Rosse was bold enough to speak. “It seems an urgent message, and yet not, perhaps, of such urgency to require the messenger to continue with the task himself.”

My father gave him a disapproving look. He obviously regarded rampant sickness and men dying in droves as inappropriate topics for discussion at table with his wife and young daughters. Quite possibly he considered it a military matter, and not a topic to be lightly discussed until King Troven had decided how best to deal with it. I was surprised when he actually replied to Rosse’s observation. “The medical officer for Gettys is, I fear, a superstitious man. He has sent a separate report to the queen, full of his usual speculations about magical influences from the native peoples of that region, stipulating that it not leave the messenger’s hand until he delivered it to her. Our queen, it is said, has an interest in matters of the supernatural, and rewards those who send her new knowledge. She has promised a lordship to anyone who can offer her proof of life beyond the grave.”

My mother made bold to speak, I think for the benefit of my sisters. “I do not regard such topics as appropriate for a lady to pursue. I am not alone in this. I have had letters from my sister and from Lady Wrohe expressing the discomfort they felt when the queen insisted they join her for a spirit-summoning session. My sister is a skeptic, saying it is all a trick by the so-called mediums who hold these sessions, but Lady Wrohe wrote that she witnessed things she could not explain and it gave her nightmares for a month.” She looked from Elisi, who appeared properly scandalized, to Yaril, whose blue eyes were round with interest. To Yaril, she added the comment, “We ladies are often considered to be flighty, ignorant creatures. I would be shamed if any of my daughters became caught up in such unnatural pursuits. If one wishes to study metaphysics, the first thing one should do is read the holy texts of the good god. In the Writ is all we need to know of the afterlife. To demand proof of it is presumptuous and an affront to the deity.”

That seemed properly to quench Yaril. She sat silent while my younger brother Vanze reported that he had worked on reading a difficult passage in the holy texts in the original Varnian and then meditated for two hours on it. When my father asked how Yaril had employed her day, she spoke only of mounting three new butterflies in her collection and of tatting enough lace to trim her summer shawl. Then, looking at her plate, she timorously asked, “Why must they guard the cemetery at Gettys?”

My father narrowed his eyes at her circling back to a topic he had dismissed. He answered curtly, “Because the Specks do not respect our burial customs and have been known to profane the dead.”

Yaril’s little intake of breath was so slight that I am sure I was the only one who heard it. My interest was more piqued than satisfied by my father’s reply, but as he immediately asked my mother how her day had progressed, I knew it was hopeless even to wonder.

And so that dinner came to a close, with coffee and a sweet, as all our dinners did. I wondered more about the Specks than I did about the mysterious plague. None of us could know then that the plague was not a onetime blight of disease, but would return to the outposts, summer after summer, and would gradually strike deeper and deeper into the western Plains country.

During that first summer of contagion, awareness of the Speck plague slowly seeped into my life and colored my concept of the borderlands. I had known that the farthest outposts of the king’s cavalry were now at the foothills of the Barrier Mountains. I knew that his ambitious King’s Road being built across the Plains pushed ever closer to the mountains, but that it was expected to take four more years before it was completed. Since I was small I had heard tales of the mysterious and elusive Specks, the dappled people who could only live happily in the shadows of their native forest. Tales of them were, to my childish ears, little different from the tales of pixies and sprites that my sisters so loved. The very name of the people had crept into our language as a synonym for inattentive: to do a Speck’s day of work meant to do almost nothing at all. If I was caught daydreaming over my books, my tutor might ask me if I was Speck-touched. I had grown up in the belief that the distant Specks were a harmless and rather silly folk who inhabited the glens and vales of the thickly forested mountains that, to my prairie-raised imagination, were almost as fantastic as the dappled folk who dwelt there.

But in that summer, my image of the Specks changed. They came to represent insidious disease, a killing plague that came, perhaps, simply from wearing a fur bought from a Speck trader or wafting one of the decorative fans they wove from the lace vines that grew in their forest. I wondered what they did to our graveyards, how they “profaned” the dead. Instead of elusive, I now thought of them as furtive. Their mystery became ominous rather than enchanting, their lifestyle grubby and pest-ridden rather than primitively idyllic. A sickness that merely meant a night or two of fever for a Speck child devastated our outposts and outlying settlements, slaughtering by the score hearty young men in the prime of their youth.