Renegade’s Magic. Robin Hobb
feel the fear as keenly and could work despite it. I’d even heard that some of the penal workers now craved the intoxicants so much that they clamoured to be on the work details at the road’s end. The drugged and desensitized men would push the road on into the forest. I’d enabled that. It had almost earned me a promotion.
I recognized uncomfortably that my heart was turning more and more towards a forest way of thinking. The divide in me ran deep now. I was still a Gernian, but that was no longer sufficient reason to believe that the King’s Road must be pushed through at all costs. I glanced back towards Tree Woman’s stump. No. The cost to me alone was too high. It had to be stopped.
How?
I stood for a long time as the afternoon waned, watching the men and teams flailing away at their tasks. Even at this distance, I could see that the workers were impaired. No one moved briskly and mishaps abounded. A wagon trying to turn too tightly with a load of rock turned over and dumped its cargo. An hour later, another wagon mired, and a third driver, trying to get past the mired wagon, drove his team into the ditch and overset his load there.
Yet for all that, the work was progressing. It might be tomorrow before they had replaced the culverts, and perhaps even another day before they had a drivable surface on the road there. But eventually, like patient insects, they would get it done. And then they would push on once more, cutting inexorably into the forest. Did it matter to me if they cut down her tree next week or three years from now? I needed to stop them.
Yet no matter how I wracked my brain, I could not come up with a plan. I’d gone to the Colonel before the plague descended on us and begged him to stop the road. I’d explained to him that the kaembra trees were sacred to the Specks, and that if we cut them, we could expect an all-out war with the forest people. He’d dismissed me and my concerns. Silly superstitions, he’d told me. Once the trees were cut and the Specks discovered that no great calamity befell them, he believed they could more readily adapt to the civilization we offered them. Not even for an instant did he pause to wonder if there might be a grain of truth in what the Specks believed about their trees.
When I asked if the road could not go around the kaembra trees, he pointed out that engineers had mapped out the best route, and it went past Gettys and through the mountain pass that traders had once used. For years, the resources of Gernia had been committed to building the road on that route. An alternate path had once been considered, one that would have gone past Mendy and the Fort to cut through the Barrier Mountains there. But to redirect the road-building effort to that route would mean adding years to the King’s project, not to mention absorbing the waste of all that had gone into pushing the road as far as Gettys and beyond it. No. Nothing so trivial as a stand of ancestral trees would halt the King of Gernia’s grand vision.
The Colonel was dead now, a victim of the Speck plague. The Specks had struck back at the tree cutters in the only way they had. They’d done the Dust Dance for the visiting officials from Old Thares and the inspection team, and in the process had infected everyone with the plague. I’d warned him of that, too. If the Colonel had ever reconsidered my words, he’d taken all such thoughts to the grave with him. Even if I’d been able to go into Gettys and talk to the new commander, my words would make no impression on him. The two realities, Gernian and Speck, simply did not meet. The Colonel had not even been able to grasp that the Specks were at war with us. He had thought that because they came yearly to trade with us, we’d reached an accord of sorts, and that they would slowly adopt our ways. I knew better. Each year, in the course of that ‘trading’ time, they attacked us, deliberately spreading Speck plague among us.
Our peoples couldn’t even agree on what constituted a war.
I doubted the Specks knew of the magnitude of the blow they’d dealt us with the latest outbreak of plague. The Speck plague had struck down every visiting officer on the reviewing stand. General Brodg, our Commander in the East had fallen, as well as his predecessor, the venerable General Prode. Those losses would echo throughout all of Gernia. And within the fort at Gettys most of our resident officers had fallen sick, drastically reducing the ratio of officers to enlisted men. The command at Gettys had been passed down three times in the space of a month. The man who had it now, Major Belford, had never commanded a post before. I wondered if the King would bother to replace him, and who would assume the position of Commander in the East. I wondered who would want it. Then I decided that such decisions no longer concerned me. I was a soldier no more. I wasn’t even sure I was a Gernian.
A resolve formed in me slowly. I needed to stop the road, not just to preserve Tree Woman, but for the sake of both peoples. I needed to make building the road an impossible task so that King Troven would either give up the idea, or would completely reroute his road far to the north, through Mendy and the Fort. Once the King had diverted his energies to that route and pass, Gettys as a military encampment would lose much of its value. It might be abandoned altogether. And that might be the end of the clash between Gernians and Specks. Perhaps we could go back to peaceful and sporadic trading; or perhaps it would be even better if all interaction between my peoples ceased.
I felt like a curtain was rising in my mind. The time for trying to reason with either people was gone; it was time for me to simply destroy the road. It was a very rudimentary strategy, but I still felt a lift in my spirits to have devised it. I felt a bit foolish as well. Why had I not found this determination before now? The answer to that was easy. Even if I now knew what I wished to do, I had very few ideas of how to implement my plans. There was small sense in planning to do a task that seemed impossible. Impossible for any ordinary man with ordinary means. But I was no longer an ordinary man, was I? I’d given way to the magic and accepted this task. I, Nevare Burvelle, was going to destroy the King’s Road.
It was why I’d been given the magic. Lisana and Jodoli, the Speck Great Man I’d met, had both insisted that my task was to turn back the intruders, the Gernians. They had told me that the magic had chosen me, had made me a Great One for that very task. The conclusion was inescapable. I was to use the magic to stop the road.
The only thing I still didn’t know was how.
The magic had been growing in me, like a fungus overtaking a piece of fruit, since I was fifteen years old. For several years, it had skulked beneath my awareness. Only when I left home to go to the Academy had I become aware that something strange lurked within me. And only after I’d contracted Speck plague and survived it did the magic begin to change my body so radically. It had cloaked me in the fat that had made me an object of ridicule and disdain and hampered not just my physical life but my military career. Yet in all the years that it had possessed me and changed me, I’d only managed to use it for my own ends a few times. For the most part, it used me.
It had used me to spy on my people, to better understand ‘the intruders’ and how they might be fought. It had used me to spread the Speck plague in our capital city and all through our Cavalla Academy, destroying a whole generation of young officers. It had used me again to know when best to strike in Gettys, so that the entire inspection team of officers and nobles from the West might be wiped out.
Every time I had managed to use the magic, even with the best of intentions, the magic had found a way to turn it back on me. Both Lisana and Scout Hitch had warned me against trying to use the magic for my own ends. About the only thing I’d learned about how the magic was actually wielded was that it flamed in response to my emotions. Logic could not wield it, nor could wishful thinking ignite it. It only boiled through my blood when my heart was completely involved. When I was angry, or frightened or seething with hate, then the magic came to me without effort, and the urge to use it became well nigh irresistible. At any other time, attempting to bend it to my will was impossible. It bothered me, and not a little, that logic rather than emotion was prompting me to turn the magic against the road itself. Was not that a very Gernian reaction to a Speck problem? But perhaps that was why the magic had chosen me. Still, if I was going to use magic to stop the road being built, I would first have to find the heart to do it.
I turned my head and looked towards Lisana’s stump. I thought of how I had nearly killed her, and what it had meant to me to discover that she was still alive. I thought of the sapling that had once been a branch, and how it rose from the fallen trunk of her tree. I’d seen that happen before.