What good has the magic done you, you asked. I could say that through it, you came to know me. And that you have come to know the forest in a way you never could have before. But the real answer is that the magic is not for your good, and so it does not matter if it does things that make you happy or not.” She cocked her head at me slightly. “Don’t you remember, Soldier’s Boy? I held you over the abyss and told you that you must choose.

I told you that you must say you wished to be taken up to this life. And you said you did, and I brought you here.”

“But I did not know what I was choosing. I only knew that I feared to die.”

“None of us ever know what we are choosing when we choose life. If certainty is so important to you, than you should have chosen to be dead.

That is a certain thing.”

“Look at the life I am leading, Lisana. I’m a soldier in name only; what I truly am is a gravedigger. Tomorrow I am going to bury the woman I was once supposed to marry. Did you know that? How cruel a fate is that? For her, as well as for me, because if the magic had not intervened in my life, I am sure Carsina would be safe at her home and awaiting me still. I am lonely and alone, my body hampers me, I am always hungry—”

“And those are the things you chose instead of the magic.” She cut into my diatribe. She sounded angry.

“What am I going to do?”

I meant the question to be rhetorical. I’d asked it of myself thousands of times with no answers. Lisana had one.

“You are going to do what the magic wants you to do. It would have been easier by far for you to have lived with the choice you made instead of fighting it. Now it comes for you, Nevare. And no one can protect you anymore.”

“You called me Nevare,” I said.

“Nevare.”

I was sitting up in my bed in my cabin. The echo of her voice saying my name was still in my ears. It was such a physical memory that it was hard to convince myself it had been part of my dreamwalking. I rubbed my eyes and sighed. Only darkness showed through the crack in my shutters. It was still night. I groaned. I doubted I would find sleep again that night.

My fire was nearly out. I forced myself to get out of bed and pad across the room to give it another stick of wood. Feeding it now was easier than trying to start another fire in the morning. I was getting back into my bed when I thought I heard a noise outside. I swung my feet back onto the floor. Soft as the wind, someone spoke outside my door. “Nevare?”