I tried to push my dislike of my aunt aside. It was clouding my memories of my uncle. I did not want to focus on her so much that I accidentally wandered into her dream. I tried to find quiet within my soul, to ignore the nagging sense that my time to dream-walk was ticking away, and to focus instead on my memories of my uncle. I summoned up the sensory memories that linked me to him: the smell of his tobacco, the taste of his brandy, the warmth and casual comfort of his study in Old Thares. I focused on the warm clasp of his hand on mine whenever he greeted me, and the sound of his voice as he said my name.

“Well, there you are, Nevare. And how have you been? Will you join me in a game of Towsers?”

I had to smile, knowing how much he detested the inane game that Epiny and his younger daughter Purissa so often trapped him into playing. In his dream, his daughters were in the room with him, cards in hand, but the moment I entered his dream, they faded into shadows in the background. They went on playing, slapping down their cards and leaping up to shout wildly when they’d made a point, but the actions and the sounds of their voices became distant and muffled.

“Uncle, I’ve little time. I’m visiting your dreams to tell you that things are desperate in Gettys. The fort has been attacked by the Specks. Their food stores are nearly depleted and their morale is devastated. Epiny and Spink are doing their best; they have a baby now, a little girl, Solina. But hunger presses them, and the spring rains bring cold and hardship. I know the roads are bad. But Epiny has asked me to reach you this way. I want to tell her that you are sending help to her. Even if it will be weeks before it reaches her, to know that help is on the way will lend her strength. Truly, times are desperate in Gettys.”

“Will you have a glass of wine with me, Nevare?” My uncle was smiling at me. Our contact was more tenuous than I’d thought. In the morning, he might remember he’d dreamed of me, or he might recall nothing at all. I suddenly recalled something Epiny had said to me.

“Sir, my journal. My soldier-son journal. Epiny sent it to you. If you’ve read it, you’ll know about this kind of magic. Dream-walking. I’m really here, in your dream, talking to you of real things. Epiny needs your help. Please, Uncle Sefert!”

“That damnable book! I am deeply disappointed in my wife, Nevare, deeply disappointed. Has she no idea how this could smear the Burvelle name? Epiny said not to read it, and I am a man of honor! But my wife made no such promise, and she has been full of folderol and foolish mysticism for too long. She will bare my nephew’s derangement, for such it must be! Poor Nevare! Keft was too hard on the boy, too hard, as he now admits to me in his letters. But what am I to do? He drove his son from under his roof, and only the good god knows what became of him. I do not think he should ally himself with the Stiet name, let alone engage his daughter to a boy who is himself a disowned soldier son of a soldier son who was never truly a soldier! What is the advantage in that? I’ve told him he should send little Yaril to me. I would see her safely into a good match. But I fear his mind is no longer sound; my brother’s handwriting looks more like a random trickling of ink, and his words wander more than his lines do! Curse the Specks and their dirty plague; I fear it has been the undoing of the Burvelles!”

I’d unsettled him. I suddenly became aware that his back was cold. At the same moment, he felt the draft. He left me, surfacing from sleep just enough to pull his blankets back into place. I waited in a limbo of grayness, hoping, but although he slept, he did not dream. “Lord Burvelle!” I cried into the nothingness. “Hear me! Your daughter needs you. She is hungry and cold and oppressed with sadness. Send help to her. Please, say you’ll send her help!”

There was no response. A sudden and dangerous idea came to me. Recklessly, I acted on it. The clinging scent of her heavy perfume. The clicking of her heavily ringed hand against her wine goblet at a dinner table. The cold stare of her icy eyes. “Lady Burvelle. Daraleen Burvelle!”

I tumbled into her dream as if a trapdoor had opened under me. Instantly, I wished to be away from it. I had not thought a woman of her years and position would be prone to such salacious fancies. She was entangled with not one virile young man, but two, and from her panting, was fully occupied with the sensations their efforts were waking. I was horrified, scandalized, and embarrassed. “Lady Burvelle! You daughter Epiny is in dire circumstances and has need of your aid! The Specks have raided Gettys and near destroyed it. Do whatever you must to send her help.” I barked out the words. My message jolted her from her dream and once more plunged me into a gray netherworld.

I wondered how much time was left to me. My first impulse was to return to Epiny, but I had no good news to give her. I doubted that either her father or mother would heed the messages I had delivered.

It came to me that I might still see Yaril that night and possibly fulfill Epiny’s charge to me as well. I fled to my sister and found her effortlessly. The dream I slipped into made no sense to me at all. Yaril was pinning fish to the wall of the parlor, rather like the way she had once collected butterflies. But the fish were alive, slippery and thrashing, so it was a messy and futile undertaking. No sooner had the drawing tacks been put through their tails and fins than they wriggled free of them and fell to the floor. Yet Yaril seemed obsessed with finishing her task.

Even before I spoke, she was aware of me. “Nevare, hold this one, please. I think if you held him, I could pin him down properly and he wouldn’t come loose again.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her in some amusement. Her activity had distracted me completely from the desperation of my visit.

She looked at me as if I were daft. “Well, if I don’t, they’ll all be on the floor and underfoot all the time. What else should I do? Hold his tail flat to the wall. That’s it! There!” She pushed another drawing tack into the fish’s tail and then stepped back to admire the effect.

“Yaril,” I said quietly as she began to choose another fish from the floor. “Do you know that you’re asleep and dreaming this?”

“How would you know?” she asked me in a tolerant fashion. “Oh, look, let’s have that handsome bluegill next.”

“I would know because I’m using Speck magic to visit you in your dreams. Because I have something important to tell you, and many things to ask you.”

“Ask away, so long as you hold the fish for me. Here. Mind, now! He’s a slippery one.”

“I’d rather tell first,” I said as I took the flapping fish from her hands. I tried to keep my voice calm and my tone light. I didn’t want to startle her out of her dream. “The first thing is that you must remember this dream in the morning, and you must believe that you dreamed true.”

“Oh, I always remember my dreams. You should know that. Don’t you remember how Papa sent me from the breakfast table for talking about my dreams, and you came afterward to comfort me? And to bring me a cold pastry to eat.”

“I do remember that. Good. So you will remember what I tell you. It’s important. I have bad news but you must take it calmly. Otherwise, you’ll waken yourself and we won’t have any time to talk.”

“Oh, drat! That’s my last tack, and I need two more.”

“Here are some more.” I reached into my pocket, wished for tacks to be there, and drew out a handful of them. “You pin him while I talk. Yaril, it’s about our cousin Epiny. She’s at Gettys with her husband, Spink.”

“I haven’t heard from her in ages! I expect I shan’t until the post riders can get through the snow again. They say it was deep this year in the foothills.” She made a little sound of effort as she pushed the tacks through the tail and into the wall. I tried not to focus on it. If I thought too much about my dainty little sister tacking living creatures to the walls of the drawing room, it would bother me, and I was sure she’d be aware of it. Aware enough to perhaps awaken herself. She stooped to pick up another fish from the floor.