But that was not to be. No one else at the gathering seemed to pay the constant noise any mind. Once Soldier’s Boy was dressed and ensconced on a throne again, Kinrove deigned to notice him once more. He made a signal to his feeders, and Soldier’s Boy was lifted, throne and all, and carried within a comfortable speaking distance. Jodoli and the young Great One were also lifted and brought forward, but I noticed that our chairs were arranged so that Jodoli was between her and me, and she was at a slightly greater distance from Kinrove’s elevated dais than either of us. Cushions were placed at my feet and Olikea and Likari made themselves comfortable there. Other people carried in tables already laden with food, plates, wine, and glasses, and these were placed in easy proximity to our chairs. It was all done swiftly and graciously, yet his hospitality did not extend to permitting his guests onto his dais. He kept his vantage: to look at him Soldier’s Boy had to tilt my head. The message was not subtle at all: he regarded himself as Greatest of the Great Ones and asserted his right to lord it over other Great Ones.

But the aroma of the food mollified the resentment and wariness Soldier’s Boy felt. I was shocked at how his hunger roared back to life at the sight of it. The quality of the food offered to us from Kinrove’s table made our earlier feast seem a crude meal indeed. The style of preparation and the spices used were foreign to me, as was the way the dishes were presented, but I could not quibble with the result. The flavors brought back rich memories to Soldier’s Boy of when Lisana had been alive and had dined as grandly as this every day. This lavishing of attention and catering to needs were how the Specks rewarded their Great Ones. For some years Kinrove had been the Greatest of the Great, but Jodoli and every other Great One anticipated that as they grew in size and mightiness, their kin-clans would pay this sort of homage to them. To sample this lifestyle now was a foretaste of what might come. Likari’s beaming little face betrayed that he was very much enjoying himself. Olikea looked around with greedy eyes, storing up her memories of this wonderful night. This was what she aspired to; she would live as Galea did, waited on hand and foot and accorded all the respect due to the favored feeder of a Great One.

There was little conversation; talking would have interfered with the eating. Olikea asserted her right to be the one to serve food to Soldier’s Boy, and this she did so assiduously that my mouth was scarcely ever empty. Firada was there to tend to Jodoli’s needs. She appeared to compete with her younger sister to be even more attentive to Jodoli than Olikea was to me. A moment later, I realized there was competition there, not for the food but for how much of it each of us could consume. Soldier’s Boy was sated and more than sated, but Olikea kept pressing him to eat, enticing him to try a bite of this or to have just one more mouthful of that. Behavior that had been shameful at my brother’s wedding less than two years ago was now hailed as the height of manners. Not only did Soldier’s Boy honor Kinrove with enjoyment of his food, he achieved status for himself as he continued to eat long after Jodoli had turned his face away from Firada’s entreaties.

The only competition was the young female Great One who had earlier expressed the desire to kill me. Between bites, Soldier’s Boy watched her from the corner of my eye and tried to overhear the few words that were spoken by her. I gleaned that her name was Dasie and that her people lived to the north of my Specks. Soldier’s Boy searched the recollections Lisana had shared with him. In summer, the two kin-clans had little to do with each other. It was only in winter when they came to the coast and shared the same hunting grounds under the eaves of the evergreen forest that the kin-clans crossed paths. But they shared with our kin-clan what we shared with every Speck kin-clan: the Valley of the Ancestor Trees. Their Great Ones were entombed there, living in the kaembra trees just as ours were. The two trees that had been the first to fall had been their eldest elders. My kin-clan mourned them as a loss to the People, but Dasie and her kin-clan mourned them as murdered relatives. It did not matter that the people embodied in the trees had died generations ago; if anything, it made their lingering awareness and wisdom all the more precious. The Gernians had destroyed their deepest link to their past. Their hatred burned hot. And so she watched as Soldier’s Boy ate, and I watched her. Her primary feeders were two men, one about my age and the other a man of about forty years. They conferred with each other as they fed her, and several times Soldier’s Boy caught the younger man staring at him with extreme dislike.

This was not at all the initial meeting that I had expected with Kinrove, and I wondered again what his strategy was in inviting us here. That his feeder hoped to win the use of the fertility image I understood. But looking at the man and feeling the sense of command that he exuded, I doubted that was the whole of why we had been summoned. The tension between him and Dasie was palpable. Why was she here? What did she hope to gain? I suspected that Kinrove played a deeper political game than we knew. It worried me.