by Robin Hobb
I think they judged me overcome by terror when I could not walk out of the courtroom on my own. The soldiers who dragged me from the prisoner’s box from the courtroom, through the streets, and back to my cell were not gentle. Spink walked silently beside me, his face grim. The rejoicing mob closed around us, shouting curses and making the short walk from the courtroom to the prison seem endless. My chained ankles flopped and clanked behind me, and every impact was a clout of pain as they dragged me down the steps and back to my basement cell. My captors dropped me inside my cell. The sergeant knelt to retrieve his leg irons as I sprawled on the floor. I had thought nothing could increase the pain of that stricture, but when he undid the locks and jerked the embedded metal cuffs from my swollen flesh, I roared with new agony.
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“Serves you right,” I heard him say, and then consciousness fled from me in a red wave.
When I came to myself, I was still lying on the floor of my cell. I groaned and managed to sit up. I wondered how much time had passed. It was hard to reach the cuffs of my trousers to try to pull them up and see the damage to my legs. The leg irons had crushed and gashed the tendons above my ankle. The flesh above and below the imprints left by the leg irons was dark and swollen. Both my feet were puffy and tender. I tried to flex my feet and could not. I dragged my bulky body over to where my single blanket was mingled with the collapsed wreckage of my pallet, pulled my blanket free, put it around my shoulders, and leaned back against the wall. I was cold and hungry and I could barely move my feet.
I would die tomorrow.
That knowledge came to me just like that. All my petty concerns for cold or thirst or pain gave way to numbing awareness of my impending death. Yet I couldn’t even focus on dying. All I could think of was the agony that would precede it as the lash ate the skin and flesh from my back. They’d strip me for the flogging. That was customary, as was tying the man by his wrists to the post to keep him upright. Details of what I would endure ate into my mind like acid. The mockery of the crowd. How they would dash me with vinegar water to revive me if I lapsed into unconsciousness. I would die a varlet’s death, and I already knew that I would not go to it with dignity and courage. I’d scream. I’d faint. I’d piss myself.
“Why?” I asked the dimly lit cell, but received no answer. I tried to pray, but could not find enough faith to do even that. Pray for what? A miracle that would save me and return me to a life worth living? I couldn’t imagine what could possibly happen to do that. I didn’t know what to ask of god, nor which god would hear my appeal. I sat and stared at the stout wooden door of my cell. I would have wept, but even that ambition was beyond me now. I sank into a sort of stupor.
I heard the door at the end of the corridor open and then footsteps, and slowly lifted my eyes to the barred window. My bowels had turned to cold liquid. Was it morning already? Had I spent my last night in the world? My lips suddenly trembled like a scolded child’s, and useless tears flooded my eyes. I wiped them hastily on my sleeve and stared stiff-faced at the window.
When Spink’s haggard face appeared there, it nearly unmanned me. His eyes were red-rimmed and shot with blood. For a moment, we were both silent. Then he said hoarsely, “I’m sorry, Nevare. I’m so sorry. ”
“There was nothing anyone could have done for me,” I said.
“They’ve allowed me fifteen minutes to speak to you. ”
“What time is it?” I demanded.
For a moment he looked puzzled. Then he said, “Evening is just coming on. ”
“What time is my execution scheduled?”
He choked for a moment, then managed to say, “Noon tomorrow, it will commence. ”
Silence fell. We were both thinking that no one know when it would finally end.
And then, to say anything at all, I asked him, “How is Epiny?”
“Strangely calm,” he said. “She encouraged me to come here for a final visit. She said I should tell you that she loves you and doesn’t forget anything. I thought she was going to insist on coming with me, but she didn’t. I didn’t want to leave her alone. Amzil is off on some errand of her own, and the children are minding themselves. But she said she was well in control of her mood and insisted I should come to you. She said you’d want to know that we had heard back from your sister. Yaril received the letter you sent through Carsina. She wrote back to Carsina, but she also had the sense to write to Epiny as well. ”
I swallowed my words. I didn’t say that I wished I’d never sent the letter. I’d told her that I was alive. By the time she read Spink’s response that would no longer be true. I wondered, very briefly, if Captain Thayer had received my sister’s letter; it probably would have puzzled him mightily if he had. I hoped that he had discarded it and would never plumb the mystery of what it meant. I wished to die as Nevare Burv, the gravedigger, not Nevare Burvelle, the disgraced soldier son of a nobleman.
