Forest Mage

ROBIN HOBB

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.voyager-books.co.uk

This paperback edition 2007

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2006

Copyright © Robin Hobb 2006

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019 Cover illustraion © Jackie Morris, Shutterstock.com (background)

Map by Andrew Ashton

Robin Hobb asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.

Ebook edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780007279463

Version 2019-05-14

Dedication

To Alexsandrea and Jadyn, my companions through a tough year. I promise never to cut and run.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Chapter One: Forest Dreams

Chapter Two: Homeward Bound

Chapter Three: Spindle Dance

Chapter Four: The Fast

Chapter Five: Rosse’s Wedding

Chapter Six: A Day Of Letters

Chapter Seven: Dewara

Chapter Eight: Judgment

Chapter Nine: Plague

Chapter Ten: Flight

Chapter Eleven: Franner’s Bend

Chapter Twelve: The King’s Road

Chapter Thirteen: Buel Hitch

Chapter Fourteen: Journey To Gettys

Chapter Fifteen: Gettys

Chapter Sixteen: The Cemetery

Chapter Seventeen: Routine Duty

Chapter Eighteen: Visitor

Chapter Nineteen: Winter

Chapter Twenty: Spring

Chapter Twenty-One: Olikea

Chapter Twenty-Two: Fence Posts

Chapter Twenty-Three: Two Women

Chapter Twenty-Four: An Envelope

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Road

Chapter Twenty-Six: Dancers

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Ambush

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Coffins

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Messenger

Chapter Thirty: The Apology

Chapter Thirty-One: Accusations

Chapter Thirty-Two: Lisana

Chapter Thirty-Three: Court Martial

Chapter Thirty-Four: Surrender

Acknowledgment

About the Author

Also By Robin Hobb

About the Publisher

Map

ONE

Forest Dreams

There is a fragrance in the forest. It does not come from a single flower or leaf. It is not the rich aroma of dark crumbly earth or the sweetness of fruit that has passed from merely ripe to mellow and rich. The scent I recalled was a combination of all these things, and of sunlight touching and awakening their essences and of a very slight wind that blended them perfectly. She smelled like that.

We lay together in a bower. Above us, the distant top of the canopy swayed gently, and the beaming rays of sunlight danced over our bodies in time with them. Vines and creepers that draped from the stretching branches above our heads formed the sheltering walls of our forest pavilion. Deep moss cushioned my bare back, and her soft arm was my pillow. The vines curtained our trysting place with their foliage and large, pale-green flowers. The stamen pushed past the fleshy lips of the blossoms and were heavy with yellow pollen. Large butterflies with wings of deep orange traced with black were investigating the flowers. One insect left a drooping blossom, alighted on my lover’s shoulder and walked over her soft dappled flesh. I watched it unfurl a coiled black tongue to taste the perspiration that dewed the forest woman’s skin, and envied it.

I lay in indescribable comfort, content beyond passion. I lifted a lazy hand to impede the butterfly’s progress. Fearlessly, it stepped onto my fingers. I raised it to be an ornament in my lover’s thick and tousled hair. She opened her eyes at my touch. She had hazel eyes, green mingling with soft brown. She smiled. I leaned up on my elbow and kissed her. Her ample breasts pressed against me, startling in their softness.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said softly, tilting back from the kiss. ‘I’m so sorry I had to kill you.’

Here eyes were sad but still fond. ‘I know,’ she replied. There was no rancour in her voice. ‘Be at peace with it, soldier’s boy. All will come true as it was meant to be. You belong to the magic now, and whatever it must have you do, you will do.’

‘But I killed you. I loved you and I killed you.’

She smiled gently. ‘Such as we do not die as others do.’

‘Do you yet live then?’ I asked her. I pulled my body back from hers and looked down between us at the mound of her belly. It gave the lie to her words. My cavalla sabre had slashed her wide open. Her entrails spilled from that gash and rested on the moss between us. They were pink and liverish grey, coiling like fat worms. They had piled up against my bare legs, warm and slick. Her blood smeared my genitals. I tried to scream and could not. I struggled to push away from her but we had grown fast together.

‘Nevare!’

I woke with a shudder and sat up in my bunk, panting silently through my open mouth. A tall pale wraith stood over me. I gave a muted yelp before I recognized Trist. ‘You were whimpering in your sleep,’ Trist told me. I compulsively brushed at my thighs, and then lifted my hands close to my face. In the dim moonlight through the window, they were clean of blood.

‘It was only a dream,’ Trist assured me.

‘Sorry,’ I muttered, ashamed. ‘Sorry I was noisy.’

‘It’s not like you’re the only one to have nightmares.’ The thin cadet sat down on the foot of my bed. Once he had been whiplash lean and limber. Now he was skeletal and moved like a stiff old man. He coughed twice and then caught his breath. ‘Know what I dream?’ He didn’t wait for my reply. ‘I dream I died of Speck plague. Because I did, you know. I was one of the ones who died, and then revived. But I dream that instead of holding my body in the infirmary, Dr Amicas let them put me out with the corpses. In my dream, they toss me in the pit-grave, and they throw the quicklime down on me. I dream I wake up down there, under all those bodies that stink of piss and vomit, with the lime burning into me. I try to climb out, but they just keep throwing more bodies down on top of me. I’m clawing and pushing my way past them, trying to get out of the pit through all that rotting flesh and bones. And then I realize that the body I’m climbing over is Nate. He’s all dead and decaying but he opens his eyes and he asks, “Why me, Trist? Why me and not you?”’ Trist gave a sudden shudder and huddled his shoulders.

‘They’re only dreams, Trist,’ I whispered. All around us, the other first-years that had survived the plague slumbered on. Someone coughed in his sleep. Someone else muttered, yipped like a puppy and then grew still. Trist was right. Few of us slept well anymore. ‘They’re only bad dreams. It’s all over. The plague passed us by. We survived.’

‘Easy for you to say. You recovered. You’re fit and hearty.’ He stood up. His nightshirt hung on his lanky frame. In the dim dormitory, his eyes were dark holes. ‘Maybe I survived, but the plague didn’t pass me by. I’ll live with what it did to me to the end of my days. You think I’ll ever lead a charge, Nevare? I can barely manage to keep standing through morning assembly. I’m finished as a soldier. Finished before I started. I’ll never live the life I expected to lead.’

Trist stood up. He shuffled away from my bed and back to his. He was breathing noisily by the time he sat down on his bunk.

Slowly I lay back down. I heard Trist cough again, wheeze and then lie down. It was no comfort to me that he, too, was tormented with nightmares. I thought of Tree Woman and shuddered again. She is dead, I assured myself. She can no longer reach into my life. I killed her. I killed her and I took back into myself the part of my spirit that she’d stolen and seduced. She can’t control me any more. It was only a dream. I took a deeper, steadying breath, turned my pillow to the cool side and burrowed into it. I dared not close my eyes lest I fall back into that nightmare. I deliberately focused my mind on the present, and pushed my night terror away from me.

All around me in the darkness, my fellow survivors slept. Bringham House’s dormitory was a long open room, with a large window at each end. Two neat rows of bunks lined the long walls. There were forty beds, but only thirty-one were full. Colonel Rebin, the King’s Cavalla Academy commander, had combined the sons of old nobles with the sons of battle lords, and recalled the cadets who had been culled earlier in the year, but even that measure had not completely replenished our depleted ranks. The colonel might have declared us equals but I suspected that only time and familiarity would erase the social gulf between the sons of established noble families and those of us whose fathers could claim a title only because the King had elevated them in recognition of their wartime service.

Rebin mingled us out of necessity. The Speck plague that had roared through the Academy had devastated us. Our class of first-years had been halved. The second-and third-years had taken almost as heavy a loss. Instructors as well as students had perished in that unnatural onslaught. Colonel Rebin was doing the best he could to reorganize the Academy and put it back on a regular schedule, but we were still licking our wounds. Speck plague had culled a full generation of future officers. Gernia’s military would feel that loss keenly in the years to come. And that had been what the Specks intended when they used their magic to send their disease against us.

Morale at the Academy was subdued as we staggered forward into the new year. It wasn’t just the number of deaths the plague had visited on us, though that was bad enough. The plague had come among us and slaughtered us at will, an enemy that all of our training could not prevail against. Strong, brave young men who had hoped to distinguish themselves on battlefields had instead died in their beds, soiled with vomit and urine and whimpering feebly for their mothers. It is never good to remind soldiers of their own mortality. We had believed ourselves young heroes, full of energy, courage and lust for life. The plague had revealed to us that we were mortals, and just as vulnerable as the weakest babe-in-arms.

