I came eventually to where I had diverged from the correct trail home. I plodded along it, hungry, tired, and confused. Was I a dutiful soldier son, a loyal trooper in my king’s cavalla, or was I a disowned son masquerading as a soldier in a threadbare frontier existence? Was I the forest mage’s student who had both loved and slain her? Had I shamed myself deeply last night by having relations with a Speck, or had I simply had a wonderful, extravagant sexual experience? Without success, I tried not to wonder what my encounter with Tree Woman and my other self meant. I had felt the echoes of their emotions and could not doubt the sincerity of what they had felt. It was all the stranger in that I had been a dumb and blind participant in their romance.

When I saw daylight breaking through the forest roof ahead of me, I knew it traced the demarcation between the ancient forest and the younger trees on the burned hillside. My steps slowed. I would soon be leaving one world for another, and as I approached the boundary, I was not entirely sure that I wished to do so. If I left the forest, I would be making a large decision, with consequences I didn’t fully grasp. What did the magic want me to do? I didn’t know, and I also didn’t know if I wanted to fall in with the magic’s plan for me, or fight it with every ounce of my strength. Tree Woman had said that if the magic had its way, I would be the downfall of my entire race. That seemed impossible. But I had been there when the Dancing Spindle stopped turning. It seemed that with my aid, the Speck magic had hastened the end of the Plains magic and all its people. Could I possibly bring a similar destruction down on my own kind? As I led Clove from the old forest to the new, my eyes fell on a neatly stacked pile of cut poles beside the trail. There were about twenty of them, no bigger around than my wrist, and only about eight feet long. They had rough gray-green bark still on them. I had no doubt that Kilikurra had cut them and left them there for me. I was surprised that he had felt comfortable cutting trees in the forest when the Specks seemed to so oppose our tree cutting for our road. My second emotion was disappointment. He had misunderstood me completely. I had intended to harvest some hefty logs for stout corner posts that I could set deep in the earth. By the time I dug holes for these posts, my fence would be only five feet tall, and so spindly that the wood would likely rot through in just a couple of years.

I half expected Kilikurra to step out of the dappling shadows and claim the credit for his good deed. When he did not, I decided that I could not be sure he wasn’t there, and that my best course was to appear grateful. I put a hitch line on the bundled poles, and then bowed gratefully to the forest. Clove didn’t like the strange contraption scraping and jolting along behind him, but eventually we managed to get down to the cemetery. I left the poles there, having decided I could use them as stakes to set out the straight lines for my barricade. I was freeing Clove from his unwanted load when I heard the heavy thunder of running feet. I straightened and turned to find Ebrooks coming at me at a dead run. Kesey, panting heavily, was some distance behind him. I looked behind me, saw no cause for the alarm on their faces, and turned back to them, shouting, “What is it? What’s wrong?”