by Robin Hobb
Save, perhaps, Lisana.
“Lisana. ” Soldier’s Boy spoke the name aloud, and I wondered if he were aware of my thoughts or if his had touched me. Now that I put my attention on him, I realized he was again pining like a schoolboy for her. Thoughts of her were what held him immobile in his bed and kept him from wanting to interact with the others. He simply wanted to be still and think of her. He thought that she alone could offer him the comfort and understanding he craved. To all others, he must stand firm as a Great One, even when he felt he had failed them in every way. Only with her could he be honest about his confusion and fear. I felt him reach for her then, a magical groping that went in a futile circle and came back to himself. He could not find her; could not touch her, sense her; could not dream-walk to her. That ability had stayed with me. “The magic gave you Lisana. And what did I get?” he asked bitterly.
“Apparently, the ability to kill people and feel absolutely nothing. Or to witness a death, such as Dasie’s, and be unmoved by it. ”
Something, I felt something there, something he hid before he responded to me. “Oh. So you will mourn Dasie, too, will you? She knew her risks. She had no love for us, and all but laughed when Likari was summoned to the dance. But I forget. You do not have the spine to hate your enemies. So do not let that stop you. Mourn her, and mourn the men who were glad to murder you when they had the chance to do so as a cowardly mob. Is there anyone you do not weep for, Nevare? Will you sigh over the rabbit that is simmering in the pot right now?” A pause and then, “Truly, you should have been your father’s priest son. Or better yet, his daughter, always wailing and snuffling her nose in a handkerchief. ”
“I sigh for Likari,” I said quietly and viciously. “Likari, whom you condemned to death by dancing. Dancing takes a bit longer than slitting a man’s throat, but I’m sure it works just as well in the long run. ”
He struck me then and I felt it. “I hate you. I hate that you were ever a part of me. ”
I set my will and endured his blow. I think it shocked him that I could. “The hatred is mutual,” I informed him coldly.
A sudden coldness flowed through him, a hatred so strong that it nearly froze me. “While you live in me I will never enjoy any part of my life. I see that now. Always you will be there, sniping and criticizing me. Always there will be a weak Gernian conscience whining at me. ” He paused and announced, “I will find a way to kill you. ”
“You can try,” I retorted, my anger masking my fear. “It seems to be what you always attempt. Kill anything that opposes you. Kill anyone who makes you think. So kill me if you can. I suspect that if you destroy me, you will destroy your last link with Lisana. And that, I think, would only be just. She is not like you, Soldier’s Boy. She has a heart. She should not have to associate with a conscienceless murderer like you. ”
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“No worse than you, Nevare Burvelle. Or will you deny that you tried to kill, not just me but also Lisana? You even believed you had succeeded. But you had not. And now it is my time. ”
I waited, expecting a blow or some final words from him. Instead, I received nothing. Some time passed. He stirred in his bed and instantly his feeders surrounded him. No Gernian cavalla officer, no matter how high his rank, would have allowed underlings to tend him as assiduously as Soldier’s Boy’s feeders did. They flocked around him, offering him food, drink, clothing to wear, and slipping shoes on his feet. They tended him as if he were the King of Gernia, and he accepted it as his due. I wondered that he could stand being cosseted so.
“Are you a man or a great doll?” I asked him snidely, but received no response. Often when he did not directly reply to me, I could sense his reaction to my barbs, but this time there was nothing. I realized I could not pick up any trace of what he was thinking. He ignored me absolutely as he resumed his morning routine. He washed, he ate, and Sempayli came in to report to him. The man had a low, soft voice. I had to strain to hear what he was saying. He seemed to be giving a solid military report of who had returned and in what condition and how the raid had unfolded for those not immediately under Soldier’s Boy’s commands. Soldier’s Boy took it all in, but I could sense nothing of his feelings let alone his responses. I felt as if my ears were packed full of wool.
