It seemed weeks, no, months ago that I had hovered by this stream as a disembodied entity and Epiny had picked and sampled some of the scarlet drupes. In real time, it had been but a few days, and the heavily laden berry bush still offered me a plenitude of fruit. After I had slaked my thirst, I sat down beside it and methodically began to strip it of berries. They were potent food for the magic, and as I ate them, I felt my reserves filling. I replenished the magic I had burned to escape the Gernian prison and the sustenance that Lisana’s tree had drawn from me. The wounds in my hands healed and the ache in the wrists quieted and then faded to nothing. I felt the sagging skin of my belly tighten as I consumed it. I filled myself with magic more than I did with food.
Large and heavy as I was, the magic lent me stealth. I moved through the woods with the same lumbering grace that bear and elk possess. In the lost sky above me, the sun was foundering to the west. The dimness in the forest deepened toward full darkness. I felt no weariness, even though I could not recall the last time I had slept a full and comfortable night. I was charged with both magic and purpose. Like a heavy shadow, I slipped through the forest toward the road’s end.
I reached it as the crews were finishing their day’s labor. Epiny’s sabotage had been effective in its limited way. Today, the crews had not cut into any new trees or finished hauling away the bodies of the trees they had felled. Instead, all their time had been taken up with salvaging wagons and equipment and repairing the destroyed culverts to make the road passable once more. I stood in the gloomy shelter of the forest and watched them leave. Prisoners did the heavy labor of the road building, the backbreaking shovel, axe, and saw work. The prisoners had their overseers, and in turn, the overseers were backed up by the soldiers. Now, as the day ended, the last load of ragged, sweating prisoners shuffled to the remaining wagons. Some of the crew wore leg irons and were shackled into teams. Others enjoyed relative freedom in manacles. A manacled man can still use a shovel or an axe. Their chains clanked loudly as they climbed awkwardly into the heavy wagons that would carry them back to Gettys and their confinement for the night.
I waited until night was full before I moved. I ghosted along in the shelter of the trees, surveying the work that had been done today. I was not pleased to see that they had set a guard. Epiny’s sabotage had alarmed them, I supposed. A lantern burned in one of the surviving equipment sheds. I slunk closer, and perceived that four men had been left on watch there. They sat sullenly around the tail of a wagon, their lantern in the middle of it, and passed round a bottle of rum. I did not envy them their lonely vigil. If I opened my awareness, I could feel the insistent itching of the fear, the prickling sensation that evil watched them and waited its opportunity to pick them off, one by one. Their loaded long guns leaned upright against the wagon’s open bed, one beside each man. I frowned at that. Drunken fearful men would be quick to lunge for their weapons. The magic could heal me very quickly, but did not make me proof against instantaneous death.
I resolved I would give them no cause for alarm. Not yet.
I took in a deep breath of night and held it. I turned my eyes away from the yellow lantern light of the watchmen. I breathed out slowly, expelling the darkness I had held within me. The blackness of night hovered round me in a cloud. Cloaked in darkness, I stepped softly forward. Deep moss cushioned my footfalls as I moved away from the watchmen. Tree branches drew aside from me; bushes swayed from my path silently lest they betray me with a rustle. I had no light but I did not need it. I was a part of the forest around me and I came into full awareness of it.
For a brief time, it overwhelmed me. I became aware of the deep carpet of life that extended around me in all directions. I was a mote in that intertwining net of living things. Life extended deep beneath my feet in the rich earth with the questing roots and the burrowing worms and the scuttling beetles. Trees surrounded me and reached far above my head. Rabbits, deer, and foxes moved in the darkness just as I did, while overhead, birds both sleeping and wakeful perched on the branches.
As I began to comprehend that interconnectedness I became aware of a stabbing pain. I gritted my teeth against it and clutched at my belly, almost expecting to find a mortal wound there. But I was fine. It was not my body that hurt; the injury I sensed was to the larger organism through which I moved and in which I existed.
The road was the wound. It was a deep gash with a virulent infection, one that the forest could not heal by itself. The road builders had cut deep into the forest’s green and living flesh, and filled that gap with gravel and sand and stone. Every time the forest tried to knit the wound closed with healing foliage, the road builders cut it back again. They were not like maggots in a wound, for maggots eat only dead flesh. These intruders maintained the slice of deadness they had placed in the forest, and cut back any attempt the forest made to heal itself. They had to go. Until the road builders were driven away, the forest could not heal.