by Robin Hobb
“No way to treat a lady,” a voice rasped hoarsely behind me. “You scoundrel. You raping bastard!” I let go of the woman and turned, smelling earth and rot and quicklime.
Dale Hardy stood, legs spread, at the edge of the torchlight. He held my wooden bucket by the bale. “I warned you!” he shouted as he charged at me. As he came into the light, I could see that the quicklime had eaten half his face away. He could not be alive, I thought wildly, he could not be a walker. I took a stumbling step backward as he swung the heavy wooden bucket in a wide arc. It was coming too fast. I could not avoid it. It hit the side of my head, and I exploded into light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ACCUSATIONS
Ebrooks and Kesey found me a few hours later. When they arrived with the first wagonload of bodies for the day, they were puzzled to see the dead torches and only a single shroud remaining where they had left seven corpses the previous evening. Thinking I had somehow dug a new pit and begun to inter them on my own, they had walked out into the graveyard. They’d found me, facedown, next to Dale Hardy’s body. As they approached, a whole flock of croaker birds rose. They’d been feeding on the six bodies that were neatly fastened by the swiftly growing rootlets to my hedgerow trees. The whole area stank of rotting flesh and buzzed with flies.
Kesey thought I was dead. He and Ebrooks assumed that I’d gone down fighting with Specks who had come to steal our dead. Blood coated one whole side of my head. But when Kesey rolled me over, I groaned. He sent Ebrooks running to my cabin to get water.
“And that was when Ebrooks found Carsina’s body in your bed,” Spink said quietly.
He stood outside my cell and spoke to me through a small barred window. I lay on a straw-stuffed mattress on a narrow pallet and looked up at the dim ceiling. The only light came from a lantern fasted to the wall in the outside hall. Spink was the first visitor I’d had since I’d wakened in the cell a day and a half ago. They’d fed me twice, food on a tray shoved through an open slat in the bottom of the door. Grayish stuff in a bowl and a round of very hard bread with water. I’d eaten it. The two meals had been the only noteworthy events since I’d wakened there in the dark, head pounding with pain.
I listened to the silence of Spink waiting for me to come up with a logical explanation. Talking hurt. I didn’t like to move my jaw. Thinking hurt, too. I made it brief. “Carsina was a walker. She came to me just like Hitch did. I tried to help her, but her fever came back. She asked me to get her husband for her. I was going to bring her some water first. I took the bucket, went outside, and realized that all the corpses we’d received that day were walkers. And they were all headed for the hedge. I ran out there and tried to pull one woman free of the tree, but it was already growing into her. I couldn’t get her loose. And that was when Dale Hardy came up out of the pit grave, picked up my bucket, and hit me with it. And that’s all I know.”
It was my turn to fall silent. I waited for him to say he believed me. When the silence lasted, I waited for him to say he didn’t believe me.
What he finally said was, “That doesn’t sound good, Nevare.”
“Just say it sounds like a madman raving. I know it does.” I sighed and slowly sat up. “I don’t remember any of what you’re telling me. Only that bucket coming at me.” The vertigo passed. I felt dizzy every time I changed position. I scratched the side of my head. Flaky brown blood came off under my nails. The magic did not seem to be healing me as swiftly this time as it had when I’d been shot. The answer came to me. The magic was severely depleted. If I didn’t feed it, the next time death knocked on my door, it might come right in. At that moment it sounded like sweet mercy. “Spink, you shouldn’t be here. No one connects you and Epiny to me. Go home. Let me just meet my fate.”
“Before you sounded mad. Now you just sound stupid,” he huffed. When I made no response, he sighed. “If you only sounded insane, it would be better for you.”
I stood up slowly and came to the window. “What do you mean?”
“Captain Jof Thayer nearly went mad when he heard that the dead body of his wife was found in your bed. Captain and Clara Gorling are equally distressed. It looks…very bad, Nevare.”
