her, and the woman snatched a bowl of food from the table and raced to his side. Other feeders followed her, surrounding Kinrove, wiping the sweat from his brow with cool, damp cloths, offering water, wine, and delicacies, and all the while exclaiming with dismay at how his magic had been drained by the iron.
Dasie had turned her attention to Jodoli. “And you?” she asked him severely. “Will you try to stop me from what I must do?”
Jodoli was not without his pride nor did he lack intelligence. His head had sunk forward onto his chest. Sweat ran freely down the sides of his face and his robe was drenched with it. He rolled his head back on his shoulders and looked up at her as she stood over him. His eyes were horribly bloodshot. “Can you believe,” he wheezed out, “anything a man says when a sword is at his chest?”
She stared at him. Then she made a curt gesture, and her warrior moved the tip of his blade away from Jodoli’s chest. Jodoli’s breathing eased but he still said nothing to her.
Dasie did not have the stomach for it. She gestured angrily at the feeders and servers who huddled still along the wall. “Come to him! Bring him water and food. ” Then she turned back to Jodoli. “I ask you, by the magic, to tell me the truth; do you intend to hinder me in any way?”
“What could I do to stop you?” he demanded of her. “I have seen far more of the Jhernians than you have. Like Kinrove, I think what you do is madness. You will stir up the hornets’ nest and all of us will be stung. I think I will do what Kinrove does; I will do all I can to protect my own kin-clan, and hope that the rest of the People can care for themselves. ”
Despite being at her mercy, he spoke to her as if she were a small, selfish child. His disdain was not lost on her. “When I have driven the intruders away,” she said to him through gritted teeth, “then I will send for you. And you will come to me and thank me and beg me to forgive you for how wrong you were. I think you may be surprised, when I put out the call for warriors ready to defend our lands, how many of your folk will answer that call. Many of us are sick and weary with waiting and waiting and waiting for someone to drive them away. ”
I thought he would be wise and keep silent. Firada was at his side now. She held a cup to his lips and Soldier’s Boy watched enviously as he drank deeply. When he lifted his face from the cup, he drew three deep breaths. Dasie had started to turn away when he spoke to her. “They have always come to our lands, Dasie. The intruders are not newcomers here. Go to the elders if you do not believe me. Dream-walk to the oldest of your kin-clan and ask. Always they came, at high summer, to trade with us. In times past, before they built their Gettys Fort, we let them come into the mountains and some even journeyed as far as the Trading Place. How else do you think they came to know of it? It was only when they tried to build their road through our Vale of Ancestors that we had to stop them. If you kill the intruders, even if you kill every one of them at Gettys Fort, do you truly believe no more will come? Can you be so childish, so simple as to believe that killing them will drive them away forever?”
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Anger froze her face into a grimace. She leaned forward to glare down at him. “I will kill as many as I can kill. And if more come, then I will fight them, and I will kill them. And if others come behind them, then I will kill those others. How many can there be? Eventually, they will stop coming. Or I will have killed them all. ” She lifted her gaze from Jodoli and turned it on me. “It isn’t that hard to kill them. I’ll show you. I’ll start with this one. ”
She stalked toward me like a heavy-bodied cat intent on prey. The iron sword pointed at my chest still held Soldier’s Boy immobile, not with its threat so much as by virtue of the metal. Sweat ran in trickles down my back and side. He felt light-headed, dizzy, and nauseous, and yet Soldier’s Boy focused on marshaling his magic against the iron. His reserves were dwindling dangerously. Both Olikea and Likari had ventured out from the line of servers and feeders still herded up against the wall. Olikea looked both angry and frightened. As Dasie strode toward me, Likari broke away from his mother with a shout and ran to stand between the advancing mage and me. He looked at the iron sword, sensing the terrible toll it was taking on me, and then spun back to face the oncoming woman, panting with terror.
She scarcely spared him a glance. “Out of my way, boy. ”
“No. Stop! He
is our Great One! I am his feeder. I cannot allow you to kill him. You will have to kill me first!”
He didn’t speak it as a threat, but merely as a statement of what all knew to be true. Any feeder would lay down his life to protect his Great One.
