“Just who do you ‘scout’ for, Hitch? The information you’re gathering doesn’t sound like something Colonel Haren sent you after.” I was beginning to feel angry, the kind of anger that comes when fear threatens and one doesn’t know the exact source.

“Damn you, Never. You sit there and I talk to you and you hear the words, but it’s like you don’t listen to what they mean. It’s Speck magic, old son. It’s got you. I told you before, it’s got me, too. It uses me. It uses you. The scary part is that you seem to be using it and I don’t think you have any concept of what you are doing. Or how heavily in debt you are to it. When it demands to be paid back, you’re going to have to give it more than just yourself. You’re going to have to give it things that don’t belong to you, things I care about. I’m here to tell you that you have to draw a line with it and fight. Be a Gernian, man, at least a little.”

“It seems to me that a few weeks back, you didn’t think so highly of my patriotism. If I recall correctly, you mocked me for it.”

“I mock anyone who does things without thinking for himself why he does them. And that is what you’re doing with your magic. You took out the Dancing Spindle. And when you did, I think that what the Plains magic lost, Speck magic gained. And certainly you seemed to have gained. You do things I’ve never seen anyone do, and I’ve seen quite a bit of Speck magic in my wandering. Last time I went through Dead Town, I saw your little vegetable garden. You told it to grow. It’s still growing. Just as the people at the courier station are still not receiving supplies, just as they denied them to you. You’re setting things in motion, Never, with no heed as to the ultimate consequences. You stopped the Spindle turning, but you’ve set all sorts of little things spinning for you.”

“Look,” I said bluntly. “I did those things. Well, I guess I did them. You say so, and I’m going to believe you. But I don’t know how I did them. And I don’t know how to undo them. If anyone is at fault here, it’s the damn magic, not me. It came into my life and took it over. I never sought it out. It’s ruined everything for me. It’s taken my body, my career, my fiancée, my family, even my name. I’ve lost everything to it. And I still don’t know how it works or why it works or what it wants of me. But with all the things it has done to me, why can’t I use it to do a little good? Amzil and her children were starving. Was it so bad, what I did?”

He huffed out his breath in a blast of disbelief. “Damn me. You did do it. You really did!” He took a breath as if to restore him steadiness. “Was it so bad? You ask that as if you think I know the full answer. All I can tell you is that this magic gets into you, like ivy putting roots into a tree trunk. And it climbs up you and it steals your light and sucks out your sustenance. It uses you, Never. And every time you use it, you give more of yourself to it. Do you understand me? Tell me that you know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t! That is, I do and I don’t. How do you know so much about it, anyway?”

“I told you. There was a woman, a Speck woman. She wanted me, and what a Speck woman wants, she takes. And a Speck woman is just like their magic. She makes you her own, and that’s it.” He stood up so suddenly his chair nearly fell over. With lightninglike reflexes, he caught it and then stepped clear of it. He walked a turn around my small house, staring at the walls as if he could see through them. “Never met a woman like her before. Once you start going among them, you’ll see what I mean. They got a whole different way of seeing the world, a whole different idea of how life works. And once they take you in, suddenly it seems that it’s the only way to see things. They just accept the magic. They don’t go around thinking that they’re going to decide how their lives go. They laugh at us for that. Once, that woman showed me a little plant growing by a stream. She said, ‘You see that little plant, all by itself, having its own life?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I see it.’ And she said, ‘That’s you. And you see that other little plant over there, on the other side of the stream? You see it, all by itself over there? That’s me.’

“So I thought she was trying to tell me something, about how the stream separated us, about how different we were. But then she went over and grabbed the plant that was me and she pulled it up out of the ground. But its tough little roots came with it. And she started following that root, lifting it up out of the ground, and that root went from my plant to another to another and to another and finally it went right under the stream and come up on the other side and she pulled it up and it went to the plant she said was her. And she stood there, holding up all this network of roots, and she said, ‘See. There isn’t one little plant growing alone. It’s all of us.’”