“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 wroth. 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 behavior, 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 said 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?”
“Go home,” I told her bluntly. This was no place for her.
“I can’t,” she said simply. “My mother would not let me back in the door, for fear I would bring the plague with me. And under the circumstances, there is nowhere else I could go. I’m not only a disgraced woman, I’m probably a plague carrier now.” She seemed quite cheery about both fates. Then her voice dropped, and she said soberly, “Besides. You need me here. Both of you, but especially you. Whatever it was that hovered over you the last time I saw you has grown more powerful. When I thought you were dead…that was what horrified me. You had no breath I could detect, no pulse at all. You-now do not laugh at me-your aura had faded to where I could not detect it. But the aura of that, that other that is within you had grown stronger. It raged about you like fire devouring a log. I was so frightened for you. You need me to protect you from it.”