The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy: Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, Renegade’s Magic. Robin Hobb

like children beginning some nursery game. I was almost immediately uncomfortable. The ground was uneven and stony. ‘Now what do we do?’ I asked, somewhat irritably. ‘Do we shut our eyes and hum? Or bow our heads and—’

      ‘Hush!’ Spink replied, his voice commandingly intense.

      I glared at him but he was staring, mouth ajar, at Epiny. I followed his gaze and felt repelled. She had allowed her mouth to fall half-open and her face to slacken. Her eyeballs were visible beneath her half-open lids and they were jittering back and forth like marbles rattled in a can. She drew in a long, raspy breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth. A tiny bubble of spittle rode it.

      ‘Disgusting!’ I said in quiet dismay, appalled at my cousin’s shameless theatrics. This was far worse than whatever she had subjected me to the night before.

      ‘Be quiet!’ Spink hissed. ‘Can’t you feel the change in her hand? This is real!’

      Her small hand in mine was very warm to the touch compared to Spink’s cold and callused one. I had not noticed before how warm it was. Then, as Epiny’s head first lolled back and then rolled laxly forward on her neck, her hand in mine grew cooler. In two heartbeats, it was as if I held hands with a corpse. I exchanged worried glances with Spink. Epiny spoke. ‘Don’t let go,’ she begged us. ‘Don’t let me get lost here in the wind.’

      I had been at the point of dropping her hand. Now I held it firmly. Her small fingers clutched at mine as if her very life depended on it.

      ‘Let’s stop this,’ Spink said quietly. ‘Epiny, I thought you were playing a game with us. This is … Let’s stop this. I don’t like it at all.’

      She made a sound, an ugly noise somewhere between a retch and a sigh. She seemed to struggle to control her own voice. Then, ‘Can’t,’ she muttered. ‘I can’t shut the window. They’re here all the time.’

      ‘Enough!’ I said. I tried to let go of Epiny’s hand, but she held on to my fingers with unnatural strength.

      ‘Someone’s coming,’ she whispered. Her head dropped, sagging to her breast. Then I felt something change in her. I still cannot explain what happened. Perhaps it was something like looking through rain on a dusty windowpane, and seeing a shape and then suddenly recognizing the person outside. Up to then, I had thought her sounds and grimaces a selfish and ugly little game she was playing to mock us. At that moment, it became something much more dangerous. She lifted her head, but it wobbled on her neck. She looked at me but someone else was looking out of her eyes. The gaze she turned on me was tired and worn and old.

      ‘We weren’t dead,’ she said quietly. The voice wasn’t Epiny’s. She spoke with the accent of a frontier woman. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, and then tears ran from their corners. ‘I wasn’t dead. My little boy wasn’t dead. We’d just been sick so long. I could hear them talking but I couldn’t rouse myself. They said that we were dead. They sewed us up together in a burial bag. They’d run out of coffins. We woke up under the ground. We couldn’t get out. I tried. I tried to free us. I tore my nails against the canvas. I bit it until my teeth bled in my gums. We died there, in that sack, under the ground. And all around us, in that burying ground that night, we heard others dying the same way. We died. But I didn’t cross their bridge.’

      Her voice didn’t sound angry, just flat with sorrow. She looked at me earnestly. ‘Will you remember that, please? Remember it. ’Cause there’ll be others.’

      ‘I will,’ I said. I think I would have said anything to give that poor soul comfort. Epiny’s eyes went dull and the woman’s expression faded from her face, leaving her features soft and unformed.

      I breathed a huge sigh of relief it was over. ‘Epiny?’ I said. I gave her hand a little shake. ‘Epiny?’

      Something or someone else took her. It didn’t slide into her as the woman had. It seized her so that her body jerked sharply in its grip. Her hold on my hand tightened painfully and I heard Spink gasp at her grip. When she lifted her face and looked me in the eyes, I recoiled as if her gaze burned me. Tree woman looked at me from my cousin’s face. A pain tingled, then burned through me, from the top of my head down to the base of my spine. I felt immobilized by it.

      ‘I did not summon you!’ she said disdainfully. ‘You are not welcome here until I call you. Why do you try to come to me? Do you seek to give my magic to her? Do you think you can touch our magic and not be touched by it? Magic touches back, soldier’s boy. Magic may give, but it always takes. You send this little one into my world, with no thought for her. What if I decide to keep her, soldier’s boy? Would that teach you not to play with my magic? Hold fast, do you say, and make our sign to invoke it? Hold fast indeed.’

      Epiny abruptly let go of my hand. I felt dizzy when she did so, as if I dangled over a chasm with only Spink’s hand to grip. To my shock, her freed hand made the little charm sign over her own hand where she clasped Spink’s, the sign every good cavalla-man makes over his cinch to make it hold. Tree woman looked back at me through Epiny’s eyes and smiled her knowing smile. ‘When the time comes, I will show you what “hold fast” means, soldier’s boy.’

      Then Epiny suddenly wilted, her softened hand pulling loose from Spink’s as she collapsed. He released my hand and caught her by the shoulders before her face struck the ground. He pulled her back to lean against him and looked at me with anguish.

      ‘Is she dead?’ I asked dully. I was surprised the words emerged from my mouth. Control of my body came back to me slowly, like a numbed hand buzzing back to usefulness.

      ‘No, no, she’s breathing. What happened, Nevare? What was that? What did she mean?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I was not lying, for I did not know any way I could explain it to him. A creature I had dreamed seemed to have reached out and threatened me through my cousin. I felt dizzy. I put both hands to the sides of my head as if that would still the whirling of the world. One of my fingertips brushed the old scar on my scalp. It was hot and pulsed with pain. My recollection of the injury flared fresh in my mind. I closed my eyes and shook my head. I tried to push the knowledge away from me, but it would not leave. It threatened to put a crack in my ordinary and logical life. Only a crazy man could have made any sense from the events. I did not want to be crazy, and so I could not think seriously about these things or permit them to have meaning in my life. I lumbered to my feet and panting, staggered away from them both. I was suddenly angry, with Epiny and myself, for allowing any of my strange dreams and experiences to take that one step closer to my reality. I was angry that Spink had witnessed it. ‘I wish I had never let her talk me into this séance nonsense!’ I snarled.

      ‘I don’t think that was fakery, Nevare,’ Spink said firmly, as if I had asserted it was. He still held my cousin in his arms. His face was pale, his freckles standing out sharply on his face. ‘Whatever happened here was, well, not real but … not pretend, either.’ He finished his sentence lamely. ‘She’s not waking up, Nevare! What did we allow her to do? I should have listened to you. I know that now, I should have listened to you. Epiny? Nevare, I’m so sorry. Epiny! Please, wake up!’

      I looked away from the misery on his face. Spink, like me, was an eminently sensible man. If we started believing that my cousin could summon spirits that talked through her, well, where would that belief carry us? Yet if we did not believe it, we must decide that either she was insane, or an unrepentant liar making fools of us. I stubbornly rejected every theory, and turned my back on Spink’s dilemma in order to ignore my own. ‘This should never have happened!’ I said savagely. I think Spink took it as a rebuke to him. He had begun to timidly pat at Epiny’s cheek in an effort to bring her around. He looked frightened, almost as if he wanted to cry.

      I went and wet my handkerchief in the river and came back to dab at her wrists and temples. Epiny roused quite slowly. Even when she could sit up by herself, she still seemed dazed. Finally, she looked at me and said, ‘I want to go home now. Please.’

      I caught our horses and helped my cousin to mount. Our ride back was far more sedate than our journey there. I did not speak