Soldier’s Boy rose and followed his lieutenant out of the lodge. Some of his troops had assembled for his review. Close to four hundred warriors had followed him on his raid. He had lost nearly a third of them, and only fifty or so now awaited him. These were the men who had been most loyal to him and were now most disillusioned. A dozen or so bore injuries of varying severity. They looked at him and their eyes were full of confusion. I watched him try to rally their spirits. I wondered why he bothered. “You will not lead those troops into battle again,” I sneered at him, but as before, I felt no response to my jibe. It became harder and harder to hear the words addressed to Soldier’s Boy and near impossible to hear anything of what he said in response. He was cutting me off from him, I now knew. It was strange to realize that he had been allowing me to break in on his thoughts.
And now he was not. What did that bode for me?
As the day passed, I became more and more isolated from him. I could look out through his eyes, and hear, in a muffled way, what he heard and even what he responded. I was aware of what he did with his body, how he ate and drank, what he did, but he had separated me from himself. My sense of taste and smell faded, just as my hearing had. Even touch seemed muted and distant. It was not the absolute emptiness that I’d once been marooned in, but an even stranger place where what I thought had no impact on my life at all.
My life. I wondered if I could even call it that anymore. It was more like being trapped inside the body of a marionette, and unable to anticipate what string would next be pulled. With every passing day, the world outside his body became less accessible to me. Daily he spoke to people—Sempayli, his warriors, his feeders, and Olikea. I heard his words and could make out their responses, but sensed nothing of what he felt. My emotions were so often at odds with his. I was truly a man living in a stranger’s body. Where I would have wished to comfort Olikea when she silently wept at night, he made no move toward her. When I thought he should have rebuked a member of his household or praised one of his warriors, he just as often did something entirely different. My disconnection from his thoughts became a sort of madness for me, excruciating in a very different way from my time in the emptiness. It was like reading a book in which the words and sentences almost made sense, but not quite. I could not predict what he would do next.
In the times when he slept and I did not, I thought often of Gettys and the raid. I tried not to imagine what must have followed; the warehouses of food had been put to the torch, as had many of the dwelling places. I tried not to think of families without adequate food or shelter in the deep cold of winter. Sometimes I thought about Spink and wondered if he had ignored my warning, or if he had reacted to it in a way I didn’t understand. Obviously, he’d been outside the walls of the fort that night. Had he heeded my warning and removed his family from the fort? I tried to imagine where I would have hidden Epiny and Amzil and the children if I knew a Speck attack was imminent. I was actually pleased when I could not decide; a secret a man does not know is one he cannot betray.
The remaining days of winter trickled by. Soldier’s Boy regained his girth. Olikea remained a cipher to me, her movements listless and her face nearly expressionless. She still went about the tasks of being his feeder, but I saw little of her old spirit. She did not speak of Likari; had she given up all hope of recovering him? She seemed indifferent to everything in life; even when she accommodated Soldier’s Boy’s need for sex, she seemed uninterested in her own pleasure. I wondered what emotions and thoughts he had at such times, but those, too, were hidden from me. She was neither cruel nor contemptuous toward him. It seemed as if every intense emotion had vanished from her, leaving a woman gray as the overc
ast sky.
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Soldier’s Boy’s status with the People had dwindled, but he remained a Great One. His feeders did not desert him: that would have been unthinkable for a Speck. It did seem to me that they had to work harder to provide for him. The kin-clan had turned the sunshine of their attention back onto Jodoli, and he was the one who benefited from their hunting and gathering. There was no want in Soldier’s Boy’s lodge, but there was not the sumptuous plenty of days past. If he noticed it, he gave no sign of it to any of his feeders.
For a time, his warriors continued to seek him out. They gathered outside his lodge to smoke and talk, and then go off to hunt and fish together. I could not decide if habit brought them, or if they somehow hoped that something more would come of their failed effort. Each morning, he went out to greet them but every day fewer of them came. He had nothing to offer them. His promises of victory had been empty. The intruders remained at Gettys, the ancestor trees were still in danger, and Kinrove’s dancers were still prisoners of the magic. None of the rewards he had offered them in exchange for all their hard work had been fulfilled. After a time, they no longer bothered to wait for him, but met up with their comrades and dispersed to the day’s hunting and gathering. No one spoke any more of driving the Gernians away by force of arms. His army was no more.
