Renegade's Magic

Dasie shook her head. “I will not waste time with these deceptions. I wish simply to go down to them and kill them. Slaughter them all.”

“If all we do is slaughter them, then more will simply come after them.” He held up a pleading hand to halt her objection. “First, of course, will come the slaughter. But in the wake of that, the few who survive must be told that we have a ‘king’ of our own. Or a ‘queen.’ They must believe that there is one person who can speak for us. And with that one person, they will make a treaty, like the treaty they made with the far queen who defeated them. Boundaries will be set, new boundaries that fence them out of our lands. And rules of trade.”

“Rules of trade?” Dasie was listening to him now.

“To make them greedy,” Soldier’s Boy said. “And to assure us of the tobacco we need for the trade. With only one intruder will we trade. That one we will make wealthy. It will be in his best interests to remain the only one we trade with. We will choose someone strong, someone who will hold the others at bay for us, and will obey our rules for the sake of keeping a monopoly on trade with us. Greed will protect us better than fear.” He paused and smiled at her grim face.

“But first, there must be fear.”

She slowly returned his smile. “I think I begin to understand. Their weakness becomes our strength. Their greed will be the leash that holds them back. It is, I think, a good idea. Together we will plan this.” Her smile grew colder, wider. “And the first part we will plan is the slaughter.”

Soldier’s Boy gestured to Likari and the boy filled his plate. Olikea appeared with a flagon of beer. He scarcely noticed that they tended him. I was a mote of despair, suspended inside him. He had considered his plan well. If he could carry it out, I judged that it would work. He ate some of the meat and then said to Dasie, “The massacre is actually our simplest task. The intruders have long ago lost all wariness of us. They deem us no more threat than the mice that scamper through the stable, and pay as little attention to us. Kinrove’s dancers will strive to keep them demoralized and fearful. It is a pity that more of them did not stay to create a stronger magic”—and he paused delicately—“but Kinrove will have to make do with those he has. In the days and nights before our attack, we will have him increase the power of his magic; when we attack, the intruders will already be exhausted and dispirited. They will almost welcome our killing them.” He smiled and drank.

It was too much for me. I gathered all my awareness and fury, sharpened it into a point, and with all my strength, tried to unseat Soldier’s Boy from my body. I know he felt my attack, for he choked briefly on his beer. He set his mug down firmly on the tabletop. He spoke internally, to me only.

“Your time is past. I do what I must. In the long run, it is for the best, for both peoples. There will be a slaughter, yes, but after that, the war will be over. Better one massacre than year after year of eroding one another. I have weighed this long, Nevare. I think it is a decision that even Father would understand. And I cannot permit you to interfere. If you will not willingly join me, then I must at least keep you from hindering me.”

He boxed me.

That is how I thought of it then and how I recall it now. Imagine being imprisoned in a box with no light, yet no dark, no sound, no sensation against your skin, no body, nothing except your own presence. I’d experienced it once before, briefly, when he had been unconscious. The experience had not prepared me to endure it again; rather, it had only increased my dread. At first I did not believe what he had done. I held myself in stillness, waiting for the absence of all things to pass. Surely there would come some glimmer of light, or dimming of shadow, some whisper of sound, some whiff of scent. How long could he completely suppress half of himself?

That brought an unpleasant thought to me. Had I ever done this to him? When I thought I had absorbed him and integrated him back into myself, had he hung in this senseless internal dungeon? I did not think so, I decided. This, I felt, was a very deliberate act on his part. He sought to render me harmless. Down here I could not distract him. Did he suspect that I’d slipped away from him before and dream-walked on my own? Was that what he feared? He should. Because if ever I was in a position to do so again, I would immediately get to Epiny to warn her of the impending attack on Gettys.

Time, as I have mentioned before, is a slippery thing in such a place. Are hours moments or moments hours? I had no way of knowing. When my first period of internal ranting and shrieking passed, I tried to calm myself. The measuring of passing time seemed to me to be of the utmost importance, and I tried to give myself that comfort in any number of ways. Counting only led to despair. The mind counts faster than the lips, and even when I deliberately slowed my count, I realized that reciting an eternity of numbers only deepened my hopelessness.