The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy. Robin Hobb

girth of the tree before me. This tree stood straight and tall; she was thick of trunk and limb, reaching her branches wide to the nourishment of the sun. Her fallen leaves carpeted the earth below her, a thick, rich litter of humus and leaf skeletons and last year’s leaves gone brown but still recognizable. The red flowers had tall yellow stamens in their centres. When the wind puffed past them, they released their yellow pollen to drift like smoke. The wind blew some toward me; it smelled earthy and rich, but stung my eyes. I blinked to clear the pollen from my lashes, and when my watering vision cleared, a woman stood before the tree. I halted.

      She was no guardian warrior! I stared at her, aghast. She was very old and very fat. She was someone’s fat old granny, save that I had never before seen a woman so corpulent. Her bright eyes were hooded with flesh and wrinkles. Both her nose and ears had grown with her years. Her lips were plumped and pursed at me as if she considered me in as much bewilderment as I did her.

      I continued to stare, to try to make sense of what confronted me. Dewara wanted me to do battle with this? Her flesh girdled her arms and doubled her chin. Many rings were sunken into her plump fingers, and heavy earrings, thick with gemstones, had stretched the lobes of her ears. Her fallen bosom was enormous and rested on the rolling swell of her belly. Her hair, long and streaky grey as a horse’s mane, hung like a cloak over her shoulders and down her back. The persistent breeze toyed with its uneven ends. Her robe looked as if it had been woven from grey-green lichen. It hung nearly to the ground, tenting her immense girth, and her thick ankles and plump feet showed beneath it. She was barefoot. The sunlight breaking through the tree’s leafy canopy dappled her skin and garment with shadow.

      Then she moved, and my image of her changed. When she shifted, the shadowy patterns on her skin and robe moved with her, independent of the true shadows of the leaves. Her feet, like her bare arms and face, were patterned with splotches of pigment. Even at that distance, I recognized it was neither paint nor tattoo. She was dappled, speckled with colour. It took an instant before I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was seeing a Speck.

      The reality was far different from the images I had formed in my mind. I had thought a Speck would be speckled with small marks, like freckles. Instead, the colour that patterned her skin was uneven. It reminded me of the dappling of some cats, as if their stripes were left unfinished to become splotches and dots. Her dapples gave me that sense of a pattern interrupted. A dark stripe ran down her nose. Dark streaks radiated from the corners of her eyes. The backs of her hands and fingers were dark, like a cat’s sooty feet, but the colour faded on her forearms.

      Entranced, I drew closer to her, almost forgetting Dewara’s warnings. My approach had become the cautious creep of the fascinated cat rather than the wary stalking of a warrior. Her face was still, her expression both serene and dignified. Now she seemed, not old, but ageless. Her face was lined but they were the kindly lines of a woman who smiled often and enjoyed life. In a woman of my own kind, I would have found her bulging flesh repulsive, but because she was a Speck, it seemed just another difference between us.

      She spoke, asking in Jindobe, ‘Who approaches?’ Her expression remained grave, but her low voice was courteously neutral. It was the question that anyone might ask of a stranger approaching her door.

      I halted. I wanted to answer her, but I could not remember my name. I felt that I had left it behind when I entered the Kidona world. I reminded myself that I had taken Dewara’s challenge in order to become Kidona. To become a warrior and gain Dewara’s respect, I had to defeat the enemy in front of me. Yet he had not warned me that the sentry might be an old woman. The part of me that was not Kidona felt shamed by the bare blade in my hand and my failure to reply to her courteous question. A Gernian soldier did not bear weapons against women and children. I felt a strong tug from that self, and found myself lowering my sword. I tried to be chivalrous and yet warrior-like as I said, ‘The one who brought me here calls me “soldier’s son”.’

      She cocked her head to one side and smiled at me as if I were very young. Her voice rebuked me gently, as a kindly old woman might recall manners to a youngster. ‘That is not your proper name, nor any way to introduce yourself. What is the name your father gave you?’

      I took a breath and found a truth I had not previously known. ‘I do not think I can say that name here. I came here to be Kidona. But as of yet, I have no name in Kidona.’ After I spoke, I felt suddenly childishly foolish, to have confided this information to my enemy. I hardened my muscles and brought my blade up to readiness again.

      She seemed singularly unimpressed with my sabre. She leaned closer, and as she did so, I perceived that her loose hair was snagged on the tree’s trunk, as if binding her to it. She peered at me and I felt that she looked deep inside me. In a quiet, almost confidential voice, she informed me, ‘I see your difficulty. He thinks to use you to force his way past me. He has made you believe that you must kill me to gain a man’s respect and standing. That is not true. Killing is only killing. The respect that Kidona will give you if you kill me is real only to him. No one else believes in it, least of all you. And you don’t have to kill me to earn true respect. My blood will only buy you that fool’s regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.’

      I thought about what she said. They were an idealist’s words that made sense as a lofty philosophy. But on a day-to-day level, I knew that much of my world had been bought with blood. My father often spoke of that, that our soldiers, especially the cavalla officers, had ‘bought the new Gernia with their lives, made these lands ours when the soils of them were watered with the blood of our soldier sons.’

      ‘I don’t agree with you!’ I called out to her, and then realized I need not have spoken so loud. Somehow I had drawn much closer to her without being aware of it. I wondered if the root path had drawn me closer, unperceived by me. I glanced around but had no way to tell.

      She smiled then, an elder’s smile. ‘The truth doesn’t need you to recognize it, young man, for it to be so. You need the truth to recognize you. Until you do, you are not real. But let us set aside the truth of the worthlessness of things bought with blood. Let us try to recall who you are in another way. We are not defined by what we die for, but by what we live for. Will you acknowledge that truth?’

      Somehow, the whole situation had changed. She was testing me now, rather than meeting my warrior’s challenge. I felt that she guarded the bridge, demanding that I prove myself worthy to cross. If I earned her regard, she would permit me passage. I did not have to be Kidona to cross.

      Distant as a bird’s call on a hot summer day, Dewara’s voice reached me. ‘Do not talk with her! She will twist your thoughts like a twining vine. Ignore her words. Rush forward and kill her! It is your only hope!’

      She did not lift her voice to reply to him. She spoke almost quietly as she said, ‘Be quiet, Kidona man. Let your “warrior” speak for himself.’

      ‘Kill her now, soldier’s son! She seeks to possess you!’

      But like a distant birdcall, the sound of his voice seemed a territorial challenge that did not apply to me. I let his words go by me, my mind mulling over the tree woman’s words. Defined by what we live for. Was that how I defined myself? Should a soldier ponder such things?

      ‘The same things I live for are the things I would die for,’ I said, thinking of my king, my country and my family.

      She nodded slowly, like the canopy of a tree swaying in a flurry of wind.

      ‘I see that. There is much in you that wants to live for those things. More of you wishes to live for them than to die for the Kidona man’s respect. He is the one who sends you to kill me. You do not have that quest in your true heart, but only in the heart he has tried to give you. He thinks he cannot lose. You are, still, the son of his enemy. If I die, you have served him well. If you die, he takes no real loss. But I think either death would be a loss for you. What was your real quest, soldier’s son? Why have the gods sent you to me, why have you managed to come past every trap unscathed? I do not think you are meant to die trying to kill me. There is more to you than that. You come as a weapon. Are you a weapon from the gods given as a gift to me?’

      ‘I