Forest Mage

SIX

A Day of Letters

I did my best to be invisible during the following days of festivities at my home. It was not easy. I had to be present at the dinners, and with a house full of guests, it was difficult to avoid socializing completely. Most unpleasant of all for me was that the Grenalters had been invited to stay with us. Carsina and my sister Yaril snubbed me at every opportunity. If by chance I entered a room they were in, they would immediately sweep disdainfully from it. It maddened me with frustration, the more so in that never once did they enter a room and allow me the chance to vacate it as soon as I saw them. I told myself it was juvenile to long for the chance to show Carsina just how uninterested I was in her, but in my heart I burned to hurt her pride as she had injured mine. I contented myself with making savagely accurate accounts of all my interactions with her in my soldier-son journal.

Rosse and Cecile had departed on their wedding trip. They intended to travel downriver to Old Thares, where my uncle would host a reception for them. Cecile had two aunts and three uncles in the capital, so Rosse would be exhibited and inspected for several weeks before they returned home to settle into the rooms prepared for the new couple. I pitied them, having to begin a new life under my father’s roof. My father, I was sure, would grant them little privacy and even less autonomy.

My father and I were at war now. He was courteous to me while houseguests were present, but once they all had departed, he made his displeasure clear. That evening, just as the house should have been peaceful, he verbally flogged me with all my shortcomings as a son, never giving me an opportunity to reply. After a time, from some depth I didn’t know I possessed, I found an icy calm and refused to give him any response. When he angrily dismissed me, I went directly to my room and to bed and spent most of that night staring up at the darkened ceiling and seething. He sought to bring me to heel like a whipped puppy. He cared for nothing I might say in my defence. Fine. Then he would hear absolutely nothing from me.

After that, our conflict was conducted in silence. I avoided my father’s company. When my mother sought conversation with me I spoke about the Academy, my teachers and friends and my uncle’s family. Of my weight gain and my war with my father, I did not speak. When I was not with her, I rediscovered my boyhood haunts along the river. I went fishing. I counted the days until this ‘holiday’ would be over and I could return to the Academy.

My cold conflict with my father made him irritable with the entire family. Elisi retreated to her music and books. Yaril often appeared with her eyes red from weeping. My father had chastised her severely for her ‘shameless flirtation’ with Kase Remwar. Plainly there had been no marriage offer between the families. As an uncommitted first son, Kase had danced, dined, and chatted with any number of eligible young maidens at Rosse’s wedding. I suspected it was simply his nature, but Yaril blamed me. I could have taken vengeance on her by telling my father that I’d seen her kiss Remwar before I’d even departed for the Academy. But even in my anger and hurt, I knew that the consequences that would fall on her would be far heavier than her foolishness merited. And keeping that secret from my father was one more bit of damage I dealt him. He thought he knew so much about his household and how to run the lives of his children. He knew us not at all.

Vanze busied himself with visiting friends in the area before departing for the seminary. I found a quiet moment to bid him farewell privately, and told him that I wished him every success. We’d already spent so much of our lives apart that I had little else to say to my younger brother. We were strangers joined only by our bloodlines.

My mother had hoped I would spend at least another week at home but by the third day after the wedding guests departed, I was eager to leave. She had found the leftover fabric from my original uniforms, and with great effort, had managed to put eases into my trousers and jacket. Cleaned and brushed, my uniform looked nearly as good as it ever had. She carefully wrapped it up in heavy paper and tied it with string, cautioning me not to wear it on my journey back, but to keep it clean, so that I’d have clothing that fitted me on my first day back at my classes. Her concern touched me. As I took the package from her, I was bracing myself to tell her that I planned to leave the next morning when one of my father’s men came up from the Landing with a larger than usual bundle of mail for him. My mother sorted through it as she always did. I watched her, waiting to have a quiet moment to speak with her.

‘Here’s something from the Academy for your father. Probably another invitation to lecture. Oh. Here are two, no, three notes for you. Someone has scratched out the Academy address and sent them on to you here instead of holding them for you. How peculiar. These will be invitations for Rosse and Cecile to visit when they return from their trip. Oh, and here’s one for Yaril from Carsina. They’ve become quite the correspondents in the last few months.’

I scarcely heard her words after she handed me my letters. The first one was in a dove-grey envelope, a very heavy paper, but the return address was what shocked me. Caulder Stiet was writing to me, from Newton. So he had gone to live with his scholar uncle, after all. His proud father had wanted nothing to do with his soldier son after the plague had wasted him away to a shadow and broken his spirit. The boy had been a nuisance and a pest to all the new noble first-years at the Academy, and to me in particular. Still, I despised Colonel Stiet for what he had done. He’d literally given his son to his younger brother, to raise as a scholar instead of a soldier. Immoral. I shook my head and looked at my other two letters.

One was from Epiny and the other from Spink. It seemed odd that each would write to me. Usually Epiny penned me a lengthy epistle and Spink just added a postscript. I studied the envelopes. All three had been sent to my Academy address, but forwarded to me at home. I scowled at that. What was Rory thinking to send my mail trailing after me? I’d be back soon.

Curiosity made me open the letter from Caulder first. His penmanship had not improved. His very short and polite note said that his uncle studied rocks and was very interested in the one I had given Caulder. Would I be so kind as to send them a detailed map that showed where I had found it? He would be ever indebted to me if I could, and remained, my friend, Caulder Stiet. I scowled over it and wondered what sort of mischief or game this was. Although we had parted on decent terms, I did not trust the little weasel and had little inclination to do him this favour. I would have set it aside, but it contained a second note from his uncle, carefully penned onto very expensive paper, noting that geology and the study of minerals was his area of scholarship, and my rock was quite an interesting mix. He would greatly appreciate my time and effort to comply with Caulder’s request. I set it aside with a growl of irritation. I owed Caulder nothing and his uncle even less. The only reason I did not discard it was that I knew Caulder’s father and my Aunt Daraleen were friends. Any rudeness I committed might find its way back to my Uncle Sefert’s doorstep. And I did owe debts of courtesy to him. I would reply to this. Later.

