I looked at Tree Woman. I still felt my love for her, but I also felt the gulf between us that she could even threaten Epiny so. “What can I do to persuade you to let her go free?” I asked bluntly. “I’ll give you anything to see her safely home.”

“That’s the wrong bargain,” Tree Woman replied. “She has already told me several things she is willing to do to win your life back for you. The only thing that is left for me to decide is if we have any use for you.”

“Let Epiny go. Help me to live and I will come to you and serve the magic.

Even if it means going against my own people to do so.”

Tree Woman cocked her head. She was quiet for a time, but it was more as if she were listening than thinking. I stood beside Epiny and tried to take her hand. She watched owlishly as my phantom hand swept through hers. I put my arm around her. She gave me a pale, tired smile and then turned her worried glance back to Tree Woman. I looked past the meditating woman to the new tree sprouting from her prone trunk. Its leaves hung limp and motionless in the summer breeze. Lisana focused her gaze on us again. “The magic will take both of you,” she announced, obviously pleased.

“That wasn’t offered!” I retorted angrily.

“Of course it was,” she replied. “Epiny said she’d give anything to save you.

You said you’d do anything to see her safely home. The magic agrees to both.”

“That isn’t fair!” I cried.

“What would be fair, Soldier’s Boy? Shall we let her go, let you die, let the intruders cut down the ancestor trees? Let the road gash through the forest like your blade cut through my trunk? Cut the People loose from their roots as you severed me from mine? That would be fair?”

“I’m sorry I did that,” I said again. I suddenly understood that Epiny’s venture into the forest had reawakened all of Tree Woman’s hurt and anger. Lisana and I had set our great battle behind us; we had even seen ourselves as victims of our own conflict. Epiny’s presence tipped the scales a different way. She was my ally who had aided me in Tree Woman’s defeat. Tree Woman felt afresh the ignominy of her defeat. Epiny was the living embodiment of my other life and my loyalty to it. She represented everything that kept me away from the magic. “Please, Lisana. Please let her go,” I said simply at last. “You ask that as if you think it were in my power. She came here howling out Olikea’s name like a she-cat in heat.

She is lucky that one did not come to her. Olikea and the others have fled into the mountains. They fear what is to come. When the magic is angered, all suffer. The People are converging on Kinrove’s folk now. They fear his magic has ceased to work. The Fear his dancers make no longer holds the intruders at bay; the ancestor trees have begun to fall again.