by Robin Hobb
When he had emptied her hiding place, he sat for a long time by the fire, wistfully sorting through the trove. Long he held in his hand a fist-sized ivory carving of a fat dimpled baby. It came to me that it was a fertility charm, and that Lisana had made efforts not to be so alone in her life. Those efforts had availed her nothing. Great Ones, I suddenly knew, had few offspring, and all such were highly valued by the People. I saw Olikea’s frequent bedding of me in a different light and felt both naive and foolish that I had ever thought she was attracted to me for myself. In my mind, I reviewed her dalliance with me. She had never deceived me. I had supplied the context for our sex, to make myself believe her interest in me was as romantic as it was carnal. It hadn’t been then and it wasn’t now. She had expected me to wield power she would share. And she had hoped to be the mother of a rare and valued asset to her kin-clan—the child of a Great One.
I felt a rush of shame and resentment. My deception of myself was my own fault, but it was easier to be angry with Olikea than to admit that to myself. I stoked my resentment with the idea that she had dared to think of my child as if it would be a valuable piece of livestock. I resolved to have nothing more to do with her.
Then I realized it was no longer my decision to make. I opened myself to Soldier’s Boy’s thoughts, and found that he was giving no consideration to Olikea at all. He accepted all she had done, all she had offered me, all she had hoped to profit as natural and normal. Of course she would want a Great One’s child. Producing such a baby would have benefited both of them in terms of the regard of their kin-clan. Of course Olikea would have fed and pampered and bedded me. It was what a Great One’s feeders did.
Even Lisana’s feeders?
No. She’d had no long-term feeders. She hadn’t wanted that sort of relationship.
And later, when she had tried for a child?
His thoughts darted away from my touch like a fish darting away from a flung stone. Ah. That question stung, did it? Interesting.
He sat by the fire, looking at Lisana’s impressive collection. I could feel both Lisana’s sentiment about it and Soldier’s Boy’s more pragmatic evaluation of what rested there. Before him, if he could find the will to use it, lay the instrument of his rise to power. There was wealth enough there to command instant respect from the People, whether he wore it, traded it, or distributed it as largesse. Here was the foundation of his plan, if he dared to seize it and use it as his own.
But that, of course, was the sticking point. It was not his. It had been Lisana’s; it was Lisana’s still, in his mind, as she lived in his heart. Just looking at it made him feel closer to her. She had treasured these things; it seemed heartless and mercenary of him to raid her cache and then think only of what her treasures could buy for him.
I felt him yearn toward her. He picked up a large jade pendant in the shape of a lily leaf and held the cool stone against his cheek. Slowly it warmed, just as it had warmed against her breast when she had worn it. He opened his heart and reached wildly toward her, but it was a hopeless reaching. Ever since I had defeated him in that other world, ever since his topknot had been torn free of his skull, he had not been able to see or hear or touch Lisana. I had taken his anchor in that world and now it belonged to me. He had glimpsed her in the times I had contacted her, but only through the filter of my awareness. That was not what he longed for. He wanted to live alongside her in that other world as he had when he was her apprentice—her apprentice and eventually her lover.
His mind turned rawly to those memories. He had come into awareness of his own existence slowly, like an opening blossom. Just as I had grown and learned under Sergeant Duril’s tutelage in those years, so he had learned from his mentor. She was the guardian of the path that led to the spirit world. She stood the watch and kept away those who did not belong. It was tedious work and she could never completely relax her vigilance. There was always a part of her that remained on her sentry duty even at their most tender moments. It had been his first lesson in how demanding the magic could be; it took from a Great One whatever it and the People needed. A Great One might have magic, but it was not without cost.
Grief and weariness suddenly washed over him in a double wave. The nagging hunger that was his constant companion gave up and was still. His body wanted only rest. He walked ponderously to the moss bed, in the heavy stride of a man accustomed to his bulk. At the side of the bed, he lifted briefly the slack folds of his belly flesh.
“You wasted my wealth, Nevare.” It felt peculiar to have him address me so deliberately. “Now must I disperse Lisana’s treasure to try to regain my standing. You are so Gernian in your arrogance and wastefulness. But now you must live within me, and I shall teach you how a Great Man of the People conducts himself.”
He groaned softly as he lowered himself down to the bed. The night was growing cooler, and the wind pushed damp air in the windows and door. As Likari had observed, the blanket was not large enough to cover both of them. He curled himself around the sleeping boy, lifting the edge of the blanket to take small shelter beneath it. He sighed and then trickled out magic. The moss stirred softly and then grew around him and the boy, cupping them and then creeping around their bodies as if he were a fallen log. Slowly his body warmed them. He slipped into a deep sleep.
I did not.