Next I opened the letter from Spink. The first few lines made my breath catch. ‘The Speck plague has come to Bitter Springs. Epiny has become very ill and I fear for her life.’

The pages fluttered from my hand to the floor. Heart hammering, I snatched up the envelope from Epiny and opened it immediately. There was her familiar handwriting, perhaps a bit more scrawling than usual, and the first line read,

‘I do hope that Spink’s letter did not overly alarm you. The spring water treatment proved nothing less than amazing.’

Heart still pounding, I gathered up the scattered pages of Spink’s letter and took all of my mail into the parlour. I opened the curtains to let in more light, and sat down on a cushioned chair. I spread out my mail on a low table and pieced together the puzzle. Spink’s letter had arrived at the Academy days before Epiny’s had, but they had been sent on together. Relieved of the worst of my fears, I sat down to read the missives in order.

Spink’s letter was wrenching, and not even Epiny’s letter that proved her survival could eliminate all his bad news. He had no idea how the plague had come to their little settlement at Bitter Springs. No one had reported seeing any Specks, or even any ill persons. He himself had continued to make a slow but steady recovery from the illness, despite occasional bouts of night fever and sweats. He had thought he had left the dread disease far behind in Old Thares. A small group of plainsmen who lived near Bitter Springs had succumbed to it first. It had devastated their little settlement, swiftly reducing it from seventeen families to seven. Before anyone had realized they were dealing with Speck plague, it had spread. Two of Spink’s sisters had caught it. Epiny had insisted on nursing them, saying that as she survived the plague once, she was probably immune to it. She had been wrong. When Spink had mailed his letter to me, both his sisters and Epiny were severely ill and not expected to recover. His mother was struggling to care for them with Spink’s help, but he feared that she would exhaust herself and also fall to the sickness. He strove to nurse Epiny just as faithfully as she had cared for him in his time of sickness.

‘It is a terrible irony that the disease that helped bring us together may now part us forever. It was so hard to write to her father and warn him of her decline. I tell you truthfully, Nevare, that if she dies, the better part of me will die with her. I do not think I will have the courage to go on. In a last effort to save them, we will resort to practices that my mother deems “little better than superstition”. I will take her and my sisters to Bitter Springs and their supposedly healing waters. Pray for us.’

So his letter ended.

I set his heart-broken letter aside and eagerly took up Epiny’s missive. It was written in her usual rambling style, very frustrating to someone who simply wanted to know how everyone fared there. Nevertheless, I forced myself to read it slowly and carefully.

‘My dear cousin Nevare,

‘I do hope that Spink’s letter did not overly alarm you. The spring water treatment proved nothing less than amazing. Having had the plague before, albeit in a much milder form, I was perhaps more aware than anyone else of how severely it had stricken me this time. My cousin, I did not expect to survive! I do not even remember the wagon journey to the springs, nor even the first time they immersed me. I am told that Spink carried me bodily into the water, and putting his hand over my nose and mouth, pinched them firmly shut, and then carried me under with him, where we remained for as long as he could hold his breath. When we emerged, he gave a similar treatment to each of his sisters. Others from the family settlement had journeyed with us and were similarly treated.

‘Then they set up a camp for us, unfolding cots under the wide blue sky and making of the meadow near the springs an open-air infirmary. On the first evening I awoke there, I already felt a lessening in my disease. Nonetheless, I was quite wilful and difficult, and poor Spink was obliged to hold me down and force me to drink a large quantity of the spring water. Oh, it tasted foul and smelled worse! My fever was not entirely abated, and I called him names and scratched his poor dear face for his troubles with me. Then I fell again into a sleep, but it was a deeper, truer sleep, and when I awoke, feeling ever so much better, the first thing I demanded to know was who had scratched him so, that I could take revenge on her! I was so abashed to be told I had done it!

‘We remained encamped by the springs for almost a week, and every day we forced ourselves to drink that noxious water, and most of our food was cooked with it. When I realized how much I was recovering, and how swiftly, I demanded that Spink join me in this water cure. Nevare, you cannot imagine the change it has wrought in him! I will not say he is his old self, but he has begun to eat more heartily, to walk with more confidence, and most important to me, the light is back in his eyes and he laughs often. Already he speaks of returning to the Academy and his studies and career. Oh, if only that dream can come true for him!

‘And now I must tell you—’

* * *

‘What is the meaning of this?’ My father’s roar of fury and anguish tore my attention from Epiny’s letter. Loose pages in my hand, I looked up to find him glaring from the parlour door. He bore down on me like a cavalla charge. In one hand he held the large envelope from the Academy. In the other were several sheets of paper. He shook them at me. His face was red, the veins standing out on his temples, and I would not have been surprised to see froth fly from his jaws, so wroth was he. ‘Explain this!’ he roared again. ‘Account for this, you young scoundrel!’

‘If you would let me see what it is, perhaps I could,’ I said to him. I did not mean to sound impertinent, but of course I did.

In fury, my father lifted his hand as to cuff me. I forced myself to stand up tall, meet his eyes and await his blow. Instead, with a snarl of frustration, he thrust a letter at me. I managed to catch it before it fluttered to the floor between us. It was on Academy letterhead, but it was not from Colonel Rebin. Instead, I recognized Dr Amicas’s handwriting. In a bold hand at the top, centred on the line, he had written Honourable Medical Discharge. I gaped at it.

‘What did you do? All the years I educated you, with the finest teachers I could procure! All the years of trying to instil values and honour into you! Why, Nevare? Why? Where did I fail with you?’

It was difficult to read while he ranted at me. My eyes skittered over the page, and phrases leapt out at me: A post-recovery condition unlikely to respond to any treatment … may worsen with time … impossible to carry out the normal duties of a cavalla officer … dismissed from King’s Cavalla Academy … unlikely to be able to serve in a satisfactory manner in any branch of the military at any level …

And at the bottom, the signature I knew so well, damning me to a useless life living on my brother’s charity beneath the weight of my father’s contempt. I slowly sank back into my seat, the page still clutched in my hands. There was a humming in my ears and stupidly I thought of the Spindle and its endless dance. My mouth felt dry and I could not form any words. My father had no such problem. He continued castigating me for my irresponsible, self-indulgent, foolish, selfish, senseless ways. I finally found a breath and remembered how to move my mouth.