The first time Colonel Rebin had assembled us on the parade ground in our old formations, he had ordered us all ‘at ease’ and then commanded us to look around us and see how many of our fellows had fallen. He then gave a speech, telling us that the plague was the first battle we had passed through, and that just as the plague had not discriminated between old nobility and new nobility, neither would a blade or a bullet. As he formed us up into our new condensed companies, I pondered his words. I doubted that he truly realized that the Speck plague had not been a random contagion but a true strike against us, as telling as any military attack. The Specks had sent ‘Dust Dancers’ from the far eastern frontiers of Gernia all the way to our capital city, for the precise purpose of sowing their disease amongst our nobility and our future military leaders. They had succeeded in thinning our ranks. If not for me, their success would have been complete. Sometimes I took pride in that.

At other times, I recalled that, if not for me, they never would have been able to attack us as they had.

I had tried, without success, to shrug off the guilt I felt. I’d been the unwilling and unwitting partner of the Specks and Tree Woman. It was not my fault, I told myself, that I’d fallen into her power. Years ago, my father had entrusted me to a plainsman warrior for training. Dewara had nearly killed me with his ‘instruction’. And towards the end of my time with him, he’d decided to ‘make me Kidona’ by inducting me into the magic of his people.

Foolishly, I’d allowed him to drug me and take me into the supernatural world of the Kidona. He’d told me I could win honour and glory by doing battle with the ancient enemy of his people. But what confronted me at the end of a series of trials had been a fat old woman sitting in the shade of a huge tree. I was my father’s soldier son, trained in the chivalry of the cavalla. I could not draw sword against an old woman. Due to that misplaced gallantry, I had fallen to her. She had ‘stolen’ me from Dewara and made me her pawn. A part of me had remained with her in that spirit world. While I had grown and gone off to the Academy and begun my education to be an officer in my King’s Cavalla, he had become her acolyte. Tree Woman had made that part of me into a Speck in all things but having speckled skin. Through him, she spied on my people, and hatched her terrible plan to destroy us with the Speck plague. Masquerading as captive dancers, her emissaries came to Old Thares as part of the Dark Evening carnival and unleashed their disease upon us.

My Speck self had seized control of me. I’d signalled the Dust Dancers to let them know they had reached their goal. The carnivalgoers who surrounded them thought they had come to witness an exhibition of primitive dance. Instead, they’d breathed in the disease with the flung dust. When my fellow cadets and I left the carnival, we were infected. And the disease had spread throughout all of Old Thares.

In my bed in the darkened dormitory, I rolled over and thumped my pillow back into shape. Stop thinking about how you betrayed your own people, I begged myself. Think instead of how you saved them.

And I had. In a terrible encounter born of my Speck plague fever, I had finally been able to cross back into her world and challenge her. Not only had I won back the piece of my soul she had stolen, but I had also slain her, slashing her belly wide open with the cold iron of my cavalla sabre. I severed her connection to our world. Her reign over me was over. I attributed my complete recovery from the Speck plague to my reclaiming the piece of my spirit she had stolen. I had regained my health and vitality, and even put on flesh. In a word, I had become whole again.

In the days and nights that followed my return to the Academy and the resumption of a military routine, I discovered that as I reintegrated that other, foreign self, I absorbed his memories as well. His recollections of the Tree Woman and her world were the source of my beautiful dreams of walking in untouched forest in the company of an amazing woman. I felt as if the twin halves of my being had parted, followed differing roads, and now had converged once more into a single self. The very fact that I accepted this was so, and tried to absorb those alien emotions and opinions was a fair indicator that my other self was having a substantial impact on who I was becoming. The old Nevare, the self I knew so well, would have rejected such a melding as blasphemous and impossible.

I had killed the Tree Woman, and I did not regret doing it. She had extinguished lives for the sake of the ‘magic’ she could draw from their foundering souls. My best friend Spink and my cousin Epiny had been among her intended victims. I had killed Tree Woman to save them. I knew that I had also saved myself, and dozens of others. By daylight, I did not think of my deed at all, or if I did, I took satisfaction in knowing that I had triumphed and saved my friends. Yet my night thoughts were a different matter. When I hovered between wakefulness and sleep, a terrible sorrow and guilt would fill me. I mourned the creature I had slain, and missed her with a sorrow that hollowed me. My Speck self had been her lover and regretted that I’d slain her. But that was he, not me. In my dreams, he might briefly rule my thoughts. But by day, I was still Nevare Burvelle, my father’s son and a future officer in the King’s Cavalla. I had prevailed. I would continue to prevail. And I would do all I could, every day of my life, to make up for the traitorous deeds of my other self.

I sighed. I knew I would not sleep again that night. I tried to salve my conscience. The plague we had endured together had strengthened us in some ways. It had united us as cadets. There had been little opposition to Colonel Rebin’s insistence on ending the segregation of old nobles’ and new nobles’ sons. In the last few weeks I’d come to know better the ‘old noble’ first-years and found that, generally speaking, they were little different from my old patrol. The vicious rivalry that had separated us for the first part of the year had foundered and died. Now that we were truly one Academy and could socialize freely, I wondered what had made me loathe them so. They were perhaps more sophisticated and polished than their frontier brethren, but at the end of the day they were first-years, just like us, groaning under the same demerits and duty. Colonel Rebin had taken care to mix us well in our new patrols. Nonetheless, my closest friends were still the four surviving members of my old patrol.

Rory had stepped up to fill the position of best friend to me when Spink’s broken health had forced him to withdraw from the Academy. His devil-may-care attitude and frontier roughness were, I felt, a good counterweight to stiffness and rules. Whenever I lapsed into moodiness or became too pensive, Rory would rowdy me past it. He was the least changed of my old patrol mates. Trist was no longer the tall, handsome cadet he’d been. His brush with death had stolen his physical confidence. When he laughed now, it always had a bitter edge. Kort missed Natred acutely. He bowed under his grief, and though he had recovered his health, he was so sombre and dull without his friend that he seemed to be living but half a life.

Fat Gord was still as heavy as ever, but he seemed more content with his lot and also more dignified. When it looked as if the plague would doom everyone, Gord’s parents and his fiancée’s parents had allowed their offspring to wed early and taste what little of life they might be allowed. Fortune had smiled on them and they had come through the plague unscathed. Although Gord was still teased by all and despised by some for his fat, his new status as a married man agreed with him. He seemed to possess an inner contentment and sense of worth that childish taunts could not disturb. He spent every day of his liberty with his wife, and she sometimes came to visit him during the week. Cilima was a quiet little thing with huge black eyes and tumbling black curls. She was completely infatuated with ‘my dear Gordy’, as she always called him, and he was devoted to her. His marriage separated him from the rest of us; he now seemed much older than his fellow first-years. He went after his studies with a savage determination. I had always known that he was good at maths and engineering. He now revealed that in fact he was brilliant, and had till now merely been marking time. He no longer concealed his keen mind. I know that Colonel Rebin had summoned him once to discuss his future. He had taken Gord out of the first-year maths course and given him texts to study independently. We were still friends, but without Spink and his need for tutoring, we did not spend much time together. Our only long conversations seemed to occur when one or the other of us would receive a letter from Spink.

He wrote to both of us, more or less regularly. Spink himself had survived the plague but his military career had not. His handwriting wavered more than it had before his illness, and his letters were not long. He did not whine or bitterly protest his fate but the brevity of his missives spoke to me of dashed hopes. He had constant pain in his joints now, and headaches if he read or wrote for too long. Dr Amicas had given Spink a medical discharge from the Academy. Spink had married my cousin Epiny, who had nursed him through his illness. Together, they had set out for his brother’s holdings at distant Bitter Springs. The sedate life of a dutiful younger son was a far cry from Spink’s previous dreams of military glory and swift advancement through the ranks.

Epiny’s letters to me were naively revealing. Her inked words prattled as verbosely as her tongue did. I knew the names of the flowers, trees and plants she had encountered on her way to Bitter Springs, every day’s weather and each tiny event on her tedious journey there. Epiny had traded my uncle’s wealth and sophisticated home in Old Thares for the life of a frontier wife. She had once told me she thought she could be a good soldier’s wife, but it looked as if her final vocation would be caretaker for her invalid husband. Spink would have no career of his own. They would live on his brother’s estate, and at his brother’s sufferance. Fond as his elder brother was of Spink, it would still be difficult for him to stretch his paltry resources to care for his soldier-brother and his wife.

