Shaman's Crossing (The Soldier Son Trilogy #1)

Soldiers had gathered to cross her. Cavalla soldiers. Cadets from the Academy, limping veterans, retired officers. They patiently waited their turns to cross. Cold wind blew past us, and brought to us the distant cries of the living. “Papa, Papa!” someone called, faint and far away. The aged man next to me bowed his head, ethereal tears streaming down his pallid face. It was his turn. He trudged onto the bridge, head bent as if to a wind I did not feel.

I saw Trist in that gathering, and Natred, and Oron. They slowly milled with the others. They did not speak to me or to one another. Silent and gray, they edged forward, interested in nothing except their own slow progress toward death. I calmly realized that was our destination. Like me, they were dying, and here our spirits waited, on the teetering point between death and life. Some lingered here a long time and seemed to resist the draw. Others seemed to decide swiftly, stepping boldly onto the bridge. It was a bridge, I suddenly knew, that did not belong here. Prior to my alliance with the tree woman, it had not existed. She and I had wrought this crossing, twisting its lines from our very beings. I had taken the magic of her people into me and yielded to her the magic of mine. Of these things was this traverse made that lured the spirits of other soldiers like myself to cross. They, too, I suddenly perceived, had touched the magic of her people. “Keep fast,” they had signed over cinches, not knowing that when the time came, the magic would hold them fast as well. Yet as the line of people shuffled forward, I flowed with them, unthinking and unresisting. I, too, would cross. When it came my time, I stepped past the Kidona swanneck that secured the footrope of the bridge and out onto it. I shuffled forward with the rest.

I reached the middle of the bridge before I lifted my eyes to see my destination. A dismal hell awaited us. It reminded me of the logged-off hillside I had passed on my river journey toward Old Thares, but it was not the same place. A massacred landscape of rolling hills lay before me. The sheared stumps before me dwarfed me and reordered my concept of the word “tree.” Giants had flourished here, and were no more. The realm of the forest god had been ransacked and robbed. Cold rain was falling on it, cutting rivulets in its bare flanks. The still-smoldering mounds of slashed underbrush and branches glowed a dark, evil red. Steam and smoke rose from them. The passage of boots and teams of horses had trampled what plant growth and underbrush remained into the muddy earth. The crushed vegetation sprawled like slaughtered children. Only on the tops of the hills did trees still stand, and I knew that their reign was soon to end. A crude roadbed snaked toward them.

“Nevare!” a girl called from somewhere far behind me. “Come back, Nevare!”

Once I had known someone named Nevare. I turned my head slowly and looked back the way I had come. Whoever had called me was not there; she had no power to reach me. Other drifting souls were crossing the bridge behind me. Oron was on the bridge, and Natred. Still others milled on the far side. I glanced back the way I had come. I recognized Caulder and then Spink in the waiting crowd. Oh. So they, too, were dying. And they, too, were called to cross the bridge. I turned forward and walked on.

As the spirits ahead of me reached the stripped and barren hillside, they drifted aimlessly. Their purposelessness seemed a form of torment, as if they had had some important destination they now could not recall. Some went toward the jagged stumps of the dead trees and touched them, pressing against them as if they were doors that would not yield. Slowly those ones sank down beside the stumps, liquefying into a thick white soup of fog at the base of the chopped trees. A wisp of vapor rose from each as they vanished. I saw Sergeant Rufet go that way. He melted at the base of a stump, leaving a larger puddle than most of the others.

I saw Tree Woman then, and my other self. She stood at the crest of the hill where a line of unharvested trees remained, her back close to one of the towering giants, and looked down on us. She judged us from that vantage point, but I also knew she could not go far from the living forest. My other self did that for her. He hunted deliberately across the bare hillside among the drifting spirits, his concentration making him far more real than the wandering wraiths. He moved purposefully, a predator among prey.

Tree Woman called encouragement down to him. “Oh, yes, get that one, hurry before he is gone. He had far more power than he knew, far more wisdom. But he had no tree to put it in; the fools never learned to save a place to store their magic. Go, hurry, and consume his magic before it disperses. Your people have little magic to them. You will have to devour many more before you are full. Eat!”

That other self that was somehow still me in spite of the antipathy I felt toward him hurried to obey her. He had grown, and in that place of ghosts, he seemed substantial. He was round of belly, heavy of arm and leg. Leaves were his only garments. His scalp-lock had been smeared with pine pitch and plaited down his back and interwoven with green vines. He rushed to the puddle that had been Sergeant Rufet and dropped to his knees beside it. He scooped up the white liquid before it was sucked into the earth. He used no leaf cup now. Instead, my other self lowered his mouth to his cupped hands, eagerly lapping the thick porridge of what had been Rufet’s soul. For a moment, I was he. I felt the stickiness on my hands and chin, and I felt myself grow stronger for having consumed his essence.