‘I don’t know what this is about, Father. Truly, I don’t.’

‘It’s about the end of your career, you fool. It’s about no future for you, and shame for your family. A medical discharge for being too fat! That’s what it’s about! Damn you, boy. Damn you. You couldn’t even fail with dignity. To lose your career because you couldn’t refrain from stuffing food in your mouth. What have you done to us? What will my old comrades think of me, sending them such a soldier son?’

His voice ran down. His hands, still clutching additional papers, were shaking. He felt this as his personal failure. His shame. His dignity. The honour of his family. Never had he considered how this might feel to me. My father had gone to stand by the window. He read through his handful of papers with his back to me, the writing tilted towards the light. I heard him give a small grunt, as if he’d been struck. A moment later, I heard the gasp of an indrawn breath. He turned to look at me, the papers still held out before him. ‘Filth,’ he said with great feeling. ‘Of all the disgusting behaviours I might fear a son of mine might indulge in, this! This!’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I said again, stupidly. I wondered why the doctor hadn’t spoken to me before I left. I knew a wild moment of hope in which I wondered if it were all a mistake, if this discharge had been written when I was still terribly ill. A glance at the date on the paper ended that dream. The good doctor had signed it several days after I’d left the Academy. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, more to myself than my father.

‘Don’t you? It’s here in black and white. Read it for yourself.’ He left the window and as he angrily strode from the room, he hurled the papers at me. It was not a satisfactory gesture. Not one even reached me. They fluttered out around him and settled on the floor. When he slammed the door behind him, that brief gust of wind stirred them again. I bent over to pick them up, grunting as I did so. My belly got in the way, and the waistband of my pants seemed too tight. I scowled as I painstakingly gathered up what proved to be my transcript and all my records, including my medical file.

I took them to the table and sorted them. Strange. All these papers were about me, and yet I’d never seen most of them before. Here was a secretary’s copy of the accusing letter that Colonel Stiet had sent to my father over the incident with Cadet Lieutenant Tiber. Here was, surprisingly, a letter of commendation from Captain Maw, saying that I had shown extraordinary ability as an independent thinker in his engineering and drafting class, and suggesting that I might best serve the King’s Cavalla as a scout on the frontier. Was that what had so upset my father? I sorted more paper. There were tallies of my test scores for my various classes. My grades were all exemplary. Surely they had been up to his expectations, not that I’d ever expected him to acknowledge it.

The medical file on me was thick. I had not realized that Dr Amicas had kept such complete records. There was a log of my illness. It began with great detail, but by the fourth day, when cadets were dropping like flies with the plague, the entries were abbreviated to ‘Fever continues. Tried giving him mint in his water to cool his systems.’ Towards the end of the file, I found notes on my recovery, and then more notes that tracked my increasing weight and girth. He’d graphed it. The continuing climb of the line was undeniable. Had that angered my father? He now knew that I had lied when I said the doctor had expected my weight gain to be temporary. Looking at the evidence, I felt a sudden sinking of heart. The line did not falter. It had risen every day since my fever had subsided. Was that what the doctor expected it to do? How long would it continue? How long could such a trend continue? could such a trend continue?

Towards the bottom of the stack, I found what had damned me in my father’s eyes. This document was not in the doctor’s handwriting. My name was marked on the top of the sheet, and a date. Below it was a set of questions, questions that rang oddly familiar in my mind. An aide’s notes below each one recorded my answer.

‘Did you go to Dark Evening in Old Thares?

Yes.

Did you eat or drink there?

Yes.

What did you eat? What did you drink?

Potatoes, chestnuts, meat skewer. Cadet denies drinking anything.

Did you encounter any Specks there?

Yes.

Cadet specifically mentions a female Speck. “Beautiful”.

Did you have any contact with any Speck that evening?

Cadet evasive.

Did your contact include sexual congress?

Cadet denied. Continued questioning. Cadet evasive. Cadet eventually admitted sexual contact.’

I stared at the damning words. But I had not. I did not. I hadn’t had sexual contact with a Speck on Dark Evening, and I certainly hadn’t confessed that I had to the aide. I remembered him now, vaguely, as a dark shape silhouetted against a window that was too bright with light. I remembered him badgering me for an answer when my mouth was dry and sticky and my head pounded with pain.

‘Yes or no, Cadet. Answer yes or no. Did you have sexual contact with a Speck?’

I had told him something to make him go away. I didn’t remember what. But I’d never had sexual contact with a Speck. At least, not in real life. Only in my fever dreams had I lain with Tree Woman. And that had been only a dream.

Hadn’t it?

I shook my head at myself. It was becoming more and more difficult for me to draw a firm line between my real life and the strange experiences that had befallen me ever since the Kidona Dewara had exposed me to plains magic. In her medium’s trance, Epiny had confirmed that I had indeed been split into two persons, and one of me had sojourned in another world. I had been willing to accept that. I’d been able to accept it because I thought it was over. I’d recovered the lost part of my self and made it mine again. I had believed that my Speckself would merge with my real self, and the contradictions would cease troubling me.

Yet time after time, that strange other self intruded into my life, in ways that were becoming more and more destructive to me. I recognized him when I’d lain beside the farm girl, and he’d triumphed at Dancing Spindle. That Nevare, I felt, that ‘Soldier’s Boy’ had been the one to spout anger so drastically at Carsina. I’d known him by the anger pulsing in my blood. He’d had the courage to free the dove from the sacrificial hook. I’d felt him again whenever I’d found words to confront my father in the days since the wedding. He wasn’t a wise influence on me. But he could rally my courage and foolhardiness and suddenly push me to assert myself. He relished confrontation in a way I did not. I shook my head. In that, he was a truer son to my father than this Nevare was. Yet I had to admit there had been times when I’d valued his insight. He had been with me the first time I glimpsed a true forest on my river journey to Old Thares, and it had been his anger I’d felt over the slain birds at Rosse’s wedding. In quieter moments, his vision of the natural world replaced mine. I would see a tree sway or hear the call of a bird, and for the passing instant of his influence, those things would mesh with my being in a way my father’s son would not understand. I no longer denied the existence of my Speckself, but I did all I could to prevent him controlling my day-to-day existence.