She stopped. “Step away from him, lad. He has deceived you. He is not of the People and he doesn’t deserve your loyalty, let alone your death. ”
“You are wrong. ” Soldier’s Boy panted out the words.
“Be silent!”
He ignored her command. “Kill me, and you go against the very magic that made you what you are. ” He did not speak the words smoothly, but gasped them out, a few at a time. I could taste blood at the back of his throat. He could not resist the iron much longer. “You throw aside a tool, a weapon, crafted by the magic. If you kill me and then go to do battle with the intruders, you will lead your warriors to slaughter. They will fall, by the dozens, by the hundreds. The intruders will be angered against you, and they will bring thousands against you. Without Kinrove’s dance to hold them back, they will flood up like water rising from an angry river and fill your forest with death. ”
“Be silent!”
“You threaten us with iron! Where did you learn that? Do you think they will not shoot iron into your body and destroy your magic? Do you think that the People will survive when the Plainsfolk did not? The intruders defeated the Plainspeople with iron and with bullets, and if you wage war in the same way they did, then you will meet the same fate. ”
Her fury built with every word he gasped out. She swelled like an angry cat as she stood before us. She seemed to be groping for words or perhaps for the surge of will to murder him.
He spoke quietly, a whisper now, fading with his strength. “But I know how to drive the intruders back. That’s why the magic made me. It takes a stag to know how to defeat another stag in a battle of clashing antlers. No matter how brave or strong, a seal cannot fight that way. ” He drew a breath and swallowed with effort. “I know how to turn their own ways against them. Kinrove’s dance cannot stop them. ” He paused, drew breath. “You cannot kill enough of them to stop them. ” He panted, drew a deep breath. The world was black around the edges. “But I know how. Don’t kill the only Great One who knows—” His words spiraled away and his head wobbled on his neck. Blackness closed in around us. I could not see, and the sounds I heard came from far away. My hands and feet tingled and were gone. Soldier’s Boy was unconscious, and I was cut adrift from my body’s information in a floating blackness.
That shrill keening was probably Likari. A woman was shouting, and possibly it was Olikea, but it might have been Dasie ordering Soldier’s Boy to tell whatever secret he knew. I could still feel the iron; it was dangerously close to us. I wanted to flee this body, go to Lisana for help, dream-walk to Epiny, do something, but both his magic and his physical strength were so depleted that I was trapped there. Trapped and aware, while he was blissfully unconscious of the imminent death that hovered. I waited, torn between anticipation and dread, for the iron blade to rush into my chest. I didn’t want death; but in the moments before he had collapsed, Soldier’s Boy had threatened me with the only thing that seemed worse right now: complete dishonor. He had offered to become a traitor for Dasie, to turn my knowledge of my own people against them.
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Time changes when one is deprived of one’s senses, but not one’s consciousness. I felt as if I spent years in that hellish suspension, torn between hoping he’d die and fearing he’d live and condemn me to be a traitor. Hours passed, or perhaps days. In a desperate bid for my honor, I tried to take my body back, but had no idea of how to do so. I could not feel my hands, my feet, could not open my eyes. I could not feel my heart beating or time my own breathing. A terrible thought came to me; perhaps he had died, but not taken me with him. Perhaps his part of my mind was gone and my body already stilled and starting to stiffen, and I’d been left behind in the unlife that wasn’t a death, either. If I’d had a mouth or lungs, I would have screamed. Instead, I did something that surprised me; I prayed.
Not to the good god, but to the god of death and the god of balances. I prayed to the god who had demanded of me either a death or a life. “Come and take me now!” I begged him. “Take this, death or life as it may be, and be satisfied. I give it to you freely. ”
There was no response, and in my boundless darkness, I wondered if I had just committed a blasphemy against the good god, and if this was what it meant to be godless.
How much time I passed in that state, I will never know. I do know that, before Soldier’s Boy awoke again, I sensed him there with me. He coalesced around me, and for one brief moment, I thought I’d be able to take him into myself and become whole again, on my terms. I was very still, afraid that if I roused him in any way, he would resist the process. Slowly I began to sense my body again. My head ached and whirled. I could see nothing and sound was just a formless roar around me, like the surf I had listened to earlier that day. My hands and feet tingled strangely. I felt my fingers twitch against the fabric of my robe, and that rasp of flesh against thread was, after my deprivation, the most heady sensation I’d ever felt. I pressed my hand against the weave, treasuring the contact, but in that moment, Soldier’s Boy became aware of me. By a means I could not sense, he wrested control away from me.
