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I’d unsettled him. I suddenly became aware that his back was cold. At the same moment, he felt the draft. He left me, surfacing from sleep just enough to pull his blankets back into place. I waited in a limbo of grayness, hoping, but although he slept, he did not dream. “Lord Burvelle!” I cried into the nothingness. “Hear me! Your daughter needs you. She is hungry and cold and oppressed with sadness. Send help to her. Please, say you’ll send her help!”

There was no response. A sudden and dangerous idea came to me. Recklessly, I acted on it. The clinging scent of her heavy perfume. The clicking of her heavily ringed hand against her wine goblet at a dinner table. The cold stare of her icy eyes. “Lady Burvelle. Daraleen Burvelle!”Advertisement

I tumbled into her dream as if a trapdoor had opened under me. Instantly, I wished to be away from it. I had not thought a woman of her years and position would be prone to such salacious fancies. She was entangled with not one virile young man, but two, and from her panting, was fully occupied with the sensations their efforts were waking. I was horrified, scandalized, and embarrassed. “Lady Burvelle! You daughter Epiny is in dire circumstances and has need of your aid! The Specks have raided Gettys and near destroyed it. Do whatever you must to send her help.” I barked out the words. My message jolted her from her dream and once more plunged me into a gray netherworld.

I wondered how much time was left to me. My first impulse was to return to Epiny, but I had no good news to give her. I doubted that either her father or mother would heed the messages I had delivered.

It came to me that I might still see Yaril that night and possibly fulfill Epiny’s charge to me as well. I fled to my sister and found her effortlessly. The dream I slipped into made no sense to me at all. Yaril was pinning fish to the wall of the parlor, rather like the way she had once collected butterflies. But the fish were alive, slippery and thrashing, so it was a messy and futile undertaking. No sooner had the drawing tacks been put through their tails and fins than they wriggled free of them and fell to the floor. Yet Yaril seemed obsessed with finishing her task.

Even before I spoke, she was aware of me. “Nevare, hold this one, please. I think if you held him, I could pin him down properly and he wouldn’t come loose again.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her in some amusement. Her activity had distracted me completely from the desperation of my visit.

She looked at me as if I were daft. “Well, if I don’t, they’ll all be on the floor and underfoot all the time. What else should I do? Hold his tail flat to the wall. That’s it! There!” She pushed another drawing tack into the fish’s tail and then stepped back to admire the effect.

“Yaril,” I said quietly as she began to choose another fish from the floor. “Do you know that you’re asleep and dreaming this?”

“How would you know?” she asked me in a tolerant fashion. “Oh, look, let’s have that handsome bluegill next.”

“I would know because I’m using Speck magic to visit you in your dreams. Because I have something important to tell you, and many things to ask you.”

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“Ask away, so long as you hold the fish for me. Here. Mind, now! He’s a slippery one.”

“I’d rather tell first,” I said as I took the flapping fish from her hands. I tried to keep my voice calm and my tone light. I didn’t want to startle her out of her dream. “The first thing is that you must remember this dream in the morning, and you must believe that you dreamed true.”

“Oh, I always remember my dreams. You should know that. Don’t you remember how Papa sent me from the breakfast table for talking about my dreams, and you came afterward to comfort me? And to bring me a cold pastry to eat.”

“I do remember that. Good. So you will remember what I tell you. It’s important. I have bad news but you must take it calmly. Otherwise, you’ll waken yourself and we won’t have any time to talk.”

“Oh, drat! That’s my last tack, and I need two more.”

“Here are some more.” I reached into my pocket, wished for tacks to be there, and drew out a handful of them. “You pin him while I talk. Yaril, it’s about our cousin Epiny. She’s at Gettys with her husband, Spink.”

“I haven’t heard from her in ages! I expect I shan’t until the post riders can get through the snow again. They say it was deep this year in the foothills.” She made a little sound of effort as she pushed the tacks through the tail and into the wall. I tried not to focus on it. If I thought too much about my dainty little sister tacking living creatures to the walls of the drawing room, it would bother me, and I was sure she’d be aware of it. Aware enough to perhaps awaken herself. She stooped to pick up another fish from the floor. pqdm.com