In the darkness, I shifted in my bunk. Trist was right, I decided. None of us would have the lives we’d expected. I muttered a prayer to the good god for all of us, and closed my eyes to get what sleep I could before dawn commanded us to rise.

I was weary when I rose the next morning with my fellows. Rory tried to jolly me into conversation at breakfast, but my answers were brief, and no one else at our table took up his banter. Our first class of the day was Engineering and Drafting. I’d enjoyed the course when Captain Maw instructed it, despite his prejudice against new noble sons like me. But the plague had carried Maw off, and a third-year cadet had been pressed into duty as our temporary instructor. Cadet Sergeant Vredo seemed to think that discipline was more important than information, and frequently issued demerits to cadets who dared to ask questions. Captain Maw’s untidy room full of maps and models had been gutted. Rows of desks and interminable lectures had replaced our experimentation. I kept my head down, did my work and learned little that was new to me.

In contrast, Cadet Lieutenant Bailey, was doing rather well instructing Military History, for he plainly loved his topic and had read widely beyond his course materials. His lecture that day was one that engaged me. He spoke about the impact of Gernian civilization on the plainspeople. In my father’s lifetime, Landsing, our traditional enemy, had finally dealt Gernia a sound defeat. Gernia had had to surrender our territory along the western seacoast. King Troven had had no choice but to turn his eyes to the east and the unclaimed territories there. Nomadic folk had long roamed the wide prairies and high plateaus of the interior lands, but they were primitive folk with no central government, no king, and few permanent settlements. When Gernia had begun to expand east, they had fought us, but their arrows and spears were no match for our modern weaponry. We had defeated them. There was no question in anyone’s mind that it was for their own good.

‘Since Gernia took charge of the plainsmen and their lands, they have begun to put down roots, to build real towns rather than their seasonal settlements, to pen their cattle and grow food rather than forage for it. The swift horses of great stamina that sustained the largely nomadic peoples have been replaced with sturdy oxen and plough-horses. For the first time, their children are experiencing the benefits of schooling and written language. Knowledge of the good god is being imparted to them, replacing the fickle magic they once relied on.’

Lofert waved a hand and then spoke before the instructor could acknowledge him. ‘But what about them, uh, Preservationists, sir? I heard my father telling one of his friends that they’d like to give all our land back to the plainsfolk and let them go back to living like wild animals.’

‘Wait to be acknowledged before you ask a question, Cadet. And your comment wasn’t phrased as a question. But I’ll answer it. There are people who feel that we had made radical changes to the lifestyles of the plainsmen too swiftly for them to adapt to them. In some instances, they are probably correct. In many others, they are, in my opinion, ignorant of the reality of what they suggest. But what we have to ask ourselves is, would it be better for them if we delayed offering them the benefits of civilization? Or would we simply be neglecting our duty to them?

‘Remember that the plainspeoples used to rely on their primitive magic and spells for survival. They can no longer do that. And having taken their magic from them, is it not our duty to replace it with modern tools for living? Iron, the backbone of our modernizing world, is anathema to their magic. The iron ploughs we gave them to till the land negate the “finding magic” of their foragers. Flint and steel have become a requirement, for their mages can no longer call forth flame from wood. The plainsmen are settled now and can draw water from wells. The water mages who used to lead the People to drinking places along their long migratory routes are no longer needed. The few windwizards who remained are solitary creatures, seldom glimpsed. Accounts of their flying rugs and their little boats that moved of themselves across calm water are already scoffed at as tales. I have no doubt that in another generation, they’ll be the stuff of legend.’

Cadet Lieutenant Bailey’s words saddened me. My mind wandered briefly. I recalled my own brief glimpse of a windwizard on the river during my journey to Old Thares. He had held his small sail wide to catch the wind he had summoned. His little craft had moved swiftly against the current. The sight had been both moving and mystical to me. Yet I also recalled with wrenching regret how it had ended. Some drunken fools on our riverboat had shot his sail full of holes. The iron shot they had used had disrupted the wizard’s spell as well. He’d been flung off his little vessel into the river. I believed he had drowned there, victim of the young noblemen’s jest.

‘Lead can kill a man, but it takes cold iron to defeat magic.’ My instructor’s words jolted me from my daydream.

‘That our superior civilization replaces the primitive order of the plainsmen is a part of the natural order,’ he lectured. ‘And lest you feel too superior, be mindful that we Gernians have been victims of advanced technology ourselves. When Landsing made their discovery that allowed their cannon and long guns to shoot farther and more accurately than ours, they were able to defeat us and take from us our seacoast provinces. Much as we resent that, it was natural that once they had achieved a military technology that was superior to our own, they would take what they wished from us. Keep that in mind, Cadets. We are entering an age of technology.

‘The same principle applies to our conquest of the plains. Shooting lead bullets at plains warriors, we were able to maintain our borders by force of arms, but we could not expand them. It was only when some forward-thinking man realized that iron shot would destroy their magic as well as cause injury that we were able to push back their boundaries and impose our will on them. The disadvantages of iron shot, that it cannot be easily reclaimed and re-manufactured in the field as lead ball can, were offset by the military advantage it gave us in defeating their warriors. The plainsmen had relied on their magic to turn aside our shot, to scare our horses, and generally to confound our troops. Our advance into their lands, gentlemen, is as inevitable as a rising tide, just as was our defeat by the Landsingers. And, just like us, the plainsmen will either be swept away before new technology, or they will learn to live with it.’

‘Then, you think it is our right, sir, to just run over them?’ Lofert asked in his earnest way.

‘Raise your hand and wait to be acknowledged before you speak, Cadet. You’ve been warned before. Three demerits. Yes. I think it is our right. The good god has given us the means to defeat the plainsmen, and to prosper where once only goatherds or wild beasts dwelt. We will bring civilization to the Midlands, to the benefit of all.’

I caught myself wondering how much the fallen from both sides had benefited. Then I shook my head angrily, and resolutely set aside such cynical musings. I was a cadet in the King’s Cavalla Academy. Like any second son of a nobleman, I was my father’s soldier son, and I would follow in his footsteps. I had not been born to question the ways of the world. If the good god had wanted me to ponder fate or question the morality of our eastward expansion, he would have made me a third son, born to be a priest.

At the end of the lecture, I blew on my notes to dry them, closed up my books and joined the rest of my patrol to march in formation back to the dormitory. Spring was trying to gain a hold on the Academy grounds and not completely succeeding. There was a sharp nip of chill in the wind, yet it was pleasant to be out in the fresh air again. I tried to push aside my sombre musings on the fate of the plainsmen. It was, as our instructor had said, the natural order of things. Who was I to dispute it? I followed my friends up the stairs to our dormitory, and shelved my textbooks from my morning classes. The day’s mail awaited me on my bunk. There was a fat envelope from Epiny. The other cadets left me sitting on my bunk. As they hurried off to the noon meal, I opened her letter.

Her letter began with her usual queries about my health and schooling. I quickly skimmed past that part. She had arrived safely in Bitter Springs. Epiny’s first letter about reaching her new home was determinedly optimistic, but I sensed the gap between her expectations and the reality she now confronted. I sat on my bunk and read it with sympathy and bemusement.

‘The women of the household work as hard as the men, right alongside the servants. Truly, the saying that “men but work from sun to sun, woman’s work is never done!” is true of Lady Kester’s household. In the hours after dinner, when the light is dim and you might think some rest was due us, one of us will read or make music for the others, allowing our minds to drift a bit, but our ever-busy hands go on with such mundane tasks as shelling dried peas or using a drop-spindle to make thread of wool (I am proud to say I have become quite good at this chore!) or unravelling old sweaters and blankets so that the yarn can be re-used to make useful items. Lady Kester wastes nothing, not a scrap of fabric nor a minute of time.

‘Spink and I have our own dear little cottage, built of stone, as that is what we have an abundance of here. It used to be the milk house, and had fallen into disrepair after the last two milk cows died. When Lady Kester knew we were coming, she decided that we would relish a little privacy of our own, and so she had her daughters do their best to clean and tighten it up for us before we arrived. The inside of it was freshly whitewashed, and Spink’s sister Gera has given us the quilt that she had sewn for her own hope chest. There is only the one room, of course, but it is ample for the little furniture we have. The bedstead fills one corner, and our table with our own two chairs is right by the window that looks out over the open hillside. Spink tells me that once the late frosts have passed, we shall have a vista of wild flowers there.

