Renegade's Magic

I was startled. “Do you know a way to help me?”



The brightness of her face dimmed. “No. But I was hoping you were going to ask something that would make me feel useful. Something that would make a difference.” She looked up at me. “Why else would you come to me in my dreams like this?”



Why had I come? I spoke honestly, wondering if it would be my last chance to speak to her. “I came for comfort, I think. To find someone who cared about Nevare.”



The light not only came back to her face; it warmed and gentled her features. “Nevare, I thank you for coming, then. I am that. I do care about you, and if you take comfort in hearing me say it, then I am comforted that I can say it.” She looked, for a moment, as young as she had been in Old Thares. I realized then how much her harsh life at the frontier outpost was aging her. Her features were sharper, her skin more weathered. She had never been a fleshy person, but now it seemed that the resources of her body had dwindled away from her arms and legs and face and into her burgeoning pregnancy. Compared to the women of the Specks, she was a stick figure. In a Speck gathering, she would have been pitied and Spink disdained for his failure to keep the woman he had impregnated plump and gleaming through her pregnancy.



“You are so thin,” I said without thinking.



She laughed and placed her hands on her rounded belly. “Thin?”



“That is the baby. I am speaking of you, Epiny. Your fingers are like little twigs.”



Concern flitted through her eyes. “My stomach is still unsettled by my pregnancy. Everyone has told me, over and over, that my morning sickness will soon be over. But it just goes on.” She shook her head at me. “But I am tired to death of talking about myself. Whenever I see another woman, it seems all she wants to do is advise me or commiserate with me.”



“Even Amzil?” I asked her, smiling.



She did not smile in return. “I am concerned for Amzil,” she said softly.



“Is she sick?”



“Would that it were something as simple as that! She is bitter beyond telling, Nevare. She had a glimpse of a dream, and then it was gone before she could put her hands on it. And she blames everyone and everything for her unhappiness: the town, the cavalla, the soldiers on the street, the officers and their wives, the townsmen. I think she even blames Spink and me to some degree.”



“With time, it will pass,” I said, with no confidence I spoke truth. There had been time, but each time I thought of the life I would never share with her, the pain was still as sharp. It had not passed for me.



“I wonder if she will allow it to pass? She seems to treasure her pain. She swings from holding her children and weeping over them, saying they are the only love she will ever know, to snapping at them impatiently or to simply staring past them, her needlework neglected in her lap.” She halted the tumbling flow of her words and then said hastily, “I do not mean to speak against her or to gossip. There are times, of course, when she is just Amzil, and she works very hard to keep the house tidy and the meals prepared. But I fear for her.”



“Fear for her? Why?”



“Oh. It is the same thing I told you about before. Whenever she sees one of the men who…who accosted her that night, or who looked on and did nothing, she will not look aside, but stares at them as if her eyes could burn holes in them. Or she asks them, with acid courtesy, how they are doing that morning and bids them ‘good day’ in a tone that plainly says she hopes they have anything but a good day. Some of them are cowed by such behavior. But there are a few who regard her with hatred that she knows their shame and fears them not. They cannot clearly recall what happened that night. Neither can Amzil nor Spink. There is a gray time in their minds, and I know that Amzil and Spink are tormented by what might have happened in those moments. Spink would like to think he behaved honorably and with courage. But he simply cannot remember. Amzil would like to think that she fought off her attackers, but she has nightmares in which she goes limp with terror and cannot even cry out and the men do foul things to her before you can intervene. I cannot think what those men imagine to fill in those missing hours. It eats at them like a canker, I think. Amzil has led them to believe that she does recall what happened, and she flaunts that in front of them and treats them with fearless disdain.”



“One of them will kill her,” I said dully. “Simply to put an end to that reminder. Simply to be sure that no witness remains.”



“So I fear,” Epiny said and sighed.



“Every time I have tried to use the magic to my own good, it has cut me. Cut me and burned those I hold most dear.”