Now we’re marching again, and the grey men by the house are watching us go with blank baffled faces. I think of the story I was told, and I don’t believe they get it right when they say the Pepecaui left war behind to go into the interior. Perhaps it was different then.

I feel as though I’m going toward war, that towers vastly above around and behind its pawns, the enemy soldiers, and us. War fashioned the interior. The war story is waiting to be lived again and to make all of us into its own characters. We will step into our places while the overture plays a medley of themes that will play out in full and in order later on. It’s magic, because I do what I don’t want to do, and there’s no power that I can feel being brought to bear on me. If a hand had me by the collar, and I were being dragged away, I could struggle. If Makemin or Saskia would only point at me, order the others to catch or kill me, or even only threaten me, I could run. But there is no power here to resist. I simply go along. Hating, and rebelling at heart. Something like the sweeping power of the tides sets everything all too smoothly in motion. I feel war’s unreal presence, like blank mindless insanity shining happily from these rocks, watching us bring ourselves to it, for its delectation. We’re going to kill and die at war’s fiat in this beautiful place, nothing more.

My eyes cling to what they see around me. Everything says to me, “you will never see us again.”

I am trying not to clutch at the charm, seeming to want to squeeze it into the flesh of my hand and absorb its powers, if it really has any. In a flash I see Pepedora scheming with Wacagan to get rid of us, set me up with this charm of his. But how does that make sense? Leave his town open to invasion? I shake my head—this is foolish thinking. Makemin is the one dragging us into the interior, against the orders of the Predicanten; Pepedora had nothing to do with that.