Al almost laughed to see that Red pull his knife away and look at it, try to see what was wrong. He ran the edge against his own finger, to test it; Al thought of making the blade razor sharp right then, but no, no, the rule was to use his knack to make things right, not to cause injury. The others gathered round to look at the knife. Some of them mocked the knife's owner, probably thinking he hadn't kept the edge sharp. But Al spent that time finding all the other steel edges that those Red men had and making them round and smooth. They couldn't've cut a pea pod in half with them knives when Al was through.

Sure enough, all the others pulled out their knives to try them, running the edges against Al or Measure first, and finally yelling and shouting and accusing each other, quarreling over whose fault it was, probably.

But they had a job to do, didn't they? They were supposed to torture these White boys and make them scream, or at least hack them up bad enough that when their folks found the bodies they'd thirst for revenge.

So one of the Reds took his old-fashioned stone-edged tommy-hawk and brandished it in front of Al's face, waving it around so he'd get good and scared. Al used the time to soften up the stone, weaken the wood, loosen the thongs that held it all together. By the time the Red got to lifting it up ready to do some real business, like smashing Al in the face with it, it crumbled apart in his hand. The wood was rotted clear through, the stone fell to the ground as gravel, and even the thong was split and frayed through. That Red man shouted and jumped back like as if he had a rattler a-biting at him.

Another one had a steel-blade hatchet, and he didn't waste no time waving it around, he just laid out Measure's hand on a rock and whacked it down, meaning to cut Measure's fingers off. This was easy stuff to Al, though. Hadn't he cut whole millstones, when the need was? So the hatchet struck and rang on the stone, and Measure gasped at the sight of it, sure it'd take his fingers clean off; but when the Red picked up the hatchet, there was Measure's hand just like before, not marked a bit, while the hatchet had finger-shaped depressions in the blade, like it was made of cool butter or wet cake-soap.

Them Reds, they howled, they looked at each other with fear in their eyes, fear and anger at the strange things going on. Alvin couldn't know it, being White, but the thing that made this worst of all for them was they couldn't feel it like they felt a White man's spells or charms or doodles. A White man put a hex, they felt it like a bump in their land-sense; a beseeching was a nasty stink; a warding was a buzz when they came close. But this that Alvin did, it didn't interrupt the land at all, their sense of how things ought to be didn't show them nothing different going on. It was like all the natural laws had changed on them, and suddenly steel was soft and flesh was hard, rock was brittle and leather weak as grass. They didn't look to Al or Measure as the cause of what was going on. It was some natural force doing it, as best they could figure.

All that Alvin saw was their fear and anger and confusion, which pleased him well enough. He wasn't cocky, though. He knew there was some things he didn't know how to handle. Water was the main one; if they took it in their heads to drown the boys, Al wouldn't know how to stop them, or save himself or Measure. He was only ten, and being bound by rules he didn't understand, he hadn't figured out what-all his knack was good for, or how it worked. Maybe there was things within his power that could be right spetackler, if he only knowed how, but the point was he didn't know, and so he only did the things that were within his reach.

This much was on his side– they didn't think of drowning. But they thought of fire. Most likely they were planning that from the start– folks told tales of finding torture victim in the Red wars back in New England, their blackened feet in the cooling ashes of a fire, where they had to watch their own toes char until the pain and bleeding and madness of it killed them. Alvin saw them stoking up the fire, putting hot-burning branches on it to make it flare. He didn't know how to take the heat out of a fire, he'd never tried. So he thought as fast as he could, and while they were picking Measure up by his armpits and dragging him to the fire, Al got inside the firewood and broke it up, made it crumble into dust, so it burnt up fast, all at once, in a fire so fast it made a loud clap and a puff of bright hot light shot upward. It rose so fast that it made a wind blow in from all directions onto the place where the fire had been, and it made a whirlwind for a second or two, whipping around, sucking up the ashes and then puffing them out to drift down like dust.

Just like that, nothing left of the fire at all except dust settling fine as mist all over the clearing.

Oh, they howled, they jumped and danced and beat on their own shoulders and chests. And while they were carrying on like an Irish funeral, Al loosened the ropes on him and Measure, hoping against hope that they might even get away after all before their folks and neighbors found them and started in with shooting and killing and dying.

Measure felt the ropes loosening, of course, and looked sharp at Alvin; up to then he'd been almost as crazy with what was happening as the Reds. Of course, he knew right off that it was Alvin doing it, but it wasn't as if Alvin could explain what he was planning– it took Measure by surprise same as the others. Now, though, he looked at Alvin and nodded, starting to twist his arms out of the ropes. None of the Reds had noticed so far, and maybe they could get a running start, or maybe– just maybe– the Reds were so upset they wouldn't even try to follow.

Right then, though, everything changed. There was a hooting sound from the forest, and then it got picked up by what sounded like three hundred owls, all in a circle. Measure must have thought for a second that Al was causing that to happen, too, the way he looked at his little brother– but the Reds knew what it was, and stopped their carrying on right away. From the fear on their faces, though, Al figured it must be something good, maybe even something like rescue.

From, the forest all around the clearing there stepped out dozens, then a hundred Reds. These were all carrying bows– not a musket among them– and the way they dressed and had their hair, Al reckoned them to be Shaw-Nee, and followers of the Prophet. It was about the last thing Al expected, truth to tell. It was White faces he wanted to see, not more Red ones.

One Red stepped out of the mass of the newcomers, a tall strong man with a face as hard and sharp as stone, it looked like. He fired off a couple of harsh-soundmig words, and immediately their captors began babbling, jabbering, pleading. It was like a bunch of children, Al thought, doing something they knew they shouldn't ought to, and then their pa comes along and catches them at it. Having been caught in such mischief himself sometimes, he almost felt a little sympathy, till he remembered that what his captors had had in mind was cruel death for him and his brother. Just because they ended up without a scratch didn't mean them Reds weren't guilty of the bad intent.

Then one word stuck out of all the yammering– a name: Ta-Kumsaw. Al looked at Measure to see if he'd heard, and Measure was looking at him, raising his eyebrows, asking the same thing. They both mouthed the name at the same time. Ta-Kumsaw.

Did this mean Ta-Kumsaw was in charge of all this? Was he angry at the captors because they failed at the torture, or because they'd captured White boys at all? There wasn't no explanation from the Reds, that was sure. All that Al could know for sure was what they did. The newcome Reds took all the muskets away from the gun-toters, and then led them off into the woods. Only about a dozen Reds stayed with Al and Measure. Among them was Ta-Kumsaw.