“Don’t ever tell Yaril how I died,” I pleaded with him.
“I’ll try to find a way to avoid it,” he told me, but could not meet my eyes.
I cleared my throat. “Is she well?” I asked him.
“She is engaged to marry Caulder Stiet. ” His voice was flat as he announced this. “She says that she does not think it so evil a fate as she once did, that she thinks she can manage him. The actual phrase she used was that she found him ‘tractable. ’ Your father had a stroke and has had difficulty speaking. She does not say that this has made her life less onerous, but that is what Epiny reads between the lines. ”
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“Who is running the estate?” I wondered aloud.
“Yaril, by the sound of her letter. She mentions that a Sergeant Duril, her new foreman, was very proud to hear you’d become a soldier. He asked her to send his best wishes along with hers, and to remind you that you’d promised you would write to him. ”
And that was when I broke. I lowered my face into my hands and dissolved into tears. Spink was silent, doubtless embarrassed to witness this. I managed to calm myself enough to say, “Spink. You have to find a plausible lie for me. If it’s the last favor you can do for me, please do it. Don’t let any of them know how I died. Not Yaril, not Caulder or my father, not Sergeant Duril. Please. Please. ”
“I’ll do what I can,” he replied hoarsely.
I lifted my face in surprise. Tears ran unchecked down his face. He was not a tall man. He stood on tiptoes and thrust his arm into my cell window as far as the bars would allow. “I’d like to shake your hand a final time,” he said.
“I don’t think I can stand up, Spink. I’m hamstrung. Those leg irons cut into my ankle tendons badly. ”
He pulled his hand back and peered down at my feet. He narrowed his eyes in sympathy. “Those bastards,” he said with quiet feeling.
“Lieutenant Spinrek! Sir?”
“What is it?” Spink scrubbed angrily at his eyes as he shouted back at the guard. “My time isn’t up yet. ”
“No, sir, it isn’t. But you’re wanted right away. All the officers are being called to report. There’s been a disturbance out at the road’s end, some sort of sabotage. And—”
Before the guard could complete his sentence, a muffled explosion shook my cell. The guard gave a yelp of terror. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. A sudden crack ran across the back wall of my cell.
The guard’s voice shook as he called down the corridor, “That sounded like it came from the prison quarters, sir! Do you think it’s an uprising?”
Epiny! I mouthed silently at Spink in horror.
“It couldn’t be,” he said aloud, but I heard the terrified doubt in his mind.
There was a second, smaller explosion. Dust hung in the air now, and I coughed. Spink looked in at me and our eyes met for a last time. “She sent you this,” he said hastily, and vanished for an instant from my sight. Something wrapped in a napkin was thrust through the food sl
ot in the bottom of my door. Then Spink bobbed into sight again. “Farewell, my friend,” he said through the bars, and then he was gone. I listened to the clatter of his boots as he hurried down the hall.
I noticed that he had not said, “Good-bye. ” I hoped that he would be in time to whisk Epiny away from the scene of her mischief and get her safely home before anyone knew she was involved. And I wondered, with a sudden hope too sharp to bear, what else had she set in motion?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
SURRENDER
I waited until I heard the door slam behind both Spink and the guard. I could not tear my eyes from the napkin that rested on the floor of my cell. My nose picked up a tantalizing scent emanating from it. I grunted as I leaned forward over my belly and tried to massage my injured legs. It only awoke fresh agony in them. I gave up the thought of standing up and dragged myself over to the door to see what Spink had left. My hands trembled as I carefully unfolded the napkin to reveal a small pastry. I looked at the browned crust sprinkled with sparkling sugar as if I were beholding a treasure chest of jewels. My nose told me that it was stuffed with the forest berries from Epiny’s kerchief. In a transport of joy, I devoured it. There were scarcely three mouthfuls to it, but when I had consumed it, a sense of well-being flushed through me. It muted the pain in my legs. I was tugging at the cuffs of my trousers, trying to see if the magic was healing my injuries, when I heard a peculiar sound.
