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Even drugged with laudanum, there was no stopping Epiny once she started talking. I broke in before she could start rambling again. “Call Spink, Epiny. Tell him what I told you.”

“Told me.”Advertisement

“About the Specks and the attack.”

“He’s sleeping now. He’s so tired. I told him to try the laudanum, but he said no. He thinks it’s good for me to get this rest. He thinks it’s good for the baby that I’m so calm now.”

“Epiny, I have to go now.” My supply of magic was dwindling. “You have to remember this dream. You have to tell Spink to warn everyone.”

“Are you going to come and see the baby soon?”

“You have to warn Spink. Warn everyone. It’s urgent!”

“Urgent,” she repeated listlessly, and then I felt her rally a bit. “Father was so angry, Nevare. About the book.”

Shame choked me and I could make no reply. Yet at the same time, a most peculiar sensation came over me, a sense of the completion of a great circle. I had known that this would happen. I’d always known it, from the time I first set pen to the paper that my uncle had sent me in my beautiful soldier-son journal. I had always known that somehow it would go back to him, and that the consequences of what I had written there would grind my future into powder. It was a strange feeling to realize that from the beginning, I had been documenting my disgrace for all to know. It was almost a relief, now that it was done and over. Epiny was still speaking in her dreamy singsong way.

“He told my mother she had no right, that it was his name she was risking. She said the Queen would never know, would never bother to find it out. She said a fortune was at stake, and he should not let his dignity cripple him. Hadn’t he brought you into our home? Hadn’t he married me off to a common soldier, like an innkeeper’s daughter? Father was so wroth. He will speak to your father. He said. He said…” Her voice trailed away and her touch turned to moonlight on my hands, and then a cloud covered even that. She was barely there.

“Epiny.” I sighed, and let go of our feeble contact.

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I hovered, a mote in Soldier’s Boy’s awareness, a sort of Gernian conscience that he paid no heed to. I wanted to agonize over my soldier-son journal. I hated all I had written there, hated myself for being so stupid as to write it. Too late. What was shame to me now, a dead man, a Speck, a renegade mage against my own people? Too late to think of my good name. I had no name. What I did have was a tiny remnant of my stolen magic. Epiny had been my best hope. We’d been joined by the magic before and I had been certain I could walk into her dreams. If she hadn’t given in to the dark depression of the creeping magic, if she hadn’t taken the Gettys Tonic of laudanum and rum, I could have been certain of my warning being heeded. But she had. The magic had outwitted me again.

I thought I had strength enough for one more try. I would reach for Spink. I had never dream-walked to him, but I knew him well. He might dismiss Epiny’s words as a strange dream; if I touched him, mind to mind, he would know it was real. I knew he would have a hard time convincing the upper echelons of the military command at Gettys to heed his warning as it was; better not to have Epiny saying that the warning was based on her dream.

I summoned all I could recall of Spink, every facet of him, from the boyish and enthusiastic cadet he had been at the Academy to the weary and harassed lieutenant and husband he had become at Gettys. I reached hard for the moments of contact that we had shared in that otherworld we had walked when the Speck fever had taken us both. Back then, he had been more willing than I to accept the reality of that episode. I only hoped that if I could reach him, he would still be as open-minded.

Dream-walking to Spink was not like traversing terrain. I felt I was a needle plunged endlessly through folded bolts of fabric, trying to find a single thread. Trying to make this new contact was more draining than reaching Epiny had been. Epiny had always been more open to magic than the rest of us. But I found Spink, and with every bit of my remaining strength, I forced myself into his dream. It was a dreary place. He dreamed of digging a hole in stony earth. He was in the hole and had to throw the shovelfuls of rocky soil up over his head. Half the time, earth and gravel cascaded back down on him. He was in the bottom of the hole, trying to get his shovel point under a large stone, and then suddenly I was there with him. He didn’t flinch or start. Dreams adjust quickly to intruders. I found a shovel in my hands. Spink looked up, wiped gritty sweat from his face, and said, “You dug your hole and I dug mine. And here we are, stuck in what we’ve made of our lives.” pqdm.com