by Robin Hobb
I don’t think she even heard me. She gave a sniff and sat up straighter. “Well. We all know what we must do now, and that is to find out exactly what was going on last night. We should hold another seance.”
“We have no time,” I said quickly. “Spink and I both have to return to the Academy this afternoon. In fact, we should return to your home very soon. Spink and I have to pack and then return to the Academy before nightfall. There won’t be time for a seance this afternoon.”
“Well, of course not. I meant right now, and here. That’s why I brought you here, you know. It’s very private.”
I was startled and unprepared. “But… it’s broad daylight. And I thought…”
“You thought I’d have to set up some sort of trick. I don’t, Nevare. That is what is so upsetting to me about this talent. Ever since my first seance with Guide Porilet, it has been only too easy. I feel like she opened a window in my mind, and I don’t know how to shut it. I feel I must always stand watch between my thoughts and that other world. Those others stand there, right at my shoulder, just at the corner of my vision, waiting for a chance to speak through me. Pressing always against my boundaries.”
“It sounds very uncomfortable,” Spink said. He leaned out around me to speak to Epiny.
She looked a little startled. “I am surprised you would understand that!” she exclaimed, and then shocked me by saying, “Oh. I did not mean to be rude when I said that. It is just that I’ve become so accustomed to people saying, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’ Even my mother, who first took me to a seance, says that. You know, I am not sure that she believes in what Guide Porilet does. I fear she thinks it is just a game she plays, a pretence she makes to win favour with the queen.” She, too, was leaning past me to speak to him. I stood up and stepped away, uncomfortable to be in the middle of their exchange. She immediately slid closer to him on the wall and held out a hand to him, adding, “I know that what we do is real. I think you know it, too. Shall we attempt it here and now?”
“Attempt what?” he asked her. A very foolish smile spread across his face like some sort of creeping rash.
“A seance, of course. Nevare, come here and take hands. No, wait, this won’t do. Last night, something very dark and powerful was going on. If I am overtaken by spirits, I don’t want to go tumbling off the wall. Let’s find a more comfortable place on the grass and make a tiny circle.”
“I’m afraid that we’ll be late getting back.” I protested, backing further away from them. I didn’t even want to talk about last night or admit that anything had happened, let alone attempt a re-enactment. “Spink and I do have to return to the Academy this afternoon, you know.”
“And you’re afraid. That’s natural, Nevare. But you don’t need to worry about being late. My father will scarcely leave without you. And you know that we must do this, for our own peace of mind. Here’s a good place. Come sit with us.”
She had been moving as she spoke, drawing Spink along after her. She indicated a flat place amongst the ruins that did not look too damp, and then, folding her legs, sat down cross-legged, her riding skirt conforming to her body in a way that was entirely too revealing. She still had not released Spink’s hand, and with a tug, she pulled him down to sit beside her. “Hurry up, Nevare,” she chided me.
“But—”
“If you are so worried about the time, do sit down and let us get this over with.”
I eased myself down across from them. She immediately held out her free hand to me. I looked at it without enthusiasm. Honesty took me. “I’m not that worried about the time. I didn’t like what happened last night, whatever it was. Quite frankly, whatever it was, I’d prefer to ignore it and go on with my regular life. I’ve no desire to repeat that experience with another seance.”
“Ignore it? You could just ignore it?” she demanded of me.
“Exactly what did happen last night?” Spink asked almost at the same moment.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” I told them both. To Epiny I said firmly, “Whatever you did to me, I didn’t enjoy it. No more seances.”