‘Even so, it is quite rustic and quaint, but as soon as Spink’s health has improved, he says he will put in a new floor and fix the chimney so that it draws better, and use a spoke shave to persuade the door to shut tightly in the jamb. Summer approaches and with it warmer weather, which I shall be grateful to see. I trust that by the time the rains and frosts return, we shall have made our little home as cosy as a bird’s nest in a hollow tree. For now, when the cold wind creeps round the door or the mosquitoes keen in my ear at night, I ask myself, “Am I not as hearty as the little ground squirrels that scamper about during the day and have no better than a hole to shelter in at night? Surely I can take a lesson from them and find as much satisfaction in my simple life.” And so I make myself content.’

‘Yer cousin wants to be a ground squirrel?’ Rory asked me. I turned to find him reading over my shoulder. I glared at him. He grinned, unabashed.

‘That’s rude, Rory, and you know it.’

‘Sorry!’ His grin grew wolfish. ‘I wouldn’t have read it, but I thought it was from your girl and might have some intrestin’ bits in it.’

He dodged my counterfeit swipe at him and then with false pomposity warned me, ‘Better not hit me, Cadet! Remember, I outrank you for now. Besides, I’m a messenger. Dr Amicas sent word that you were to come and see him. He also said that if you don’t think his request to visit him weekly is sufficient, he could make it a direct order.’

‘Oh.’ My heart sank. I didn’t want to go see the Academy physician any more, but neither did I want to annoy the irascible old man. I was aware still of the debt that I owed him. I folded up Epiny’s letter and rose with a sigh. Dr Amicas had been a friend to me, in his own brusque way. And he’d definitely behaved heroically through the plague, going without rest to care for the dozens of cadets who fell to the disease. Without him, I would not have survived. I knew that the plague fascinated him, and that he had a personal ambition to discover its method of transmission, as well as document which techniques saved lives and which were worthless. He was writing a scholarly paper summing up all his observations of the recent outbreak. He had told me that monitoring my amazing recovery from such a severe case of plague was a part of his research, but I was dismally tired of it. Every week he poked and prodded me and measured me. The way he spoke to me made me feel that I had not recovered at all but was merely going through an extended phase of recuperation. I wished he would stop reminding me of my experience. I wanted to put the plague behind me and stop thinking of myself as an invalid.

‘Right now?’ I asked Rory.

‘Right now, Cadet,’ he confirmed. He spoke as a friend, but the new stripe on his sleeve still meant that I’d best go immediately.

‘I’ll miss the noon meal,’ I objected.

‘Wouldn’t hurt you to miss a meal or two,’ he said meaningfully.

I scowled at his jab, but he only grinned. I nodded and set out for the infirmary.

In the last few balmy days, some misguided trees had flowered. They wore their white and pink blossoms bravely despite the day’s chill. The groundskeepers had been at work: all the fallen branches from the winter storms had been tidied away and the greens manicured to velvet.

I had to pass one very large flowerbed where precisely spaced ranks of bulb flowers had pushed up their green spikes of leaves; soon there would be regiments of tulips in bloom. I looked away from them; I knew what lay beneath those stalwart rows. They covered the pit-grave that had received so many of my comrades. A single gravestone stood greyly in the middle of the garden. It said only, Our Honoured Dead. The Academy had been quarantined when the plague broke out. Even when it had spread through the city beyond our walls, Dr Amicas had maintained our isolation. Our dead had been carried out of the infirmaries and dormitories and set down first in rows, and then, as their numbers increased, in stacks. I had been among the ill. I had not witnessed the mounting toll, nor seen the rats that scuttled and the carrion birds that flocked, despite the icy cold, to the feast. Dr Amicas had been the one to order reluctantly that a great pit be dug, and the bodies be tumbled in, along with layers of quicklime and earth.

Nate was down there, I knew. I tried not to think of his flesh rotting from his bones, or about the bodies tangled and clumped together in the obscene impartiality of such a grave. Nate had deserved better. They had all deserved better. I’d heard one of the new cadets refer to the gravesite as ‘the memorial to the Battle of Pukenshit’. I’d wanted to hit him. I turned up my collar against a wind that still bit with winter’s teeth and hurried past the groomed gardens through the late morning light.

At the door of the infirmary I hesitated, and then gritted my teeth and stepped inside. The bare corridor smelled of lye soap and ammonia, but in my mind the miasma of sickness still clung to this place. Many of my friends and acquaintances had died in this building, only a couple of months ago. I wondered that Dr Amicas could stand to keep his offices here. Had it been left to me, I would have burned the infirmary down to scorched earth and rebuilt somewhere else.

When I tapped on the door of his private office, the doctor peremptorily ordered me to come in. Clouds of drifting pipe smoke veiled the room and flavoured the air. ‘Cadet Burvelle, reporting as ordered, sir,’ I announced myself.

He pushed his chair back from his cluttered desk and rose, taking his spectacles off as he did so. He looked me up and down, and I felt the measure of his glance. ‘You weren’t ordered, Cadet, and you know it. But the importance of my research is such that if you don’t choose to co-operate, I will give you such orders. Instead of coming at your convenience, you’ll come at mine, and then enjoy the pleasure of making up missed class time. Are we clear?’

His words were harsher than his tone. He meant them, but he spoke almost as if we were peers. ‘I’ll co-operate, sir.’ I was unbuttoning my uniform jacket as I spoke. One of the buttons, loosened on its thread, broke free and went flying across the office. He lifted a brow at that.

‘Still gaining flesh, I see.’

‘I always put on weight right before I get taller.’ I spoke a bit defensively. This was the third time he had brought up my weight gain. I thought it unkind of him. ‘Surely that must be better than me being thin as a rail, like Trist.’

‘Cadet Wissom’s reaction to having survived the plague is the norm. Yours is different. “Better” remains to be seen,’ he replied ponderously. ‘Any other changes that you’ve noticed? How’s your wind?’

‘It’s fine. I had to march off six demerits yesterday, and I finished up at the same time as the other fellows.’

‘Hm.’ He had drawn closer as I spoke. As if I were a thing rather than a person, he inspected my body, looking in my ears, eyes, and nose, and then listening to my heart and breathing. He made me run in place for a good five minutes, and then listened to my heart and lungs again. He jotted down voluminous notes, weighed me, took my height, and then quizzed me on all I’d eaten since yesterday. As I’d had only what the mess allotted to me, that question was quickly answered.

‘But you’ve still gained weight, even though you haven’t increased your food intake?’ he asked me, as if questioning my honesty.

‘I’m out of spending money,’ I told him. ‘I’m eating as I’ve eaten since I arrived here. The extra flesh is only because I’m about to go through another growth spurt.’

‘I see. You know that, do you?’

I didn’t answer that. I knew it was rhetorical. He stooped to retrieve my button and handed it back to me. ‘Best sew that on good and tight, Cadet.’ He put his notes on me into a folder and then sat down at his desk with a sigh. ‘You’re going home in a couple of weeks, aren’t you? For your sister’s wedding?’

‘For my brother’s wedding, sir. Yes, I am. I’ll leave as soon as my tickets arrive. My father wrote to Colonel Rebin to ask that I be released for the occasion. The colonel told me that ordinarily he would strongly disapprove of a cadet taking a month off from studies to attend a wedding, but that given the condition of our classes at present, he thinks I can make up the work.’

The doctor was nodding to my words. He pursed his mouth, seemed on the verge of saying something, hesitated and then said, ‘I think it’s for the best that you do go home for a time. Travelling by ship?’

‘Part of the way. Then I’ll do the rest by horseback. I’ll go more swiftly by road than on a vessel fighting the spring floods. I’ve my own horse in the Academy stables. Sirlofty didn’t get much exercise over the winter. This journey will put both of us back into condition.’

He smiled wearily as he settled into his desk chair. ‘Well. Let’s pray that it does. You can go, Nevare. But check back with me next week, if you’re still here. Don’t make me remind you.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I dared a question. ‘How is your research progressing?’

‘Slowly.’ He scowled. ‘I am at odds with my fellow physicians. Most of them persist in looking for a cure. I tell them, we must find out what triggers the disease and prevent that. Once the plague has struck, people begin to die quickly. Preventing its spread will save more lives than trying to cure it once it has a foothold in the population.’ He sighed, and I knew his memories haunted him. He cleared his throat and went on, ‘I looked into what you suggested about dust. I simply cannot see it being the cause of the disease.’ He seemed to forget that I was merely a cadet and, leaning back in his chair, spoke to me as if I were a colleague. ‘You know that I believe the onset of the plague and the swiftness of its spread mean that sexual contact cannot be the sole method of contracting it. I still believe that the most virulent cases stem from sexual contact …’

He paused, offering me yet another opportunity to admit I’d had carnal knowledge of a Speck. I remained silent. I hadn’t, at least not physically. If cavalla soldiers could contract venereal disease from what we dreamed, none of us would live to graduate from the Academy.

