She had helped me, taught me something of my Power.

I owed her a debt. Maybe there was only one way to pay her.

It frightened me. Before, during those haphazard healings, I had not thought. Now the nerves ran on me. What must I do? And, more, dreadfully, what was the consequence?

“See to your master,” I said to the slave.

The slave stretched his mouth. I had never observed any of them smile before.

“You are all my masters. Lord Orek, the buried lord, Zrenn. You.” He shut and tapped his left eye. “I am called Long-Eye,” he said. He moved sideways and was gone.

Westering red lights began to fleck into the tent.

I tried too hard to reach Hwenit. I tried to knit blood and flesh with hammer strokes.

At last, sitting bathed in sweat in the black exhalation of nightfall, it came to me how unvigorous and silent it had been before; the poisoned stallion in Eshkorek, the choking baby in the village, when I had not even felt the virtue go from me.

So Hwenit’s pupil smoothed his slate and began afresh.

The sun rose. I left the tent, and the slave was at his grave-digger’s office a second time. This second grave, out of synchronization with the other, seemed oddly superfluous, an afterthought.

“Who is this for?” I asked him, using his own wretched speech.

“My master Orek,” he said.

You harness death; you harness life. You can kill or cure. A grave becomes a symbol, one weak branch fallen from a flourishing tree.

The sun, clear of the wood, swam red and golden in front of my eyes.

I had not expected much else of Orek. Though he was young. I had no compulsion to pity. The slave clamped down the clay to cover the blond face, over which a scrap of cloth had been laid.

“How?” I said.

“His knife,” said the slave, responding to me with a weird vivacity I had not formerly noted in these slave people. “He wedged it among the tree roots and threw his body on the blade. He did it wrong. It took a while.”

I recollected gold-faced men lying on their swords in a crimson pavilion.

The sun was dividing, a blackness down its center. It would split in twain and fire the sea. Then I saw it was a black man against the sun, standing over me where I had sat. Qwef.

“Tell me if Hwenit is slain,” he said to me.

“Why should you imagine so?”

“I felt it,” he said. “Yesterday’s dusk. I felt she was near death.”

“There was magic between you after all, then.”

“Blood speaking to blood. Yes. I felt it. I could not sleep. In the night I went to look where the boats are kept through the winter. One boat was missing. I guessed then that they had come seeking you. I took my own boat. I rowed through the darkness. Is she dead?”

I got to my feet.