Time changes when one is deprived of one’s senses, but not one’s consciousness. I felt as if I spent years in that hellish suspension, torn between hoping he’d die and fearing he’d live and condemn me to be a traitor. Hours passed, or perhaps days. In a desperate bid for my honor, I tried to take my body back, but had no idea of how to do so. I could not feel my hands, my feet, could not open my eyes. I could not feel my heart beating or time my own breathing. A terrible thought came to me; perhaps he had died, but not taken me with him. Perhaps his part of my mind was gone and my body already stilled and starting to stiffen, and I’d been left behind in the unlife that wasn’t a death, either. If I’d had a mouth or lungs, I would have screamed. Instead, I did something that surprised me; I prayed.

Not to the good god, but to the god of death and the god of balances. I prayed to the god who had demanded of me either a death or a life. “Come and take me now!” I begged him. “Take this, death or life as it may be, and be satisfied. I give it to you freely.”

There was no response, and in my boundless darkness, I wondered if I had just committed a blasphemy against the good god, and if this was what it meant to be godless.

How much time I passed in that state, I will never know. I do know that, before Soldier’s Boy awoke again, I sensed him there with me. He coalesced around me, and for one brief moment, I thought I’d be able to take him into myself and become whole again, on my terms. I was very still, afraid that if I roused him in any way, he would resist the process. Slowly I began to sense my body again. My head ached and whirled. I could see nothing and sound was just a formless roar around me, like the surf I had listened to earlier that day. My hands and feet tingled strangely. I felt my fingers twitch against the fabric of my robe, and that rasp of flesh against thread was, after my deprivation, the most heady sensation I’d ever felt. I pressed my hand against the weave, treasuring the contact, but in that moment, Soldier’s Boy became aware of me. By a means I could not sense, he wrested control away from me.

“You have no right!” I railed at him as we floated together as prisoners within the body. “I was born to this body and it belongs to me! You would use it to turn me into a traitor to my own people. How can you do that? I do not understand you. How can you be so dishonorable, so false?”

His response shocked me. “Do you think that I don’t recall my boyhood in the Midlands? Do you think I was not born into this body as surely as you were? You cannot think I came suddenly into being when Lisana made me hers? No. I was always a part of you. She peeled that part of me free of you, and gave me my own life, my own will, my own experiences, my own separate education. But she did not create me from nothing. Do you think I don’t recall Father and his ‘discipline’ and endless requirements? Locked from the instant I drew breath into being his ‘soldier son,’ separated from all else so that he might convince me it was the only thing I could be. How could anyone forget that? How do you manage to forget it? Why are you still his puppet, still the obedient little soldier that your people made you be? You say you do not understand me, because I look at what was done to me and resent it. I cannot understand you, because it seems all you long for is to return to that servitude. You would be the game piece of a king who has never seen your face, no matter what injustice or abomination you must commit in his name.”

For a moment, I was speechless, shocked at the bitterness and anger in his voice. Stunned, too, that he could accuse me of longing to be a puppet and a tool of tyranny. A moment later I marshaled my own indignation. “What of you? How are you different? If Dasie takes you at your word, you will be killing people who only ever offered you kindness. How can Spink or Epiny deserve your anger? How can the prisoners deserve to be attacked by you and driven back west? What righteousness is there in that?”

“The Specks were here first! And their forest stood long before your fort. This land is theirs. The intruders must be driven out. I but side with the people who were here first.”

“Then perhaps I should side with the Kidona. Did not they have the foothills before the Specks ever ventured down into them? Were not the Specks the ‘intruders’ then into the Kidona lands? How far back shall we go, Soldier’s Boy, to decide who is right here?”

“He’s waking up. Quick, water, but not too much!”

The voice was Olikea’s, right by my ear. I was suddenly aware that I was lying on my back, and my head was cradled in the softness of her lap. I could feel her warmth, and smell the good smell of her body. A moment later, my head was lifted and I felt liquid lap against my lips. Soldier’s Boy parted them, and moisture came into my mouth, and with it, sweetness. My body became a single surge of hunger, of thirst. Mindless, Soldier’s Boy sucked at the liquid and a moment later recognized it as fruit juice. He drained the cup, gasped, and then forced a word from my lips. “More.”