Renegade's Magic
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.
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.
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.
“Nevare? What have you done to yourself?”