Epiny stared at me for a moment. “You thought that was a seance? You thought that — whatever it was — was something I did? I beg your pardon, cousin dear. Whatever happened last night was all you. All that strangeness came from you. I’m only asking you to let me find out what it was by asking the spirits. Because whatever it was, I think you need to know. I don’t think ignoring it will make it go away. That’s like saying of an ambush, ‘Oh, just keep riding and ignore those enemies. Hope for the best, that they’ll let us pass’. You need to stand your ground and face it, Nevare. Better to do it now while you have friends with you than to face it alone later.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you,” I grumbled. Her advice applied to well to what I was facing when I returned to the Academy. I wondered unhappily how much Spink had told her. Both she and Spink held out their hands to me, and I surrendered. I settled myself and unwillingly held out my hands. Epiny seized mine immediately. I was relieved that the unearthly resistance we had encountered last night was gone. Perhaps that meant nothing peculiar would happen this time. I clasped hands with Spink as well. We sat in a circle like children beginning some nursery game. I was almost immediately uncomfortable. The ground was uneven and stony. “Now what do we do?” I asked, somewhat irritably. “Do we shut our eyes and hum? Or bow our heads and—”
“Hush!” Spink replied, his voice commandingly intense.
I glared at him but he was staring, mouth ajar, at Epiny. I followed his gaze and felt repelled. She had allowed her mouth to fall half-open and her face to slacken. Her eyeballs were visible beneath her half-open lids and they were jittering back and forth like marbles rattled in a can. She drew in a long, raspy breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth. A tiny bubble of spittle rode it.
“Disgusting!” I said in quiet dismay, appalled at my cousin’s shameless theatrics. This was far worse than whatever she had subjected me to the night before.
“Be quiet!” Spink hissed. “Can’t you feel the change in her hand? This is real!”
Her small hand in mine was very warm to the touch compared to Spink’s cold and callused one. I had not noticed before how warm it was. Then, as Epiny’s head first lolled back and then rolled laxly forward on her neck, her hand in mine grew cooler. In two heartbeats, it was as if I held hands with a corpse. I exchanged worried glances with Spink. Epiny spoke. “Don’t let go,” she begged us. “Don’t let me get lost here in the wind.”
I had been at the point of dropping of her hand. Now I held it firmly. Her small fingers clutched at mine as if her very life depended on it.
“Let’s stop this,” Spink said quietly. “Epiny, I thought you were playing a game with us. This is… Let’s stop this. I don’t like it at all”
She made a sound, an ugly noise somewhere between a retch and a sigh. She seemed to struggle to control her own voice. Then, “Can’t,” she muttered. “I can’t shut the window. They’re here all the time.”
“Enough!” I said. I tried to let go of Epiny’s hand, but she held on to my fingers with unnatural strength.
“Someone’s coming,” she whispered. Her head dropped, sagging to her breast. Then I felt something change in her. I still cannot explain what happened. Perhaps it was something like looking through rain on a dusty windowpane, and seeing a shape and then suddenly recognizing the person outside. Up to then, I had thought her sounds and grimaces a selfish and ugly little game she was playing to mock us. At that moment, it became something much more dangerous. She lifted her head, but it wobbled on her neck. She looked at me but someone else was looking out of her eyes. The gaze she turned on me was tired and worn and old.
“We weren’t dead,” she said quietly. The voice wasn’t Epiny’s. She spoke with the accent of a frontier woman. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, and then tears ran from their corners. “I wasn’t dead. My little boy wasn’t
dead. We’d just been sick so long. I could hear them talking but I couldn’t rouse myself. They said that we were dead. They sewed us up together in a burial bag. They’d run out of coffins. We woke up under the ground. We couldn’t get out. I tried. I tried to free us. I tore my nails against the canvas. I bit it until my teeth bled in my gums. We died there, in that sack, under the ground. And all around us, in that burying ground that night, we heard others dying the same way. We died. But I didn’t cross their bridge.”
Her voice didn’t sound angry, just flat with sorrow. She looked at me earnestly. “Will you remember that, please? Remember it. ’Cause there’ll be others.”
“I will,” I said. I think I would have said anything to give that poor soul comfort. Epiny’s eyes went dull and the woman’s expression faded from her face, leaving her features soft and unformed.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief it was over. “Epiny?” I said. I gave her hand a little shake. “Epiny?”