He finally continued, ‘Your theory that something in the dust that the Specks fling during their Dust Dance could be a trigger appealed to me. Unfortunately, while I did my best to gather data from the sickened cadets before they became too ill to respond, the disease took many of them before they could be questioned. So we shall never know exactly how many of them may have witnessed a Dust Dance and breathed in dust. However, there are several flaws in your theory. The first is that at least one cadet, Corporal Rory Hart, witnessed the Dust Dance and had absolutely no symptoms of plague. He’s an unusual fellow; he also admitted to, er, more than casual contact with the Specks themselves, with no ill effect. But even if we set Rory aside as an individual with exceptionally robust health, there are still other problems with your theory. One is that the Specks would be exposing themselves to the illness every time they danced the dance. You have told me you believed that the Speck deliberately sowed this illness among us. Would they do it at risk to themselves? I think not. And before you interrupt—’ he held up a warning hand as I took breath to speak, ‘— keep in mind that this is not the first outbreak of Speck plague that I’ve witnessed. As you might be pleased to know, the other outbreak I witnessed was close to the Barrier Mountains, and yes, the Specks had performed a Dust Dance before the outbreak. But many of their own children were among those stricken that summer. I can scarcely believe that even primitive people would deliberately infect their own children with a deadly disease simply to exact revenge on us. Of course, I suppose it’s possible that the dust does spread the disease, but the Specks are unaware of it. Simple, natural peoples like the Specks are often unaware that all diseases have a cause and hence are preventable.’

‘Maybe they face the disease willingly. Maybe they think that the disease is more like a, uh, like a magical culling. That the children who survive it are meant to go on, and that those who die go on to a different life.’

Dr Amicas sighed deeply. ‘Nevare, Nevare. I am a doctor. We cannot go about imagining wild things to try to make a pet theory make sense. We have to fit the theory to the facts, not manufacture facts to support the theory.’

I took a breath to speak, and then once more decided to give it up. I had only dreamed that the dust caused the disease. I had dreamed that it was so and my ‘Speckself’ believed it. But perhaps in my dreams, my Speck half believed a superstition, rather than knowing the real truth. I gave my head a slight shake. My circling thoughts reminded me of a dog chasing its own tail. ‘May I be dismissed, sir?’

‘Certainly. And thank you for coming.’ He was tamping more tobacco into his pipe as I departed. ‘Nevare!’ His call stopped me at the door.

‘Sir?’

He pointed the stem of his pipe at me. ‘Are you still troubled by nightmares?’

I fervently wished I’d never told him of that issue. ‘Only sometimes, sir,’ I hedged. ‘Other than that, I sleep well.’

‘Good. That’s good. I’ll see you next week, then.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I left hastily before he could call me back.

The spring afternoon had faded and evening was coming on. Birds were settling in the trees for the night, and lights were beginning to show in the dormitories. The wind had turned colder. I hurried on my way. The shadow of one of the majestic oaks that graced the campus stretched across my path. I walked into it, and in that instant, felt a shiver up my spine, as if someone had strolled over my grave. I blinked, and for a moment, a remnant of my other self looked out through my eyes at the precisely groomed landscape, and found it very strange indeed. The straight paths and careful greens suddenly looked stripped and barren to me, the few remaining trees a sad remnant of a forest that had been. The landscape was devoid of the true randomness of natural life. In true freedom, life sprawled. This vista was as lifeless and as unlovely as a glass-eyed animal stuffed for a display case. I was suddenly acutely homesick for the forest.

In the weeks following my recovery, I had dreamed of the Tree Woman, and in my dreams I was my other self, and she was beautiful. We strolled in the dappling light that fell through the leafy shade of her immense trees. We scrambled over fallen logs and pushed our way through curtains of vines. Fallen leaves and forest detritus were thick and soft beneath our bare feet. In the stray beams of sunlight that touched us, we both had speckled skin. She walked with the ponderous grace of a heavy woman long accustomed to managing her weight. She did not seem awkward, but majestic in her studied progress. Just as an antlered deer turns his head to manoeuvre a narrow path, so did she sidle past a network of spider webs that barred our way. The untidy, unmastered, lovely sprawl of the forest put her in context. Here, she was large, lush, and beautiful as the luxuriant life that surrounded us.

In my first vision of her, when the plainsman Dewara had told me she was my enemy, I had perceived her as very old and repulsively fat. But in the dreams I’d had following my recovery from the Speck plague, she seemed ageless, and the pillowed roundness of her flesh was abundant and inviting.

I had told Dr Amicas about the occasional vivid nightmares I had. I had not mentioned to him that my erotic dreams of the forest goddess far outnumbered the horrid ones. I always awoke from those dreams flushed with arousal that quickly became shame. It was not just that I lustfully dreamed of a Speck woman, and one of voluptuous fleshiness, but that I knew that some part of me had consorted with her, in passion and even love. I felt guilt for that bestial coupling, even if it had occurred in a dream world and was without my consent. It was treasonous as well as unnatural to mate outside my race. She had made me her lover and tried to turn me against my own people. A dark and twisted magic had been used to convert me to her uses. The threads of it still clung to my thoughts, and that was what pulled my soul down to those dark places where I still desired her flesh.

In my dreams of her, she often cautioned me that the magic now owned me. ‘It will use you as it sees fit. Do not resist it. Put nothing you care about between you and the magic’s calling, for like a flood, it will sweep away all that opposes it. Ride with it, my love, or it will destroy you. You will learn to use it, but not for yourself. When you use the magic to achieve the ends of the magic, then its power will be at your command. But at all other times,’ and here she had smiled at me and run a soft hand down my cheek, ‘we are the tools of the power.’ In that dream, I caught her hand and kissed the palm of it and then nodded my head and accepted both her wisdom and my fate. I wanted to flow with the magic that coursed through me. It was only natural. What else could I possibly want to do with my life? The magic coursed through me, as essential to me as my blood. Does a man oppose the beating of his own heart? Of course I would do what it willed.

Then, I would wake and, like plunging into a cold river, my reality would drench me and shock me into awareness of my true self. Occasionally, as had happened when I passed through the shade of the oak, the stranger inside me could still take control of my mind and show me his warped view of my world. Then, in a blink of my eyes, a truer perspective would prevail, and the illusion would fade back to nothingness.

And occasionally, there were moments when I felt that perhaps both views of the world were equally true and equally false. At such times, I felt torn as to who I truly was. I tried to tell myself that my conflicting emotions were no different from how my father felt about some of his vanquished plainsmen foes. He had fought them, killed them or defeated them, yet he still respected them, and in some ways regretted his role in ending their unbound existence. At least I had finally accepted that the magic was real. I had stopped trying to deny to myself that something arcane and strange had happened to me.

I’d reached my dormitory. I took the steps two at a time. Bringham House had its own small library and study area on the second floor. Most of my fellows were gathered there, heads bent over their books. I ascended the last flight of stairs, and allowed myself to pause and breathe. Rory was just coming out of our bunkroom. He grinned at me as I stood panting. ‘Good to see you sweating a bit, Nevare. Better drop a few pounds or you’ll have to borrow Gord’s old shirts.’

‘Funny,’ I gasped, and straightened. I was puffing, but having him needle me about it didn’t improve my temper at all.

He pointed a finger at my belly. ‘You popped a button there already, my friend!’

‘That happened at the doctor’s office, when he was poking and prodding at me.’

‘Course it did!’ he exclaimed with false enthusiasm. ‘But you’d better sew it on tonight, all the same, or you’ll be marching demerits off tomorrow.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘Can I borrow your drafting notes?’

‘I’ll get them for you.’

Rory grinned his wide froggy smile. ‘Actually, I already have them. They’re what I came upstairs to get. See you in the study room. Oh! I found a letter for you mixed in with mine. I’ve left it on your bunk.’

‘Don’t smear my notes!’ I warned him as he clattered off down the stairs. Shaking my head, I went into our dormitory room.

I took off my jacket and tossed it on my bunk. I picked up the envelope. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, then smiled as the mystery came clear. The return address was a letter-writer’s shop in Burvelle’s Landing, but the name on it was Sergeant Erib Duril. I opened it quickly, wondering what he could be writing to me about. Or rather, having someone else write to me about. Most reading and all writing were outside the old cavalla man’s field of expertise. Sergeant Duril had come to my father when his soldiering days were over, seeking a home for his declining years. He’d become my tutor, my mentor, and towards the end of our years together, my friend. From him, I’d learned all my basic cavalla and horsemanship skills, and a great deal about being a man.