“What, that I tried to save his wife? What was I supposed to do? Look, Spink, I’ve been here a day and a half. And if it weren’t for,” I lowered my voice, “the magic, I’d be dead by now. No one gave me five minutes of care for my smashed head. The guard won’t talk to me at all. I don’t even know why I’ve been thrown into prison.”
Spink swallowed. He started to speak, then looked around as if he’d rather bite his tongue out.
“Just say it,” I barked at him.
“It looks bad, Nevare. No one will believe that all those people were walkers, not all at once. It looks as if you deliberately planted those trees and then, when you had the chance, shoved fresh corpses up against them to feed them. The trees had shot up almost three feet taller overnight, and blossomed! They had to chop them down to free the bodies from them. The trees had rooted into them so deeply that they had to bury them with pieces of trunk still attached to them. And Dale Hardy’s body out there, pulled right out of his grave? From the damage that the quicklime did to him no one will believe he was a walker.”
“Look at the grave. You’ll find no shovel marks on it, at least, none that I made. If anyone dug him up, it wasn’t me. And I don’t think anyone did. I think he came crawling out on his own.”
Spink gritted his teeth again. “A bit too late to look for any evidence of that sort. They put him back in the earth as quickly as they could. But it was no secret that he’d threatened you in the street that day. How people see it is that you took a macabre vengeance on both the woman who accused you and the man who wanted to defend her. You dragged his body out intending to give it to a tree.”
“And then what? I hit myself on the head with a bucket?”
“Good point. But people in the town are too scandalized and horrified to think sensibly about this, let alone make allowances for claims of Speck magic. Nevare, they found Carsina Thayer’s body in your bed.”
I was baffled. “I told you. She was a walker. I tried to save her. I gave her water, and made her one of those teas that Epiny gave me for Hitch. I never had a chance to make it for him; he was dead when I got back to him. But I thought I had a chance to save Carsina. I took my bucket to get her more water before I left for town to get her husband. But when I went out the door, I saw the other walkers. I’m afraid they distracted me from my errand.” Spink didn’t deserve my angry sarcasm, but my head was pounding with the effort of talking. My jaw felt strange. When I touched it, I found lumpiness at the hinge. Had it been broken, and healed by the magic?
“They found Carsina in your bed,” Spink said again, heavily emphasizing the word. Then, his face flushing dark scarlet, he added, “Her nightgown was rucked up around her waist.”
It took me a moment. At first, his words made no sense to me.
“Oh, by the good god!” I felt as if I’d been punched in the belly. It had never even occurred to me that Carsina’s body in my bed would be seen as anything other than an act of compassion on my part. I felt dizzy. Rumors that I could murder and rape had been hard enough to deal with. Adding necrophilia to the list sickened me. I said as much to Spink, and added, “I was rather counting on the fact that I’d tried to save Carsina to be to my benefit.”
“You’re facing execution, Nevare.”
“I didn’t do it, Spink. Surely I’ll be given a chance to defend myself? They’ll have to admit that someone struck me down.” A thought came to me. “My journal. My soldier son journal. Can you get it?”
“I already thought of that. I have it safe at my house. No one will know your secrets, Nevare.”
“I wasn’t worried about betraying secrets. I was hoping that it might be accepted as evidence. Surely if a man keeps a journal faithfully, he records what is true. There is a lot in there that I wouldn’t want widely known, of course, but there is al
so much that will prove me an innocent man, if they allow it.”
“Or a crazy man, Nevare. I don’t think they’d let you pick and choose what your judge saw. Would you really want the whole thing bared to him?”
I thought of everything that was in there. My true name, among other things. The shame a court-martial would heap on my father. My unvarnished opinion of my father, hard things I’d said about Yaril, and my trafficking with the Specks. No. “Burn it,” I suddenly decided. “I’d rather hang than have my journal become fodder for the yellow press.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen,” he assured me.
Silence fell between us. The utter hopelessness of my position washed through me. “Why are you here?” I asked miserably.
