I groped toward an understanding of the magic I had done. It had gone beyond what I’d said to what I’d felt toward them. Feelings, I discovered, did not yield to logic or even to ethics. Why should everyone at the relay station suffer because their sergeant had been so stiff-necked? Why should any of them suffer at all, at my say-so? Who was I to judge them? I chased my morality in circles that night, trying to find it. When it came to actually living as an upright man, I discovered that I was no more truly tolerant and forgiving than any worshipper of the old gods. The moment that I realized I was no better than the men who had turned me away when I begged their help, I was able to forgive. I felt something move through me, a prickling in my blood, followed by a stillness and a sense of effort expended. Had I worked magic? I couldn’t tell. I had no way of knowing, no way of proving that I had or had not. Perhaps all of this was a silly illusion, a game that Hitch and I played, pretending to powers that didn’t exist. My refusal to surrender and completely believe in magic was my final defense that enabled me to live in a world that made sense to me.

The early morning was a pearly darkness of falling snow. I burrowed deeper into my blankets and finally slept.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

VISITOR

I tried to find the rhythm of my days again, but it was broken. The snow was too deep and the ground too frozen for me to dig graves, and there was very little else for me to do. I missed my schoolbooks. Writing in my journal almost made things worse. I had far too much time to think.

Magic, my father’s opinion of me, Spink’s knowledge that I was in Gettys, Colonel Haren asking my opinion on the road dilemma: I had too much to ponder.

I tempted myself to go into town, thinking that any sort of company might be a welcome distraction, but I felt an almost irrational fear that I would encounter someone who knew me from my academy days. I isolated myself at the graveyard until a rider came out one day to fetch me. An old man had died. I hitched Clove to the wagon and went to town for the coffin and corpse. The old man had been an ex-soldier and a drunk who had died in debt to everyone who had tried to befriend him. The poor fellow had no mourners to follow me out to the grave site.

Once I had him loaded, I steeled my heart to my own callousness and completed my own necessary errands. I picked up hay and grain for Clove and some basic food supplies for myself. I forced myself to take my noon meal in the mess hall. Ebrooks was at table, shoveling his food into his mouth as if it were a competitive sport. From him I learned that Kesey was sick in bed with a toothache, but hadn’t the courage to have the molar pulled. “That side of his face is swollen like a melon, and so tender he can’t eat a bite. Even drinking water hurts him. I told him, go have it pulled and be done with it. How could the pain be any worse? He still hopes it will go down by itself. But he almost counts himself lucky to have been sick in bed last night after what happened in the streets.”