The road was the wound. It was a deep gash with a virulent infection, one that the forest could not heal by itself. The road builders had cut deep into the forest’s green and living flesh, and filled that gap with gravel and sand and stone. Every time the forest tried to knit the wound closed with healing foliage, the road builders cut it back again. They were not like maggots in a wound, for maggots eat only dead flesh. These intruders maintained the slice of deadness they had placed in the forest, and cut back any attempt the forest made to heal itself. They had to go. Until the road builders were driven away, the forest could not heal.

It was a night of awakenings for me. I accepted that the forest was a living entity, almost godlike in its sprawling being. I accepted that if it was to survive, the intruders had to be banished. The road had already cut deep into the forest; the deeper it was pushed, the more the forest was divided from itself. If the road went all the way up into the mountains, the forest knew it was doomed.

But I still did not know what the magic wished me to do.

I drew back into myself, dizzied by my new awareness. It was hard to find my small human mind, and harder still to apply it to the task the magic had given me. Impatiently, I decided that there was no time to wait for the magic to discern the solution and convey it to me. The magic was so organic, so interwoven with the problem, that it could present no simple solution to it. And yet that, I felt sure, was what was needed. Something as direct and sudden as a hammer’s blow. I suspected that the magic saw no solution, and that was why it had taken me. A very old strategic premise was that the best way to find an enemy’s weakness was to become the enemy. The forest magic had passed beyond that; it had made the enemy one of its own, precisely for this reason. The hammer of Gernian logic and engineering would be wielded with the power the magic had given me.

I tried to find stillness within me, tried to feel the magic agree with that supposition. I felt nothing. But the logic of it was so clear that I brushed aside all doubt. This was why the magic had created me. In me, the power of the magic would be wielded with Gernian logic by a trained soldier. The time for subtlety was past. It was time for me to act.

I moved like darkness itself, flowing effortlessly, encountering no resistance. I paid no mind to the guards keeping their watch. They were irrelevant to me. I had seen what the magic had not perceived. Fear without foundation would sway men only to a point.

I would give their fear roots.

CHAPTER FOUR

MAGE WORK

At the edge of the road, I hesitated. Then I left life behind and stepped out into the silence of the soulless road. I felt I tore myself free of my roots to do so. With every step I took on the roadbed, I felt my awareness of the forest net of life stretch and tear. By the time I stood in the center of the road, I felt small and exposed. Overhead, there was no friendly canopy of leaves and branches, only a terrible rift that bared me to the endless night sky. I felt my Speck self retreat and Nevare came to the fore. I blinked my eyes as if I were waking from a dream. I looked around at all that must be done in the space of a night. Then I took a breath and began.

I felt like a commander on high ground, overlooking his massed forces just before the assault begins. I felt within myself for the magic. It was not an easy thing for me to do. I groped for something I could not feel or sense in any ordinary way. And once I thought I had found it, I had to find, not the will or the intellect, but the emotion to apply it.

It was harder than I’d expected it to be. I was, I discovered, tired of feeling. I’d had enough of hurt and betrayal and despair. I didn’t want to open my heart to emotions strong enough to send the magic streaming through my blood. But I had promised. I closed my eyes for a moment and then opened them to the night. No color was left in the day, save what the pallid moon would wring from the landscape. The road all around me was a flat, gray stripe of desert…No, not desert. No matter how barren a desert might appear to be, it had structure and life and connections. This road had none of those things. Dry, forsaken, it had no life of its own and severed the connections in all the lives it divided. I had thought that when I toiled in the graveyard, I dealt in death. In reality, there I had been part of the turning cycle of life and death and life. Here was true death; here all life ceased.

Anger at what had been done warred with sorrow over the loss. With an effort of will, I turned my fury aside. Instead of hatred, I let my sorrow fill me. This dead stripe of earth had once been rich, seething with life in all its stages. I grieved for its bereavement. I let go of all self-restraint and became my grief.

Then I used the power of the magic guided by my Gernian logic.

Hitch had been right. I knew exactly what to do and I wanted to do it above all else. I lifted my arms and spread wide my hands, and then I lowered them, beckoning. I was confident of it. The magic had to come. Nonetheless, I felt a resistance from it, almost as if it questioned what I was doing. The magic was not accustomed to be used in such a way. What I contemplated was not the forest way nor the Speck way. But I knew what I was doing, and I was certain it would work. “It’s a Gernian way,” I said softly to the night wind. “A Gernian tactic to turn back the Gernians. Isn’t that why you wanted me? To use me as a tool against my own kind? Then trust me to know how I am sharpest!”

The magic relented. I felt it well up from inside me and flow outward. It strengthened my arms and then filled my hands. They grew heavy with it. I kept them closed in fists, containing it until I was sure my focus was clear and my purpose strong. Then I opened my fingers and let the magic shoot forth.

I began where it was easiest. Water always summons life. Epiny had blown up the culvert and the pooling water had washed out part of the road and soaked even more. The work crews had gone far to repair it today, but the moist earth still beckoned. It was ready to receive what I had to give.

I reached to the smallest plants, the tiny single-leaved cresses, the strands of algae that waited in the stagnant ponds at the side of the road. Given time and no disturbances, they would, in the course of a month, repopulate the damp soil and the standing puddles. From the sun and the earth, they would draw sustenance in minute daily quantities. They would edge into the available space, slowly repopulating it as their resources allowed them.

I opened myself. I surrendered to them the energy that the magic had given to me. In a matter of moments, I fed them the resources it would have taken them a year to gather. And they responded. Like an unfurling green carpet, the massed plants surged forward, enveloping the forsaken roadbed. They sank pale roots into the packed gravel, seeking the scant moisture of the settling dew, absorbing the dust of nutrients trapped among the pebbles. They were like new skin covering a gaping wound.

I choked the newly set culvert with greenery. I beckoned the lush, fat-stemmed, flat-leaved plants to fill it. I heard the rustle of their growth, and the muddy water that had flowed freely through it suddenly gagged, backed, and swelled. I waited. A crystalline trickle emerged from the filtering plant life and a pond began to back up on the high side of the road. By morning, I calculated, a new stream would be cutting its way across the road’s surface. I turned away.

I strode down the road, naked to the moonlight and the distant stars. I spoke to the trees that lined the road. I was as heartless as a herder culling cattle. Most of the trees that lined the road had had their side roots cut. They would linger for years, but they were already dying. To the weak, I commanded, “Let go your grip and fall!” The strong I bade, “Send out your roots. Buckle and break the road.”