This is a dream of mine war took from me. It owns it now, and owns me. I am and have been leaning up against a tree, my shoulder at the trunk, with the carbine I shouldn’t have and that isn’t mine in my hands. The branches keep some of the rain off, but I’m drenched through, numb and heavy. Frail daylight is gathering in dense ropes of rain. I watch it, drone of rain alone in my head. I’m alone. I’m not alone. The rain watches.

A sound of wet bracken breaking nearby. I turn abruptly toward it raising my gun—all my frozen joints squeal and I can’t stop myself pitching over onto the ground. I’ve stood there too long and my body has seized up. My mouth stinks. Gibbering in panic I thump the mud with dead fingers trying to find my dropped carbine with deadened fingers when the weight of a hand drops on my shoulder and flail weakly away from it. I look up at Thrushchurl’s head, rain ribboning from his viny locks, silver on broadcloth shoulders. He strides forward and shows me his upper teeth.

“I’m not a ghost,” he says seriously. “You had better get back up again.”

I find a carbine and climb it, regain my feet. I have many lives—the lonely one, that was just here, is melting, and the other, that I’ve lived so far, is returning, unwelcome.

Thrushchurl has already begun moving off out of the trees toward the clearing, and I want to ask him something. Back in the open the weight of the rain pushes down on me. Gun in both hands, barrel lowered, I rush to catch him up. I raise my head, and beyond him see the struggling party. With desperation I feel it begin all over again—nothing’s changed.

There is Silichieh, and I am happy to see his bearlike figure there swinging his arms in his sopping sweater. But there is Makemin, an inflexible blue shadow in the streams, pointing, shouting orders. There is Saskia—her arm launches out to catch a slipping soldier before he can fall, thrusting him roughly forward onto his feet. Jil Punkinflake’s face is swollen and rigid with freezing rain, drops fall from his dangling lower lip. Everything will go on and on the same—I’ve stopped in place—Thrushchurl brings himself up short a few feet away and looks back at me with an expression the rain smears out. Guns have been lifted. One of them cracks. I just stand and stare wanting them to kill me while I’m still numb with cold. Makemin’s arm flies up into the air and I hear his order to hold fire. His cruelly keen eyes have determined that I am one of his men.