draped from the stretching branches above our heads formed the sheltering walls of our forest pavilion. Deep moss cushioned my bare back, and her soft arm was my pillow. The vines curtained our trysting place with their foliage and large, pale-green flowers. The stamen pushed past the fleshy lips of the blossoms and were heavy with yellow pollen. Large butterflies with wings of deep orange traced with black were investigating the flowers. One insect left a drooping blossom, alighted on my lover’s shoulder and walked over her soft dappled flesh. I watched it unfurl a coiled black tongue to taste the perspiration that dewed the forest woman’s skin, and envied it.
I lay in indescribable comfort, content beyond passion. I lifted a lazy hand to impede the butterfly’s progress. Fearlessly, it stepped onto my fingers. I raised it to be an ornament in my lover’s thick and tousled hair. She opened her eyes at my touch. She had hazel eyes, green mingling with soft brown. She smiled. I leaned up on my elbow and kissed her. Her ample breasts pressed against me, startling in their softness.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said softly, tilting back from the kiss. ‘I’m so sorry I had to kill you.’
Here eyes were sad but still fond. ‘I know,’ she replied. There was no rancour in her voice. ‘Be at peace with it, soldier’s boy. All will come true as it was meant to be. You belong to the magic now, and whatever it must have you do, you will do.’
‘But I killed you. I loved you and I killed you.’
She smiled gently. ‘Such as we do not die as others do.’
‘Do you yet live then?’ I asked her. I pulled my body back from hers and looked down between us at the mound of her belly. It gave the lie to her words. My cavalla sabre had slashed her wide open. Her entrails spilled from that gash and rested on the moss between us. They were pink and liverish grey, coiling like fat worms. They had piled up against my bare legs, warm and slick. Her blood smeared my genitals. I tried to scream and could not. I struggled to push away from her but we had grown fast together.
‘Nevare!’
I woke with a shudder and sat up in my bunk, panting silently through my open mouth. A tall pale wraith stood over me. I gave a muted yelp before I recognized Trist. ‘You were whimpering in your sleep,’ Trist told me. I compulsively brushed at my thighs, and then lifted my hands close to my face. In the dim moonlight through the window, they were clean of blood.
‘It was only a dream,’ Trist assured me.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, ashamed. ‘Sorry I was noisy.’
‘It’s not like you’re the only one to have nightmares.’ The thin cadet sat down on the foot of my bed. Once he had been whiplash lean and limber. Now he was skeletal and moved like a stiff old man. He coughed twice and then caught his breath. ‘Know what I dream?’ He didn’t wait for my reply. ‘I dream I died of Speck plague. Because I did, you know. I was one of the ones who died, and then revived. But I dream that instead of holding my body in the infirmary, Dr Amicas let them put me out with the corpses. In my dream, they toss me in the pit-grave, and they throw the quicklime down on me. I dream I wake up down there, under all those bodies that stink of piss and vomit, with the lime burning into me. I try to climb out, but they just keep throwing more bodies down on top of me. I’m clawing and pushing my way past them, trying to get out of the pit through all that rotting flesh and bones. And then I realize that the body I’m climbing over is Nate. He’s all dead and decaying but he opens his eyes and he asks, “Why me, Trist? Why me and not you?”’ Trist gave a sudden shudder and huddled his shoulders.
‘They’re only dreams, Trist,’ I whispered. All around us, the other first-years that had survived the plague slumbered on. Someone coughed in his sleep. Someone else muttered, yipped like a puppy and then grew still. Trist was right. Few of us slept well anymore. ‘They’re only bad dreams. It’s all over. The plague passed us by. We survived.’
‘Easy for you to say. You recovered. You’re fit and hearty.’ He stood up. His nightshirt hung on his lanky frame. In the dim dormitory, his eyes were dark holes. ‘Maybe I survived, but the plague didn’t pass me by. I’ll live with what it did to me to the end of my days. You think I’ll ever lead a charge, Nevare? I can barely manage to keep standing through morning assembly. I’m finished as a soldier. Finished before I started. I’ll never live the life I expected to lead.’
Trist stood up. He shuffled away from my bed and back to his. He was breathing noisily by the time he sat down on his bunk.
Slowly I lay back down. I heard Trist cough again, wheeze and then lie down. It was no comfort to me that he, too, was tormented with nightmares. I thought of Tree Woman and shuddered again. She is dead, I assured myself. She can no longer reach into my life. I killed her. I killed her and I took back into myself the part of my spirit that she’d stolen and seduced. She can’t control me any more. It was only a dream. I took a deeper, steadying breath, turned my pillow to the cool side and burrowed into it. I dared not close my eyes lest I fall back into that nightmare. I deliberately focused my mind on the present, and pushed my night terror away from me.
All around me in the darkness, my fellow survivors slept. Bringham House’s dormitory was a long open room, with a large window at each end. Two neat rows of bunks lined the long walls. There were forty beds, but only thirty-one were full. Colonel Rebin, the King’s Cavalla Academy commander, had combined the sons of old nobles with the sons of battle lords, and recalled the cadets who had been culled earlier in the year, but even that measure had not completely replenished our depleted ranks. The colonel might have declared us equals but I suspected that only time and familiarity would erase the social gulf between the sons of established noble families and those of us whose fathers could claim a title only because the King had elevated them in recognition of their wartime service.
Rebin mingled us out of necessity. The Speck plague that had roared through the Academy had devastated us. Our class of first-years had been halved. The second-and third-years had taken almost as heavy a loss. Instructors as well as students had perished in that unnatural onslaught. Colonel Rebin was doing the best he could to reorganize the Academy and put it back on a regular schedule, but we were still licking our wounds. Speck plague had culled a full generation of future officers. Gernia’s military would feel that loss keenly in the years to come. And that had been what the Specks intended when they used their magic to send their disease against us.
Morale at the Academy was subdued as we staggered forward into the new year. It wasn’t just the number of deaths the plague had visited on us, though that was bad enough. The plague had come among us and slaughtered us at will, an enemy that all of our training could not prevail against. Strong, brave young men who had hoped to distinguish themselves on battlefields had instead died in their beds, soiled with vomit and urine and whimpering feebly for their mothers. It is never good to remind soldiers of their own mortality. We had believed ourselves young heroes, full of energy, courage and lust for life. The plague had revealed to us that we were mortals, and just as vulnerable as the weakest babe-in-arms.
The first time Colonel Rebin had assembled us on the parade ground in our old formations, he had ordered us all ‘at ease’ and then commanded us to look around us and see how many of our fellows had fallen. He then gave a speech, telling us that the plague was the first battle we had passed through, and that just as the plague had not discriminated between old nobility and new nobility, neither would a blade or a bullet. As he formed us up into our new condensed companies, I pondered his words. I doubted that he truly realized that the Speck plague had not been a random contagion but a true strike against us, as telling as any military attack. The Specks had sent ‘Dust Dancers’ from the far eastern frontiers of Gernia all the way to our capital city, for the precise purpose of sowing their disease amongst our nobility and our future military leaders. They had
