a low voice rumbled. It came from everywhere. “I cut him in the river.” The voice grew louder. “I cut him in the river!”
Nicodemus tried to run, but the pale ivy entangled his legs. He tried to scream, but his throat produced only a long painful hiss. He reached down to pull at the weeds but froze when he saw his hands covered by the hexagonal plates of a turtle’s shell.
Suddenly he could not move so much as his eyelid. From toe to top hair he was encased in thick black shell.
“I CUT HIM IN THE RIVER!”
A blinding red light enveloped Nicodemus. Agony lanced through his every fiber as his shell shattered.
Looking up, he saw the emerald produce a sphere of light—wispy and sallow at the edges, but blazing green at its core.
The small emerald’s radiance grew until it burned the cavern and everything in it into airy nothingness.
Above stretched a pale-blue sky, below, lush savanna grass. Ancient oak trees dotted a hillside that overlooked the wide, green water of a reservoir. Nicodemus recognized the place as a springtime Spirish meadow near his father’s stronghold.
In the meadow’s center, a tattered blanket provided seating for a young boy and a woman. She was a rare beauty: pale skin with a light spray of freckles, bright hazel eyes set above a snub nose, thin lips, a delicate chin.
But her most stunning feature was the long bronze hair cascading down her back in slow curls that glinted gold in the sunlight.
A book, a knightly romance, sat in the woman’s lap. Her lips moved as she read from it but the dream provided no sound.
The boy had long black hair and a dark olive complexion. He was perhaps eight years old and gazed at the woman with fierce green eyes. This was as much a memory as it was a dream.
The woman’s name was April, the boy’s Nicodemus.
This was a vision of long ago when Lord Severn—Nicodemus’s father—had seen fit to educate his bastard. The lord had brought April into his household ostensibly to educate his son, but most everyone knew the lord visited her chamber at night.
April had been a kind teacher but not a determined one. After Nicodemus’s first dozen futile reading lessons, she began reading her favorite books aloud to him. Being Lornish, April had been enamored of knightly romances. And after the first tale of maidens and monsters, so was the young Nicodemus.
The dream became fluid. The vision of April and his young self began to flicker. Now Nicodemus’s image was ten years old. There were flashes of Nicodemus reading alone, but more often he was with April, begging her for something.
Memory provided the details the dream left out. In what was perhaps the only shrewd act of her life, April had noticed Nicodemus’s interest in knightly romance and began reading to him less and less. When possible, she stopped at a tale’s most exciting point, claiming she was too tired to continue.
The young Nicodemus yearned to learn what happened next in each story, but his progress was slow. At times he confused his frustration regarding the text with his frustration regarding his governess’s body.
Noticing his improvement, April ceased reading to him entirely but supplied more books. Now the dream showed only images of Nicodemus reading alone.
The dream world shifted. Gone were the meadow and sunshine.Nicodemus now watched his ten-year-old self lying abed in his small Severn Hold chamber. He was reading a book titled Sword of Flame.
The bedside candles danced as several nights flickered by—this was the time when, in three agonizing months, Nicodemus had taught himself to read so that he might find out if Aelfgar, a noble paladin, could mend Cailus, his broken sword, with the Fire Stones of Ta’nak, and then wield it to free the beautiful Shahara from Zade, an evil cleric who commanded the snakelike Zadsernak.
Although the youthful Nicodemus had had trouble remembering the many silly invented names, he was delighted with the story’s inevitable course and eager to read the next twenty-seven books in the series, though he doubted that they were all as good.
Time flickered again. Now Nicodemus saw the warm night on which he had finished Sword of Flame. His young self laid the book down on his chest and fell asleep to the sound of spring rain and the cries of a full robin’s nest outside his window.
“No,” the adult Nicodemus moaned. On this night, in a dream about April, he would be born to magic. The resulting magical effulgence