But this change to my body was something I could not ignore nor exclude from my daily reality. As part of my ‘real’ life, it made no sense. The rigours of my journey home and my fast should have made me lose weight. Instead, I’d grown fatter. Had I caught the plague because I’d dreamed of congress with a Speck woman? Was my fat a consequence of the plague? If so, then I could no longer deny that the magic permeated every part of my life now. For a dizzying instant, I perceived that the magic was completely in control.

I snatched my thoughts back from that precipice. It was too terrifying to consider. Why had this befallen me? As logically as a mathematical proof, I perceived the beginning of these changes in me, the place where my path had diverged from the future I had been promised and into this nightmarish present. I knew when my life had been snatched out of my control. An instant later, I knew whom to blame for it.

My father.

At that thought, I felt the milling guilt in me stop just as the Dancing Spindle had ground to a halt. That single thought, that pinning of blame made all events since my experience with Dewara fall into a new order. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I said quietly, and the words were like cool balm on a burning wound. I looked at the door to the parlour. It was closed, my father no longer there. Childishly, I still addressed him. ‘It was never my fault. You did it. You put me on this path, Father.’

My satisfaction in finding someone to blame was very shortlived. Blaming him solved nothing. Dejected, I leaned back in my chair. It didn’t matter who had put me in this situation. Here I was. I looked down at my ungainly body. I filled the chair. The waistband of my trousers dug into me. With a grunt and a sigh, I shoved at it, easing it down under my belly. I’d seen fat old soldiers hang their beer guts out over their trouser tops this way. Now I understood why. It was more comfortable.

I sat up in my chair and gathered my papers together. When I tried to fit them all back into the envelope I discovered another letter among them. I tugged it out.

This last enclosure was addressed to me in the doctor’s hand. I threw it on the floor in childish pique. What worse thing could he send to me than what he already had?

But after a few moments of looking at it there, I bent down laboriously, picked it up and opened it.

‘Dear Nevare,’ he had written. Not Cadet Nevare. Simply Nevare. I clenched my teeth for a moment and then read on.

‘‘With great regret, I have done what was necessary. Please remember that your discharge from the Academy is an honourable one, without stigma. Nonetheless, I imagine you hate me at this moment. Or perhaps, in the weeks since I have seen you, you have finally come to accept that something is terribly wrong with your body, and that it is a crippling flaw that you will have to learn to manage. It is unfortunately a flaw that renders you completely unfit for the military.

‘You were able to accept that those of your fellows whose health was broken by the plague had to give up their hopes of being active cavalla officers. I now ask you to see your own affliction in the same light. You are just as physically unfit for duty as Spinrek Kester.

‘You may feel that your life is over at this moment, or no longer worth living. I pray to the good god that you will have the strength to see that there are other worthwhile paths that you can tread. I have seen that you have a bright mind. The exercise of that intelligence does not always demand a fit body to support it. Turn your thoughts to how you can still lead a useful life, and focus your will towards it.

‘It has not been easy for me to reach this decision. I hope you appreciate that I delayed it as long as I possibly could, hoping against hope that I was wrong. My research and reading has led me to discover at least three other cases, which, although poorly documented, indicate that your reaction to the plague is a rare but not unique phenomenon.

‘Although I am sure you are little inclined to do so at this time, I urge you to remain in contact with me. You have the opportunity to turn your misfortune into a benefit for the medical profession. If you will continue to chart weekly your increases in weight and girth, while keeping a record of your consumption of food, and if you will send me that information every two months, it would be of great benefit to my study of the plague and its manifestations after the disease stage has passed. In this, you could serve your king and the military, for I am certain that every bit of information we gather about this pestilence will eventually become the ammunition we use to defeat it.

In the good god’s light,

Dr Jakib Amicas’

I folded his letter carefully, though my strongest impulse was to rip it to pieces. The gall of the man, to dash my hopes and then suggest that I pass my idle time in helping him to further his ambitions by graphing and charting my misfortune! I moved very slowly as I put all the documents and letters back in meticulous order and slid them back in the envelope. When it was done, I looked at it. A coffin for my dreams.

I could not finish reading Epiny’s letter. I tried, but it was all prattle about her new life with Spink. She liked taking care of the chickens and gathering the eggs warm from the nests. Good. I was glad for her. At least someone was still contemplating a future, even if it was one that involved chickens. I gathered my papers, left the parlour and slowly climbed the stairs to my room.

In the days that followed, I moved like a ghost in my old home. I had entered an endless tunnel of black despair. This day-to-day existence of meaningless tasks was my future. I had nothing beyond this to anticipate. I hid from my father, and my sisters scrupulously aided me in avoiding them. Once, when I encountered Yaril in the hallway, an expression of disgust contorted her face and anger filled her eyes. Never before had she looked so much like my father. I stared at her, horrified. She made a great show of holding her skirts away from me as she hurried past me and into the music room. She closed the door loudly.

I considered cornering her and demanding to know when she had become such a foul little chit. Growing up, I had indulged her, and often shielded her from my father’s wrath. Her betrayal stung me as no other. I took two strides after her.

‘Nevare.’

My mother’s soft voice came from behind me. Surprised, I spun around.

‘Let her go, Nevare,’ my mother suggested softly.

Irrationally, I turned my anger on her. ‘She behaves as if my weight is a personal insult to her, with no thought of how it affects my life or what I’ve lost as a consequence of what has befallen me. Does she think I did this deliberately? Do you think I want to look like this?’

