Renegade's Magic (The Soldier Son Trilogy #3)

“He will not join me,” Soldier’s Boy replied sullenly.

I heard Lisana’s soft rebuke. “And in your heart, you do not wish him to. You hold him as far from you as he does you. Are you jealous even of yourself? Do you think I could love you and not love all of you?”

I smiled to hear that, even as it amazed me. Trust the heart of a woman to be large enough to encompass two such disparate people and make them one. I felt his magic push me away from her, but not before she was aware of my thought. I felt her warmth follow me as she enfolded Soldier’s Boy in her embrace.

Freed, I arrowed through something that was neither space nor time, traveling across something that was not distance. Unerring, Soldier’s Boy’s push sent me to my cousin Epiny. I found her sitting in a rocker by a fire. She was neither asleep nor awake as she rocked but wearily insensate after a difficult day. She had always thought babies were sweet little cherubs who slept and ate and slept again. She smiled at her childhood memories of her own little sister. The moment Purissa even gurgled in a discontented way, she’d been whisked away by her nurse, her wails vanishing with her when the nursery door was shut firmly behind them. She’d always imagined that her nurse quickly discovered what discontented the child and solved it and that Purissa went back to being a placid and contented infant. Solina seemed placid and contented only when being held by her mother. Held and rocked, endlessly rocked. From elsewhere in the cottage, I heard a child’s voice uplifted in querulous complaint, and Amzil’s irritable hushing. Dia was unhappy about something. The babe in Epiny’s arms squirmed and wailed a thin protest in sympathy.

Epiny sighed and tears started under her eyelids. She was tired, so very tired, and her head hurt. Spink had stopped taking the Gettys Tonic and forbidden it to everyone in his household. Amzil had nearly left over it; if she’d had anywhere else to go, she would have. The whole household had been miserable since Spink had decreed it, and he had been so unreasonable. He wouldn’t allow it in the door, not a drop, not even to soothe the children when they had nightmares.

“But you know, he’s right, Epiny.” I inserted myself into her meandering trail of thoughts.

“But being right doesn’t get him far. When he was right about the dangers of a Speck attack, it only brought him blame for not shouting more loudly and taking more action.”

“What did Spink do that night?”

She sighed. The baby on her breast was not quieting but only wailing in an endlessly hopeless way. With the toe of one foot, she started the rocker moving again. “He said he’d dreamed of you that morning, and asked me if I had. I thought I might have, but I couldn’t remember details. Only that you were very agitated and kept saying that I had to warn everyone. So he tried telling people that he had a bad premonition and that we must all be extra wary that night. But of course everyone just laughed at him. The Specks go away in winter; everyone knows that. But he made Amzil and me take the children, some bedding, and some food and go spend the night in a little stone cottage outside the gates. The cottage was abandoned years ago, and it was so cold and he forbade us to have any fire or light at all. We ended up huddled together like mice under a doormat. He told his men, soldiers accustomed to working in supply, and announced that he was having a night drill, and that all must turn out for it armed and uniformed for the cold. And he took them outside the fort, too, and made them march a patrol around the town outside the fort. He thought that when the attack came, it would be noisy, with guns firing and men shouting. He never even knew that the Specks were inside the fort until the fires blazed up. He was riding back toward the fort when—Nevare? You are here? Really here with me?”

“Yes, Epiny. I’ve dream-walked to you. I wanted to be sure you had all weathered the attack intact.”

“Small thanks to you!” she said with sudden deep bitterness. “Nevare, Spink saw you that night! He says that you looked right at him, eye to eye. He had been on the point of firing, and then when he saw your face, he could not!” A shiver of outrage ran over her. “Some have faulted him for that, calling him coward or traitor! Yet none of them faced up to you, either. How dare they speak so about him, how dare they! And how could you have put him in such a position, Nevare!”

“Epiny, you know how I am bound! I did all I could, to come and warn you both. It was as much as I could do!” The accusing tone of her words tore me. How could she believe I had done that of my own will? “Even now, I am held! My time to speak with you is short.”

“I know. I do know. But still, it is a heavy thing for him to bear, for there is no possible way he could explain it. Others saw you, Nevare. Or what they said was your ghost, come back as a Speck. The heaviest losses were taken by the men who were in the mob that night when you fled Gettys; only five now survive who witnessed your death. Rumor mutters about the town. Some say your ghost led the attack to take vengeance on the town. The barracks where the men were massacred as they tried to escape? Those soldiers were under Captain Thayer’s command. You remember who he was, don’t you? Carsina’s husband? The monster that was going to let his men rape and murder Amzil, simply as a way of tormenting you before they beat you to death! Now, whenever he sees Amzil on the street, or even little Kara sent out on an errand, he glowers and stares like a madman! He rules his own troops like a despot. I fear him, Nevare. I fear that he will stop at nothing to feel he has avenged himself. He says that Amzil is worse than a whore and he will prove it. Oh, how could you take vengeance, and then leave us here to bear the brunt of the ill will you woke?”