I read the curiously formal letter through twice. Obviously, the letter-writer had chosen to put the old soldier’s words in more elegant form than Duril himself would have chosen. It did not sound at all like him as he sympathized with my illness and expressed fond wishes that I would recover well. Only the sentiment at the end, graciously phrased as it was, sounded like advice my old mentor would have given me:

‘Even after you have recovered from this dread epidemic, I fear that you will find yourself changed. I have witnessed, with my own eyes and often, what this devastating plague can do to a young man’s physique. The body that you so carefully sculpted for years under my tutelage may dwindle and serve you less well than it has in the past. Nonetheless, I counsel you that it is the soul of a military man that makes him what he is, and I have faith that your soul will remain true to the calling of the good god.’

I glanced back at the date on the envelope, and saw that the letter had taken its time to reach me. I wondered if Duril had held it for some days, debating as to whether or not to send it, or if the letter-writer had simply overlooked the missive and not sent it on its way. Well, soon enough I’d see Sergeant Duril. I smiled to myself, touched that he’d taken the time and spent the coins to send me this. I folded the paper carefully and tucked it away among my books.

I picked up my jacket again. From the chest at the foot of my bed, I took my sewing kit. Best to get it done now, and then study. As I looked for the place where the button had popped off, I discovered they all were straining, and two others were on the point of giving way.

Scowling, I cut the buttons off both my shirt and my jacket. I was absolutely certain that my newly-gained bulk would vanish in the next month or two as I grew taller, but there was no sense in failing an inspection in the mean time. As I refastened the buttons with careful stitches, I moved each one over to allow myself a bit of breathing space. When I put my shirt and jacket back on, I found it much more comfortable, even though it still strained at my shoulders. Well, that couldn’t be helped. Fixing that was beyond my limited tailoring skills. I frowned to myself; I didn’t want my clothing to fit me poorly at my brother’s wedding. Carsina, my fiancée would be there, and she had particularly asked me to wear my Academy uniform for the occasion. Her dress would be a matching green. I smiled to myself; girls gave great thought to the silliest things. Well, doubtless my mother could make any needed alterations to my uniform, if the journey home did not lean me down as I expected it to.

After a moment’s hesitation, I cut the buttons off my trouser waistband and moved them over as well. Much eased, I took down my books and headed to the study room to join my fellows.

The scene in Bringham House library was much different from our old study room in Carneston Hall. There were no long trestle tables and hard benches, but round tables with chairs and ample lighting. There were several cushioned chairs set round the fireplace for quiet conversation. I found a spot at a table next to Gord, set down my books and took a seat. He glanced up, preoccupied and then smiled. ‘A messenger came for you while you were gone. He gave me this for you.’

‘This’ was a thick brown envelope, from my uncle’s address. I opened it eagerly. As I had anticipated, it contained a receipt for my shipboard passage as far as Sorton, and a voucher written against my father’s bank in Old Thares for funds for my journey. The note from my uncle said that my father had requested he make my arrangements for me, and that he hoped to see me again before I left for the wedding.

It was strange. Until I held it in my hand, I had been content, even satisfied to stay at the Academy. Now an encompassing wave of homesickness swept over me. I suddenly missed my whole family acutely. My heart clenched as I thought of my little sister Yaril and her constant questions, and my mother and the special plum tarts she made for me each spring. I missed all of them, my father, and Rosse, my older brother, even my older sister Elisi and her endless good advice.

But foremost in my thoughts was Carsina. Her little letters to me had grown increasingly fond and flirtatious. I longed to see her, and had already imagined several different ways in which I might steal some time alone with her. For a short time after Epiny’s wedding to Spink, I had entertained doubts about Carsina and myself. My parents had chosen my fiancée. On several occasions, I’d had reason to doubt that my father always knew what was best for me. Could they truly select a woman that I could live with, peacefully if not happily, the rest of my life? Or had she been chosen more for the political alliance with a neighbouring new noble, with the expectation that her placid nature would give me no problems? I suddenly resolved that before I returned to the Academy, I would know her, for myself. We would talk, and not just niceties about the weather and if she enjoyed dinner. I would discover for myself how she truly felt about being a soldier’s bride, and if she had other ambitions for her life. Epiny, I thought with grim humour, had ruined women for me. Prior to meeting my eccentric and modern cousin, I had never paused to wonder what thoughts went through my sisters’ heads when my father was not around to supervise them. Having experienced Epiny’s sharp intelligence and acid tongue, I would no longer automatically relegate women to a passive and docile role. It was not that I hoped Carsina secretly concealed an intellect as piercing as Epiny’s. In truth, I did not. But I suspected there must be more to my shy little flower than I had so far discovered. And if there was, I was resolved to know it before we were wed and promised to one another to the end of our days.

‘You’re a long time quiet. Bad news?’ Gord asked me solemnly.

I grinned at him. ‘On the contrary, brother. Good news, great news! I’m starting for home tomorrow, to see my brother’s wedding.’

TWO

Homeward Bound

My departure from the Academy was neither as swift nor as simple as I had hoped. When I went by the commander’s office to inform him that I had my ticket and was ready to leave, he charged me to be sure I had informed each of my instructors and taken down notes of what assignments I should complete before my return. I had not reckoned on that, but had hoped for freedom from my books for a time. It took me the best part of a day to gather them up, for I dared not interrupt any classes. Then my packing was more complicated than I had planned, for I had to take my books, and yet still travel light enough that all my provisions would fit in Sirlofty’s saddle panniers.

It was some months since the tall gelding had had to carry anything besides me, and he seemed a bit sulky when I loaded the panniers on him as well. In truth, I was as little pleased as he was. I was proud of my sharp uniform and fine horse; it seemed a shame to ride him through Old Thares laden as if he were a mule and I some rustic farmer taking a load of potatoes to market. I tried to stifle my annoyance at it for I knew that half of it was vanity. I tightened my saddle cinch, signed the ancient ‘hold fast’ charm over the buckle and mounted my horse.

My ticket told me that my jank would sail the following evening. There was no real need of haste, yet I wanted to be well aboard and settled before the lines were cast off. I went first to my uncle’s home to bid him farewell, and also to see if he had any messages for my father. He came down immediately to meet me, and invited me up to his den. He did all he could to make me feel welcome, and yet there was still some stiffness between us. He looked older than he had when first I met him, and I suspected that his wife Daraleen had not warmed towards him since Epiny’s wild act of defiance. Epiny had left their home in the midst of the plague to hurry to Spink’s side and tend him. It was a scandalous thing for a woman of her age and position to have done, and it completely destroyed all prospects of her marriage to a son of the older noble houses.

Epiny herself had been well aware of that, of course. She had deliberately ruined herself, so that her mother would have no options but to accept Spink and his family’s bid for her hand. The prospect of a marriage connection with a new noble family, one with no established estates but only raw holdings on the edge of the borderlands, had filled Daraleen with both chagrin and horror. Epiny’s tactic had been ruthless, one that put her fate into her own hands, but also severed the bond between mother and daughter. I had heard Epiny’s artless little sister Purissa say that she was now her mother’s best daughter and jewel for the future. I was certain she was only repeating words she’d heard from her mother’s lips.

So when my uncle invited me to sit while he rang for a servant to bring up a light repast for us, I remained standing and said that I needed to be sure of being on time for my boat’s departure. A sour smile wrinkled his mouth.

‘Nevare. Do you forget that I purchased that ticket at your father’s behest? You have plenty of time to make your boat’s sailing. The only thing you have to worry about is stopping at the bank to cash your cheque and get some travelling funds. Please. Sit down.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, and sat.

He rang for a servant, spoke to him briefly, and then took his own seat with a sigh. He looked at me and shook his head. ‘You act as if we are angry with one another. Or as if I should be angry with you.’

I looked down before his gaze. ‘You’d have every right to be, sir. I’m the one who brought Spink here. If I hadn’t introduced him to Epiny, none of this would ever have happened.’

He gave a brief snort of laughter. ‘No. Doubtless something else, equally awkward, would have happened instead. Nevare, you forget that Epiny is my daughter. I’ve known her all her life, and even if I didn’t quite realize all she was capable of, I nevertheless knew that she had an inquiring mind, an indomitable spirit, and the will to carry out any plan she conceived. Her mother might hold you accountable, but then, Epiny’s mother is fond of holding people accountable for things beyond their control. I try not to do that.’

