“What are you doing?” I asked her, fearing that I already knew.

“I do not know how he could do it. But if he tries…if he tears your body from this place, just as Dewara once did, then I will still keep your soul. Or as much of it as I can.”

“You would divide me again?”

“I hope not. I hope that all of you will stay.” Tears had begun in her eyes. She put her free arm around me and pressed the soft flesh of her body against mine. “Hold tight to me,” she pleaded. “Hold very tight. Don’t let him take you away.”

“I won’t.” I put my arms around her. I kissed her. “I’m staying with you,” I promised. Our mouths were so close I felt her breath against my lips. I felt her tears cling to my cheeks. Another streak of pain raced down my back. I cried out, but held tight to Lisana. Another stripe, this one right next to the first. And another.

They came in a methodical flogging now, one after another, each agony laid down next to the previous one. I could not control my response to it. The body I had imagined for myself in Lisana’s world had a bloody ruin for a back. The blood streamed down my legs, and I trembled with the pain, but held on to her. There was nothing else I could do, no way to defend myself from the greedy flesh-stripping birds that attacked me in another world.

It went on for a very long time. When Lisana could no longer hold on to my body because of the damage it had sustained, when I had sunk to my knees, moaning with pain, still she stood by me, weeping and gripping grimly the handful of hair on the top of my head.

The first time I had ever met her, when we had come together as adversaries, I as Dewara’s champion and she as the guardian of the dream bridge, she had seized me in the same way. And when I fell into the abyss, she had kept that grip, and jerked out of me a core of my person. She had kept that piece and it had grown to be Soldier’s Son. But what would happen to me this time, neither of us knew. I did not even know if I would be torn from her world. Perhaps, when Orandula was through with his torment of me, he would let me go, and I could heal and be with her.

A grimmer thought came to my pain-encrusted mind. Perhaps the torment would never end. Perhaps this was what the Old God meant by taking my death from me. That even after my life was over, I would know no peace. It seemed too cruel a fate to contemplate; could anyone, even a god, do such a thing?

For the first time since the torment began, Orandula spoke to me. “Of course I could. But that is not what we agreed upon. You told me I could take your death. And I will.”

“Please! Mercy,” I begged.

“But I am not the god of mercy. I am the god of balances.”

“By the good god, please stop!” I begged him.

“I do not know this good god. Truth to tell, I sometimes think he is whatever god is giving you what you think you want. And thus perhaps all of us take turns being your good god.”

“Then be the good god to me now,” I begged. All I could feel was pain. Sunlight on my leaves was gone, Lisana holding my hand was gone, even her grip on my hair had vanished. There remained only me and the eternal punishment of this god. “God of balances, balance this, this justice you claim from me with the mercy I beg.”

Another searing stripe of pain. Was this the flogging I’d escaped in that other life? Did this pain now balance the pain I hadn’t had then? It was a senseless question.

Orandula seemed detached from what he did to me. “Balance justice with mercy? But surely justice can be balanced only with injustice.” Words tumbled and bumped in my head. If mercy was not justice, was it an injustice when mercy was given?

Beaks were rummaging in my guts, snapping and snipping, pulling out bits of this and that, tugging them away.

“Please.” In all the world, there was only Orandula left to speak with. “Please, make it be over.”

I had not known I was going to beg for that. But there it was, the words were out of my mouth.

“Very well,” the god replied. And I knew darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

EMERGENCE

Darkness. Absolute darkness. But not peace. My body was bathed in pain. The skin of my face, my arms and legs, my back and belly, all stung as if badly burned. That was it. As thoughts re-formed in my head, I realized what had happened. I’d been sunburned. Dewara had left my body exposed to the sun and I was burned all over. I remembered it now. Soon I would open my eyes, and find myself back in my bed, at home. My mother would be weeping by my bedside while my father kept watch.

I was going back to the beginning of it all. Back to where I could choose differently, live my life over. I would not make the mistakes I’d made before. I’d be strong and more aggressive. My father would be proud of me. I’d be an officer in the King’s Cavalla. My mother and siblings would not die of a plague that I’d let loose upon Gernia. The old god had taken me back to where it had all begun, to when Dewara had sent me to do battle against Tree Woman and I had failed. Had that been a death? Was that the death the old god had taken?