“You speak of extremes. The warriors are ready to fight as hard as we must fight to win,” Dasie asserted.
“Are the warriors ready to die to protect their comrades, in the hope that their fellows will win?” Soldier’s Boy asked her quietly.
She was startled. “But you say that our plan is good. That Kinrove’s dance will have demoralized the protectors of Gettys, that we will fall on them when they are full of sleep and confused. You have said we will slaughter them.” She paused, her anger and indignation building. “You promised this!” she accused him.
“And we will.” He replied calmly. “But some of us will die. This we have to admit, going into this battle. Some of us will die.” He paused, waiting for some sign that she accepted this. Her face remained stony. He sighed and went on, “And when a warrior is injured, or when he sees his brother fall, dying, he cannot then decide that the price is too high to pay. Each of them must go into this battle thinking that if he must die for us to win it, then he will. It is the only way. This is what I am trying to teach them. Not just how to quickly be where I tell them to be, not just how to obey an order without conferring with one another or arguing. I must build them into a group that has a focus and a goal, a goal that is more important to each of them than his own life. We will not have more than one chance to do this well. The first time we attack them, we must wipe them out. It is our only hope.”
Dasie lowered her chin to her chest, thinking. Her eyes were closed to slits as she stared into the fire. At last she said in a soft, sad voice, “This is worse than Kinrove’s dance. In the dance, they gave up their own lives to protect us. But now you tell them they must kill, and yet must still give up their own lives. I thought to save my people from such things. You are telling me I have only plunged us even deeper into it.”
“And I have more to say.” Soldier’s Boy shifted slightly in his seat. “You will not like to hear it. But I know it is true. We need to support Kinrove in his dance. He has complained to me weekly that he does not have enough dancers for the magic to work well. He is bitter, saying that you broke his magic for the sake of your personal feelings, and now that you require it to work, you demand more of him than he can do. He says he needs more dancers, if he is to send fear and sadness not just to the edges of the forest, but deep into Gettys. And that is where we need it to be.” He paused and then looked at the fire as he said quietly, “We must allow him to summon more dancers.”
She looked at him incredulously. “Can you say this to me? When only three months ago, I took iron into his encampment to free the dancers? Don’t you understand at all why I did that? His dance was destroying us; the price he demanded to hold the intruders at bay was too high. It had torn the fabric of our families, and our kin-clans. I stopped the dance so that the People could go back to living as they used to live. What is the point of what I did if now I say to my people, ‘You must not only submit to being summoned to the dance, to dance until you die, but you must be willing to take death to the intruders and perhaps die there as well.’ Where is the peace and tranquility and return to the old ways that I promised them?”
I scarcely heard his response. Three months ago? My eternity of isolation had only been three months? Listening to them, I had feared I eavesdropped on an ongoing war council. I now knew, with a surge of hope, that Gettys had not yet been attacked. There was still time to stop this. How to stop it, I was not yet certain. But I had time, if only a small amount.
Soldier’s Boy was talking to her, low and earnest. “Before our people can go back to being what they were, to living as they have always lived, we must free ourselves of the threat from the intruders. So, yes, we must change, for this small time, yes, we must subject the People to these things. In order to save them.”
“In order to save them, I must permit Kinrove to work a summoning on our own people? I must let him turn the magic on the People again?”
“Yes.” Soldier’s Boy spoke heavily and with regret.
“You are certain that this is your counsel to me?”
I thought I heard a trap in her words. Either Soldier’s Boy did not or he was past caring. “Yes.”
“Then so be it.” She heaved herself out of her chair and stood. The scarlet and blue robes that she wore fell into heavy folds around her. Her feeders came immediately to stand at her side, ready to assist her should she require it. “Bring my wraps,” she told them. “And have my bearers ready my litter. We quick-walk back to my lodge tonight.” She turned back to Soldier’s Boy and grumbled, “It makes no sense that you insist on living here. It is a hardship on everyone that you are so far from every winter village.”