“You have no right!” I railed at him as we floated together as prisoners within the body. “I was born to this body and it belongs to me! You would use it to turn me into a traitor to my own people. How can you do that? I do not understand you. How can you be so dishonorable, so false?”
His response shocked me. “Do you think that I don’t recall my boyhood in the Midlands? Do you think I was not born into this body as surely as you were? You cannot think I came suddenly into being when Lisana made me hers? No. I was always a part of you. She peeled that part of me free of you, and gave me my own life, my own will, my own experiences, my own separate education. But she did not create me from nothing. Do you think I don’t recall Father and his ‘discipline’ and endless requirements? Locked from the instant I drew breath into being his ‘soldier son,’ separated from all else so that he might convince me it was the only thing I could be. How could anyone forget that? How do you manage to forget it? Why are you still his puppet, still the obedient little soldier that your people made you be? You say you do not understand me, because I look at what was done to me and resent it. I cannot understand you, because it seems all you long for is to return to that servitude. You would be the game piece of a king who has never seen your face, no matter what injustice or abomination you must commit in his name. ”
For a moment, I was speechless, shocked at the bitterness and anger in his voice. Stunned, too, that he could accuse me of longing to be a puppet and a tool of tyranny. A moment later I marshaled my own indignation. “What of you? How are you different? If Dasie takes you at your word, you will be killing people who only ever offered you kindness. How can Spink or Epiny deserve your anger? How can the prisoners deserve to be attacked by you and driven back west? What righteousness is there in that?”
“The Specks were here first! And their forest stood long before your fort. This land is theirs. The intruders must be driven out. I but side with the people who were here first. ”
“Then perhaps I should side with the Kidona. Did not they have the foothills before the Specks ever ventured down into them? Were not the Specks the ‘intruders’ then into the Kidona lands? How far back shall we go, Soldier’s Boy, to decide who is right here?”
“He’s waking up. Quick, water, but not too much!”
The voice was Olikea’s, right by my ear. I was suddenly aware that I was lying on my back, and my head was cradled in the softness of her lap. I could feel her warmth, and smell the good smell of her body. A moment later, my head was lifted and I felt liquid lap against my lips. Soldier’s Boy parted them, and moisture came into my mouth, and with
it, sweetness. My body became a single surge of hunger, of thirst. Mindless, Soldier’s Boy sucked at the liquid and a moment later recognized it as fruit juice. He drained the cup, gasped, and then forced a word from my lips. “More. ”
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“Slowly. Go slowly. ” Those words were to me. Then, “Refill the cup. Quickly!” That command was given to someone else, probably Likari. He’d opened my eyes, but shapes and colors seemed to whirl and blend rather than resolve themselves into sensible images. He closed them again. The cup came back, and with it my sense of smell. It was a thick apple juice, spiced and warmed, and this time he drank it more slowly. It helped but my whole body was still in distress. Things simply felt wrong inside me, far beyond the horrible hunger that chewed at me. I’d come as close to dying as a man could and still step back from the brink, I decided.
“Can he speak yet?” The voice that demanded an answer to that question belonged to Dasie.
“You nearly killed him. Can you expect him to speak so soon after such damage? Look at him! The skin hangs from the bones of his face. It will take me weeks to rebuild him to where he can eat with pleasure, let alone wield any power. ”
Soldier’s Boy coughed and then cleared his throat. It took all his will to drag in his breath, and something more than mere willpower to send it out as words. “I can speak. ” He opened his eyes again. Light and darkness swam and mingled, shadows formed and suddenly Dasie’s face was looming over his. He shut his eyes and turned away from her, sickened by the memory of iron.
“You said the magic made you for a reason. That because you have been one of the intruders, you know how to drive the intruders out. You said it was not by Kinrove’s dance, nor by my fighting a war as they fight them. But what else is there? Tell me, now, unless it was all just a trick to keep me from killing you. ”