Anna opened burning and blurred eyes, slowly, painfully.
Jecks looked solemnly at her, propped up as she was by lumpy pillows in the high-backed bed. She met his glance for a moment, then closed her eyes against the pounding headache and the miniature starbursts that flashed before her.
When she opened them again, the white-haired lord sat in the chair by her bed.
“My lady . . . Lady Anna . . . you cannot continue like this.” Jecks extended a goblet. “It is wine, honeyed. You must drink.”
Anna drank. Then she closed her eyes for a moment.
“You must eat and drink more before you sleep.”
Obediently, she forced her eyes back open and took another sip of the wine, far too sweet for her preference. She tried to get her eyes to focus on the white-haired lord, but one moment he seemed clear, and the next a silvered fuzzy image.
“Another,” he urged inexorably.
She took a small sip. A thought struggled somewhere, and finally she asked, “The . . . message?”
“As you ordered, I did send it, under the blue flag of messages and harmony. Lord Ehara doubtless did not feel such harmony when he received your words.”
“Received?” Anna rasped.
“You have lain like one enchanted or dead for nearly a week. The message has surely been delivered, but there has been no time for a reply. We have forced water into you, but you are thin unto death.” He extended a small fragment of bread. “You must eat.”
Anna slowly chewed the bread, hard as it was with a dry mouth, then let Jecks hold the goblet again as she drank. “The darn . . . ?”
“You have wrought a mighty sorcery,” he admitted, offering another small fragment of bread. “The river has filled the gorge for three deks and slowed its flow for another five. . . . And it has yet to creep halfway, nay not even a fourth part of the way, up those stones your sorcery laid.”
“Is any . . . water going . . . past . . . ?”
“Beyond the dam are only sands and drying rocks. And more sand and dry rock. Before long, Lord Birfels worries that the waters will flood the fields near Emor.”
Emor? Anna hadn’t even heard of Emor.
“That is a small hamlet fifteen deks upstream of Abenfel.” Jecks pressed another square of dark bread upon her.
“Be . . . awhile,” mumbled Anna as she struggled with the bread. “Years. It’s a deep gorge.”
“Not as deep as before. The waters have covered the sands and the shores, and it is a lake of blue.” He offered more bread.
Chewing the bread took effort, and her jaws moved as though they were made of lead. She swallowed and took another sip of wine.
Her eyes felt heavy, far too heavy, and she could no longer keep them open.