I heard the door at the end of the corridor open and then footsteps, and slowly lifted my eyes to the barred window. My bowels had turned to cold liquid. Was it morning already? Had I spent my last night in the world?

My lips suddenly trembled like a scolded child’s, and useless tears flooded my eyes. I wiped them hastily on my sleeve and stared stiff-faced at the window. When Spink’s haggard face appeared there, it nearly unmanned me. His eyes were red-rimmed and shot with blood. For a moment, we were both silent. Then he said hoarsely, “I’m sorry, Nevare. I’m so sorry.”

“There was nothing anyone could have done for me,” I said.

“They’ve allowed me fifteen minutes to speak to you.”

“What time is it?” I demanded.

For a moment he looked puzzled. Then he said, “Evening is just coming on.”

“What time is my execution scheduled?”

He choked for a moment, then managed to say, “Noon tomorrow, it will commence.”

Silence fell. We were both thinking that no one know when it would finally end.

And then, to say anything at all, I asked him, “How is Epiny?”

“Strangely calm,” he said. “She encouraged me to come here for a final visit. She said I should tell you that she loves you and doesn’t forget anything. I thought she was going to insist on coming with me, but she didn’t. I didn’t want to leave her alone. Amzil is off on some errand of her own, and the children are minding themselves. But she said she was well in control of her mood and insisted I should come to you. She said you’d want to know that we had heard back from your sister. Yaril received the letter you sent through Carsina. She wrote back to Carsina, but she also had the sense to write to Epiny as well.”

I swallowed my words. I didn’t say that I wished I’d never sent the letter.

I’d told her that I was alive. By the time she read Spink’s response that would no longer be true. I wondered, very briefly, if Captain Thayer had received my sister’s letter; it probably would have puzzled him mightily if he had. I hoped that he had discarded it and would never plumb the mystery of what it meant. I wished to die as Nevare Burv, the gravedigger, not Nevare Burvelle, the disgraced soldier son of a nobleman.

“Don’t ever tell Yaril how I died,” I pleaded with him.

“I’ll try to find a way to avoid it,” he told me, but could not meet my eyes.

I cleared my throat. “Is she well?” I asked him.

“She is engaged to marry Caulder Stiet.” His voice was flat as he announced this. “She says that she does not think it so evil a fate as she once did, that she thinks she can manage him. The actual phrase she used was that she found him ‘tractable.’ Your father had a stroke and has had difficulty speaking. She does not say that this has made her life less onerous, but that is what Epiny reads between the lines.”