He shut his eyes for a moment. “Epiny demanded that I come. She did something, Nevare. She did it for a friend, a deathbed favor. She had no idea what it would mean. Sergeant Hoster entrusted a letter to her. She promised that if Hoster died, she would deliver it to the commanding officer of the regiment and demand that the letter be opened and read in her presence, and the contents acted upon. Nevare, I swear she had no idea what was in it! When Major Helford read it out loud, she fainted there in his office. They came to get me, and I had to carry her home. She’s been distraught ever since.”
I didn’t have to ask what it was. Epiny, my own cousin, had unwittingly delivered Sergeant Hoster’s damning evidence against me. I spoke the heavy words slowly. “The letter accused me of Fala’s murder. And it told where to find Clove’s harness, with the one mismatched strap.”
He stared at me. Then, “Yes,” he said softly. His eyes were sad. I tried not to see the question in them.
“Hitch did it,” I told him. “He confessed it all to me that night he walked.”
Spink glanced away from me. His eyes did not come back to meet mine.
“Spink, I’m telling the truth. He told me he took the strap from Clove’s harness and that he killed Fala with it because the magic forced him to do it. He’d set the whole thing up. He was the one who took me to Sarla Moggam’s brothel in the first place.” I suddenly stopped talking, as I recalled that no one there had seen us together. He’d entered before I had, and I’d probably left after he’d gone. Oh, so neatly done, Hitch. You served the magic well.
Spink spoke hesitantly. “I’m sorry, Nevare. I believe you. I do. But it all sounds so, well, so desperate. What possible reason could Scout Hitch have for killing that whore? You’re accusing a dead man whom almost everyone on the post respected. He was a bit of a rogue, that’s true, but I don’t think anyone is going to believe that he killed Fala because Speck magic made him do it.”
“But they’ll believe that I did it for pleasure,” I said heavily.
He closed his eyes before he spoke. “I am afraid that they will.”
I turned and walked away from the door. I sat down on the bunk. The wood frame made a cracking sound. I ignored it. “Go away, Spink. Save your reputation. I don’t think there’s anything that anyone can do for me now. Go away.”
“I do have to go. But I’ll be back, Nevare. I don’t believe the things they’ve said about you. Neither does Epiny. For what it’s worth, most of her women are angry at her now, because although she gave Major Helford the letter, she has tried to say that it’s all a huge mistake, that Sergeant Hoster didn’t have the truth of it. But they found Clove’s harness hidden in the stable, with the one odd bit of strap, and the strap they found around Fala’s neck matches the harness perfectly.”
“So, in addition to knocking myself out with a bucket in the midst of dishonoring the dead, I’m now stupid enough to have strangled a whore with a strap from my own horse’s harness? Think about it, Spink! Can you honestly picture any man planning such a murder? ‘I think I’ll take a harness strap from my own horse’s harness, take it to town with me, lure Fala away from the brothel, strangle her with it, and leave her body where it’s certain to be found.’ Can anyone believe that I’m that stupid?”
The muscles stood out on the side of his jaw. He forced himself to speak. “Nevare. These acts you are accused of are so hateful that given even a scrap of evidence, they’ll find you guilty. The whistle brigade is demanding that someone be punished, and the only someone in custody is you.”
My mind jumped back to what he had been telling me. “Epiny took my part? Publicly?”
He nodded grimly.
“Tell her to renounce it. Tell her to say that she has changed her mind.”
“Oh, and of course she would do that if her husband commanded it.” Spink’s voice was dryly sarcastic, but I saw something else in his tight smile. Pride. He knew Epiny would not back down. And he took pride in the fact that she would stand behind her convictions regardless of the consequences.
“Oh, Spink, I am so sorry. She will lose all her friends over this, won’t she?”
“Not quite. Amzil has come forward to stand beside her. She has told everyone that you lived with her for nearly a month in Dead Town and never put a hand on her or demonstrated any sort of temper. Of course, as a former whore, her word counts for less, but she gave it nonetheless.”
I winced. “Go home, Spink. You’ve done all you can and I need to think. There has to be some compelling evidence I can offer that I’m innocent.”
“You’ll have to come up with it soon,” he warned me.
“Surely they won’t try to hold a court-martial while the plague is still raging?”