My voice had risen to a shout. Nevertheless, my mother answered me softly. ‘No, Nevare. I don’t think you do.’ Her grey eyes met mine steadily. She stood before me, small and arrow straight, just as she stood when confronting my father. At that thought, my anger trickled out of me like liquid from a punctured water skin. I felt worse than emptied. Impotent. Humiliated by my show of temper. I hung my head and shame washed through me.

I think my mother knew it.

‘Come, Nevare. Let us find a quiet place and talk for a bit.’

I nodded heavily and followed her.

We avoided the music room, and the parlour where Elisi sat reading poetry. Instead, she led me down the hall to a small prayer room adjacent to the women’s portion of our household chapel. I remembered the room well, though I had not entered it since I was a child and in my mother’s daily care.

The room had not changed. A half-circle of stone bench faced the meditation wall. At one end of the bench a small, well-tended brazier burned smokelessly. At the other end, a stone bowl held a pool of placid water. A mural of the good god’s blessings covered the meditation wall, with niches in the art where offerings of incense could be set. Two alcoves already held glowing bars of incense. A dark green mint-scented bar burned low in a niche painted like a harvest basket, an offering for good crops. A fat black wedge released the scent of anise into the air as it glimmered, nearly spent, in the niche for good health that hovered over a cherubic child’s head.

With housewifely efficiency, my mother removed the anise incense with a pair of black tongs reserved for that task. She carried it to the small worship pool; it hissed as she dunked it in, and she stood a moment in reverent silence as the remains of the anise brick settled to the bottom. She took a clean white cloth from a stack of carefully folded linens and carefully wiped the alcove clean.

‘Choose the next offering, Nevare,’ she invited me over her shoulder. She smiled as she said those words and I almost smiled back. As a child, I had always vied with my sisters for the privilege of choosing. I had forgotten how important that had once been to me.

There was a special cabinet with one hundred small drawers, each holding a different scent of incense. I stood before the intricately carved front, considering all my choices and then asked, ‘Why are you sacrificing for health? Who is ill?’

She looked surprised. ‘Why – I burn it for you, of course. That you may recover from what you have— what has befallen you.’

I stared at her, torn between being touched by her concern and being annoyed that she thought her prayers and silly scented offerings could help me. An instant later I recognized that I did think her incense sacrifices were silly. They were play-acting, religion by rote, an offering that cost us so little as to be insignificant. How, I suddenly wanted to know, did burning a brick of leaves and oil benefit the good god? What sort of a foolish merchant god did we worship, that he dispensed blessings in exchange for smoke? I felt suddenly that my life teetered on an eroded foundation. I did not even know when I had stopped having confidence in such things. I only knew it was gone. The protection of the good god had once stood between all darkness and me. I had thought it a fortress wall; it had been a lace curtain.

The elaborately carved, gilded and lacquered cabinet before me had once seemed a gleaming casket of mystery. ‘It’s just furniture,’ I said aloud. ‘A chest of drawers full of incense blocks. Mother, nothing in here is going to save me. I don’t know what will. If I did, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it. I’d even be willing to offer blood sacrifice to the old gods if I thought it would work. Cecile Poronte’s family does.’ It was the first time I’d mentioned that to anyone. In the days since the wedding, I’d felt no inclination to share any conversation at all with my father.

My mother paled at my words. Then she carefully corrected me. ‘Cecile is a Burvelle now, Nevare. Cecile Burvelle.’ She stepped past me and opened the sage drawer of the cabinet. Sage for wisdom. She took out a fist-sized greenish brick of incense and carried it to the worship brazier. With gilded tongs, she held it to the slumbering coals, stooping to blow through pursed lips to wake their ashed red to glowing scarlet. A slender tendril of smoke rose to scent the room and one corner of the sage brick caught the charcoal’s red kiss. She did not look at me as she bore the sage incense to the alcove for health and tucked it safely inside.

She stood for a moment in silent prayer. Habit urged me to join her there and I suddenly wished I could. But my soul felt dry and bereft of faith. No words of praise or entreaty welled in me, only hopelessness. When my mother turned aside from the mural, I said, ‘You knew the Porontes worship the old gods, didn’t you? Does father know?’

She shook her head impatiently. I don’t know if she was answering my question or dismissing it. ‘Cecile is a Burvelle now,’ she insisted. ‘It no longer matters what she did in the past. She will worship the good god alongside us every Sixday, and her children will be raised to do the same.’

‘Did you see the dead birds?’ I asked her abruptly. ‘Did you see that ghastly little carousel in their garden?’

She pursed her lips as she came to take a seat on the bench. She patted a space beside her and I sat down reluctantly. She spoke softly. ‘They invited me to witness it. Cecile’s mother sent an invitation to your sisters and me. The words were cloaked but I understood what it was about. We arrived too late. Deliberately.’ She paused for a moment and then advised me sincerely, ‘Nevare, let this go. I don’t think that they truly worship the old gods. It is more a tradition, a form to be observed rather than any true belief. The women of their family have always made such offerings. Cecile made the Bride’s Gift to Orandula, the old god of balances. The slain birds are a gift to the carrion bird incarnation of Orandula. His own creatures are killed and then offered back to him to feed his own. It’s a balance. The hope is that the woman offering the sacrifice will not lose any children to stillbirth or cradle death.’

‘Does trading dead birds for live children make any sense to you?’ I demanded. And then, rudely I added, ‘Do you really find any sense in burning a block of leaves to make the good god give us what we ask?’

She looked at me strangely. ‘That’s an odd question to be troubling a soldier son, Nevare. But perhaps it is because you were born to be a soldier that you ask it. You are applying the logic of man to a god. The good god is not bound by our human logic or measurements, son. On the contrary, we are bound by his. We are not gods, to know what pleases a god. We were given the Holy Writ, so that we might worship the good god as will please him, rather than offering him things that might please a man. I, for one, am very grateful. Imagine a god who dealt as men do: what would he demand of a bride in exchange for future children? What might such a god ask of you as recompense to restore your lost beauty? Would you want to pay it?’

