“See this?” Jodoli asked me, and with his toe, he scuffed at a flagged surveyor’s stake driven into the earth. “This is their sign that they mean to cut deeper into the forest. Once before they came into the forest and drove many of these into the earth, in a line that went far up into the mountains.

We pulled them all up. But this one, new planted, means that they intend to try again.”

“Yes. It does.” I raised my voice to make myself heard above the muttering of a hundred angry voices. Then my own words sounded strangely loud to me. I looked around in the darkness. “Take me to the elders you spoke of.

Let me talk to them, and hear from them how they think this can be resolved.” “They think there are only two ways. The Gernians must go away. Or the Gernians must die.”

A chill went up my back at his words, but I replied, “Let me speak to them.

There must be another way. I know my people well. They will not leave.”

“Then they will die. I take no joy in telling you that,” Jodoli replied. “This way,” he added before I could speak again and led me forward to the very edge of the cut. Jodoli stopped when he was still in the shelter of the woods, but I walked forward as if pulled by a magnet. I stepped out of the forest onto the torn bare earth and looked around me in awe. Behind me, I heard Jodoli’s frantic call of, “Come back! Come back!” I ignored it. I had to see for myself what my king’s ambition had done.

The huge fallen trees were not completely gone, but the pieces that had blocked the progress of the road had been cut to pieces and hauled away.

The ground under my feet was yellow with fragrant fresh sawdust that had been churned and mixed with forest soil by the passage of heavy hooves.

The stumps had been removed by a combination of digging, chopping, and burning. Nothing remained of them save a sunken spot in the earth.

With my back to the forest, the road stretched out before me, a wide avenue of light. I could see that the repairs to the eroded parts of the road had proceeded well. When the inspection team arrived in a few days, they would be shown a stretch of well-constructed road with fresh progress into the forest. Colonel Haren would be proud. Then I turned my back on the road and looked into the forest. Squarely in the path of the road stood another immense tree. The preliminary bite of the ax showed pale against the dark bark. As yet, it was a small chip out of such a great trunk, less than a mosquito bite on a man’s ankle. And yet that bit of whiteness caught the moonlight and winked back at me, as if sharing an evil joke.

Jodoli leaned up against the tree, and the uneven shadows made his dappled body difficult to distinguish from the mottled bark. He had pillowed one cheek against the tree and his eyes were closed, his brow furrowed. Slowly I left the Gernian world of the road and walked back into the Specks’ forest. “Jodoli,” I said to him when I stood by him, but he appeared lost in thought. Or asleep. I touched his shoulder.