I was disconcerted that the next dreamer I glimpsed was my father. Why would Soldier’s Boy seek him out, I wondered, and then knew that he was Soldier’s Boy’s father just as much as he was mine. My father was sleeping the shallow sleep of an old man. The Speck plague and his stroke had aged him beyond his years. He dreamed of being clad once more in brave green and leading a flanking movement that would close off the enemy’s retreat. In his dream, he battled Plainsmen who rode leggy white horses and brandished battle-axes at him, but I saw him as an ailing old man, his age-dappled hands twitching against the blankets of his bed. We burst into his dream, and I rode by his side, as brave as he was, astride Sirlofty once again. My father looked over at me, and for one wild instant, he was glad and proud of me. I knew then I had broken into a cherished dream, one in which I had fulfilled all his plans for me. But just as my heart warmed toward him, I grew fat, bursting my buttons and spilling out of my shirt, my flesh obscenely pale and jiggling.
“Why, Nevare? Why? You were supposed to be me, all over again! Why couldn’t you be a good soldier for me? If I was only allowed one son to follow after me, why couldn’t you have fulfilled the task? Why? Why?”
The old man’s muffled dream shouts woke him, and he broke free of our dream touch. For a second, I saw his room at Widevale, glimpsed the fireplace and his bedstead and a bedside tray laden with all sorts of medicine bottles and thick heavy spoons.
“Yaril! Yaril, where are you? Have you abandoned me, too? Yaril!” He shouted for my sister like a frightened baby calling for his nursemaid. We left him there, sitting up in his bed and calling. It tore at my heart and that surprised me. I’d been able to be angry with my father, even hate him so long as he seemed like a man and my equal. To see him frail and afraid stole my anger from me. Guilt racked me suddenly, that I’d caused him so much pain and then left him alone. For that moment, it mattered not at all that he’d disowned me and cast me out. When I had been a child, I had always felt protected by his sternness. Now he wailed for the sole child fate had left him, alone and forlorn, sonless in a world that valued only sons.
Even as my awareness reached toward him, longing to protect him from the doom he had brought down on himself, Soldier’s Boy swept on, snatching me away from him. I caught glimpses of other people’s dreams, splashes of color against the fantastic canvas of Soldier’s Boy’s own dreaming mind. I could not focus on any one sensation: it was like trying to read the riffled pages of a book. I saw a word here, a paragraph there. He had no memories of his own; the connections that called him were mine. Trist dreamed of a girl in a yellow velvet dress. Gord was not asleep. He looked up from the thick book he was studying, startled, saying, “Nevare?”
Sergeant Duril was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, dreamless. No images floated in his mind, only the gratitude that for a time, his aching body could be still, his painful back flat on his mattress. My presence in his mind was like a drop of oil falling on a calm pool. “Watch your back, boy,” he muttered, and sighed heavily. Soldier’s Boy swept on.
I do not think he was aware of his burning body, but I was. Someone trickled cool water past his lips. His mouth moved ineffectually. I sensed how tight and hot his skin felt. Distance and fever distorted Olikea’s words. They seemed sharp, yet I could hardly hear them. “He makes a fever journey,” I thought I heard her say, and Likari piped up with a question that ended in the word “name.”
Olikea’s response faded in and out of my hearing. “Not a baby,” she said disdainfully, but I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. My attention was caught by a fantastic landscape. Never had I seen colors so intense. Very large objects came into my view, things so big that I could not see what they were until we had swept past them. Then I wondered if the butterfly had seemed so large because we were close to it, or if it truly had been so immense that it covered half the sky and it seemed small only as we retreated from it.
“Fever dream,” I told myself, but it was hard to believe that it was only a dream and that I had not been transported into some other world.
Then, most tantalizing of all, we crashed into Epiny’s dream. Her dream was sweet and simple; she was sitting by the fireside in the sitting room in her father’s house in Old Thares. Next to her was a beautiful carved wooden cradle mounted on a rocking stand. A curtain of fine lace, all worked with pink rosebuds, draped the cradle. She sat next to it, reading a book and gently rocking the cradle. She looked up as I crashed into the room.
“Nevare? What have you done to yourself?”