I made efforts to be neither idle nor passive. Any number of times, I tried to see if I could slip away from him to dream-walk. I never managed to. He was rebuilding his cache of magic, and he guarded it so jealously that I could find no way to tap into it and siphon off what I needed for that magic. I constantly watched for some vulnerability, but as day after day trickled away, my hopes receded. I felt I was an animal trapped and forgotten in a cage that grew ever smaller. Soldier’s Boy often sat and stared into the hearth fire, brooding. I wondered if he planned a return to power or merely dwelt on his failure and frustration. To me, Soldier’s Boy seemed like a man without a purpose.
As spring ventured closer, the Specks began to prepare for their annual migration. Food was prepared and packed for the journey, while the lodges were put in good order and all the winter equipment and garments were carefully stored away. I heard more talk about what the summer would bring, and especially I heard more discussions about whether there would be any trade at all with the intruders. The trading or lack of it seemed to bother the People more than the concept of danger or vengeance from the Gernians. Even without knowing Soldier’s Boy’s thoughts, I was forced to confront yet again just how different the People were from the Gernians in how they thought. These two cultures, I decided, would never find common ground. Perhaps Dasie would eventually be proven right; the war would end only when one side had destroyed the other.
The night before our migration was to begin was a busy one for everyone except Soldier’s Boy. He was a center of stillness as he sat in his cushioned chair and watched all his feeders busy around him. Olikea supervised the tidying of the lodge. She determined which cooking pots would travel with us and which would be stored, how much food we would take and who would carry what. She immersed herself so completely in her task that she seemed almost her old self. Then, one of the women asked her about storing Likari’s things.
The boy had not owned much. The cedar chest for his possessions was not a large one. His garments were as he had left them, tossed in, rumpled, crumpled, dirtied still from the last time he had worn them. Most of them showed the wear and tear that any boy of his years would put on clothing. Doubtless by now he had outgrown most of them, I thought. Then I wondered if he was growing, or if the constant dancing had stunted him as I’d heard it would. He had also, not toys, but the tools of a boy learning to be a man. I watched with Soldier’s Boy as Olikea took them, one at a time, from the chest. A knife. A fire-starting kit in a worn pouch, one that Olikea had passed down to him. A net for fish. The sharp crystal that Soldier’s Boy had used to cut himself to mark himself as a Speck. That was wrapped carefully in a soft square of doeskin. The last item Olikea exhumed was my sling. I didn’t recall giving it to him, and yet there it was, among the litter of things in his chest. Olikea picked up a pair of worn shoes, and suddenly clutched them to her chest and broke down in loud sobs. She rocked the old shoes as if they were a baby, clutching them to her chest and calling, “Likari, Likari!” in a voice that penetrated past any muffling.
Soldier’s Boy had not been helping with the packing. Instead, he had been sitting on a chair next to her, idly watching her work. I thought he would put his arms around her or that he would at least say something. Instead, he rose ponderously and walked away from her. At the door of Lisana’s lodge, he hesitated, then strode out into the mild spring night. When a feeder sprang to her feet and would have followed after him, he curtly waved her back. For the first time in weeks, he left the lodge alone.
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The area around the lodge had become a tiny village. Hearth light leaked out into the night from shuttered windows and doors left open to the fresh air. He walked past the smaller dwellings where his feeders and some of his warriors lived. The mossy trail down to the water had become a well-trodden path. Where there had been brush and brambles the first day that he and Likari found the lodge, there now was open space under the immense trees. Dry branches and fallen wood had been gathered for the fire long ago, and new paths crisscrossed each other as he made his way down to the stream. Even that was changed. A rough bridge had been built over it. He crossed it and walked on, following the stream downcurrent.
