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is, well, not Steam.
    “The ward will persist; weed specieswill not be able to get in, while the wholesome natives of the new area will be able to pass in and out.” Wake goes right on sounding cheerful.
    “Rough on birds full of seeds.” Dove doesn’t sound especially worried.
    “Rough on the seeds.” Wake stands up, gestures broadly with both arms. “This is a remarkable result. I should be remiss to permit it to come to harm.”
    “Couldn’t you do somethinglike that for weeding?” Zora, but Chloris is nodding. Dove is prodding Kynefrid in the bottom of one foot with their toes.
    Wake smiles at Zora. “There are just more than two hundred Independents in this Second Commonweal; there’s precisely one of me, and of those two hundred Independents, less than thirty are as strong or stronger than any of you five.”
    “If we six did nothing else, you could,with two years’ practice, ward perhaps a hundred hectares like this in a day, every day. You could not maintain each ward, once made, as you shall maintain this one; they would fade, fade to uncertainty in a season and to nothing in two seasons. So perhaps ten thousand hectares, doing nothing else; no increase in skill, no general service, no responses to crisis or alarm.”
    “You, you couldn’t dothat yourself?” Chloris, sounding shocked.
    “Not every day.” Wake makes a gesture I cannot interpret. “The five of you are untrained, but you are strong. More of the strength of the ward is yours than mine.”
    “Not more than fifty thousand,” Dove says, quietly. People who that much land could feed, I’m pretty sure Dove means.
    Wake nods. “Though there are things that might be done, if weeds wereno concern, still certainly not warded land sufficient to feed a fifth of the Creeks no matter what skill might be applied. Which is a tenth the Second Commonweal.”
    There’s that little catch in everybody, even Steam, thinking about it. Half a million Creeks, half a million displaced, everybody really worried about food next year. We moved all the stored food when we displaced, away from the unceasingtide of horrible things from across the Dread River, let loose when the Iron Bridge dropped and a ward the Commonweal didn’t know anything about collapsed with it. This year isn’t the problem. It’s getting farms and houses and roads and I’m told canals into the Folded Hills, and it’s figuring out how to do that really fast, without getting too many people who know how to farm killed doingit.
    Being able to make the weeds, all the weeds, just die would be extremely useful.
    “Could you teach people the ward?” Chloris, tentative and thoughtful.
    “There were,” Wake sounds very dry, “in the Commonweal as was, eight Independents who could cast that ward, five of whom could do it reliably. The Second Commonweal has one of the five and three of the eight.”
    Wake stands up, looks a good dealmore cheerful. “I shall be delighted if I am able to teach it to one of you.
    “In the meanwhile, shall we see what there is to learn of this new land?”

Chapter 7
    We stay out from under the trees. Dove sums it up for everybody by saying “It feels holy in there.” It does, even after carefully sorting out that none of us think holy involves gods, that known-to-be-inefficient way to concentrate more of the Power than one person can raise.
    Still, it does feel holy in there. It doesn’t feel old, which is odd, given the trees, but it’s deep and peacefuland clean.
    Wake has Steam run us through some different breathing exercises, ones about sensitivity rather than power. Trying to imagine breathing out through my fingers is bizarre, but it starts to do something after awhile.
    “Why fingers?” from Kynefrid, gets met with “Touch is the most basic sense,” from Wake, and the real problem is that the answer nearly makes sense. You can see it go througheveryone’s face, that shouldn’t make sense, it’s not like we’re actually going to be