“What are you proposing?”

“I’m proposing that we drop all walls. Become one. Completely.” The sunlight, feeble as it was, was already making his face tingle. With a grunt and a sigh, he stood and moved into the shelter of the trees. It was chilly there, but his skin was no longer exposed to direct sunlight. He found a mossed-over log and sat down on it.

I suddenly divined what had conquered him. “Lisana wants us to be one.”

“Yes.” He ground his teeth together and then said, “She sent me away. She told me that until we are one, I can no longer come to her. She…she rebuked me harshly that I had not yet made you a part of myself.”

“So I should drop my walls and let you absorb me. So that you’ll be able to use the magic fully, to kill or drive my people away so yours can live in peace. So that you can be with Lisana.”

“Yes.” He gritted out the word. “Become part of me. Let the magic work through us as it was meant to. Accept what we are, a man of both cultures. Neither side is innocent, Nevare.”

I could not argue with that.

Into my silence, he added, “Neither of us is innocent. In the names of our peoples, we have done great wrongs.”

And that, too, was true. I sat, the spring day all around me, and considered what he proposed.

“How do we know which one of us will retain the awareness?” I asked him bluntly. Privately, I wondered if he would offer this “merging” if he was not already confident it would be him.

“How do we know it will be only one of us? Perhaps, together, we become someone else. A person who has never existed before. Or the person the boy we were would have grown to be.” Idly he peeled a layer of moss from the rotting log. Beetles scattered, scuttling over the rotten wood and hiding again in the moss.

“I could become the person I was meant to be before I was sundered.” I spoke thoughtfully. My father’s soldier son. I’d take back the ruthlessness that Soldier’s Boy had stolen from me, the capacity to steel myself to do the awful things that war required of a soldier.

He laughed aloud, amused. “Could not I say exactly the same thing? Did not I feel the same sundering when you parted from me and went back to our father’s house and then off to that school? Do you think I don’t feel exactly as you do? I had a childhood. I was raised a Gernian and the son of a new noble. I remember our mother’s gentle words. I remember music and poetry, fine manners and dancing. I had a softer side once. Then I had an experience with Dewara that changed me profoundly. And Tree Woman took me under her guardianship. I watched someone else walk off with my body. But I never stopped being I and me to myself. I never became some other. You so obviously believe you are the legitimate owner of this body, Nevare, the only one who should determine what I do in this world. Can’t you grasp that I feel just the same way?”

I was silent for a time. Then I said stiffly, “I see no resolution to this.”

“Don’t you? It seems obvious to me. We let down our guards and stop resisting each other. We merge. We become one.”

I tried to think about it, but suddenly the answer was too clear before me. “No. I can’t do it.”

“Why won’t you at least try it?”

“Because no matter how it came out, it is intolerable for me to think about. If we become one, and you are dominant, I cease to exist. It would be a suicide for me.”

“I could say the same to you. But that might not happen. As I said, we might simply become a whole, a different person in which neither of us dominates.”

“It would still be intolerable. I cannot imagine a person who had any of my ethics and could tolerate the memory of what you did at Gettys. Those acts were completely reprehensible to me. I cannot accept them as a part of my past. I will not.”

He was silent for a time. Then he asked quietly, “What of your acts of war against the People? Your cutting of Lisana’s tree? You were the one who told the intruders how to overcome Kinrove’s magic and cut our ancestor trees. Was that not killing the People?”

They were trees, not people. The thought washed into my mind, but died, unuttered. It wasn’t true. When the trees had fallen, the spirits within them had moved on. My actions had been just as responsible for deaths as Soldier’s Boy’s had. Neither one of us had bloodied our hands; we had let others do that for us. But the deaths I had caused were just as unforgivable as the slaughter of the soldiers. The lurch of heart that gave me, as the acid realization ate into my soul! And Epiny had told me that the tree cutting would soon resume, if it had not already. I realized it was the result of two half measures of magic; I had told the commander at Gettys how to drug his laborers to get around the fear magic of the forest. And then Soldier’s Boy, with his bloody raid, had energized them with enough hate to make them decide to push on despite any fear or despair they felt. Together we had brought those deaths down on the People. And together we had made possible the slaughter at Gettys. If we had been one, could any of those events have happened? If Soldier’s Boy had had to feel my emotions, would he have been able to commit the atrocities that he had? If we had been one, would I have been better able to stand up for myself at Gettys and demand that I be heard?