“Spink, you shouldn’t be here. No one connects you and Epiny to me. Go home. Let me just meet my fate.”

“Before you sounded mad. Now you just sound stupid,” he huffed. When I made no response, he sighed. “If you only sounded insane, it would be better for you.”

I stood up slowly and came to the window. “What do you mean?”

“Captain Jof Thayer nearly went mad when he heard that the dead body of his wife was found in your bed. Captain and Clara Gorling are equally distressed. It looks…very bad, Nevare.”

“What, that I tried to save his wife? What was I supposed to do? Look, Spink, I’ve been here a day and a half. And if it weren’t for,” I lowered my voice, “the magic, I’d be dead by now. No one gave me five minutes of care for my smashed head. The guard won’t talk to me at all. I don’t even know why I’ve been thrown into prison.”

Spink swallowed. He started to speak, then looked around as if he’d rather bite his tongue out.

“Just say it,” I barked at him.

“It looks bad, Nevare. No one will believe that all those people were walkers, not all at once. It looks as if you deliberately planted those trees and then, when you had the chance, shoved fresh corpses up against them to feed them. The trees had shot up almost three feet taller overnight, and blossomed! They had to chop them down to free the bodies from them.

The trees had rooted into them so deeply that they had to bury them with pieces of trunk still attached to them. And Dale Hardy’s body out there, pulled right out of his grave? From the damage that the quicklime did to him no one will believe he was a walker.”

“Look at the grave. You’ll find no shovel marks on it, at least, none that I made. If anyone dug him up, it wasn’t me. And I don’t think anyone did. I think he came crawling out on his own.”

Spink gritted his teeth again. “A bit too late to look for any evidence of that sort. They put him back in the earth as quickly as they could. But it was no secret that he’d threatened you in the street that day. How people see it is that you took a macabre vengeance on both the woman who accused you and the man who wanted to defend her. You dragged his body out intending to give it to a tree.”

“And then what? I hit myself on the head with a bucket?”

“Good point. But people in the town are too scandalized and horrified to think sensibly about this, let alone make allowances for claims of Speck magic. Nevare, they found Carsina Thayer’s body in your bed.”

I was baffled. “I told you. She was a walker. I tried to save her. I gave her water, and made her one of those teas that Epiny gave me for Hitch. I never had a chance to make it for him; he was dead when I got back to him. But I thought I had a chance to save Carsina. I took my bucket to get her more water before I left for town to get her husband. But when I went out the door, I saw the other walkers. I’m afraid they distracted me from my errand.” Spink didn’t deserve my angry sarcasm, but my head was pounding with the effort of talking. My jaw felt strange. When I touched it, I found lumpiness at the hinge. Had it been broken, and healed by the magic?