She was trying to make me think, but her last words stung me. ‘Beauty? Lost beauty? This is not a matter of vanity, Mother! I am trapped in this bulky body and nothing I do seems to change it. I cannot put on my boots or get out of bed without being bound by it. How can you assume you can even imagine what it is like for me to be a prisoner in my own flesh.’

She looked at me silently for a few moments. Then a small smile passed her lips. ‘You were too small to remember my pregnancies with Yaril and Vanze. Perhaps you cannot even remember what I looked like before my last two children were born.’ She lifted her arms as if inviting me to consider it. I glanced at her and away. Time and childbearing had thickened her body, but she was my mother. She was supposed to look that way. I could, vaguely, recall a younger, slender mother who had chased me laughing through the freshly planted garden in our early years at Widevale. And I did recall her last pregnancy with Vanze. I most recalled how she had lumbered through the rooms of the house on her painfully swollen feet.

‘But that’s not the same thing at all,’ I retorted. ‘The changes then and now, those are natural changes. What has befallen me is completely unnatural. I feel as if I am trapped in some Dark Evening costume that I cannot shed. You are so caught up in looking at my body that all of you, Father, Yaril and even you, cannot perceive that within I am still Nevare! The only thing that has changed is my body. But I am treated as if I am these walls of fat rather than the person trapped behind them.’

My mother allowed a small silence to settle between us before she observed, ‘You seem very angry at us, Nevare.’

‘Well, of course I am! Who would not be, in these circumstances?’

Again she made that quiet space before suggesting in a reasonable voice, ‘Perhaps you should direct that anger against your real enemy, to add greater strength to your will to change yourself.’

‘My will?’ My anger surged again. ‘Mother, it has nothing to do with my will. My discipline has not failed. I work from dawn to dusk. I eat less than I did as a child. And still, I continue to grow heavier. Did not Father speak to you about Dr Amicas’s letter? The doctor thinks that this unnatural weight gain is a result of the plague. If it is, what can I do about it? If I had survived a pox, no one would fault me for a scarred face. If the Speck plague had left me trembling and thin, people would offer me sympathy. This is exactly the same, yet I am despised for it.’ It was horribly depressing to know that not even my mother understood what I was going through. I had hoped that my father would have explained my fat as a medical condition to my family and to Carsina’s parents. But he had told no one. No wonder Yaril had no sympathy for me. If my mother, my oldest and staunchest ally, deserted me, I would be completely alone in facing my fate.

She pulled out the last block of support, speaking to me as if I were seven and caught in an obvious falsehood.

‘Nevare. I watched you eat at Rosse’s wedding. How can you say that you eat less than you did as a child? You devoured enough food to sustain a man for a week.’

‘But—’ I felt as if she had knocked the breath from my lungs. Her calm eyes so gently pierced me as she met my gaze.

‘I don’t know what happened to you at the Academy, my son. But you cannot hide from it behind a wall of fat. I know nothing of the doctor’s letter to your father. But I do know that what I have seen of how you eat now would cause this change in any man.’

‘You can’t believe I eat like that at every meal!’

She kept her calm. ‘Do not shout at me, Nevare. I am still your mother. And why else would you hide from your family at every meal if not because your gluttony shamed you? As it should. That shame is a positive sign. But instead of concealing your weakness, you must control it, my dear.’

I rose abruptly. I towered over her and for the first time in my life, I saw alarm cross my mother’s face as she looked up at me. She knew that I could have crushed her.

I spoke carefully, biting off each word. ‘I am not a glutton, Mother. I did nothing to deserve this fate. It’s a medical condition. You wrong me to think so poorly of me. I am insulted.’

With what dignity I could muster, I turned and walked away from her.

‘Nevare.’

It had been years since I had heard her speak my name in that tone. It was to my anger as iron was to magic. Despite my inclination, I turned back to her. Her eyes were bright with both tears and anger.

‘A moment ago, you said that nothing in this room could save you. You are wrong. You are my son, and I will save you. Whatever it is that has caused such a change in you, I will oppose it. I will not back down, I will not flee, and I will not give up on you. I am your mother, and for as long as we both live, that is so. Believe in me, son. I believe in you. And I will not let you ruin your life. No matter how often you turn away from me, I will still be here. I will not fail you. Believe that, son.’

I looked at her. She held herself straight as a sword and despite the tears that now tracked down her cheeks, her strength radiated from her. I wanted to believe that she could save me. So often when I was small, she had swept in and stood between my father’s wrath and me. So often she had been the steadying influence, the true compass for me. There was only one answer I could give her. ‘I will try, Mother.’ I turned and left her there, with her incense and her smoke and her good god.

As I left the room, I knew I was as alone as I had ever been. Regardless of my mother’s good intentions, my battle to regain my life would be a solitary one. She was my mother and she was strong but the magic was like an infection in my blood. Oppose it however she might, she could not cure me. The magic had taken me, and I would have to battle it alone. I sought my room.

I found no solace there. The neglected letters still rested on the desk. I longed to sit down and immerse myself in them but I had no heart to answer them just now. My bed complained as I lay down on it. I stared around at the bare walls and simple furnishings and the single window. It had always been a severe room, a place of minimal comfort, a room that would train a boy to embrace a soldier’s life. Now it was a bare cell. In this room, I would live out the rest of my days. Every night I would lie down here alone to sleep. Every morning, I would rise to do my father’s bidding, and when he was gone, I would have to accept Rosse’s authority over me. What else was there for me? For a flashing moment, I thought of running away. I had a childish image of myself galloping away on Sirlofty, going east towards the end of the King’s Road and the mountains beyond. The thought lifted me and for an instant, I actually considered rising from my bed and leaving that night. My heart raced at the wild plan. Then I came to my senses and marvelled at my foolish impulse. No. I was not going to give up my dream just yet. As long as I had my mother’s belief to sustain me, I would stay here. I would resist the magic and try to reclaim my life. I closed my eyes to that thought and without intending to, drifted off into a deep sleep.

