When she saw me, Tree Woman suddenly flung her arms up to the sky. She grew taller until she stood great as any live oak, and then larger still. She soared in size, to fill half the sky over the stripped hill. She pointed toward me, her fingers long as branches. “Go back!” she commanded me in fury. “You are not to be in this place. Go back! Inhabit the body until we are ready!”

What gave her such power over me? I felt she seized me by my hair, jerking me from the trudging queue of spirits and hurled me back across the chasm. I landed on my back, and my eyes flew open and I gasped. Wan daylight filled the room around me, pressing painfully into my eyes. Someone seized my wasted hand and gripped it so tightly the bones rubbed together. “He’s not dead! Doctor, come here! Nevare is not dead!”

The doctor’s voice was more distant than Epiny’s. “I told you he wasn’t dead. This plague sometimes mimes death. It’s one of the dangers. We give up on people too soon. Get some broth into him. That’s about all you can do for him. Then change the sheets on the empty cots. We’ll have them filled again before evening, I fear.”

My fever dreams had been so vivid and strange that for a brief time, I simply accepted that Epiny was sitting on a stool between my bed and Spink’s. She wore a stained smock over one of her ridiculous dresses. Her cheeks were red and her lips chapped. Her care-worn face and bundled-back hair made her look more womanly than I’d ever seen her. I stared at her and forgot to resist her as she spooned broth into my mouth. When I began to shiver violently, she set the cup and spoon aside and tucked my blankets more securely around me. “Finishing school?” I said to her. My cracked lips had difficulty shaping the words.

She frowned at me momentarily, and then a sour smile came to her pinched mouth. “Finished with that!” she said, and managed a small laugh. She leaned closer to me. “I ran away. And I went to Dark Evening, and had a wonderful time with Spink. And then I went home and told my parents where I’d been. I knew full well my mother would tell me that I was a ruined woman, and “damaged goods”, and all those other quaint phrases powerful women apply to women who don’t fall under their control. But I also knew, because I’d filched the letter, that Spink’s family had already made an offer for me. When she told me no decent man would ever have me now, I set it on the table before both of them, and told that that as it was the only offer they would ever get for me, it was therefore the best and they’d be wise to take it. Oh, what a terrible scene she made.” Her voice went suddenly thick and for an instant she fell silent. I knew her triumph was not free of pain. When she went on, her voice was tighter. “My parents will have no choice except to take it. No one else will have me now. I made sure of it.”

I was puzzled. “Spink said… he never met with you.”

She looked startled, then smiled. She turned away from me and reached out her hand to touch his face. “Such a dear little lie. It probably cost him a great deal to lie to you to protect my ‘honour’. He thinks quite highly of you, you know. He wants our first son to be named for you. We intend to be married as soon as we can, and to start our family immediately.” And with that sentence, she suddenly sounded as girlishly domestic as any of my sisters. “We will share a wonderful life. I can’t wait. I hope we are posted on the frontier.”

“If he lives,” I said huskily. I had seen past her to the lax body in the next bed. The boyish roundness was gone from Spink’s face. His mouth hung ajar and his breath came and went unevenly. Yellow crust caked around his nostrils and eyelids. He was as unlovely as anything I had ever seen.

Yet Epiny looked down at him with her heart in her eyes. She took his limp hand in hers. “He must,” she said decidedly. “I have gambled everything for him. If he dies and leaves me alone,” she looked at me and tried to hide her fear, “I will have lost it all.”

I turned my head on my hot pillow. “Uncle Sefert?”

“He isn’t here.”

“But… how are you here, then?” The effort of that string of words set me coughing. With a practiced touch that told me she had done this before, she braced my shoulders to sit me up while she offered me water from a cup. She did not answer until she let me down again.

“I came here when the reports began to reach my father of how bad things were at the Academy. Your letter came… the one about Dark Evening and Caulder, and being culled with only a future as a scout now. Father was furious. He set out immediately to the Academy, but at the gates he saw a yellow banner and guards turned him back. By the time he got back to the house, my mother had had messengers from her friends, warning of sickness in the city that was spreading fast. My mother declared that none of us would budge from the house until the contagion was past. She lived through the black-pox when she was a girl, and still remembers those days.

“I stood it for three days, being shut up in the house with her. When she was not prophesying that we would all die of the plague, she was scolding me for my shameless behaviour, or weeping over how I had ruined my chances and soiled the family name. She vowed she’d never let me marry Spink. She said I’d have to live at home with her the rest of my life, a disgraced old maid. You cannot imagine how awful that future would be, Nevare. I tried to explain to her that she was treating me as her mother had treated her, disposing of her like a commodity, for it has become obvious to me that women are most responsible for the oppression of women in our culture. And when I tried to speak rationally to her, and point out that she was only angry because I had seized control of my own worth and traded my ‘respectability’ for a future I wanted instead of letting her sell me off for a bride-price and a political connection, she slapped me! Oh, she was furious when I said that. Only because she recognized it was true, of course.”

She lifted a hand to her cheek, remembering the blow. “It’s her own fault for educating me,” she added regretfully. “If she had kept me at home and ignorant as your family keeps your sisters, I’d probably have been quite tractable.”

Epiny’s words washed over me like waves against a beach. The sense of them faded in and out of my mind. It took me a time to realize she had stopped talking, without, of course, answering my question. I summoned my strength. “Why?”

“Why did I come here? I had to! There were dreadful reports that the infirmary here was overcome with so many sick cadets. After the first scare of plague passed, people began to venture out and the newspapers to print again. The Academy is still quarantined. The plague still rages here, as if it has taken root and will not be satisfied until it has consumed all of you. The city leaders decided to send everyone with the plague here, to keep it away from the general populace. The papers spoke of rows of bodies laid out on the lawns, draped only with sheets and a light fall of snow. They are burying the corpses on the grounds, with quicklime to try to control the smell.

“I came when the paper said that the doctors were allowing the bodies to simply pile up in the halls of the infirmary, and hiring beggars off the streets to fill in for the nursing assistants who themselves had fallen to the plague. I could not stand the thought of you and Spink here and sick, with no one to look after you. And I knew you were sick because no more letters came. So I left the house in the middle of the night. It took me most of the night to walk here, and then I had to get past the quarantine guards. Luckily, I found a tree with its branches leaning over the wall. I was up and over in no time. And of course, once I was inside, Dr Amicas had no choice but to let me stay. I’m as quarantined as anyone now. When I pointed out to him that there was no sense in refusing to let me help, he gave me a smock. He told me I could help until I, too, dropped dead of the plague. He’s a sensible man but not a very optimistic physician, is he?”