I looked around, trying to discover its source. The crack in the wall was running. I watched it wander a crazy path across the face of the plaster. Bits of whitewashed plaster popped off and fell to the floor in a dusty shower, revealing the heavy bricks and thick mortar behind it. The engineer in me concluded that the building was resettling after the concussion of the nearby explosion. I decided that either the crack would soon stop, or the whole thing would suddenly give way and fall on me. It was difficult to care about either outcome.
More plaster flaked away. A chunk of mortar fell to the floor and shattered. I sat up and stared at the wall. Near the bottom, a brick shifted out of place as if pushed from behind.
I tried to stand and found that still sent agony shooting up my legs. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I rolled over onto my knees. I crawled to the back wall of my cell and put my ear against it. I heard small sounds, as if hungry mice were at work in the wall. Mice in a wall of mortar and brick, set below ground level? Tiny grindings and popping sounds came from the besieged wall. Plaster popped off the wall near the ceiling, and the crack ran along the top of the wall. At the same time, a dusty stream of mortar drizzled from between two lower rows of bricks. It cascaded down the wall, forming gritty little piles at the bottom of it. Then, as I watched in awe, one brick midway up the wall very slowly began to seesaw its way out of the wall. In fits and starts, it ground its way out from its fellows. When it protruded enough from the wall that I could get a grip on it, I seized it in both my hands and tried to pull it from its niche. It didn’t budge. I let go and moved back to watch. The wall continued to shed crumbs of mortar and bits of plaster in a nearly continuous sprinkling. A second brick wriggled slightly beside the first one. Little grinding noises, pops, and cracks sounded.
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The two bricks suddenly hinged out into my cell, and I smelled earth. A cascade of tiny white rootlets flowed out though the wall from behind the bricks. Clods of moist earth moved with the seeking roots, plopping down onto the floor. Sudden horror filled me as I recalled how the roots had emerged from the young trees and plunged into the bodies of the walkers. I hitched myself away from the wall, my heart hammering. I wanted to call the guard. No. Horrible as this might be, it would still be a faster death than being dissected by a leather lash. A third brick above the first two gave way and fell with a small thud to the floor. More roots emerged into the room and hung down the wall, a frill of white lace.
I took a deep breath and moved closer to the roots. I could smell earth clearly now. In the wall above the fallen bricks, a new crack appeared, zigzagging up the wall as it followed the mortar lines. The wall swelled in, and suddenly half a dozen bricks fell onto my ruined bed. Evening light and fresh air flowed into my cell through an opening about the size of my head. Hope rippled through me. The magic was providing an escape route for me. At what cost? I wondered, but found I didn’t care.
On my knees, I crawled to the wall. I reached up and this time the brick I tugged on came out easily. The hole at the top of the wall gave me a ground-level view of a neglected, weedy alley behind the prison. I took bricks from the edge of the hole one after another, trying to drop them quietly to the floor. The roots continued their work, both pushing bricks and mortar into my prison and shoring up the wall so the hole didn’t collapse on itself. When I judged that the hole was large enough, I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth against the pain, and reached up to seize a double handful of roots to pull myself to my feet.
And in that moment, faint as mist, I saw her. The specter of a skinny, very old Speck woman materialized before me. Her skin sagged from her bones. I recognized her eyes, and her dark little hands that she reached toward me. For a moment, I felt my face held between their phantom palms. Her smile deepened the wrinkles on her face.
“Lisana?”
“You didn’t really believe I would leave you to die, did you, Soldier’s Boy?” Her words were faint.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked.
