The next morning, Socks said, -I want to go hunting. I will not be long. Do you want to come, or go spend time with the humans?-

  “I can hunt with you any time. I’ll stay here.”

  -Good. You should learn what you can. I just didn’t want you to be sad that I left you.- The pup gave Dirt an affectionate lick and bounded off across the snow.

  Dirt headed into the fort and spent a while simply poking, seeing what everyone was up to. Although he’d spent a few days in Ogena after the battle, it had been a wild, busy time, usually spent with Màxim getting into trouble. He had seen almost nothing of typical domesticity and now he was curious.

  First, he crept close enough to Biandina’s family to make sure they hadn’t done anything to her, and everyone was fine. All the little ones were competing for her attention and the mother was helpless to stop them. After that, he quietly snuck around everywhere he could fit to see what there was to see. Mothers scolding little ones, fathers and older children out and about on various chores. Working with strips of hide set out on frames, checking on the stores of charcoal, taking horses to go ride somewhere, all sorts of things.

  People stopped to chat wherever they met. Some mentioned the giant wolf, wondering if he was still around, and marveled that nothing awful had happened. Apparently not all the stories about giant wolves had happy endings, and if Dirt stayed here long enough, he wanted to hear them all.

  Word was also spreading about the events in the Aedes yesterday, too. The accounts all conflicted, with some saying that the wolf had killed a man in anger, and some that the guards had killed someone who attacked the wolf’s pet boy. Only a few of them mentioned half-dead Iliaru’s true nature, and those were typically recited and received with skepticism. No one yet mentioned the moving skeleton.

  The general atmosphere was festive, in a subdued way. This tribe had only been gathered back together like this for a short time, only since the bad weather started not too long ago, and they were still in good spirits about it.

  Dirt didn’t always manage to stay out of sight, which limited how much he could observe. He stood out too much in his unusually tight clothing. One woman carrying a heavy waterskin on a rope, waved him over and quietly said, “Boy, come here. Were you Mettodiu’s son?”

  “Nope,” said Dirt.

  “Whose son are you?”

  “Nobody’s,” said Dirt.

  “Who are you staying with, then?”

  “I’m staying with the giant wolf,” said Dirt. “I’m the little human he brought along.”

  She looked visibly relieved, then gave a friendly little chuckle. “You need to ask him for some new pants. I thought you were an orphan the tribe was neglecting.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks for checking. Do your people always take care of orphans?”

  “Of course. We have more work than hands. We can’t spare a single pair,” she said. Then she nodded, readjusted the rope holding the big waterskin, and continued on.

  Dirt was growing fonder of the tribe already. No one had shot an arrow at him yet, for one. It seemed like they took care of each other and everyone got along. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t all cram in here together every winter.

  The tribe had its problems, surely. The giant birds and hulking canines that hunted them, and who knew what else was out there. And that statue in the Aedes. That was another problem. Exiling Biandina over it was a problem, too. And he wasn’t even sure where to start with the elders murdering a man by stabbing him and burying him alive in the treasury. Should Dirt punish them? What if they’d been justified somehow?

  Now that he thought about it, the poorer it sat with him. Here they were sending Biandina to her fate for killing a rabbit, and they’d killed a human in the exact same place and hidden it from everybody. The part of him that was Dirt viewed the action with innocent ignorance, having very little idea of what was appropriate for humans. But the part of him that was Avitus squirmed at the idea. It revolted him, even. There should be laws. Especially if they had sacrificed him to Avitus’ dear Melodia. That would be a sacrilege.

  A short while later, he decided it was time to go find the elders. He needed to ask more about the statue and test the waters on teaching someone to see minds. They’d probably say it was a terrible idea, since that person would learn their secret, but he still wanted to see what they thought about it. He’d just have to be coy about it.

  Once inside, he wondered why the tents were nicer in here, under the ancient roof where it would be dark day and night. He understood wanting to have a roof over his head, but it would be like living completely underground. Perhaps they liked it because it kept the rain off. So how did they decide who got to live here? He’d have to ask later.

  They hadn’t yet replaced the heavy wooden frame that blocked the entrance to the Aedes, fortunately, and Dirt walked right in.

  The corpse and Dirt’s bloody clothing were gone now, and the elders were kneeling next to the bloodstain and discussing between each other in hushed tones. They held wet washcloths in their hands and judging by the heavy leather waterskin, they had been cleaning. They’d even made some progress, it looked like.

  No one else was in here besides them. Dirt suspected that typically, no one was allowed in, and they were the ones who decided. They looked over as he entered and gave him unpleasant glares.

  Well, no reason to waste their time if they were busy. Best to get right to it. Dirt asked the old man, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I have a quick question for you. I know Gnese’s name, but not yours. That’s not the question, though.”

  The old man’s face stayed cold, but he answered. “Fidelu.”

