Gas-a-ho pushed him down on the bed and tilted his head to the light of the scuttle. He cast; there was a fringe of green light at the edge of Aneas’s consciousness.

“The wound will not heal faster if you mess with it,” the shaman said. “I need you to let me in.”

“In?” Aneas asked.

Let me in, the Outwaller shaman said as his fingers touched the wound again.

Aneas’s eyes snapped open. He retreated into his memory forest, and stood a moment under a tall maple he had known all his life, on which hung a myriad of artifacts. In the aethereal, he was not naked; he wore deerskin hose and quillwork garters and a long shirt of embroidered linen. Then he extended a hand; the other hand held a small flint knife.

Gas-a-ho was smaller in the aethereal, and had the head of an owl, which was deeply disconcerting to Aneas.

He looked around, and made a soft sound of approval.

Aneas nodded. “I do not allow many in here,” he admitted. He let the flint knife dissipate. “Something is wrong here.”

Gas-a-ho opened his beak and made a raucous noise. “Brother,” he said. “You took more than a bump on the head. You were dead. Among my people, you would take a new name and perhaps a new wife. You have been to a far country, and we need to know that the man who returned is the same.”

Aneas was looking at his tree. It was the same tree, and yet it was not; there were scars in the bark, and a shadow hung in the tops. But worst of all, there were things that should have been hanging on the tree that were gone, and other things were hanging in their stead.

“How can I be a different person?” Aneas asked.

“How can you be the same?” Gas-a-ho asked. “You were dead. I lost you, brother. You weren’t alive anymore. Irene fetched back a corpse.”

“Irene,” Aneas said softly.

“Listen to me,” Gas-a-ho said. He was looking carefully at Aneas’s tree, at the field of raspberry bramble beyond, at signs of use and signs of casting and remnants of memory, sniffing like a hunting dog. “Do you feel anything . . . strange . . . from Looks-at-Clouds?”

Aneas thought, and wisps of cloud trailed across the sun of his mind.

He was afraid.

Gas-a-ho shook his head. “I am not the gods, to play with your mind. But something here is very wrong.” He reached a human hand into the brambles and pulled out an old deerskin quiver. The thorns caught on it, but the deerskin was tough.

“That was my father’s!” Aneas said, and took the quiver. He was sure it had been hanging on the tree, and he found a broken branch close to the ground.