I had tried, without success, to shrug off the guilt I felt. I’d been the unwilling and unwitting partner of the Specks and Tree Woman. It was not my fault, I told myself, that I’d fallen into her power. Years ago, my father had entrusted me to a Plainsman warrior for training. Dewara had nearly killed me with his “instruction.” And toward the end of my time with him, he’d decided to “make me Kidona” by inducting me into the magic of his people.

Foolishly, I’d allowed him to drug me and take me into the supernatural world of his people. He’d told me I could win honor and glory by doing battle with the ancient enemy of his people. But what confronted me at the end of a series of trials had been a fat old woman sitting in the shade of a huge tree. I was my father’s soldier son, trained in the chivalry of the cavalla. I could not draw sword against an old woman. Due to that misplaced gallantry, I had fallen to her. She had “stolen” me from Dewara and made me her pawn. A part of me had remained with her in that spirit world. While I had grown and gone off to the academy and begun my education to be an officer in my king’s cavalla, he had become her acolyte. Tree Woman had made that part of me into a Speck in all things but having speckled skin. Through him, she spied on my people, and hatched her terrible plan to destroy us with the Speck plague. Masquerading as captive dancers, her emissaries came to Old Thares as part of the Dark Evening carnival and unleashed their disease upon us.

My Speck self had seized control of me. I’d signaled the Dust Dancers to let them know they had reached their goal. The carnivalgoers who surrounded them thought they had come to witness an exhibition of primitive dance. Instead, they’d breathed in the disease with the flung dust. When my fellow cadets and I left the carnival, we were infected. And the disease had spread throughout all of Old Thares.

In my bed in the darkened dormitory, I rolled over and thumped my pillow back into shape. Stop thinking about how I betrayed my own people, I begged myself. Think instead of how I saved them.