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 allyou. 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 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 were holding 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 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…Please. 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? Keep fast, do you say, and make our sign to invoke it? Keep fast indeed.” Epiny abruptly let go of my hand. I felt dizzy when she did so, as if I were dangling 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 ‘keep 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 of 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
