“I will tell you, Kinrove. For before I came into your grand pavilion this evening, I stood and watched your dancers pass. I watched them make three circuits. I studied each face as each one passed. I saw no joy in any of them. Only fear. Or despair. Many wore the look of one who knows that death is soon to come. A few hate you, Kinrove. Did you know that? Do you ever go outside and look at the faces of those you have called to dance? Have you forgotten that once your dancers were the People?”
The pavilion had grown quiet. Serving folk still moved, but they had slowed, as if they lingered to hear an answer. The importance of her question sang silently in the air around us. The drumming and horns and the endless shuffling of the dancers seemed to grow louder in that stillness.
Kinrove’s answer was not as strong as it could have been. “The magic calls the dancers. I but send it out. Every year, in rotation, it goes to a different kin-clan. It goes forth and it summons, and some answer that summons. I cannot control who is called. I do only what is needed. And those who are called and come here to dance, dance for all of us. It is not a shameful calling. When they die, they are buried with respect. Their lives have served us all well.”
“They have not had lives!” Dasie asserted in response. “Especially not those who answer the call when they are little more than children. Their lives stop on the day they come to you. What do they do from that day hence, Great One? Do they laugh or take mates? Do they have children or hunt or talk around the fire in the evening with their neighbors? Do they have any life of their own? NO! They dance. Endlessly. They dance until they drop, and then they are dragged away from the chain for a brief rest, fed the herbs and foods that will fill their bodies with energy again, and then they are taken back to the dance. They dance until they are mindless, nothing more than bodies in motion, like spindles weaving your dance of magic. And then they die. Why are their deaths so unimportant to you? Why are their deaths worth so much less than the death of a person who left his body a hundred years ago?”
I felt the same shiver that ran up Soldier’s Boy’s back. I knew what the magic’s call to me had done to my life. I thought of all the dancers I had glimpsed so briefly on my way into the pavilion.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to serve the magic in an endless dance. I knew how the magic had commanded me. I’d seen what it had done to Hitch. But what if it had demanded of me that I dance, endlessly, in a circle? What if I’d known that the dance would be the final sum of all my life? What would it be to rise daily from brief rest, knowing that all that day I would dance until weariness dropped me? Was the fear they had worn on their faces real? Did they dance in terror or black despair as a way to generate the waves of magic that rolled over the King’s Road and through Gettys? I could not imagine such an existence, nor the leader who would condemn his people to live it. Even the prisoners who labored on the King’s Road always knew there was eventually an end to their task. Some died before they reached that end, true, but those deaths were not inevitable. Many reached their freedom and even realized the King’s promise of land and a home of their own. Kinrove’s dancers were expected to dance their lives away, in the name of keeping the ancestral forest safe. And apparently he saw no eventual end to the dance, no final solution. To keep the intruders at bay, the dance would have to go on forever.
It appalled me. I was shocked that any leader could use his people so. I tried to break into Soldier’s Boy’s thoughts: “And I’m not the only one who thinks it’s monstrous. Look at Dasie, Soldier’s Boy. She and others like her are why Kinrove has a magical barrier around his encampment. He may call himself Greatest of the Great, but not all believe he should wear that title.” As before, I received no acknowledgment from the other half of myself. I retired to seethe quietly to myself.
At last Kinrove spoke. “I do not undervalue my dancers, Dasie. Without them, I could not weave the magic that protects us all. I spend them only because I must, just as I spend myself. They and I are part of a greater magic, one that you do not comprehend. You ask if their lives are not worth as much as those of our elders. No. They are not. Each elder in a tree was a Great One in his time, chosen not by man but by the magic. And in the years they have existed since then, they have acquired ever more knowledge. They hold our past for us and guide us toward a future. Those who must die to protect them should feel honored to do so. They are honored by us while they live and dance. We give to each the best care we can—”
“Except to give them back their lives!” Dasie cut in angrily. I could feel her anger. I do not know if she meant to expend magic, but she did. The fury rolled off her in waves; Soldier’s Boy felt it as a surge of unfriendly warmth against my skin. Her feeders were leaning forward, whispering to her urgently, but she paid them no mind. “For years you have used them, Kinrove. Used them, and claimed the magic they made as your own. You have styled yourself the ‘Greatest of the Great’ on the heaps of their bones. You say you do it to save us from the Jhernians. But you take from us more than we can replace. Yearly the dancers die, and we do not bear enough children to replace them. You are dancing your own people to death in the name of saving them.”