He sounded tired and sad, and despite my guilt, or perhaps because of it, my heart went out to him. He had treated me well, almost as if I were his own son. Despite my father’s elevation to noble status, he and his elder brother had remained close. I knew that was not true of many families, where old noble heir sons regarded their ‘battle lord’ younger brothers as rivals. Spink’s ‘old noble’ relatives had no contact with him, and had turned a blind eye to the needs of his widowed mother. Certainly a great deal of my aunt’s distaste for me was that she perceived my father as an upstart, a new noble who should have remained a simple military officer. Many of the old nobility felt that King Troven had elevated his ‘battle lords’ as a political tactic, so that he might seed the Council of Lords with recently elevated aristocrats who had a higher degree of loyalty to him and greater sympathy for his drive to expand Gernia to the east by military conquest. Possibly, they were right. I settled back in my chair and tried to smile at my uncle. ‘I still feel responsible,’ I said quietly.

‘Yes, well, you are the sort of man who would. Let it go, Nevare. If I recall correctly, you did not first invite Spink to my home. Epiny did, when she saw him standing beside you at the Academy that day we came to pick you up. Who knows? Perhaps that was the instant in which she decided to marry him. I would not put it beyond her. And now, since we are discussing her and Spinrek, would you tell me if you’ve heard anything from your friend? I long to know how my wayward daughter fares.’

‘She has not written to you?’ I asked, shocked.

‘Not a word,’ he said sadly. ‘I thought we had parted on, well, if not on good terms, at least with the understanding that I still loved her, even if I could not agree with all her decisions. But since the day she departed from my doorstep, I’ve heard nothing, from her or Spinrek.’ His voice was steady and calm as he spoke, but the hollowness he felt came through all the same. I felt an instant spurt of anger towards Epiny. Why was she treating her father so coldly? ‘I have received letters not just from Spink, but also from Epiny. I will be happy to share them with you, sir. I have them with me, among my books and other papers in Sirlofty’s pack.’

Hope lit in his eyes, but he said, ‘Nevare, I couldn’t ask you to betray any confidences Epiny has made to you. If you would just tell me that she is well …’

‘Nonsense!’ Then I remembered to whom I spoke. ‘Uncle Sefert, Epiny has written me pages and pages, a veritable journal since the day she left your door. I have read nothing there that I’d hesitate to tell you, so why should you not read her words for yourself? Let me fetch them. It will only take a moment.’

I saw him hesitate, but he could not resist, and at his nod I hastened down the stairs. I took the packet of letters from Sirlofty’s panniers and hurried back up with them. By then, a tempting luncheon had been set out for us in the den. I ate most of it, in near silence, for my uncle could not resist his impulse to begin immediately on Epiny’s letters. It was like watching a plant revived by a rainfall after a drought to watch him first smile and then chuckle over her descriptions of her adventures. As he carefully folded the last page of the most recent missive, he looked up at me. ‘I think she is finding life as a frontier wife rather different from what she supposed it to be.’

‘I cannot imagine a greater change in living conditions than leaving your family home here in Old Thares for a poor cottage in Bitter Springs.’

He replied with grim satisfaction in his voice, ‘And yet she does not complain. She does not threaten to run back home to me, nor does she whimper that she deserves better. She accepts the future that she made for herself. I am proud of her for that. Her life, indeed, is not what I would have chosen for her. I would never have believed that my flighty, childish daughter would have the strength to confront such things. And yet she has, and she flourishes.’

I myself thought that ‘flourish’ was far too strong a word to apply to what Epiny was doing, but I held my tongue. Uncle Sefert loved his unruly daughter. If he took pride in her ability to deal with harsh conditions, I would not take that from him.

I was willing to leave Epiny’s letters with him, but he insisted I take them back. Privately, I resolved to rebuke her for making her father suffer so; what had he done to deserve such treatment? He’d given her far more freedom than most girls of her age enjoyed, and she’d used it to arrange a marriage to her own liking. Even after she had publicly disgraced herself by fleeing his house and going to Spink’s sickbed, my uncle had not disowned her, but had given her a modest wedding and a nice send-off. What more did she expect of the man?

As I bade my uncle farewell, he gave me a letter to my father and some small gifts to send to my mother and sisters and I managed to find room for them in my panniers. I made a brief stop at my father’s banker in Old Thares to change my cheque into banknotes, and then went immediately down to the docks. My ship was already loading, and I was glad I had arrived with some time to spare, for Sirlofty received the last decent box stall on board the vessel. My own cabin, though very small, was comfortable and I was glad to settle into it.

My upriver passage on the jankship was not nearly as exciting as our flight downriver had been the previous fall. The current was against us, and though it was not yet in full spring flood, it was still formidable. The vessel used not only oarsmen, but also a method of propulsion called cordelling, in which a small boat rowed upstream with a line threaded through a bridle and made fast to the mast. Once the small boat had tied the free end of the line to a fixed object such as a large tree, the line was reeled in on a capstan on the jankship. While we were reeling in the first line, a second towline was already being set in place, and in this way, we moved upriver between six and fifteen miles a day. An upstream journey on one of the big passenger janks was more stately than swift, and more like spending time at an elegant resort than simple travel.

Perhaps my father had intended that part of the journey to be a treat for me, and an opportunity to mingle socially. Instead, I chafed and wondered if I would not have made better time on Sirlofty’s back. Although the jankship offered all sorts of amusements and edification, from games of chance to poetry readings, I did not enjoy it as I had the first time I’d taken ship with my father. The people on board the vessel seemed less congenial than the passengers my father and I had met on our previous journey. The young ladies were especially haughty, their superciliousness bordering on plain rudeness. Once, thinking only to be a gentleman, I bent down to retrieve a pen that had fallen from one young lady’s table by her deck chair. As I did so, one of my ill-sewn buttons popped from my jacket and went rolling off across the deck. She and her friend burst out laughing at me, the one pointing rudely at my rolling button while the other all but stuffed her handkerchief in her mouth to try to conceal her merriment. She did not even thank me for the pen that I handed back to her, but continued to giggle and indeed to snort as I left her side and went in pursuit of my wayward button. Once I had reclaimed it, I turned back to them, thinking that they might wish to be more social, but as I approached them they hastily rose, gathered all their items and swept away in a flurry of skirts and fans.

Later that day, I heard giggling behind me. A female voice said, ‘Never have I seen so rotund a cadet!’ and a male voice replied, ‘Hush! Can’t you tell he’s with child! Don’t mock a future mother!’ I turned and looked up to find the two ladies and a couple of young men standing on an upper deck and looking down at me. They immediately looked away, but one fellow was unable to control the great ‘haw’ of laughter that burst from him. I felt the blood rush to my face, for I was both infuriated and embarrassed that my weight was a cause of so much amusement.

I went immediately back to my stateroom, and attempted to survey myself in the tiny mirror there. It was inadequate to the task, as I could only see about one eighth of myself at a time. I decided that they had been amused by how tight my uniform jacket had become on me. Truly, it had grown snug, and every time I donned it after that, I feared that I cut a comical figure in it. It quite spoiled the rest of the voyage for me, for whenever I attended one of the musical events or cultural lectures, I felt sure that the ladies were somewhere in the audience, staring at me. I did catch glimpses of them, from time to time, often with the same young gentlemen. They all seemed comfortable staring at me while avoiding my company. My annoyance with them grew daily, as did my self-consciousness.

Matters came to a head one evening when I was descending the stairs from one deck to the next. The stairs were spiralled to save space, and quite tightly engineered. My height as well as my new weight made them a bit tricky for me. I had discovered that as long as I kept my elbows in and trusted my feet to find their footing without attempting to look down, I could navigate them smoothly. Even for a slender passenger, the stairs did not allow users to pass one another. Thus as I descended, a small group of my fellows were waiting at the bottom of the steps for me to clear the way for them.

They did not trouble to lower their voices. ‘Beware below!’ one fellow declared loudly as I trod the risers. I recognized his voice as the same one that had declared me pregnant. My blood began to boil.

I heard a woman’s shrill and nervous giggle, followed by another male voice adding, ‘Ye gads, what is it? It’s blocking the sun! Does it wedge? No sir, it does not! Stand clear, stand clear.’ I recognized that he was imitating the stentorian tones of the sailor who took the depth readings with a lead line and shouted them back to the captain.

‘Barry! Stop it!’ a girl hissed at him, but the suppressed merriment in her voice was encouragement, not condemnation.

‘Oh, the suspense! Will he make it or will he run aground?’ the young man queried enthusiastically.

