Likari piped up with a question that ended in the word, ‘name?’
Olikea’s response faded in and out of my hearing. ‘Not a baby,’ she said disdainfully, but I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. My attention was caught by a fantastic landscape. Never had I seen colours so intense. Very large objects came into my view, things so big that I could not see what they were until we had swept past them. Then, I wondered if the butterfly had seemed so large because we were close to it, or if it truly had been so immense that it covered half the sky and it only seemed small as we retreated from it.
‘Fever dream,’ I told myself, but it was hard to believe that it was only a dream and that I had not been transported into some other world.
Then, most tantalizing of all, we crashed into Epiny’s dream. Her dream was sweet and simple; she was sitting by the fireside in the sitting room in her father’s house in Old Thares. Next to her was a beautiful carved wooden cradle mounted on a rocking stand. A curtain of fine lace, all worked with pink rosebuds, draped the cradle. She sat next to it, reading a book and gently rocking the cradle. She looked up as I crashed into the room.
‘Nevare? What have you done to yourself?’
I looked down. I was immensely fat again, and mottled with specks. I wore a garment like a wide belt, and from it hung a number of pouches. My neck was ringed with necklaces of leather strung through beads of polished stone. My wrists were likewise decorated. Soldier’s Boy opened his mouth to speak. With frantic energy, I fought him for control of the mouth and words. Here, I suddenly discovered, we were much more equally matched. I could not force out the words I wanted to say, but neither could he. We stood before Epiny, two battling spirits in one body, voiceless as the mouth worked and only nonsense sounds came out.
Epiny’s image of herself suddenly brightened and firmed, as if she had come closer to me without moving. ‘Nevare. You are here, aren’t you? This is that “dream-walking” you wrote about in your journal! Why have you come to me? Is there something important I must know? Are you in danger? Are you hurt? Where are you, Nevare? What do you need of me?’
Epiny in the flesh could be overwhelming. Epiny on this dream plane exceeded that. As she focused herself at me, she seemed to grow larger. The room disappeared; only the cradle remained at her side and despite her frantic questions, she continued to rock it in a calm and calming manner. I thought I finally understood what the ‘aura’ she told me about was. Epiny radiated her self like a fire radiates heat. In this place, nothing was concealed. Her intensity, her curiosity, her burning sense of justice and her equally hot indignation at injustice; it all flowed out of her, a corona of Epiny-ness. It was humbling to stand there and feel the waves of her love for me beat against me.
I wanted so badly to stay and speak with her. Soldier’s Boy’s desire to stay mute and flee was equally strong. Caught in that tug of war, we were a silent presence full of conflict.
‘If you cannot speak to me here, at least hear what news I have. It may comfort you to know that both Spink and Amzil believed me when I told them that you lived. It was such a relief to them. Neither had wanted to admit to the other that the memories of that night were truncated and contradictory. Still, there have been repercussions. Spink can go about his daily tasks, knowing that he did not fail you. But it has still changed his heart towards the men he rode with that night. He cannot abide the sight of them. He knows how capable of evil they are. He avoids Captain Thayer, Carsina’s husband, but the man knows that Spink despises him. I fear he will take umbrage against Spink some day.
‘I fear for him, Nevare. He cannot hide what he knows about those men; it shows in his face and his eyes whenever we encounter any of them. And they, I think they feel they must be rid of him; perhaps it is the only way in which they will be able to forget that night. They believe they beat you to death, or at the least, witnessed their comrades doing so. But their memories are not clear on exactly how it happened. So when Spink looks at them with disgust, well, I do not think they know what to believe about themselves.
‘And Amzil does not make it better. I do not know what you said to her that night, but it has made her fearless. And when I gave her your message, that you loved her but had to leave her, it hardened something in her. Now she is worse than fearless whenever she encounters one of those men. She torments them. When she sees one of them on the streets or in the mercantile, she does not turn her eyes away or avoid him. Instead, she stalks him like a cat, meeting his gaze, walking up on him and staring him straight in the face. They flinch from her, Nevare. They look away, they try to avoid her, but she is making them hate her. The one that tried to stand up to her, who would not leave the store when she glared at him? When he looked at her with disdain, she returned his gaze and said aloud, loud enough for other customers to hear her, “Perhaps he has forgotten what happened the night a mob beat the grave-digger to death. I have not. You think you know what I am; I’ve heard you call me the Deadtown Whore. But I know what you are. I remember every detail. And I had far rather be a whore than a snivelling coward.” He fled from her then, convinced that what she recalls is what others recall of him as well.
‘Winter will close around us soon, Nevare, and winter is not a good season here in Gettys. It is a time when every injury festers, and the cold and the dark promise to hide every evil thing that is done. I am afraid. I bar the door at night, and Spink sleeps with his pistol cocked and ready on the bedside table. He has talked of resigning his commission; he no longer wishes to serve with these men. I think that if winter were not so close, he would do it, and we would flee, for the sake of the baby. Such cowardice would scald him and leave a scar that would never heal. Yet, when spring comes, if nothing has improved here, what else can he do? Better that he take us away from here than that he is shot in the back and I am left at the mercy of these wolves. So he has told me himself.’
Her words cut me like razors. I had thought I had been saving them all when I cut myself adrift. Instead I had not only plunged them into danger and torment, but then abandoned them all to take care of themselves. I did not deceive myself that I could have been of great use to them, but it seemed cowardly that I was not there at all. Most troubling to me was Amzil’s anger and the behaviour it prompted. I could not blame her for it. How must it be for her, to see walking on the streets the men that would have raped her, even to death? I wished she would flee to a safer place, but not if it meant leaving Epiny pregnant and without the comfort of another woman near. It was all too horrible to contemplate. I tried to reach my hands towards Epiny, but they were not mine to control, not even in a dream. I focused all my will on trying to say even one word to her.
That was a mistake. For while I devoted my strength to that, Soldier’s Boy tore us free of Epiny’s dream and fled with me. I looked back as we took flight, and saw Epiny looking up after us. She dwindled in the distance until she was gone.
‘They should just go away.’ Soldier’s Boy was speaking to me, but the words echoed and I knew that in the other world, he raved in his fever. If I reached, I could be aware of that body, burning inside and yet shivering with cold in the dank cave. I heard people whispering. Perhaps it was Olikea and Likari. Their voices sounded wavery and frightening.
‘A death. Or a life. Which do you owe me, Nevare? Which will you give me, Nevare?’
An immense croaker bird confronted us. The carrion bird was black and white, with brilliant red wattles around his beak. The wattles were thick and fat and somehow disgusting and threatening at the same time. He opened his beak wide and I saw how strangely his tongue was fastened into it, and how sharp his tongue looked.
‘I am not Nevare! I am Soldier’s Boy of the People. I owe you nothing.’
The bird opened his beak wide with amusement. He rattled his wing plumes, resettling them, and a sickening wave of carrion stench wafted against me. ‘Neither debts nor names are so easily shed, Nevare. You are who