I had no sense of where he was going, and when we came to a place where the stream widened, he sat down on a rock. I thought perhaps he was taking a rest; he had walked farther than he had in some days. For a time, he sat in silence. Around us, the forest evening breathed out its spring breath. The brush willow along the stream’s edge had the beginning of catkins. The water in the stream was running fast and cold from snowmelt in the mountains, gurgling over stones. After he had sat for a time in silence, tiny frogs resumed creaking and cheeping to the night. Soldier’s Boy listened to their chorus.
Abruptly he spoke to me in his mind. “I must go to Lisana. I must see her, touch her, talk to her. I must. ”
His words reached me but he still kept his emotions walled off from me. I replied with caution. “But you can’t. Unless I take you to her. ”
He looked down, staring at the rocks in the streambed that were blurred by the water’s swift flow. “That’s true. So what is your price?”
I was shocked that he would bargain so baldly, and distrustful of it. “What are you offering?”
“I don’t have time to barter with you over this. ” Anger scorched the words. “Name what you want and I’ll likely give it to you. I need to speak with Lisana. ”
“I need to speak with Epiny. And Yaril. ”
He scratched the back of his scalp. His hair had grown out long over the winter. Olikea had begun to pull it back into plaits for him. The forest folk had few looking glasses, and as Soldier’s Boy was groomed by his feeders, he seldom looked in one. I was grateful. I suspected I looked even more ridiculous than I had.
“Very well,” at last he said tightly. “I don’t see what harm you can do to me by talking with them. Of course, I don’t see what good you can do for yourself, either. But it’s what you’ve asked for. Take me to Lisana. Now. And while I speak to her, I wish to be alone. ” Grudgingly, he added, “I will provide you the magic you need to dream-walk to your cousin and sister. ” That suited me far better than anything I could have devised. Distracted by Lisana, he would not be able to spy on my conversations. Of course, the reverse was also true, and I was sure he had deliberately chosen to make it so. “Lisana, then,” I agreed readily. “Right now?”
“We cannot go sooner,” he said, and closed his eyes.
I approached closer to him and his magic. Wariness warned me that this might be some trick on his part to destroy me. To use the mag
ic he willingly offered me, I would have to make myself accessible to him in the same way he was open to me. I weighed the risk and suddenly found I didn’t care. If he destroyed me, at least it would be over. I still believed he would not risk losing his link to Lisana by killing me. Briefly I thought of how ruthless he was, and then decided I would have to take the chance. This might be my last opportunity to converse with my cousin and be sure that she had survived our raid on Gettys.
I thought it would be difficult. Instead, it was like reaching out to clasp hands. I knew that Lisana had been waiting for this. She literally pulled me into her, and for a long moment, I lingered in the warm embrace of her mind. It was healing.
For that moment, there was no conversation, no questions or answers, nothing that even resembled thought. All that existed was acceptance and love. It was how I had imagined my mother felt about me when I was a baby, though in retrospect, I had always wondered if she had. That was the most joyous thing about our joining. I could feel what Lisana felt about me; all the doubts that lovers must have were banished in that meeting. No deceptions were possible in that intimacy. She loved me far better than I loved myself. And I reciprocated it.
I think I might have lingered forever in that healing balm, except that Soldier’s Boy suddenly pushed me aside. “Go to what you wish to do and leave me here for a time,” he said brusquely. “My magic will serve you. ”
“You are still separated, still not one?” she asked us with dismay.
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“He will not join me,” Soldier’s Boy replied sullenly.
I heard Lisana’s soft rebuke. “And in your heart, you do not wish him to. You hold him as far from you as he does you. Are you jealous even of yourself? Do you think I could love you and not love all of you?”
I smiled to hear that, even as it amazed me. Trust the heart of a woman to be large enough to encompass two such disparate people and make them one. I felt his magic push me away from her, but not before she was aware of my thought. I felt her warmth follow me as she enfolded Soldier’s Boy in her embrace.