When she'd come inside, Miranda had rushed to fetch a blanket, calling for Philpot to brew a fresh pot of tea. And Archie had rubbed Iris's cold hands and teased her, calling her his goddess of the spring storms. And Iris had shooed them all away and dreamily rambled on to them how she had seen the mother bird sitting on her nest with her wings spread over hatchlings with her own head tucked down to avoid the downpour.

"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang," Iris had quoted, her voice fragmented by her shivers. "Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." She'd turned a vague half-smile on Archie.

The next day Iris had been flushed and a bit tired. By that night she'd had a terrible ache in her head and the lung congestion had begun. "Just a silly cough."

Now Attie closed her eyes and whispered, "Sonnet 73." Iris cared about proper attribution and what the words were about, not just what they said. Attie clenched her eyelids shut tight and thought hard about how she loved her mad, dreamy mother, who was nothing like anyone else in the world, as she listened to the breath moving in and out of her mother's body. A thin sound, strained and tight, with a terrible liquid gurgle at the end.

It was just a silly cough.

LYSANDER STOOD IN A FIELD of smoking rain and thunder — both cannon fire and real thunder, for the barrage had not halted to wait for fair weather. He was wet to the bone, both hot and chilled at once. Rage and terror, in a sick roiling stew deep in his belly. He gripped a musket in his hands but his powder was wet, and he was out of shot. The bayonet was his only defense. Yet as he watched, it disintegrated before his eyes. The crimson blood upon it turned to brown, then to iron flakes that bubbled up and washed away in the rain. The downpour obscured everything, washing the world away, washing the blade right out of existence.

His hands empty now, he was defenseless against the enemy. He wasn't quite sure who the enemy was — was it the French, or the weather, or the muddy pit of Death itself that strove to suck him under?

Again and again, the collapsing siege tunnels closed in. Each time men died choking to death on mud. Lysander clawed his way out against the consuming maw of the blood-tinged mud, slipped, clawed, slipped again, until the dream allowed him to slither out upon solid ground. He was free.