“I’ve spent my strength,” she told me sadly. “It’s taken me all this time and used all my magic to grow my roots this far. Don’t waste this chance. It’s the only one I can give you. ” Her wrinkled hands slid away from my face.
“Lisana!” I whispered urgently, but she was gone. I bent my face and kissed the pale roots that now spilled in a cascade into my cell, framing my escape route. As I did so, I smelled a familiar aroma. It came not from the roots, but from the corner where I had discarded my filthy uniform and dirty wash water. I knelt down in the dim corner. The magic had kept its part of the bargain. Mushrooms were growing from the caked soil on the cuffs of my trousers. I could see the pale caps thrust up, open, and expand.
It took all my willpower to refrain from gobbling them at first sight. I forced myself to wait until they had reached full size and ceased growing. Then I snatched at them, cramming them into my mouth by the handful. I swallowed the half-chewed mouthfuls and immediately shoved more into my mouth. Magic and strength coursed through me. When they were all gone, I stood up. My legs still twinged with pain, but held my weight. I seized Lisana’s roots, kissed them gratefully, and then hauled myself up and out of my cell.
I slithered on my belly out of the hole and into the alleyway. The night wind seemed a blessing. I lay there gathering my strength, formulating my feeble plan. I was out of my cell, but still within the fort. I was on foot and just able to hobble. Even if I managed to get past the guards on the gate, I’d never escape any sort of pursuit. All Tree Woman had won for me, I regretfully concluded, was the opportunity to persuade someone to shoot me when he caught me escaping. Compared to being flogged to death, it did not seem a bad bargain at all.
I sat up and tried to get my bearings. At one end of the alley, I could see flames in the distance over the rooftops of the buildings and the wall of the fort. That would be the prison. Evidently the explosion had sparked a fire. I could hear shouts in the distance. I wondered why Epiny had blown up the prison. A wry smile twisted my mouth. I wasn’t wondering how she had done it or if she had done it. Only why. Oh, cousin. May the good god keep you safe this night!
A more immediate question came to mind. Could I stand? Leaning on the wall, I pulled myself up and onto my feet. As my feet flattened against the ground, pain bit into me and sweat broke out all over my body. The magic was healing me, but not quickly. I clenched my teeth tightly together and took three tottering steps toward the dark end of the alley.
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From behind me, I heard the clop, clop of a slowly led horse. I glanced back over my shoulder. My worst fears were instantly confirmed. Someone was leading a horse down the alley toward me. In his free hand, he carried a long gun; I could see the silhouette of the barrel. I wanted to run, but resisted that impulse. I turned back toward him and tried to look menacing. “Give me your horse or I’ll kill you!” I growled.
Horse and man halted. Then, “Nevare? Is that you? How did you get out?” Amzil hurried down the alley toward me. Patient Clove followed her even though she had dropped his lead rope. The pry bar she had been carrying rang loudly on the cobblestones when she dropped it. “Sssshh!” I hissed at her.
“How did you get out?” she demanded in a hoarse whisper.
“How did you know to come here?” I countered.
“I knew to come here after I got home and Epiny told me I’d blown a hole in the wrong prison. I thought they’d keep you with the working prisoners; I suppose that was a stupid thing to think, but when Epiny told me to blast out the east wall of the prison, that was what I did. I’d already set off the bombs she’d made out at the road’s end. I blew up the culverts and two equipment sheds; it will be weeks before a wagon can get to the road’s end. I thought the buildings would just fly apart, but it made a big hole in the ground as well. ”
She sounded very satisfied with herself as she peered up into my face seeking approval.
“You did that?”
“Well, yes. I had to. The mistress is still too weak to stand. Epiny said that if we stopped the road building, the magic would find a way to save you. But then she decided to help it along, just in case, by making a big hole in the side of the prison. So I did. Only then the master came home, to make sure she was still sick in bed, and told her that while he’d been with you, someone had blown up the workers’ prison. Oh, I felt such a fool when I got home and she told me. And we didn’t have any powder left. But I promised her that I’d take a pry bar and the horse and see what I could do to get you out. ”