I held myself, small and silent in a dark corner of his mind. I waited. I had not liked it that he addressed me by name. I knew we were both more aware of the other than we ever had been, and slowly we were becoming more accessible to each other. I felt exposed. I waited for his mind to dim into sleep. I thought he might dream, but he did not. Perhaps he was too weary.
I let the night deepen to full dark before I dared stir. Then, almost as if I had my own body, I stretched my being. Gently I peeled my awareness away from his and wondered if he would awaken to that loss.
He slept on.
Dream-walking was still a new skill to me. When I ventured out in search of Epiny, it was like riffling the pages in not just a thick book but in all the books in some grand library. I did not feel that I moved geographically but through some other nameless spatial layer. I had to focus not only on where Epiny might be but also on how her dream had felt to me the last time we had touched. I finally discovered an anchor in her silly silver whistle. I thought of it, how it shone, the otter’s shape, and finally its shrill annoying blast. As Scout Buel Hitch had once described it, so it was. As if I walked into another room, I entered Epiny’s dream.
Perhaps she would have called it a nightmare. We were in a small curtained alcove just off a grand ballroom. I could hear the music and catch glimpses of the lovely dresses and gaily slippered feet of the dancers and their finely attired partners as they whirled past a crack in the curtains. I could smell hundreds of fine beeswax tapers burning as well as catch the aroma of rich roast meat, freshly baked bread, and the waft of fine wine. Through the music, I could hear the tinkle of silverware and glasses and cheery laughter as the richly dressed aristocrats dined. All were enjoying the jovial festivities.
But in her dream, Epiny was a tiring maid. Pregnant and heavy in a worn gray dress, she was hastily pinning up hair disheveled by a lively dance or mending a slipper whose tie had been torn, or primping a bit more powder onto a haughty young girl’s graceful neck. Her dream, I quickly saw, was all about waiting and working in the dim shadows while others danced and laughed and enjoyed themselves in the splendor of Old Thares. She was weary. Her back ached and her feet were swollen but no one seemed to care for the discomfort of her advanced pregnancy. The merry dance went on without her.
“Do you wish that you could go home?” I asked her softly.
“Home?” She smiled bitterly. “This isn’t home, Nevare. Do you wish you could go back to your old dreams?”
She gestured at me, and I looked down at myself. I was slim and dapper in my green cavalla cadet uniform with the gleaming brass buttons. My black boots shone with a high gloss. I looked as if I had come as a guest
to dance at her dream ball. I felt oddly embarrassed.
Epiny’s spirit was strong and her mind quick. As soon as she realized that we were in a dream together, she took control of it. The music softened and the chattering women in the alcove vanished. Only Epiny and I remained. She sat down gratefully on a hassock that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “So,” she said into the quiet, “you’ve come to let me know you’re alive and well. When will you come home?”
“I am alive. And well, in a way. But I don’t think I’ll be coming home anytime soon, if ever. Soldier’s Boy still has control of my body. He has made me a Speck, complete with dapples. And we are staying in Lisana’s old lodge. He has unearthed a cache of her jewelry. He has a plan to make himself a powerful man among the Specks. After that, I don’t know exactly what he intends, but I know he still thinks all Gernians should be driven far from the Barrier Mountains. There is little I can do about whatever he plans. I have to keep my guard up just to retain my own awareness. I am still Nevare, and I don’t want to let go of that self. But I’m not sure how long I can hold out against him.”
It was strange. I hadn’t planned to say those things to her, or realized how worried I was that Soldier’s Boy would absorb me. “Is that why you’ve come to me? To ask my help?” She almost sounded hopeful.
I was startled. “Do you know a way to help me?”
The brightness of her face dimmed. “No. But I was hoping you were going to ask something that would make me feel useful. Something that would make a difference.” She looked up at me. “Why else would you come to me in my dreams like this?”
Why had I come? I spoke honestly, wondering if it would be my last chance to speak to her. “I came for comfort, I think. To find someone who cared about Nevare.”
The light not only came back to her face; it warmed and gentled her features. “Nevare, I thank you for coming, then. I am that. I do care about you, and if you take comfort in hearing me say it, then I am comforted that I can say it.” She looked, for a moment, as young as she had been in Old Thares. I realized then how much her harsh life at the frontier outpost was aging her. Her features were sharper, her skin more weathered. She had never been a fleshy person, but now it seemed that the resources of her body had dwindled away from her arms and legs and face and into her burgeoning pregnancy. Compared to the women of the Specks, she was a stick figure. In a Speck gathering, she would have been pitied and Spink disdained for his failure to keep the woman he had impregnated plump and gleaming through her pregnancy.
“You are so thin,” I said without thinking.
She laughed and placed her hands on her rounded belly. “Thin?”
“That is the baby. I am speaking of you, Epiny. Your fingers are like little twigs.”
