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  The watcher at the relay station below us had spotted the oncoming rider. I heard the clanging of the bell, and in the next moment the inhabitants of the station sprang into action. One ran into the stable, to emerge almost immediately leading a long-legged horse wearing a tiny courier’s saddle. He held the fresh mount at the ready while another man dashed out from the station bearing a water skin and a packet of food for the rider. A fresh rider emerged, his face already swathed against the dust, his short bright yellow cape flapping in the river wind. He stood by his mount and waited for the message to be passed to him.

  We watched as the messenger approached the station and then saw a frightening thing. The messenger only pulled in when his horse was abreast of the fresh mount. His feet never touched the ground as he lunged from one saddle to the next. He shouted something to the waiting men, leaned down to snatch up the packet of provisions and water skin, and then set spurs to the new horse. In an instant he was gone, galloping down the center of the road and through the penal coffle. Shackled men and mounted guards surged out of his way as the courier passed. There were angry shouts and cries as a section of the chained men were trampled by one of the mounted guards when they did not get out of the way quickly enough to avoid the horse. Heedless of the milling chaos in his wake, the courier was already dwindling to a tiny figure on the ribbon of road leading to the west. I stared after him for a moment, and then glanced back down at the relay station. A stableman was trying to lead the messenger’s horse, but the animal suddenly went down on his front knees, and then rolled onto his side in the dust. He lay there, kicking vaguely at the air.

  “His wind’s broke,” Duril said sagely. “He’ll never carry a courier again. Poor beast will be lucky if he lives.”

  “I wonder what desperate message he bore, that he rode his horse to death and could not pass it on to a fresh rider.” My mind was already full of possibilities. I visualized night attacks by the Specks on the Wildlands border towns, or a fresh uprising among the Kidona.

  “King’s business,” Sergeant Duril said tersely. As we watched, we saw one of the men break free of the group, running toward the manor with something in his hand. A separate message for my father? He knew most of the commanders of the forts on the eastern boundary, and he was kept almost as well apprised of conditions on the frontier as the king himself. I saw curiosity light in the old sergeant’s eyes. Duril glanced at the sun and announced abruptly, “Time for you to go in to your books. We don’t want Master Quills-and-Ink to be looking at me nasty again, do we?”

  And with that, he turned his horse’s head away from the river, the road, and the relay station and led me at an easy lope back to the trail that led down to my father’s manor house.

  My boyhood home was set on a gentle rise of land that overlooked the river. In an indulgence of my mother, my father had planted scattered trees for two acres around it, poplar and oak and birch and alder. Water hauled up from the river irrigated the trees that both shaded the house and grounds and provided a windbreak from the constant wind. It was a little island of trees in the vast expanse of prairie all around us, green and shady and inviting. Sometimes I thought it looked small and isolated. At other times, it seemed like a green fortress of welcome in the windswept arid lands. We rode toward it, the horses eager now for cool water and a good roll in the paddock.

  As Sergeant Duril had predicted, my tutor was standing outside the manor awaiting us. Master Rissle’s arms were crossed on his narrow chest and he was trying to look forbidding. “Hope he don’t wallop ye too hard for being late, young Nevare. Looks like he could be cruel and harsh, him so big and all,” Duril said in quiet derision before we were in earshot of the man. I kept my face straight at his gentle gibe. He knew he should not mock my tutor, an earnest but scrawny young scholar come all the way from Old Thares to teach me penmanship and history and figuring and astronomy. Although Duril would not curb his own disrespectful tongue, he would freely cuff me for daring to smile at it. So I held my amusement inside as I dismounted. I called a farewell to Sergeant Duril as he led our mounts away, and he answered with a vague wave of his hand.

  I longed to run and find my father, to discover what news had been so urgent, but I knew that if I did, I would only bring punishment down on myself. A good soldier did his duty and waited for orders from above without speculating. If I ever hoped to command men, I must first learn to accept authority. I sighed and followed my tutor off to my lessons. The academics seemed more tedious than ever that day. I tried to apply myself, knowing that the foundation I built now would support my studies at the King’s Academy.

