Forest Mage (84 page)

The damning evidence piled up against me. A horde of women testified, one after another, that they had witnessed me terrorize poor Carsina in broad daylight on the busy streets of Gettys. Others told how I had scowled at the noble Dale Hardy when he had sought to protect Carsina’s honor from my scurrilous behavior. One claimed to have heard me mutter threats against him as I left. A doctor I’d never seen before testified that the manner of my ambushers’ death was such that poison was the only explanation. Sergeant Hoster’s letter from beyond the grave was read aloud, and Clove’s harness held up so that all might behold the telltale piece of less worn harness compared to the strap that had been “pried out of the livid flesh about poor dead Fala’s neck.”

Late in the afternoon, Spink was finally allowed to address the judges. I heard his speech through a haze of pain. A runner was sent to fetch Amzil to testify. While we waited for her arrival, Spink read aloud statements that both Ebrooks and Kesey had thought me a good man and that I tended the graveyard well. After a significant wait, during which the judges scowled and the spectators shifted and muttered, the runner returned. He stated only that “the witness is unavailable.” That sent a buzz of speculation through the courtroom. Spink gave me one stricken glance and then maintained his composure. With the judge’s permission, he read a statement from Amzil. I wondered why she had refused to
come, but when I looked around the courtroom, I realized it did not matter. My fate had been decided before I even left my cell.

The seven judges stood as one, and then filed out of the room to consider their verdict. I sat, sweat rolling down my face and back from the pain in my ankles, and waited. The spectators shifted, murmured, and then, as the wait continued, began to openly converse with one another. Clara Gorling spoke furiously to her husband. Captain Thayer sat silently and stared at me. I met his gaze briefly and then looked aside. The genuine suffering in his face moved me. He believed me guilty of the horrific crime. I found I could not resent his hatred of me. How would I have felt in his place? That thought put a new face on what was happening to me. I glanced about the courtroom. The eyes that met my gaze were avid with hatred, yes, but fear and horror were what sparked that hate. I lowered my eyes before it.

When the judges filed back in, the courtroom quieted immediately. I knew by the looks on their faces that I was condemned. As one by one they spoke the word “Guilty,” I hung my head.

When they announced my execution by hanging, it was anticlimactic. I’d hang. My execution would bring a measure of healing to a town traumatized by my imagined misdeeds. And my death would free Epiny of her bargain with the magic. I took a breath and accepted my fate. I thought my ordeal was over.

But then one of the civilian judges stood. He smiled as he announced that the justices of the town of Gettys had decided that justice would be best served if the victims most wronged by my misdeeds were allowed to determine my punishment for my crimes against the citizens of Gettys Town. I stared at him in consternation. I’d already been condemned to hang. What punishment could they wreak on me beyond that?

Clara Gorling stood. Her husband and Captain Thayer rose to flank her. She was well prepared for her moment. She unfolded a small sheet of paper and read her statement from it.

“I speak for the women of Gettys. I do not ask this just for my poor dear cousin, but for all the women who live in Gettys.” Her hand crept up to clasp the brass whistle that hung on its chain around her neck. “Gettys is a rough town. It is a difficult place for
any woman to live, yet we do our best. We strive to make homes for our husbands and our children. We are willing to face the privations of living in such an isolated place. We know our duties as cavalla wives. And our husbands and loved ones try to protect us. Recently, the women of Gettys have banded together to try to protect ourselves. We have tried to bring the gentler virtues to this rough place, to make our homes havens of civilization and culture.

“Yet despite all our efforts, a monster has roamed free among us, raping, murdering, and—” she choked for an instant, but forced herself to go on, “dishonoring our dead. I ask that the honorable judges imagine the terror that the women in Gettys have endured. Hanging, my friends, is too good for this creature. It offers him too swift an end for his misdeeds. And so we ask that before he meets his end, he receive one thousand lashes. Let any man who thinks to perpetrate such evil against defenseless woman witness what his wickedness shall bring him.”

Tears were running down her cheeks. She paused to dab at her face with her handkerchief. A profound silence held in the courtroom. Coldness spread through me. Clara Gorling took a breath to speak on, but suddenly sobbed instead. She turned abruptly to her husband and hid her face on his shoulder. The silence held an instant longer, and then gave way to cheers and applause. I heard the request spread to the crowd outside in a rippling roar of satisfaction. Then a terrible silence fell as all waited for the officer in charge to make his decision.

He commanded me to stand to receive my sentence.

I tried to. I placed my hands flat on the railing of the box before me and tried to lever myself onto my numb and swollen feet. I stood up, teetered for a horrid moment, and then crashed to the floor. A wave of hate-filled laughter greeted my mishap. “The filthy coward fainted!” someone shouted. My head was swimming with pain and humiliation. I scrabbled my hands against the floor but could not even sit up.

Two of the brawnier guards came to my box and hauled me to my feet. “My legs are numb from the irons!” I shouted at them. I don’t think anyone heard me over the commotion in the court
room. They hauled me to my feet and held me up while the officer confirmed that the town of Gettys wished the military to honor the request of the victim’s next of kin that I receive one thousand lashes before being hanged by the neck until dead. When it was confirmed, he made it official, and then issued a lengthy apology on behalf of the cavalla that a man such as I had ever been admitted to the ranks. He deemed it a misplaced act of kindness by his worthy predecessor.

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.

“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 con
cerns 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.”

“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 slot 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.