CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BOXED

Dasie kept her word. I had expected that she would quickly depart Kinrove’s encampment after she had freed the dancers. I still believe that was her original plan, but discovering Soldier’s Boy had changed it. She stayed, and she schemed with us for the next ten days, as both Soldier’s Boy and Kinrove grew fat again.

It was alarming to me how quickly Soldier’s Boy regained both his girth and his magic at Kinrove’s table. I do not think he could have fattened his body so quickly on any other foods. Kinrove’s phalanx of feeders gathered, cooked, and served the foods that were most powerful for our magic. Soldier’s Boy ate almost constantly. That he did so with evident enjoyment, even relish, only made me angrier at him. He consumed the food of the Specks that would most quickly restore his magic, and all the while, he plotted with Dasie against my own people.

Kinrove, poor man, had become a guest at his own table. Dasie had broken his power. Despite how quickly he regained most of his flesh, Dasie dominated him, not just by iron but with her unpredictability. In bringing iron swords into his encampment and attacking other Great Ones, she had done the unthinkable. All feared her. Kinrove’s extended kin-clan kept their distance from the Great Man’s pavilion, I think out of fear of what Dasie might do to Kinrove if they appeared to threaten her. His kin-clan provided for us, food and drink and tobacco, and his feeders served us, but Dasie was the commander of our days, not Kinrove. Dasie had a proprietary air toward not only Kinrove’s feeders and possessions but toward the Great Man himself. She did not say that she intended to use the Great Man’s powers for her own ends, but she did not need to. Her cavalier attitude said it all.

Yet Kinrove had his own small triumphs and seemed to relish them. As he had predicted to Dasie, some of his dancers stayed. The majority left. They rested, ate, and regained the strength to travel, and then, over several days, they departed from his encampment to seek the winter grounds of their own kin-clans. A good part of Dasie’s force departed with them, to help them journey home. Some of their guides were brothers or daughters or other kin, who had joined forces with Dasie as a way to bring the stolen relatives home. Others had no relatives among the rescuers, but left on their own or in small groups.

Olikea took Soldier’s Boy on a brief walk in the fresh air on the morning after Dasie’s attack. I watched some of the dancers depart. Most were thin, a few emaciated. The faces were lined, their eyes haunted as if they had just wakened from a terrible dream and were not yet free of its grip. I’d seen expressions like those before, on the faces of the penal workers forced to endure the terrors of the forest on a daily basis. I recalled my own experience of “breaking a Gettys Sweat.” They had danced to send that paralyzing terror and draining sadness down to Gettys. It had been horrible for us to experience it, but for it to come to us, these dancers had had to experience it first. I wondered that Kinrove and his magic could demand that of anyone he cared about.

Stranger still to contemplate were the dancers who stayed. I caught only a glimpse of them. They were a small group compared to the throng who had danced before, perhaps no more than three dozen. They hunkered together around the dais where their drummers had set the rhythm, and Kinrove’s own feeders brought them food and drink. Other feeders massaged their legs with oil and rubbed their backs. The eyes of those dancers were haunted but also determined. They reminded me of elite troops, taking a rest before joining the next bloody battle. They fought the intruders, at great cost to themselves, but it was a cost they paid willingly.

Someone had to pay the costs to win a war, he thought to himself. He turned to Olikea. “I have an errand for Likari. An important errand. You must give him whatever of Lisana’s treasure you think he will need. Send him back, quickly, to the coppersmith’s tent. I only hope he has not left the Trading Place yet. Likari must purchase for me as many of the basket arrows as the smith has to sell. And the resin, the stuff the smith said to put inside the baskets. Send him quickly, within the hour. Tell him that when I need them, I’ll ask for them.”

“What for?” Olikea demanded, but Soldier’s Boy only replied, “Do as I ask, but tell no one else.” He left her to find and send the boy, and returned alone to Kinrove’s tables. His words had filled me with dread, but not even I could pry from his mind what his complete plan was.

Before that day was out, I heard first a single drum thumping, and then others taking up the tempo. The horns joined in, and even through the thick leather walls of Kinrove’s pavilion I heard the thudding of their bare feet on the dust as they pounded out the magic that held Gettys in thrall.