  “Fidelu. That’s another old name. Huh. Thanks. Well, the question is, you know how Socks can see your thoughts, and that’s how you were talking to him at first? What would happen if a human in your tribe suddenly learned how to do that? Hear people’s thoughts,” said Dirt. He stood awkwardly, not sure what posture he should take. He landed somewhere between friendly and dignified, he hoped.

  The answer was not quick in coming. Dirt watched as they thought it over, glaring at him all the while. They glanced at each other, then back at Dirt.

  “What are you saying?” said Gnese, carefully.

  Dirt’s eyes went to the uncovered treasury. The corpse dust in front of it had already been swept up and disposed of, and the lid put back to hide the opening. Melodia herself stood suffering, just as she’d been before.

  His lack of a quick answer made them both grow more hostile in the set of their shoulders. Their faces hardened, but the sense Dirt got was more of fear than anger. He wondered if he should find their minds; it wouldn’t be too difficult. But that might give away something he wasn’t ready to reveal yet.

  “What am I saying? I was just thinking about it,” said Dirt, trying to sound oblivious. “I’m curious what would happen if a normal human, just some random person, suddenly started to know everyone’s thoughts. I’m asking you because you’re the elders so you must know the most. So how would they be treated? What would happen to them?”

  “That person would never be trusted,” said Fidelu hastily.

  “Why not? It can be really handy, if, for example, you want to know why a baby is crying. Wouldn’t people be happy?” asked Dirt.

  “That would be useful, but there’s more to it than that,” said Gnese.

  “Like what?” asked Dirt. He’d expected this, honestly, but it was still disappointing. Humans were naturally wary and skittish, but he’d been hoping for a different reaction.

  Fidelu got his wariness under control and let his face and posture smooth out into something more grandfatherly. He sat up to relax and put on a warmer half-smile. “My boy, have you ever made a mistake?” he asked.

  “Sure, probably. Like what?”

  “It doesn’t matter what. But as you grow, you will find yourself making more and more of them. Some will be big mistakes, and some will be small. Let me explain it this way. That wolf is your only friend, right?” asked Fidelu.

  Gnese had picked up on the change of tone and lost all the harshness in her demeanor as well. Dirt did his best not to let on he knew they were putting on airs, since he was interested in their explanation.

  “No, he’s not my only friend at all. I have a bunch of friends that are trees, and some humans. My best human friend is Màxim, the duke’s son from Ogena,” said Dirt.

  “Fine. Good. So imagine that one day, you got angry with Màxim and said something cruel to him. Something truly unacceptable, and then, because you are human and we all make mistakes, you didn’t apologize. And it got worse and worse, until you weren’t friends anymore. Now, I’m sure that won’t happen, but imagine with me for a moment, hmm?” said Fidelu. His wrinkly old face lended itself well to being warm and grandfatherly.

  “Okay,” said Dirt.

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  “You have done something that he will not forgive, and now you are no longer friends. You regret what you did, and you know it was your fault, but it is too late,” said Fidelu.

  Even though the situation was imaginary and extremely unlikely, Dirt found himself bothered. He briefly pictured an angry Màxim telling Dirt never to talk to him again and didn’t like it. Dirt had to admit they were good at teaching.

  “Now let’s take a step back. Suppose that instead of saying those cruel things, you only thought about saying them. But you realized that it would be horrible to say them and what Màxim would think, so you didn’t. In fact, you didn’t even really mean those things, so you’re glad you didn’t say them,” said Fidelu. “Instead of a disaster and losing a friend, nothing happened.”

  “I see,” said Dirt. “So, if Màxim could read my mind, then he’d know what it was I thought about and get offended anyway, even though I didn’t want that to happen.”

  “Exactly. There are many things a man wishes to keep hidden, child. Some are mistakes he wishes to move past. Some are things he can never say, but still thinks of. Some are desires he must keep under control, but struggles with. Everyone who has lived long enough has things they don’t want others to know. Even you, I bet. Can you think of anything like that?” asked Fidelu, gesturing with his hand for Dirt to answer.

  The first thing that came to Dirt’s mind was that he, Avitus, had broken the world and ruined the gods and sent humanity into an extinction spiral. Everybody didn’t need to know that. “I guess,” he replied.

  Gnese put on a grandmother’s friendliness, although the hardness in her face made it less convincing than her mate’s. She said, “Now, imagine there’s one person in the tribe that everyone knows can see all their thoughts. All the things they need to keep hidden. Things that aren’t truly themselves, or things they’re trying to overcome. That one person knows all their secrets. How do you think they’ll be treated? They will always be outcasts, right?”

  “Also, they would not want to be close to anyone else. They would know that the others fear them, and they would hear those thoughts that were never meant to be spoken aloud, and be unable to stop knowing them,” said Fidelu.

