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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

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E brooks and Kesey found me a few hours later. When they arrived with the first wagonload of bodies for the day, they were puzzled to see the dead torches and only a single shroud remaining where they had left seven corpses the previous evening. Thinking I had somehow dug a new pit and begun to inter them on my own, they had walked out into the graveyard. They’d found me, facedown, next to Dale Hardy’s body. As they approached, a whole flock of croaker birds rose. They’d been feeding on the six bodies that were neatly fastened by the swiftly growing rootlets to my hedgerow trees. The whole area stank of rotting flesh and buzzed with flies.

Kesey thought I was dead. He and Ebrooks assumed that I’d gone down fighting with Specks who had come to steal our dead. Blood coated one whole side of my head. But when Kesey rolled me over, I groaned. He sent Ebrooks running to my cabin to get water.

“And that was when Ebrooks found Carsina’s body in your bed,” Spink said quietly.

He stood outside my cell and spoke to me through a small barred window. I lay on a straw-stuffed mattress on a narrow pallet and looked up at the dim ceiling. The only light came from a lantern fasted to the wall in the outside hall. Spink was the first visitor I’d had since I’d wakened in the cell a day and a half ago. They’d fed me twice, food on a tray shoved through an open slat in the bottom of the door. Grayish stuff in a bowl and a round of very hard bread with water. I’d eaten it. The two meals had been the only noteworthy events since I’d wakened there in the dark, head pounding with pain.

I listened to the silence of Spink waiting for me to come up with a logical explanation. Talking hurt. I didn’t like to move my jaw. Thinking hurt, too. I made it brief. “Carsina was a walker. She came to me just like Hitch did. I tried to help her, but her fever came back. She asked me to get her husband for her. I was going to bring her some water first. I took the bucket, went outside, and realized that all the corpses we’d received that day were walkers. And they were all headed for the hedge. I ran out there and tried to pull one woman free of the tree, but it was already growing into her. I couldn’t get her loose. And that was when Dale Hardy came up out of the pit grave, picked up my bucket, and hit me with it. And that’s all I know.”

It was my turn to fall silent. I waited for him to say he believed me. When the silence lasted, I waited for him to say he didn’t believe me.

What he finally said was, “That doesn’t sound good, Nevare.”

“Just say it sounds like a madman raving. I know it does.” I sighed and slowly sat up. “I don’t remember any of what you’re telling me. Only that bucket coming at me.” The vertigo passed. I felt dizzy every time I changed position. I scratched the side of my head. Flaky brown blood came off under my nails. The magic did not seem to be healing me as swiftly this time as it had when I’d been shot. The answer came to me. The magic was severely depleted. If I didn’t feed it, the next time death knocked on my door, it might come right in. At that moment it sounded like sweet mercy. “Spink, you shouldn’t be here. No one connects you and Epiny to me. Go home. Let me just meet my fate.”

“Before you sounded mad. Now you just sound stupid,” he huffed. When I made no response, he sighed. “If you only sounded insane, it would be better for you.”

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I stood up slowly and came to the window. “What do you mean?”

“Captain Jof Thayer nearly went mad when he heard that the dead body of his wife was found in your bed. Captain and Clara Gorling are equally distressed. It looks…very bad, Nevare.”

“What, that I tried to save his wife? What was I supposed to do? Look, Spink, I’ve been here a day and a half. And if it weren’t for,” I lowered my voice, “the magic, I’d be dead by now. No one gave me five minutes of care for my smashed head. The guard won’t talk to me at all. I don’t even know why I’ve been thrown into prison.”

Spink swallowed. He started to speak, then looked around as if he’d rather bite his tongue out.

“Just say it,” I barked at him.

“It looks bad, Nevare. No one will believe that all those people were walkers, not all at once. It looks as if you deliberately planted those trees and then, when you had the chance, shoved fresh corpses up against them to feed them. The trees had shot up almost three feet taller overnight, and blossomed! They had to chop them down to free the bodies from them. The trees had rooted into them so deeply that they had to bury them with pieces of trunk still attached to them. And Dale Hardy’s body out there, pulled right out of his grave? From the damage that the quicklime did to him no one will believe he was a walker.” pqdm.com