I did not dream. The awareness that flowed through me was as unlike dreaming as waking is to sleeping. Magic worked in me, like yeast working in bread batter. I felt it quicken, and grow, swelling in my veins. It gathered strength from my body, roiling through my flesh, drawing on the resources it had gathered against this necessity. With growing trepidation, I recognized that I had felt this sensation before. The magic had moved in me before, and it had acted. What had it done, without my knowledge or consent? I recalled the young man on the jankship, and how he had fallen after my angry words with him. That was one time, but there had been others.

The massed magic did something.

The languages I knew did not have words to express it. Could my flesh shout out a word, voicelessly, soundlessly? Could the magic, a thing that resided elsewhere than the physical world, speak a command through me, so that somewhere, something it desired happened? That was what it felt like. Dimly I sensed that something had begun. The first event that would trigger a chain reaction of responses had occurred. Finished, the magic pooled to stillness in me. Weariness washed through my body. I sank into an exhausted sleep.

When I awoke, the sun had gone down. I’d slept the rest of the day away. I got up quietly and crept down the stairs. At the bottom, I paused to listen. I heard my father’s strident voice in his study. Rosse was gone; I wondered whom he was lecturing. After a moment, I heard my mother’s soft response. Ah. I walked quickly past that door, and past the music room where Elisi drew a melancholy melody from her harp. The young fellow at Rosse’s wedding had made no offer for her. Was that my fault? The house was a pool of unhappiness and I was the source of it. I reached the door and strode out into the night.

I wandered through the dark familiar garden and sat down on a bench. I tried to grasp that my future was gone. I could think of nowhere to go tonight and nothing to do. The ferry stopped at night, so I couldn’t cross the river to Burvelle’s Landing. I’d long ago read most of the books in our family library. I had no projects. I had no friends to visit. This was a foretaste of the rest of my life. I could do manual labour on the holdings and then wander aimlessly about at night. I’d be a shadow in my old home, a useless extra son and nothing more.

I gave myself a shake to rid my head of melancholy foolishness. I hitched up my trousers, left the garden and walked over to the menservants’ quarters. My father had built them as a structure separate from the house, and my mother still complained that it looked more like a military barracks than servants’ quarters. She was right, and I was sure that it was deliberately so. One door led into a long open bunkroom for seasonal workers. At the other end of the structure, there were private apartments for married servants and rooms for our permanent help. I went to Sergeant Duril’s door. Strange to say, in all the years he’d taught me, I’d only rapped on it half a dozen times.

For a moment I hesitated before it. For all I knew of the man who had taught me, there was much I didn’t know. I wondered if he was even awake or if he was off in the Landing. At last I damned myself for a foolish coward, and knocked firmly on the door.

Silence from within. Then I heard the scrape of a chair and footsteps. The door opened to me, spilling lamplight into the night. Duril’s eyebrows shot up at the sight of me. ‘Nevare, is it? What brings you here?’

He was in his undershirt and trousers, with no boots on. I’d caught him getting ready for bed. I realized that I’d grown taller than Sergeant Duril. I was so accustomed to him in his boots or on horseback. He had no hat on; the substantial bald spot on his pate surprised me. I tried not to stare at it while he tried not to stare at my stomach. I groped for something to say other than that I was horribly lonely and would never be able to go back to the Academy.

‘Has your saddle cinch been coming loose lately?’ I asked him.

He squinted at me for a second, and then I saw his jaw loosen, as if he’d just realized something. ‘Come in, Nevare,’ he invited me, and stood back from the door.

His room revealed him. There was a potbellied stove in one corner of the room, but no fire at this time of year. A disassembled long gun dominated the table in the room. He had shelves, but instead of books they held the clutter of his life. Interesting rocks were mixed with cheap medical remedies for backache and sore feet, a good-luck carving of a frog jostled up against a large seashell and a stuffed owl, and a wadded shirt awaited mending next to a spool of thread. Through an open door, I glimpsed his neatly made up bed in the next room. A bare room for a bare life, I thought to myself, and then grimaced as I realized that his room had more character than mine did. I imagined myself as Sergeant Duril years from now, no wife or children of my own, teaching a soldier son not mine, a solitary man.

The two of us filled the small room and I felt more uncomfortable with my bulk than ever. ‘Sit down,’ he invited me, drawing out one of his chairs. I placed myself carefully on it, testing my weight against it. He pulled out the other chair and sat down. With no awkwardness at all, he launched into talk.

‘My cinch has come loose three times in the last month. And yesterday, when I was helping the crew jerk some big rocks out, a line I knew I’d tied and made the “hold fast” sign over came loose. Now, I can’t remember that ever happening to me before. I’m getting old, and thought maybe I wasn’t making the sign or maybe I was making it sloppy. Not a big thing to worry about, I told myself. But you seem to think it is. Why? Has your cinch been coming loose lately?’

I nodded. ‘Ever since the Dancing Spindle stopped dancing. I think the plains magic is failing, Sergeant. But I also think that,’ and here I stopped, to slap my chest and then gestured at my belly, ‘that somehow this is a result of it.’

He knit his brow. ‘You’re fat because of magic.’ He enunciated the words as if to be sure that he hadn’t mistaken what I’d said.

Stated baldly, it sounded worse than silly. It sounded like a child’s feeble excuse, a cry of ‘look what you made me do!’ when a stack of blocks toppled. I looked down at the edge of his table and wished I hadn’t come and asked my foolish question. ‘Never mind,’ I said quickly, and stood to go.

‘Sit down.’ He didn’t speak the words as a command, but they were stronger than an invitation. His gaze met my eyes squarely. ‘Any explanation might be better than none, which is what I’ve got right now. And I’d like to know what you mean when you say the Spindle stopped dancing.’

Slowly I took my seat again. That story was as good a place to begin as any. ‘Have you ever seen the Dancing Spindle?’

He shrugged as he took his seat across the table from me. He picked up a rag and started cleaning gun parts. ‘Twice. It’s impressive, isn’t it?’

