“I imagine so,” I said quietly. I wondered how Epiny liked Captain Thayer as a commander. The streets of the fort might be a bit safer for the women of Gettys, but I suspected his ideas of keeping women busy at home weren’t too popular with her. I tried not to grin at the thought. Epiny had not escaped from being under my aunt’s thumb to knuckling to her husband’s commander, I’d wager.
I suddenly knew that I had to see her and Spink today, and that the risks of doing so didn’t matter. I was instantly ready to go, and then I thought of Amzil, and felt an icicle of indecision up my spine. I cared for her. Why did that make me more reluctant to go and see her? I glanced down at myself and realized the obvious answer. “I need to get some proper clothing,” I said to myself, and then realized I’d spoken aloud.
“That’s very true,” Kesey agreed with a grin. “If it weren’t for the way you’re dressed, I’d a never believed your story. I would have thought you were a deserter, maybe; you got a soldier’s way of walking and sitting.”
“Me?” I made a show of laughing to hide the little burst of pride I felt. “No. Not me. But I knew a family in the fort…well, I didn’t exactly know them. My cousin knew them and said that if I got out this way, I should look them up. But I don’t suppose I should show up on their doorstep looking like this.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Kesey agreed with a grin. He’d always been a good-hearted fellow. I was counting on that now, and he didn’t fail me. “I don’t think anything I got here would fit you much better than what you got on. But if you want, I could take a note to your cousin’s friends, and maybe they could see their way clear to help you out.”
“I would be forever in your debt,” I replied fervently.
When Kesey heard that Lieutenant Kester was my cousin’s friend, he nodded affably and said, “He’s one of the few officers we have that acts like an officer anymore. Why, he had a private supply wagon that come in way ahead of the military ones, and you know what he done? Shared it all, even though it didn’t go far, and him with a house full of children, his own child and the Dead Town whore’s brats.”
It cut me still to hear Amzil called that name, and it was all I could do to hold my tongue.
“Have you paper and a pen I could use?” I asked him a bit curtly, and he looked hurt for an instant before admitting that he wasn’t much of a reader or a writer, so had nothing like that. After a bit of a search, he reluctantly came up with one of my old newspapers. “Belonged to a friend of mine. I’m not much for reading, but I’ve sort of been saving it.”
I persuaded him to give me one sheet of it, and scratched out a crude message over the print with the burnt end of a stick. There was little room to be elegant or subtle. I printed out, “I’m back, alive. I need clothes. Follow Kesey, and I’ll explain all later.”
I signed it N.B. and entrusted it to Kesey, then watched him ride away on his broom-tailed horse.
After he was out of sight, I found myself at a loss for what to do with myself. I took a brief stroll through the cemetery that I had tended so faithfully. There was a new trench grave there, so recent that the grass hadn’t covered it yet. I frowned at that, for plague outbreaks usually happened in the heat of summer. Then I saw that there was actually a marker, copied from the ones I had made, made of wood with the letters burned into it. Here were buried the victims of the massacre I’d led but a few months ago. The ground would have been too hard and frozen to permit grave-digging at the time they’d died. It gave me a sharp pang to think of the bodies stored frozen in the shed until spring had softened the ground enough to bury them. Doubtless that had been a horrid task for whoever had had to perform it. Probably Kesey and Ebrooks, I realized. I turned abruptly away from the grave of the men, women, and children I had killed and started back toward my cabin.
Curiosity made me pause and look back to where my hedge of kaembra trees had once stood. Fool that I’d been, I’d hoped to keep the Specks out of the graveyard with a barrier of trees and stone. The trees had been cut down and the sections of trunk buried along with the plague victims they’d ensnared, but I saw that the stumps had sprouted again from the roots. I tried to decide what I felt about that sight, but could not. I recalled only too well my disgust as the trees had sent their roots questing into the plague bodies, but now that I understood more fully what it was to have a tree, I felt sad that they had been cut down and the bodies buried. Would it have been so bad for those people, I wondered, to live on as trees? Could they have spoken to us as the other kaembra trees spoke to the Specks? I shook my head at myself and turned back to the cabin. That world was not mine anymore. The forest would never speak to me again.