  When the long afternoon of lessons were done and my tutor finally released me, I dressed for dinner and descended. We might live far from any cities or polite society on the Plains, but my mother insisted that all of us observe the proprieties appropriate to my father’s station. Both my parents had been born into noble houses. As younger offspring, they had never expected to hold titles themselves, but their upbringing had left them with a keen awareness of what my father’s elevation to lordship required of them. Only later would I appreciate all the courtesy and manners that my mother had instilled in me, for those lessons enabled me to move more easily at the Academy than did many of my rustic counterparts.

  Our family gathered in the sitting room until my father entered. Then he escorted my mother into the dining room and we children followed. I seated my younger sister Yaril while Rosse, my elder brother, held a chair for my elder sister Elisi. Vanze, the youngest at nine years old and my father’s priest son, said the blessing for all of us. Then my mother rang the tiny silver bell beside her place setting, and the servants began to bring in the food.

  Our family was “new nobility,” my father lifted by the king himself to lordship for his valor in the wars against the Plainspeople. For this reason, we had no dynasty of family servants. My mother was afraid of Plainspeople and my father did not approve of them mingling with his daughters as servants in our household, so unlike many of the new nobility, we had no servants from the conquered peoples. Instead, he offered house and grounds employment to the cream of his retired soldiers and their wives and daughters. This meant that most of the male servants in our household were elderly or crippled in some way that had left them unfit for military service. My mother would have preferred to hire servants from the cities in the west, but in this my father prevailed, saying that he felt a duty to provide for his men and give them a share of his own good fortune, for without them to lead to glory, he never would have merited the king’s notice. So my mother bowed her head to his will and did her best to school them in the proper ways of serving. She had taken it upon herself, in a few instances, to advertise in the western cities for suitable husbands from the serving classes for the soldiers’ daughters, and in this way we had acquired two young men who could properly wait a table, a valet for my father, and a butler.

  I managed to contain my curiosity throughout most of the meal. My father spoke to my mother of his orchards and crops and she nodded gravely at his words. She asked his permission to send to Old Thares for a proper tiring maid for my sisters, now that they were both becoming young ladies. He replied that he would think about it, but I saw him looking at my sisters with a sudden awareness that Elisi was approaching marriageable age and would benefit from greater sophistication in her manners.

  As he did at every evening meal, he asked each of his offspring in turn how we had employed our day. Rosse, my elder brother and the heir, had ridden down with our steward to visit the Bejawi settlement at the far north end of Widevale. The remnants of one branch of the formerly migratory people lived there at my father’s sufferance. When my father had first taken them in, the villagers had been mostly women, children, and grandfathers too old to have fought in the Plains wars. Now the children were young men and women, and my father wished to be sure they had useful tasks to occupy them and content them. There had been news from the Swick Reaches of an uprising of young warriors who had be
come discontented with settled ways. My father had no desire to see a similar restlessness in his nomads. He had recently gifted the Bejawi with a small herd of milk goats, and Rosse was pleased to report that the animals were thriving and providing both occupation and sustenance for the former hunters.

  Elisi, my elder sister, was next. She had mastered a difficult piece of music on her harp and begun an embroidery of a Writ verse on a large hoop. She had also sent a letter to the Kassler sisters at Riverbend, inviting them to spend Midsummer week with us, planning a picnic, music, and fireworks in the evening of her sixteenth birthday. My father agreed that it sounded like a most pleasant holiday for Yaril and her and their friends.

  Then it was my turn. I spoke of my studies with my tutor and of my exercises with Duril. Almost as an afterthought, I mentioned that we had seen the messenger and cautiously added that I was very curious as to what could prompt such cruel haste. It was not quite a question, but it hung in the air, and I saw both Rosse and my mother hoping for an answer.

  My father took a sip of his wine. “There is an outbreak of disease in the east, at one of the farthest outposts. Gettys is at the foothills of the Barrier Mountains. The messenger asks for reinforcements to replace the victims, and healers to nurse the sick, and guards to bury the dead and patrol the cemetery.”

