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 séance 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’ song 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. If it had all been a pretence, why didn’t she take advantage of his concern now? Instead she looked straight ahead, unspeaking, and I wondered how much of the séance, 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.
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 séance 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 ‘séance’, 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 séance