  Dirt nodded, thinking that over. They had a good argument. They were completely wrong about what it would be like to know everyone’s thoughts, but it was their perspective he was after. He suspected they were correct, which is why he’d wanted to make sure before having Socks open someone’s mind-eye.

  He’d be creating an outcast. Even if that person was useful, like helping babies. And there were other things, too, like telling the rats in the granary to come out where they could be captured. Or helping a horse calm down. Or knowing there was a half-dead person among the tribe.

  If he was honest with himself, Dirt had known before asking what the answer would be. They’d say not to do it, or they’d ask for it to be done to themselves, secretly. He’d intuited from the moment he first met Marina and her party that it was not something others should know.

  The elders waited patiently while he thought, and finally he said, “I guess that makes sense. And they’d probably be in danger, too.”

  “Yes, they might be. From what?” asked Gnese.

  “Say someone did something horrible, like a murder, and they didn’t want anyone to find out about it. But they knew that that person knew. They might want to kill them too, before the secret is revealed,” said Dirt, furrowing his brow to look like a little boy deep in thought.

  Both of them faltered for the briefest instant, searching his face for any sign of duplicity, but quickly regained their composure. Gnese, however, gave him an intent look, and Dirt knew what she was thinking without even looking at her mind. She was almost certainly thinking something loudly to see his reaction. Perhaps, “Child, can you see my thoughts?” Something like that.

  Dirt gave no reaction, of course. They were amateurs. His best friend was Socks, and they wanted to win a thought game?

  It made him feel a little guilty, manipulating them like this. He preferred honesty and forthrightness, and, as he often reminded himself, discipline and sincerity were his true power.

  But he doubted this was information they would easily part with. Murder, if that’s what it was, was something that should not be tolerated. He knew the word “justice”, even if he couldn’t say how it should play out. And he also knew the word “execution”, which was what happened to criminals like murderers. Maybe he could get them to let something slip, and it would be exonerating instead of condemnatory.

  “I’m not reading your minds, so you can stop looking at me funny. Tell you what. Let’s do a bargain. I’ll answer any one question from you, even if the answer is a secret, and you do the same for me. What do you think?” said Dirt.

  “I decline,” said Gnese, without hesitation.

  “As do I,” said Fidelu.

  Dirt scowled. He should have seen that coming. He thought they might want some answers themselves, but all they wanted from him was his departure.

  He searched out their minds then, taking only a moment to find them. They were easy to find, being the closest, and they were both looking at him. And they had fear in them that was tied to watching his face, to his voice. They were afraid of what he’d say.

  Dirt made sure to watch so he could get his answer, whether they wanted to give it or not. “Fine. Oh well. Suppose instead that for no reason at all, I just randomly asked you whether you had a good reason for killing that guy and stuffing him in there,” he said.

  It wasn’t easy watching both of their minds at the same time—that was one thing he didn’t have much practice with. In Gnese’s mind flashed an image of tendrils creeping through the hole in the roof, of dark whispers and darker fears. In Fidelu’s, memories of envy and lust. He’d wanted to mate with Gnese, and that was related somehow. In both cases, they quickly tried to think of something else.

  “Don’t think about it, whatever you do. Don’t think about why you killed him. Stop! Think about something other than why you killed him!” said Dirt, making it impossible. “Aaaahhh, not that! Not why you killed him and stuffed him in there!”

  Fidelu and Gnese had a similar idea, that they needed to propitiate the Murderous Lady. For Fidelu, it was an excuse, an opportunity, and for Gnese, a solemn obligation. She was pregnant now and the tribe would be secure. How could she ask anyone else to suffer in her place? How could she make some other woman a widow, or bereft of her child?

  In the few seconds before they managed to start thinking of other things, albeit imperfectly, Dirt put the story together, at least in simple fashion. Fidelu had desired Gnese for his mate, and Gnese had known that, but she was already paired to Ghjacumu. They had slaughtered him for the Murderous Lady, hoping to calm her curse, and it had worked. Gnese’s nightmares and daydream visions had ceased, and the two of them became a mated pair and married, and raised Ghjacumu’s baby.

  “So how’d you get away with it? Why didn’t anyone… Oh, the previous elders covered for you?” asked Dirt, finding the answer in their thoughts. “So they were in on it? I guess they must have told you about it, but hardly anyone else, or people would have checked the treasury the moment Ghjacumu disappeared.”

  “Don’t speak that name here,” hissed Gnese.

  “What do you want?” asked Fidelu, cold and hard. Hard as Biandina’s mother. From how his mind felt, this was more natural for him than anything else he’d been doing.

  “What I want changes all the time. First, I wanted to meet more humans. Then I wanted Biandina to live safely with her family, but only her siblings want that right now, not even her. Now what I want, is… I guess I don’t know. What do I want?” said Dirt. “No, I do know. I want you to be free of this.”