  Rosse was bold enough to speak. “It seems an urgent message, and yet not, perhaps, of such urgency to require the messenger to continue with the task himself.”

  My father gave him a disapproving look. He obviously regarded rampant sickness and men dying in droves as inappropriate topics for discussion at table with his wife and young daughters. Quite possibly he considered it a military matter, and not a topic to be lightly discussed until King Troven had decided how best to deal with it. I was surprised when he actually replied to Rosse’s observation. “The medical officer for Gettys is, I fear, a superstitious man. He has sent a separate report to the queen, full of his usual speculations about magical influences from the native peoples of that region, stipulating that it not leave the messenger’s hand until he delivered it to her. Our queen, it is said, has an interest in matters of the supernatural, and rewards those who send her new knowledge. She has promised a lordship to anyone who can offer her proof of life beyond the grave.”

  My mother made bold to speak, I think for the benefit of my sisters. “I do not regard such topics as appropriate for a lady to pursue. I am not alone in this. I have had letters from my sister and from Lady Wrohe expressing the discomfort they felt when the queen insisted they join her for a spirit-summoning session. My sister is a skeptic, saying it is all a trick by the so-called mediums who hold these sessions, but Lady Wrohe wrote that she witnessed things she could not explain and it gave her nightmares for a month.” She looked from Elisi, who appeared properly scandalized, to Yaril, whose blue eyes were round with interest. To Yaril, she added the comment, “We ladies are often considered to be flighty, ignorant creatures. I would be shamed if any of my daughters became caught up in such unnatural pursuits. If one wishes to study metaphysics, the first thing one should do is read the holy texts of the good god. In the Writ is all we need to know of the afterlife. To demand proof of it is presumptuous and an affront to the deity.”

  That seemed properly to quench Yaril. She sat silent while my younger brother Vanze reported that he had worked on reading a difficult passage in the holy texts in the original Varnian and then meditated for two hours on it. When my father asked how Yaril had employed her day, she spoke only of mounting three new butterflies in her collection and of tatting enough lace to trim her summer shawl. Then, looking at her plate, she timorously asked, “Why must they guard the cemetery at Gettys?”

  My father narrowed his eyes at her circling back to a topic he had dismissed. He answered curtly, “Because the Specks do not respect our burial customs and have been known to profane the dead.”

  Yaril’s little intake of breath was so slight that I am sure I was the only one who heard it. My interest was more piqued than satisfied by my father’s reply, but as he immediately asked my mother how her day had progressed, I knew it was hopeless even to wonder.

  And so that dinner came to a close, with coffee and a sweet, as all our dinners did. I wondered more about the Specks than I did about the mysterious plague. None of us could know then that the plague was not a onetime blight of disease, but would return to the outposts, summer after summer, and would gradually strike deeper and deeper into the western Plains country.

  During that first summer of contagion, awareness of the Speck plague slowly seeped into my life and colored my concept of the borderlands. I had known that the farthest outposts of the king’s cavalry were now at the foothills of the Barrier Mountains. I knew that his ambitious King’s Road being built across the Plains pushed ever closer to the mountains, but that it was expected to take four more years before it was completed. Since I was small I had heard tales of the mysterious and elusive Specks, the dappled people who could only live happily in the shadows of their native forest. Tales of them were, to my childish ears, little different from the tales of pixies and sprites that my sisters so loved. The very name of the people had crept into our language as a synonym for inattentive: to do a Speck’s day of work meant to do almost nothing at all. If I was caught daydreaming over my books, my tutor might ask me if I was Speck-touched. I had grown up in the belief that the distant Specks were a harmless and rather silly folk who inhabited the glens and vales of the thickly forested mountains that, to my prairie-raised imagination, were almost as fantastic as the dappled folk who dwelt there.

