He stood by the muck-filled pond, turning the crystal slowly in his hands. He remembered something then, something of mine. When I was just a boy and Sergeant Duril was training me to be a soldier, he always carried a sling and a pouch of small rocks. Whenever he caught me unwary, I could expect the thud of a rock against my ribs or back or even my head. “And you’re dead,” he’d always tell me afterward. “Because you weren’t paying attention.”
After a time, I’d begun to save the different rocks he used to “kill” me. I’d had a box full of them before I’d left home.
He held up the crystal for Likari to see. “I want to keep this. Do you have room in your pouch for it?”
“I can put it with your sling.”
There was a small surprise. “You have my sling.”
“I found it in your old clothes. I thought you might want it again.”
“You were right. Good boy. Put the crystal with it.”
The boy nodded, pleased at the praise, and reached to take it from me. “Careful. It’s sharp,” Soldier’s Boy warned him, and he took it gingerly. He stowed it away in one of the pouches on his belt, and then looked up, a serious question in his eyes. “Let’s go eat,” Soldier’s Boy told him, forestalling it, and led the way back to the dwindling fire and the food.
The fish was very good, but there wasn’t enough of it. I could feel that Soldier’s Boy had used too much magic making light and warmth. He was wearied. At this stopping place, there were alcoves hollowed into the lower walls of the chamber. He chose a large one and clambered into it, and was unsurprised when Olikea and then Likari joined him there. The moisture in the air made the chill more noticeable, as if the cold were settling on us like dew. Our combined body heat warmed the alcove, but the single blanket did little to confine our warmth. It leaked away and cold crept in. He decided that he could not afford to use any more magic that night; we’d simply have to get by.
Soldier’s Boy fell asleep. I did not. I hovered inside him in the darkness and pondered everything I’d witnessed. I am not a fool. I immediately connected the many tiny injuries he’d dealt himself and the inky slime he’d rubbed into them to the dapples on any Speck’s skin. Was it some sort of a tattoo that they inflicted even on the smallest child? Olikea’s specks had never seemed like tattoos to me. They’d even seemed to have a slightly different texture from the rest of her skin. I’d always assumed that all Speck babies were born with, well, specks on them. Was it possible that the Specks were not Specks when they were born?
Because I was aware, I think I was more conscious of Soldier’s Boy’s rising temperature. His flesh flushed warm and the tiny stinging wounds that he had dealt himself began to itch. He muttered in his sleep and shifted uncomfortably. Without waking, he scratched first one arm and then the other. He shifted again, causing the others to murmur in protest, and then dropped into a deeper sleep. Almost as soon as he did, I felt his fever rise higher.
He was ill. Very ill. He’d sickened my body and I was trapped inside it, voiceless and helpless. Every place where the crystal had pierced his skin now itched abominably, far worse than any insect bite or sting that I’d ever endured. When he sleepily scratched at the sores, I could feel how puffy and swollen each one was. I felt something pop like a blister and then the wetness of blood or pus on my skin. I longed to get up and go to the water, to wash myself and clean the injuries, but I could not rouse him at all.
He was deep into dreams now, and as his fever climbed, his dreams became brighter and sharper edged and harder to ignore. He dreamed of a forest that was impossibly green, and a wind that swept through it like the waves on an ocean, and somehow there were ships on those waves, ships with brightly colored sails that floated and spun through the forest treetops. It was a bizarre dream of bright colors and giddy shapes, and it completely fascinated me. I wondered if my rationality would give way to his fever.
Then I felt him leave the body.
It was a strange sensation. For a moment, I felt I was alone in the fever-racked shell. Desperately I reached out to try to regain control of my physical being. Then, as if the current of a river had seized me, I felt myself pulled away from my body and out into an otherness. It was like being dropped down a shaft. I felt shapeless and unanchored; then I became aware of the part of me that was Soldier’s Boy and held tight to him. It was like gripping the mane of a runaway horse.
He was dream-walking. I knew that right away, but it was as unlike my experience of dream-walking as a rushing river is unlike a quiet pool. It was a wandering fever dream, energized by the heat that tormented his body. He snapped from one awareness to the next, without pause or purpose, like a captured fish darting about in a bucket of water. We brushed wildly against Olikea’s dreams, a memory of shared lust, and then rushed toward Lisana. He beat furiously about her, like a bird trying to break through a window, but could not sense, as I did, how she reached toward him, trying to catch and hold the connection. She gave a lonely cry as he darted away again.