Something or someone else took her. It didn’t slide into her as the woman had. It seized her so that her body jerked sharply in its grip. Her hold on my hand tightened painfully and I heard Spink gasp at her grip. When she lifted her face and looked me in the eyes, I recoiled as if her gaze burned me. Tree woman looked at me from my cousin’s face. A pain tingled, then burned through me, from the top of my head down to the base of my spine. I felt immobilized by it.
“I did not summon you!” she said disdainfully. “You are not welcome here until I call you. Why do you try to come to me? Do you seek to give my magic to her? Do you think you can touch our magic and not be touched by it? Magic touches back, soldier’s boy. Magic may give, but it always takes. You send this little one into my world, with no thought for her. What if I decide to keep her, soldier’s boy? Would that teach you not to play with my magic? Hold fast, do you say, and make our sign to invoke it? Hold fast indeed.”
Epiny abruptly let go of my hand. I felt dizzy when she did so, as if I dangled over a chasm with only Spink’s hand to grip. To my shock, her freed hand made the little charm sign over her own hand where she clasped Spink’s, the sign every good cavalla-man makes over his cinch to make it hold. Tree-woman looked back at me through Epiny’s eyes and smiled her knowing smile. “When the time comes, I will show you what ‘hold fast’ means, soldier’s boy.”
Then Epiny suddenly wilted, her softened hand pulling loose from Spink’s as she collapsed. He released my hand and caught her by the shoulders before her face struck the ground. He pulled her back to lean against him and looked at me with anguish.
“Is she dead?” I asked dully. I was surprised the words emerged from my mouth. Control of my body came back to me slowly, like a numbed hand buzzing back to usefulness.
“No, no, she’s breathing. What happened, Nevare? What was that? What did she mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I was not lying, for I did not know any way I could explain it to him. A creature I had dreamed seemed to have reached out and threatened me through my cousin. I felt dizzy. I put both hands to the sides of my head as if that would still the whirling of the world. One of my fingertips brushed the old scar on my scalp. It was hot and pulsed with pain. My recollection of the injury flared fresh in my mind. I closed my eyes and shook my head. I tried to push the knowledge away from me, but it would not leave. It threatened to put a crack in my ordinary and logical life. Only a crazy man could have made any sense from the events. I did not want to be crazy, and so I could not think seriously about these things or permit them to have meaning in my life. I lumbered to my feet and panting, staggered away from them both. I was suddenly angry, with Epiny and myself, for allowing any of my strange dreams and experiences to take that one step closer to my reality. I was angry that Spink had witnessed it. “I wish I had never let her talk me into this seance nonsense!” I snarled.
“I don’t think that was fakery, Nevare,” Spink said firmly, as if I had asserted it was. He still held my cousin in his arms. His face was pale, his freckles standing out sharply on his face. “Whatever happened here was, well, not real but… not pretend, either.” He finished his sentence lamely. “She’s not waking up, Nevare! What did we allow her to do? I should have listened to you. I know that now, I should have listened to you. Epiny? Nevare, I’m so sorry. Epiny! Please, wake up!”
I looked away from the misery on his face. Spink, like me, was an eminently sensible man. If we started believing that my cousin could summon spirits that talked through her, well, where would that belief carry us? Yet if we did not believe it, we must decide that either she was insane, or an unrepentant liar making fools of us. I stubbornly rejected every theory, and turned my back on Spink’s dilemma in order to ignore my own. “This should never have happened!” I said savagely. I think Spink took it as a rebuke to him. He had begun to timidly pat at Epiny’s cheek in an effort to bring her around. He looked frightened, almost as if he wanted to cry.
I went and wet my handkerchief in the river and came back to dab at her wrists and temples. Epiny roused quite slowly. Even when she could sit up by herself, she still seemed dazed. Finally, she looked at me and said, “I want to go home now. Please.”