  But in that summer, my image of the Specks changed. They came to represent insidious disease, a killing plague that came, perhaps, simply from wearing a fur bought from a Speck trader or wafting one of the decorative fans they wove from the lace vines that grew in their forest. I wondered what they did to our graveyards, how they “profaned” the dead. Instead of elusive, I now thought of them as furtive. Their mystery became ominous rather than enchanting, their lifestyle grubby and pest-ridden rather than primitively idyllic. A sickness that merely meant a night or two of fever for a Speck child devastated our outposts and outlying settlements, slaughtering by the score hearty young men in the prime of their youth.

  Yet horrifying as the rumors of widespread death were to us, it was still a distant disaster. The stories we heard were like the tales of the violent windstorms that sometimes struck coastal cities far to the south of Gernia. We did not doubt the truth of them but we did not feel a dread of them. Like the occasional uprisings among the conquered Plainspeople, we knew they brought death and disaster, yet it was something that happened only on the new borders of the wild lands, out where our king’s horse still struggled to man the outposts, manage the more savage Plainspeople, and push back the wilderness to make way for civilization. It did not threaten our croplands and flocks in Widevale. Deaths from violence and privation and disease and mishap were the lot of the soldier. They entered that service well aware that many would not live to retire from it. The plague seemed but another enemy that they must face stoutheartedly. I had faith that as a people, we would prevail over it. I also knew that my current duty was to worry about my studies and training. Problems such as Plainspeople uprising, Speck plagues, and rumors of locusts were for my father to manage, not me.

  In the weeks that followed, my father discouraged discussion of the plague, as if something about the topic were obscene or disgusting. His discouragement only fired my curiosity. Several times Yaril brought me gossip from her friends, tales of Specks unearthing dead soldiers to perform hideous rites with the poor bodies. Some whispered of cannibalism and even more unspeakable desecration. Despite my mother’s discouragement of it, Yaril was as avariciously inquisitive about Specks and their wild magic as I was, and there were evenings when we passed our time in the shadowy garden frightening one another with our ghoulish speculations.

  The closest I came to having that curiosity indulged was a nig
ht the next summer when I overheard my father and elder brother Rosse discussing it. I was feeling a boy’s pique at being excluded from the domain of men. A scout had ridden in that morning and stopped to pass the day with my father. I had learned that he was taking his three years’ leave and intended to spend his three years of earned leisure in a journey to the cities of the west and back again. Scout Vaxton knew my father from years back, when they had served together in the Kidona campaign. They had both been young men then. Now my father was a noble and retired from the military, but the old scout toiled on for his king.

  Scouts held a unique place in the king’s cavalla. They were officers without official rank. Some were ordinary soldiers whose abilities had advanced them through the ranks to the duty of scouts. Others, it was rumored, were noble-born soldier sons who had disgraced themselves and had to find a way to serve the good god as soldiers without using their family names. There was an element of romance and adventure to everything I’d ever heard about scouts. Uniformed officers were supposed to treat them with respect, and my father seemed to hold Scout Vaxton in esteem, yet he did not think him a worthy dining companion for his wife, daughters, and younger sons.

  The grizzled old man fascinated me, and I had longed to listen to his talk, but only my eldest brother had been invited to take the noon meal with Scout Vaxton and my father. By midafternoon the scout had ridden on his way, and I had looked longingly after him. His dress was a curious combination of cavalry uniform and Plainspeople garb. The hat he wore was from an older generation of uniform and supplemented with a bright kerchief that hung down the back of his neck to keep the sun off. I’d only glimpsed his pierced ears and tattooed fingers. I wondered if he’d adopted Plainspeople ways in order to be accepted among them and learn more of their secrets, the better to scout for our horse soldiers in times of unrest. I knew he was a ranker, and truly not a fit dinner companion for my mother and sisters, and yet as a future officer, I had hoped that my father would include me at their meal. He hadn’t. There was no arguing with him about it, and even at dinner that evening he’d said little of the scout, other than that Vaxton now served at Gettys and found the Specks far more difficult to infiltrate than the Plains nomads had been.