Concern flitted through her eyes. “My stomach is still unsettled by my pregnancy. Everyone has told me, over and over, that my morning sickness will soon be over. But it just goes on.” She shook her head at me. “But I am tired to death of talking about myself. Whenever I see another woman, it seems all she wants to do is advise me or commiserate with me.”
“Even Amzil?” I asked her, smiling.
She did not smile in return. “I am concerned for Amzil,” she said softly.
“Is she sick?”
“Would that it were something as simple as that! She is bitter beyond telling, Nevare. She had a glimpse of a dream, and then it was gone before she could put her hands on it. And she blames everyone and everything for her unhappiness: the town, the cavalla, the soldiers on the street, the officers and their wives, the townsmen. I think she even blames Spink and me to some degree.”
“With time, it will pass,” I said, with no confidence I spoke truth. There had been time, but each time I thought of the life I would never share with her, the pain was still as sharp. It had not passed for me.
“I wonder if she will allow it to pass? She seems to treasure her pain. She swings from holding her children and weeping over them, saying they are the only love she will ever know, to snapping at them impatiently or to simply staring past them, her needlework neglected in her lap.” She halted the tumbling flow of her words and then said hastily, “I do not mean to speak against her or to gossip. There are times, of course, when she is just Amzil, and she works very hard to keep the house tidy and the meals prepared. But I fear for her.”
“Fear for her? Why?”
“Oh. It is the same thing I told you about before. Whenever she sees one of the men who…who accosted her that night, or who looked on and did nothing, she will not look aside, but stares at them as if her eyes could burn holes in them. Or she asks them, with acid courtesy, how they are doing that morning and bids them ‘good day’ in a tone that plainly says she hopes they have anything but a good day. Some of them are cowed by such behavior. But there are a few who regard her with hatred that she knows their shame and fears them not. They cannot clearly recall what happened that night. Neither can Amzil nor Spink. There is a gray time in their minds, and I know that Amzil and Spink are tormented by what might have happened in those moments. Spink would like to think he behaved honorably and with courage. But he simply cannot remember. Amzil would like to think that she fought off her attackers, but she has nightmares in which she goes limp with terror and cannot even cry out and the men do foul things to her before you can intervene. I cannot think what those men imagine to fill in those missing hours. It eats at them like a canker, I think. Amzil has led them to believe that she does recall what happened, and she flaunts that in front of them and treats them with fearless disdain.”
“One of them will kill her,” I said dully. “Simply to put an end to that reminder. Simply to be sure that no witness remains.”
“So I fear,” Epiny said and sighed.
“Every time I have tried to use the magic to my own good, it has cut me. Cut me and burned those I hold most dear.”
“I fear that is true.”
“And I fear that there is only worse to come, Epiny. The Specks’ anger against the Gernians grows. The young men, I am told, are restless and want to do worse than the magic already does.”
She gave a small, bitter laugh. “What worse could there be?”
“I don’t know. And that is what I fear. Soldier’s Boy has access to my memories. I fear he will turn what I know against Gettys. Epiny, there must be some way to resolve this. Some way to make the Gernians leave our lands and stop cutting our ancestor trees.”
For a moment, Epiny just looked at me silently. Then she cocked her head, leaned closer to me, and said, “Nevare?” in a cautious voice.
“What?”
She reached across to me and set her hand on mine. “You are Nevare?”
“Of course I am. Why? What?”
“You said ‘our lands’ and ‘our ancestor trees’ as if you were a Speck.”
I sighed. “Did I? I share Soldier’s Boy’s thoughts so much. And sometimes, what he thinks makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not comfortable to see both sides so clearly, Epiny. I can never retreat to feeling right or justified about anything. The Gernians are wrong to cut the trees without taking the Specks’ beliefs into consideration. The Specks are wrong to sow disease and deluge the Gernians with misery.”
“But we committed the first wrong. We came into their land and took it from them.”
“They took it from the Kidona.”
“What?”
“They took those lands from the Kidona. Took the lands and forced a settled folk to become nomads. And then did all they could to destroy the magic of the Kidona and deny them access to the spirit world.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “It’s that—no matter how far you go back, someone took the land from someone else. I don’t think anything can be solved by trying to work out who stole it first. The solution is in the future, Epiny, not the past.”
I’m not sure that she even heard me. “There must be a way to make us stop cutting the trees. There has to be someone who can stop the road. Some
one who would listen to what you’ve learned, to what we know now. Someone who would believe us and have the power to act on it.”
I shook my head. “It will never be that simple, Epiny. We’re talking about the movement of people here. You can’t just say ‘stop’ to progress.”
“The Queen could.” A strange light had come into her eyes. “Why did I never think of it before? The Queen is fascinated with all things mystical and magical. Before I ‘ruined’ myself, I was a guest at her séances; it was probably due to her séances that I became so vulnerable to magic. If I wrote to her, reminding her of who I was, if I told her what we’ve discovered about the Specks and the trees…”
