The Plainswoman had remained beside me. “What’s happening to me?” I asked her. She knit her brows and shrugged at me. She stood by me, almost as if I were in her custody.

The guide approached me with a sanctimonious smile. “Well? And have you satisfied your curiosity, sir? I am sure you must be very impressed with the winds that managed to sculpt these wondrous carvings.” His sarcasm was justified. Possibly that was why it angered me. “I’m leaving,”

I announced. I heaved myself to my feet. I was turning away when I felt a sudden wave of queasiness. The earth seemed to rock under my feet. “Is it an earthquake?” I asked frantically, although I suspected that the unrest was within my own body. I lifted my hands to my temples and stared bleakly at the guide and the Plainswoman. They regarded me with alarm.

A terrible whine like an ungreased axle shrieked through my ears. I turned my head in search of the source of it. To my horror, three of the boys had gathered at the center of the platform. Two acted as support to hold a third aloft. Thus lifted, the middle boy could reach the stone of the spindle. He had taken out a sheath knife and set the blade to the stone. As I watched, he tried to scratch a line into the ancient monument. The self that the Tree Woman had tutored stabbed me with fear. There was danger, vast danger, in suddenly loosing that magic. “Stop!” I shouted the warning. Against all common sense, I expected to see the young fool snatched up and away by the momentum of the spindle. “Don’t do that!

Stop that immediately!” The iron was tearing the magic free of the spindle in wild, flapping sheets. It could go anywhere, do anything. I was deafened and dizzied by its buffeting, but the others apparently felt nothing. The boy stopped, glared at me, and said scornfully, “You’re not my father.

Mind your own business.”

The moment he had lifted his knife from the stone, the screeching had stopped. Now, as he deliberately set his blade to the monument, it began again. As he bore down on the iron blade, the sound soared in volume and pitch. I clapped my hands over my ears against the harsh shriek. A ghostly smoke rose from the point at which blade met stone. He seemed oblivious to all of it. “Stop!” I roared at him. “You don’t know what you’re doing, you idiot!” Now every member of the touring party had turned to stare at me. For myself, I did not know how they could be immune to the shrieking of the spindle as the cold iron bore into it. Wave after wave of vertigo washed through me. The humming of the Spindle, a constant that had been so uniform I had scarcely been aware of it, now warbled as the blade’s contact slowed its turning. “Make him stop!” I shouted at them.