  He pushed past the two of them and they gave him no resistance. He stepped over the dead body without looking at it. He stopped in front of Melodia, Goddess of Song. The Murderous Lady. Which was correct anymore?

  Frankly, the whole situation disgusted him. He gathered that the Eye was using the goddess to manipulate humans to their detriment, to whittle them down generation by generation. Fear, mistrust, deception, death. Was it simply toying with them, or had it not made enough horrible monstrosities in this region to annihilate them yet? It’d had three thousand years to work on it, so either it preferred slower methods or was generally incapable of anything else. But still, to manipulate them using something so bright and beautiful as the memory of a goddess?

  “Are you still there, Melodia?” he asked, in his language. He didn’t expect an answer, and she gave none. She stared past him, wounded and dying.

  Behind him, Fidelu had risen to his feet and was looking for something to smash Dirt’s skull open with. There wasn’t much, but perhaps he could pull a paving stone up. He was even trying to hide his thoughts while he debated it, the poor fool. Without turning around, Dirt said, “Socks is nearby, Fidelu, and even if you managed to hurt me, which you won’t, you’d only outlive me by a heartbeat.”

  The message was heard and understood, and the elders struggled to think of what else to do. They wanted Dirt to leave so badly it was going to give them a headache. Everything was about to fall apart. Everything.

  Dirt quit watching their minds so he could concentrate and filled himself with mana. He stared up at the statue, old marble still smooth and bright, even if every trace of the paint was gone. She had been glorious once.

  Well, if the Eye would rebuild the statue every time it was destroyed, then destroying it wasn’t the answer. He knew what he had to do.

  Dirt hadn’t tried this on stone yet, but he knew the sigil for it. There was no reason it shouldn’t work. He used it to shape wood all the time. It didn’t work very well on water, but that was water.

  Dirt took the wood-shaping magic the dryads had taught him and replaced the sigil for ‘wood’ with the one for ‘stone.’ After considering a few more changes, like replacing ‘grow’ with ‘reform’, he spoke the magic into existence.

  He started with her broken arm, the one twisted the wrong way at the elbow and hanging limp, and by Grace, it worked. The stone lost its solidity and Dirt gently reshaped it. He turned her forearm back the right way, doing his best to make sure it looked right, and did an acceptable job. He felt his own elbow to remind himself of the shape of the bones there, and it seemed to match.

  Then he made her marble innards suck back up into her stomach. The stone slid upward, losing its shape becoming just a solid mass, but it was exactly the right amount to fill the cavity. He made the arm that had been holding her intestines extend away a little, then smoothed over her stomach and reshaped it to be a dress again. Fortunately not all of the stone fabric was ruined, which gave him plenty of places to copy, as he filled in all the rips and tears.

  He straightened her club foot by making it look like a mirror of the other one, and straightened her posture to balance out.

  Finally, he had the confidence to fix her face and get rid of that horrible expression of pain. Despite all his practice making wooden toys, the finer details were beyond him, so he left her expressionless. Still human-looking, but blank. It was good enough. He turned her palms forward in a gesture of welcoming, cleaned up a few other details like the drips of marble blood on the plinth, and then he was done.

  The mana left him and he stepped back. His eye found a dozen mistakes, but they were all minor. If he wanted to master this, he needed to spend a lot more time wandering around Turicum looking at the statues the dryads had recovered, and get a lot more practice. But despite the flaws, there was no mistaking this for anything other than Melodia. It was not a statue of a tortured, suffering woman any longer. It was an imperious woman in a full-length dress, gazing forward at a horizon only she could see.

  Dirt decided there was one last detail he wasn’t willing to leave overlooked, so he created the magic again and tilted her head downward slightly, turning her gaze onto the people in the room. Only then did he turn around to see what the elders thought.

  They watched in silence, eyes wide, completely unsure what to think. What they had just seen was too impossible to process.

  Before anyone spoke, a shadow came over the hole in the roof and plunged the Aedes into darkness. Gnese and Fidelu both cried out in alarm, but Dirt snapped his fingers and summoned a light.

  The whole gap was covered in white flesh, the flesh of the Eye and the things that emerged from it. A sinuous tendril drooped down and flopped around like it was looking for something to grab.

  Dirt heard motion behind him and spun to see all his work being undone. The statue of the goddess was moving just like a real person, her dress ripping away to expose long gashes that opened on her thighs and chest. She moved an arm forward as if pleading for mercy and it broke at the elbow, the one Dirt had fixed. Her gaze turned down to him, terror and pain coming alive in her marble features, and then she froze again, and fell from the plinth. It broke apart when it hit the ground, and all the pieces slid back together.

  -COME, DIRT,- yelled Socks. -COME NOW!-