“Epiny took my part? Publicly?”

He nodded grimly.

“Tell her to renounce it. Tell her to say that she has changed her mind.”

“Oh, and of course she would do that if her husband commanded it.”

Spink’s voice was dryly sarcastic, but I saw something else in his tight smile. Pride. He knew Epiny would not back down. And he took pride in the fact that she would stand behind her convictions regardless of the consequences.

“Oh, Spink, I am so sorry. She will lose all her friends over this, won’t she?”

“Not quite. Amzil has come forward to stand beside her. She has told everyone that you lived with her for nearly a month in Dead Town and never put a hand on her or demonstrated any sort of temper. Of course, as a former whore, her word counts for less, but she gave it nonetheless.”

I winced. “Go home, Spink. You’ve done all you can and I need to think.

There has to be some compelling evidence I can offer that I’m innocent.”

“You’ll have to come up with it soon,” he warned me. “Surely they won’t try to hold a court-martial while the plague is still raging?”

“The plague has stopped. Just as if someone blew a lamp out. Some are hailing it as a miracle. I’ve heard at least one person say that it’s the good god showing his pleasure that a vile criminal like yourself has been captured.”

“It stopped?”

“Like magic.” He smiled grimly. “Fevers went down. People rallied on their deathbeds. There hasn’t been a death since you were brought here, Nevare.”

“Like magic,” I agreed sourly. I lay back on my protesting pallet and looked at the cobwebbed ceiling. “Go home, Spink. Tell Epiny I love her and tell her to stop defending me in public. Tell Amzil the same.”

“That you love her?” He seemed incredulous.

“Why not?” I replied recklessly. “I can scarcely lose anything by saying it now.”

“I’ll do it, then,” he said, and seemed almost pleased at the prospect. As he turned to go, I called after him, “I’ll be sent some sort of counsel, won’t I? Someone who will help me present my defense?”

“They’re trying to find someone willing to represent you,” he said. If he meant the words to be reassuring, they were not. I wondered if they would still hold the court-martial if I had no representative.

If I had remained at the academy, I should have eventually had to complete a course that covered martial law and how it was administered.

What little I had heard of that course convinced me it would have been a dry study. Little had I ever thought that any of it would apply to me. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried once more to be the boy who had set off so joyfully for the academy, so full of anticipation of a glorious career and a golden future. That future was to have included an obedient and doting wife, a woman raised in the traditions of being a cavalla officer’s wife. Carsina. What had we done to one another? Then I clenched my jaw and admitted that she was little to blame for all that had happened.