“The plague has stopped. Just as if someone blew a lamp out. Some are hailing it as a miracle. I’ve heard at least one person say that it’s the good god showing his pleasure that a vile criminal like yourself has been captured.”
“It stopped?”
“Like magic.” He smiled grimly. “Fevers went down. People rallied on their deathbeds. There hasn’t been a death since you were brought here, Nevare.”
“Like magic,” I agreed sourly. I lay back on my protesting pallet and looked at the cobwebbed ceiling. “Go home, Spink. Tell Epiny I love her and tell her to stop defending me in public. Tell Amzil the same.”
“That you love her?” He seemed incredulous.
“Why not?” I replied recklessly. “I can scarcely lose anything by saying it now.”
“I’ll do it, then,” he said, and seemed almost pleased at the prospect.
As he turned to go, I called after him, “I’ll be sent some sort of counsel, won’t I? Someone who will help me present my defense?”
“They’re trying to find someone willing to represent you,” he said. If he meant the words to be reassuring, they were not. I wondered if they would still hold the court-martial if I had no representative.
If I had remained at the academy, I should have eventually had to complete a course that covered martial law and how it was administered. What little I had heard of that course convinced me it would have been a dry study. Little had I ever thought that any of it would apply to me. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried once more to be the boy who had set off so joyfully for the academy, so full of anticipation of a glorious career and a golden future. That future was to have included an obedient and doting wife, a woman raised in the traditions of being a cavalla officer’s wife. Carsina. What had we done to one another? Then I clenched my jaw and admitted that she was little to blame for all that had happened.
If I wanted to parcel out blame, I had only to look at myself. Hitch had warned me that using the magic for my own ends would always extract a harsh price. If I had not put Carsina under a command to apologize to me before she died, she might have died quietly of the plague. I had sealed my own fate. At least hanging would be a swift end for a man of my girth. The physics of such an execution probably meant that my head would be torn completely from my body. Grisly, but much swifter than dangling and strangling. I shook my head and tried to rattle such thoughts away. I could not think of that just now.
And I could not think of anything else, either.
I was in pain from the blow I’d t
aken from the bucket. Feeling my face and the side of my skull, I became convinced that I should have died of such injuries if my residual magic had not undertaken to swiftly repair them. Tender spots convinced me that the least injuries I had taken were a cracked skull and a broken jaw. I was torn between being glad the magic had preserved my life and wishing that I had died a swift death. The healing of my injuries, though not as fast as my recovery from my bullet wound, was a liability to me, I slowly realized. It was likely that when I stood before the court-martial, I would appear fully healed and in good health. No one would believe that I had taken a deadly blow from a dead man. They would find some other way to account for me being unconscious.
My cell was a small bare room. I could see the cot, a chamber-pot, the barred window in the door, and the food slot in the door. Light, dim but constant, came from a lantern on a hook in the hall outside. It was very quiet. Either the other inhabitants slept a lot or there weren’t any. Other than my visit from Spink and the guard on his regular rounds to check on me or feed me, I did not see a soul. With no pastimes and nothing to distract me from my predicament, my thoughts chased each other in ever-smaller circles.
I was going to die. That much seemed very certain. I hoped I could maintain my dignity. Just thinking of ascending the steps to a gallows made me shaky. I resolved I would not shake or weep or beg. Probably all condemned men resolved to go bravely; I hoped I’d have the strength to keep those resolutions. I dreaded my trial and yet longed for it, to have it all be over. I made and unmade final decisions a dozen times a day. I would ask that all my possessions be left to Amzil and her children. No, I would not mention her or the children lest association with me taint them. I would tell the court everything: who I was, how I had become infected with magic, the dangers of the Dust Dance, how I had consorted with Specks and been tricked into planting ancestor trees in the graveyard, and what the matured trees meant to the Specks—No. I would stand silent and say not a word and let them convict me. That would shelter my father and sister from further shame. I would tell them only of the walkers, and how I had tried to save Carsina. I wondered if they would think me a liar or a madman.