‘Did you think it moved when you saw it?’

‘Oh, yes. Well, no, I mean I didn’t believe it was moving when I saw it, but it sure looked like it was, from a distance.’

‘I got up close to it and it still seemed to me like it was moving. And then some idiot with a knife and a desire to carve his initials on something stopped it.’

I expected him to snort in disbelief, or laugh. Instead he nodded. ‘Iron. Cold iron could stop it. But what’s that got to do with my cinch coming undone?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. It seemed to me that… well, I guessed that maybe if iron stopped the Spindle, the plains magic might all go away, too.’

He took a little breath of dismay. After a moment, he wet his lips and then asked me carefully, ‘Nevare. What do you know?’

I sat for a time and didn’t say anything. Then I said, ‘It started with Dewara.’

He nodded to himself. ‘I’m not surprised. Go on.’ And so, for the first time, I told someone the whole tale of how I’d been captured by the plains magic, and how it had affected me at the Academy and the plague, and how I thought I had freed myself and then how the Spindle had swept me up and showed me the power it held before a boy’s mischief and an other self I could not control had stopped the Spindle’s dancing.

Duril was a good listener. He didn’t ask questions, but he grunted in the right places and looked properly impressed when I told him about Epiny’s séance. Most important to me, as I told my story, he never once looked as if he thought I was lying.

He only stopped me once in my telling, and that was when I spoke of the Dust Dance at the Dark Evening carnival. ‘Your hand lifted and gave the signal? You were the one who told them to start?’

I hung my head in shame but I didn’t lie. ‘Yes. I did. Or the Speck part of me did. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Oh, Nevare. To be used against your own folk like that. This is bad, boy, much worse than I’d feared. If you’ve got the right of it at all, it has to be stopped. Or you could be the downfall of us all.’

To hear him speak the true magnitude of what I’d done froze me. I sat, staring through him, to a horrible future in which everyone knew I’d betrayed Gernia. Wittingly or unwittingly didn’t matter when one contemplated that sort of treachery.

Duril leaned forward and jabbed me lightly with his finger. ‘Finish the story, Nevare. Then we’ll think what we can do.’

When I had finished the whole telling, he nodded sagely and leaned back in his chair. ‘Actually, I’ve heard about those Speck wizards, the big fat ones. They call them Great Men. Or Great Women, I guess, though I never heard of a female one. Fellow that spent most of his soldiering days out at Gettys told me. He claimed he’d seen one, and to hear him tell it, the man was the size of a horse, and proud as could be of it. That soldier told me that a Great Man is supposed to be all filled up with magic, and that’s why he’s so big.’

I thought that over. ‘The Fat Man in the freak show claimed he got so fat because he’d had Speck plague. And the doctor at the Academy, Dr Amicas, said that putting on weight like this is a very rare side-effect of the plague, but not completely unknown. So how could that have anything to do with magic?’

Sergeant Duril shrugged. ‘What is magic anyway? Do you understand it? I don’t. I know I’ve seen a few things that I can’t explain any way that makes sense or can be proved. And maybe that’s why I say that they were magic. Look at the “keep fast” charm. I don’t know how it works or why it should work. All I know is that for a lot of years, it worked and it worked well. And lately it doesn’t seem to work as well. So, somehow that magic is broken now. Maybe. Or maybe I’m not as strong as I used to be when I tighten a cinch, or maybe my cinch strap is getting old and worn. You could explain it away a thousand ways, Nevare. Or maybe you can just say, “it was magic and it doesn’t work any more”. Or maybe you could go to someone who believes in magic and thinks he knows how it works and ask him.’

That last seemed a real proposal from him. ‘Who?’ I asked him.

He crossed his arms on the table. ‘It all started with Dewara, didn’t it?’

‘Ah, well.’ I leaned back in his chair; it creaked a warning at me. I sat up straight. ‘It’s useless to try and find him. My father tried for months, right after he sent me home in shreds. Either none of his people knew where he was, or they weren’t telling. My father offered rewards and made threats. No one told him anything.’

‘Maybe I know a different way of asking,’ Duril suggested. ‘Sometimes coin isn’t the best way to buy something. Sometimes you have to offer more.’

‘Such as what?’ I demanded, but he shook his head and grinned, enjoying that he knew more than I did. Looking back on it, I suspect the old soldier had liked being my teacher. Supervising men clearing a field of rocks was no task for an old trooper like him. ‘Let me try a few things, Nevare. I’ll let you know if I have any success.’

I nodded, refusing to hope. ‘Thanks for listening to me, Sergeant Duril. I don’t think anyone else would have believed me.’

‘Well, sometimes it’s flattering to have someone want to tell you something. And you know, Nevare, I haven’t said I believed a word of any of this. You have to admit it’s pretty far-fetched.’

‘But—’

‘And I haven’t said I disbelieve any of it, either.’ He shook his head, smiling at my confusion. ‘Nevare, I’ll tell you something. There’s more than one way to look at the world. That’s what I was getting at, about the magic. To us, it’s magic. Maybe to someone else, it’s as natural as rain falling from clouds. And maybe to them, some of what we do is magic because it doesn’t make reasonable sense in their world. Do you get what I’m trying to tell you?’

‘Not really. But I’m trying.’ I attempted a smile. ‘I’m ready to try anything. My only other idea was to run away east on Sirlofty. To the mountains.’

He snorted a laugh. ‘Run away to the mountains. And then what? Don’t be a fool, Nevare. You stay here and you keep on trying. And let me try a few things, too. Meanwhile, I suggest you do things your da’s way. Get out and move. Show him you’re still Nevare, if you can. Don’t make him angrier than he already is. In his own way, he’s a fair man. Try it his way, and if it doesn’t work, maybe he’ll concede it’s not your fault.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘You know I am.’

I looked at him and nodded slowly. A spark had come back into his eyes. Purpose burned there. Perhaps I had done as much for him by coming to him as he had done for me by simply listening.

I thanked him and there we left it, for that night.