Yet at that moment I did not feel torn between my two peoples; my selves were united in how furious I was with both factions and how desperately I wished I could withdraw from them both entirely. We rattled through the near-empty back streets and toward the gate. The sentries annoyed me by stopping me. “Where you headed, soldier?”

I was in no mood for their sudden vigilance. They’d let me in unchallenged, but would stop me on my way out? “Where do I always go?

Back to the cemetery. It’s my post.”

They exchanged a glance and a nod. “Right. You may pass.” I slapped the reins on Clove’s broad back, jolting him up to a trot. I left the fort behind and rattled my way out of town. Every time Clove tried to drop down to a walk, I nagged him on. I wanted the noise of the empty cart and the jostling and the dust. The violence of it suited my mood. As I left the town behind me, I urged him up to a canter. The cart jolted and bounded, bouncing in and out of potholes. I passed two struggling trees beside a failed farm. A flock of black-and-white croaker birds had found something dead by the trees. They rose, screaming their displeasure, as I careened past them. I knew I invited disaster and didn’t care. The anger was building inside me and I longed to have an outlet for it. Everyone was acting in absolute certainty and righteousness. Was I the only one who could see how wrong both sides were? Destruction and death awaited everyone, and I saw no way to defuse any of it.

The lack of a focus for my anger made it a churning, clawing dragon inside me. Time after time, Tree Woman had insisted to me that the magic had chosen me because I was the one who could do something that would send my people away from these lands. Over and over, she had tried to wrangle from me what it was that I had done or was going to do. I’d always thought her eager for the destruction of my folk; now I wondered if she didn’t believe that driving the Gernian away was the only way to save us all. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps the only way to avoid the coming conflict was to make the Gernians retreat from the land of the People.

But I knew of nothing I could do to cause that. The coming month would bring me dozens of plague victims to bury, and would see the felling of the Specks’ ancestral trees. No one would triumph. The ancestor trees would fall and the Speck culture with them. The Gernians would fall to the disease the Speck had deliberately sown among them. Death, death, death for everyone. Magic thrummed in me, drumming through my veins with each beat of my heart, but I could not save a single soul from the misery ahead.