“Just as you intended to do to them,” I reminded him.

“Yes.” He took a deep breath and sat up, squaring his shoulders. “Yes.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

RESOLUTIONS

It was dark and Soldier’s Boy felt stiff from sitting on the cold rock by the stream. It took him some time to lever himself to his feet, and then he groaned as he straightened his back. He kneaded the earth with his feet as if he were a cat, trying to limber up his reluctant body. He walked for a short way, seeing the trees only as blacker pillars in a less dense darkness. We could see where the village was; a dim glow came from the lighted windows on the hillside above us, but it was not sufficient to light the path. Blundering haplessly, he soaked his feet twice before he found the bridge and crossed the stream.

At the bottom of the hill, he suddenly felt overwhelmed by dark, cold, and sorrow. He remembered his feeders calling for him earlier, and wished he had responded. He wanted to call for someone to come with a lantern and guide him home, and then despised himself for even thinking of it. He forced himself to trudge up the hill. In the dark, he could not find the trodden path. Twice he stumbled, and once he went to his knees. He staggered back to his feet, his teeth clenched on his silence.

One of his feeders suddenly appeared on the brow of the rise with a torch. “Great One! Is that you?” Before he could respond, the feeder shouted out, “I see him! He’s here! Come quickly!”

In moments they surrounded him. One carried a torch. Two others took him by the arms and tried to help him along. He shook them off. “I do not need assistance. I’d prefer to be alone.”

“Yes, Great One,” they responded, and stepped back from him. But the man with the torch walked before him, lighting his way, and the other two followed him, ready at any moment to spring to his aid if he needed them.

Once in the lodge, he perceived that in his absence no one had gone to bed. Instead, a hot sweet drink was simmering by the hearth beside a platter of fried dough drizzled with honey. No one asked if he was hungry or thirsty. It was their assumption. The moment he sat down by the fire, someone whisked his shoes off his feet and replaced them with dry, warm socks. A blanket, warmed by the fire, was draped around his shoulders. He realized then he was shuddering with cold and gripped it gratefully around himself. Olikea poured the warm drink into a mug and put it carefully into his hands. Her words were not as caring as her actions.

“The night before we begin to travel, I have a hundred tasks to organize and you walk off into the darkness and lose yourself. If you cannot be helpful, at least do not be a hindrance!” Her eyes were still red and swollen from her earlier weeping. Her voice was hoarse with it, but none of her pain showed in her tone. It was purely the waspishness of a woman irritated beyond her limits. No one but Olikea would have dared speak to him like that. The other feeders had grown accustomed to how bold she was with him. And he almost welcomed her anger following her weeks of lassitude.

“I’m cold,” he said, as if somehow that excused him. “And hungry. Just bring me food.”

I do not think he intended to sound so harsh. Perhaps if he had known how close she was to breaking, he would have chosen his words differently. But spoken, there was no calling the words back. Olikea seemed to swell with her anger like an affronted cat, and then her own words burst from her in a torrent.

“You are cold? You are hungry? And what of my son, whose delight it was to serve you? Do you think he is warm right now, and comfortable and well fed? But unlike you, who make the choice to wander off into the night and chill yourself, Likari dances because he must.”

She paused for breath. Soldier’s Boy was silent. He continued to stare straight ahead, the warm blanket around his shoulders, the hot mug in his hands. I sensed something building in him, but Olikea perhaps thought that he ignored her.

“You have forgotten him!” she suddenly shrieked. “You said you would get him back. You said you would do something, that you would destroy all of Gettys so that Kinrove would give my son back to his kin-clan. He served you as well as a boy of his years could! He spoke of you with pride—no! He spoke of you with love! And you were the one who said that the dance must start again to protect the ancestor trees. You knew it was our turn for the dancers to be wrenched from our homes and families. But you didn’t care. Because we are not really your kin-clan, are we? We are just the people who feed you and clothe you and see to all your needs. You do not care what we suffer! You do not lie awake at night and think of Likari’s poor little feet, dancing, dancing, always dancing! You do not wonder if he is cold but so enspelled that he does not know how his skin chaps and his lips split and bleed. You do not wonder if he is thin, if he coughs when he rests. You do not wonder how he is treated during his brief rest periods.” She sank down onto her haunches and rocked herself back and forth as she continued to fling accusations at him, her hands over her eyes.