“Pick the berries for me, Epiny. Even a kerchief full will restore some of my power.” I felt tantalizingly more substantial. The smell of the two berries she’d eaten was on her breath. I longed to devour every one that remained on the bush.

“But you said they’d put me in the magic’s power,” she protested. “Won’t they do the same to you?”

“I’m already in the magic’s power. If you can get them to me in the prison, I may be able to rejuvenate enough magic to be able to help myself. Then you won’t have to.”

“But—”

“I’ve already given Lisana my word. Pick the berries for me, Epiny.” She stood a long time considering it. Then she spread her handkerchief on the moss and began, one-handed, to pick berries and drop them on it. When she had a goodly pile, she gathered up the four corners of her kerchief and picked it up. “The way home?” she asked me again.

I made a decision. “Going home the way you came is far too long. Follow this stream,” I told her. “It has to flow downhill. It will take you closer to the end of the road. From there, I think you can beg aid of the men working there. They’ll put you on a cart and get you home.”

It was a long and weary walk for her. The berries, she told me, seemed to have calmed the fear in her and lent her strength. Even so, my heart ached for her. She’d had the sense to put on boots before she stole the horse and cart, but her heavy skirts were scarcely the best hiking garb. I greatly feared that night would fall before we were out of the forest. I wondered if I’d misjudged the way until we heard the muted sounds of axes falling and smelled the smoke of burning brush. “We’re nearly there,” I said quietly.

“All you have to do is go toward the sounds. The men working on the road will help you.”

Her response was as subdued. “She took me to the end of the ridge and made me look down on what we had done to her forest. I don’t pretend to understand completely what the ancestor trees mean to her. But for that moment, I felt what she felt, and my heart actually went out to her, Nevare. Different as we are, I still understood that all she wants is to keep things as they are, to protect her people.”

“But we both know that things never remain as they are, Epiny. It’s a lost cause already.”

“Perhaps. But I’ve already said that I’d stop them from cutting the ancestor trees. Do you know exactly what they are?”

“I think that when a Great One dies, the Specks give the body to a tree.

And that the tree absorbs the body, and somehow that person lives on as a tree.”

“That’s what Tree Woman is? Lisana?”

“I think so. We’ve never discussed it directly. There are so many things that she assumes I know, and—”