I caught our horses and helped my cousin to mount. Our ride back was far more sedate than our journey there. I did not speak at all. Spink essayed several bland pleasantries, and after his third effort, Epiny said she would like to listen to the birds’ sing for the rest of the ride. There were no birds that I saw or heard. I think she knew Spink was unnerved by our experience and was trying to make her feel better, but could not summon the energy to reward him. I wanted to dismiss the whole incident as her dramatic ploy to get Spink’s attention. I could not. It if had all been a pretence, why didn’t she take advantage of his concern now? Instead she look straight ahead, unspeaking, and I wondered how much of the seance, if any, she remembered. She dismounted at the door, and I allowed Spink to escort her inside while I took the horses around to the stable.
When I came in, Spink told me that Epiny had a severe headache and would not be joining us for luncheon. When we saw my uncle at the table and I passed on this message, he nodded calmly and said that she was often plagued with headaches. He seemed to find nothing odd about it, and turned the talk to plans for when we might next come to visit. Spink could not seem to find a response or an appetite. He pushed his food about on his plate and when I said that we had been warned that our studies would soon become more difficult and that we should save our free time for our books, Spink nodded unhappily.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tiber
The carriage ride back to the Academy was a quiet one. It seemed to pass very quickly, as time does when one is dreading something. Both Spink and I were subdued, and my uncle very thoughtful. The bizarre seance and Epiny’s abrupt withdrawal after it filled my thoughts. I struggled with whether or not it was my duty to tell my uncle of all that had transpired. The worst was that I could not in good conscience talk about it without revealing to him my subjective experience of it. I dissected the ‘seance’, trying to recall every word that Epiny had said to me. Slowly, I began to see that it was my interpretation of her words that was so otherworldly and strange. She had never said, “I am Tree-Woman, reaching for you from your past!” I had supplied all those connections myself. All she had done was look at me with a strange expression on her face and mutter some vague references to magic and ‘hold fast’ charms.
I felt swept by a tide of revelation. I had created it all in my mind. That was all. Nothing had really happened. Charitably, I decided that Epiny did believe that spirits were invading her mind and making her say and do strange things. She was not a conscious fraud. I had been drawn in by her play-acting or delusion, and I had provided the unspoken details that had made the seance so alarming. If, as a rational and modern man, I looked at what she had said and done, there was really very little to it. I drew in a deep breath, and with great relief, rejected my fears. All my anxiety was of my own making, the penalty I must pay
for having indulged in her ungodly game of seance. The next time, I would know better.
I was older and a man. I had set her a bad example by participating. I would not make that error again.
Spink, too, was silent and withdrawn, staring out the window wordlessly at the passing scenery. I think my uncle mistook the cause of our gloom. As we drew closer to the Academy gates, he took a deep breath and then warned us that he had sent a messenger ahead that morning, to request ‘an hour of the commander’s time’. Then he added, “I know you two are dreading what your honesty may have brought down upon you and your fellows. If Colonel Stiet is any kind of true officer, then he will appreciate knowing that there are abuses going on within his command. Lieutenant Tiber deserves to be treated fairly, as do all first-years of any parentage. Stiet should take steps to assure equity, and I intend to ask him to keep me informed of his progress in dealing with the offenders. If what I hear does not satisfy me, then I will write to your father, or go directly to the board that oversees the Academy. If it comes to that, you both may be called on to testify. I don’t think it will go that far, but I want to be honest with you. Through no fault of your own, you have entered difficult waters. Nevare, I want you to write to me daily and with honesty. If letters do not arrive from you as expected, I will be visiting here again, so see that you do not neglect this task.”
My heart sank at his words, but I dutifully replied, “Yes, Uncle.” To have him remind me that there were other, weightier matters hanging over my head dampened my spirits even more thoroughly.
We bade him farewell at the entrance to the Administration Building. Spink and I watched him as he strode up the steps and entered. I thought I caught a brief glimpse of Caulder when the door was opened. I hoped not. I’d seen as much of that youngster as I wanted, and desired still less to have anything to do with him after I had seen how Epiny disdained him. I wished I had not witnessed the scene between them; Caulder would not forget that I had seen his humiliation. Spink and I shouldered our bags and headed back toward Carneston House. Halfway there, Spink spoke up suddenly but quietly.
