“Yah. I heard him. But you know, Nevare, he’s right. Things have been hard for the regiment here, and there’s some of us as would welcome being shipped off somewhere else, disgraced or not. But the rest of us remember the old days, and while we’d like to leave, we’d like to see the road get pushed through first. So that when we walk away, we can say, well, it was hard but we done it.” I looked at rough, plain-spoken Ebrooks and noted that although his uniform shirt was stained, it was as clean as it would come. He was clean-shaven and his hair was combed. He wasn’t much of a cavalla trooper, but right now he stood in front of a nobly born, academy-trained soldier son and looked far more like a soldier than I did.

I felt ashamed of myself and also envious. “I wish I could have joined this regiment in better times, and know it as you do,” I said humbly.

He gave me a sour grin. “Nevare, in better times, we wouldn’t have had you. That’s harsh, but it’s true. So you come to Gettys and you got a chance to join us. Make it an opportunity. Live up to what we were rather than dragging us down any further. That inspection team won’t arrive for another ten days. Get yourself together. I don’t suppose we’re going to win any citations from them while our primary objective goes undone, but at least we can try to avoid disgrace.”

“You mean the King’s Road? I thought it was up to the prisoners to build it.”

“Well, the shovel-and-pick labor, yes. But our scouts and engineers were supposed to lay it all out for them, and map out the tasks and say what was needed to get it done and how fast it could be done.”

“And didn’t they?”

He gave me a look. “You go walking into that forest like it’s nothing, Nevare. I don’t know how you do it. But for the rest of us…well, whips and threats are all that keep the prisoners working, and even so, the progress is so slow it’s like going backward. Colonel Haren thinks he’s onto something. Rum. And laudanum. I don’t know where he got an idea like that. Get a batch of prisoners drunk or doped up and give them axes—that’s got to be a recipe for trouble.” He gave a lopsided shrug. “But I hear that it’s working. Drunks are too stupid to be afraid of anything.

Some of them get gloomy or cranky, but a man with a whip or a gun can persuade you that you’ve got to work no matter how gloomy or cranky you are.

“They’ve started cutting into those monster logs and hauling chunks away.

Like ants trying to carry off a loaf of bread crumb by crumb is what one guard told me, but it’s better than no progress. Even liquored up, most prisoners can’t stand to work there more than an hour, and the guards have to be almost as drunk as the workers are. Makes cutting grass here look like a real pleasure.” Stillness washed through me. The road might go through. And I’d given the colonel the idea of how to do it. Haren seemed a fair man. He might not credit me with the idea, but I suspected I’d have a stripe or even two on my sleeve by the end of summer. Crashing against that idea like two waves meeting was the terrible sick sense that I had betrayed the forest and Tree Woman. I’d given the intruders a way to defeat the magic. They would keep cutting and gouging, an hour at a time, one tree at a time, until they’d cut right through the heart of the forest and the People. I’d betrayed the Specks just as completely as I’d betrayed the Gernians when I’d signaled the Dust Dancers to spread their plague. I felt queasy with what I had done. “You look pale. Are you sick?” Ebrooks asked me.