I emerged at that point from the stairwell. My cheeks were red but not with exertion. There I encountered the familiar foursome, in evening dress. One girl, still giggling, rushed past me and up the steps, her little slippers tapping hastily up the stairs and the skirts of her yellow gown brushing the sides of the stair as she went. Her tall male companion moved to follow her. I stepped in front of him. ‘Were you mocking me?’ I asked him in a level, amiable voice. I cannot say where my control came from, for inside, I was seething. Anger bubbled through my blood.

‘Let me past!’ he said angrily, with no effort at replying.

When I did not answer him or move, he attempted to push by me. I stood firm, and for once my extra weight was on my side.

‘It was just a bit of a joke, man. Don’t be so serious. Allow us passage, please.’ This came from the other fellow, a slight young man with foppishly curled hair. The girl with him had retreated behind him, one little gloved arm set on his shoulder, as if I were some sort of unpredictable animal that might attack them.

‘Get out of my way,’ the first one said again. He spoke the words through gritted teeth, furious now.

I kept my voice level with an effort. ‘Sir, I do not enjoy your mockery of me. The next time I receive an ill glance from you or hear you ridicule me, I shall demand satisfaction of you.’

He snorted disparagingly. ‘A threat! From you!’ He ran his eyes over me insultingly. His sneering smile dismissed me.

The blood was pounding in my ears. Yet strangely, I suddenly felt that I was in full control of this encounter. I cannot explain how pleasing that sensation was; it was rather like holding an excellent hand of cards when everyone else at the table assumes you are bluffing. I smiled at him. ‘You’d be wise to be thankful for this warning from me. The opportunity will not come again.’ I’d never felt so dangerous in my life.

He seemed to sense how I dismissed his bluster. His face flushed an ugly scarlet. ‘Make way!’ he demanded through gritted teeth.

‘Of course,’ I acceded. I not only stepped back, but also offered him my hand as if to assist him. ‘Be careful!’ I warned him. ‘The stairs are steeper than they appear. Watch your footing. It would be a shame if you stumbled.’

‘Do not speak to me!’ he all but shouted. He tried to cuff my hand out of the way. Instead, I caught his elbow, gripped it firmly and assisted him up the first step. I felt the iron of my strength as I did so; I think he did, too. ‘Let go!’ he snarled at me.

‘So glad to help you,’ I replied sweetly as I released him. I stepped back two steps, and then gestured to his companions that they should follow him. The girl rushed past me and up the steps, with her companion a stride behind her. He shot me a look of alarm as he passed, as if he thought I might suddenly attack him.

I was walking away when I heard a shout above me, and then a man’s roar of pain. One of them must have slipped in his panic. The woman mewed sympathetically at whichever man had fallen. I could not make out his words, for they were choked with pain. I chuckled as I walked away. I was to dine at the captain’s table that evening, and I suddenly found that I anticipated the meal with a heartier than usual appetite.

The next morning, as I enjoyed a good breakfast, I overheard gossip at our table that a young man had slipped and fallen on the stairs. ‘A very bad break,’ an old woman with a flowered fan exclaimed to the lady beside her. ‘The bone poked right out of his flesh! Can you imagine! Just from a missed step on the stair!’

I felt unreasonably guilty when I heard the extent of the young man’s injuries, but decided that he had brought them on himself. Doubtless he’d missed a riser; if he hadn’t mocked me, he would not have felt obliged to use such haste in fleeing from me.

When next I caught sight of their small party in the late afternoon, the young man I had ‘assisted’ on the stairs was absent. When one of the women caught sight of me, I saw her give a gasp of dismay and immediately turn and walk off in the other direction. Her friend and their remaining male companion followed her just as hastily. For the rest of the voyage they assiduously avoided me, and I overheard no more remarks or giggling. Yet it was not the relief that I had hoped it would be. Instead, a tiny niggle of guilt remained with me, as if my bad wishes for the fellow had caused his fall. I did not enjoy the women being fearful of me any more than I had enjoyed their derision. Both things seemed to make me someone other than who I truly was.

I was almost relieved when our jank reached the docks at Sorton and I disembarked. Sirlofty was restive after his days below decks, and displeased at once more having to wear his panniers. As I led him down the ramp to the street, I was glad to be on solid land again and dependent on no one but myself. I wended my way deeper into the crowded streets and out of sight of the jankship.

Along with my ticket and travelling money, there had been a letter from my father that precisely detailed how my journey should proceed. He had measured my journey against his cavalla maps, and had decided where I should stay every night and how much distance I must cover each day in order to arrive in time for Rosse’s wedding. His meticulous itinerary directed me to spend the night in Sorton, but I abruptly decided that I would push on and perhaps gain some time. That was a poor decision, for when night fell, I was still on the road, hours short of the small town my father had decreed was my next stop. In this settled country of farms and smallholdings, I could not simply camp beside the road as I would have in the Midlands. Instead, when the night became too dark for travelling, I begged a night’s lodging at a farmhouse. The farmer seemed a kindly man, and would not hear of me sleeping in the barn near Sirlofty, but offered me space on the kitchen floor near the fire.

I offered to pay for a meal as well, so he rousted out a kitchen girl. I expected to get the cold leavings of whatever they’d had earlier, but she chatted to me merrily as she heated up a nice slice of mutton in some broth. She warmed some tubers with it, and set it out for me with bread and butter and a large mug of buttermilk. When I thanked her, she answered ‘It’s a pleasure to cook for a man who obviously enjoys his food. It shows a man has a hearty appetite for all of life’s pleasures.’

I did not take her words as a criticism for she herself was a buxom girl with very generous hips. ‘A good meal and a pleasant companion can stir any man’s appetite,’ I told her. She dimpled a smile at me, seeming to take that as flirtation. Boldly, she sat down at the table while I ate, and told me I was very wise to have stopped there for the night, for there had been rumours of highwaymen of late. It seemed plain to me that she had gone far beyond her master’s orders, and after I watched her clear up my dishes, I offered her a small silver piece with my thanks for her kindness. She smilingly brought me two blankets and swept the area in front of the hearth before she made up my bed for me.

I was startled into full wakefulness about an hour after I had drowsed off when I felt someone lift the corner of my blanket and slide in beside me. I am shamed to say that I thought first of my purse with my travelling money in it, and I gripped it with my hand beneath my shirt. She paid no mind to that but nudged up against me, sweet as a kitten seeking warmth. I was quickly aware that she wore only a very thin nightdress.

‘What is it?’ I demanded of her, rather stupidly.

She giggled softly. ‘Why, sir, I don’t know. Let me feel it and see if I can tell you!’ And with no more than that, she slipped her hand down between us, and when she found that she had already roused me, gripped me firmly.

I was no more prudish than any young man of my years. If I had been chaste before, it had been more from lack of opportunity than any inclination to virtue. I’ll admit that I gave a passing thought to disease, for the Academy had lectured us more than once on the danger of coupling with cheap street whores. But I very swiftly and easily persuaded myself that this girl in such an outlying farmstead had probably not known many men and thus had little chance of disease.

There followed a night I have never forgotten and seldom regretted. I was fumbling at first, but then that ‘other self’ seemed to awaken inside me, and I discovered that he was not only experienced but skilful at bed games. I knew when to tease with a tickling touch, and when my mouth should be hard and demanding. She shivered under me, and the small moans that escaped her were music to me. I did experience some awkwardness, for although the rounded contours of her body seemed like familiar territory to me, I was not accustomed to dealing with the bulk of my own belly. Ruefully, I had to admit to myself that my weight gain was more than a trifling matter, but I refused to let it become an obstacle for us. Towards dawn, we parted with many kisses. I fell into the sleep of exhaustion, and morning came much too early for me.

If I had been able to think of any excuse, I would have fabricated a reason to spend another night. As it was, the same kitchen maid offered me a huge breakfast and a very fond farewell. I did not wish to embarrass her by treating her as if she were an ordinary whore, but I did slip some money under my plate where she would find it when she cleared away the dishes. I bade the farmer and his wife farewell, and thanked them earnestly for their kind hospitality. The farmer repeated the kitchen maid’s warning about highwaymen. I promised him I’d be wary and saddled up Sirlofty and went on my way with an entirely different opinion of myself than I’d had the day before. As I made the ‘hold fast’ sign over my cinch buckle, I suddenly felt myself an adventurous traveller experiencing life on my own for the first time. It was exhilarating and a welcome change from the self-consciousness I’d felt on the jankship.

The day passed quickly. I paid small attention to the road or scenery, but instead pondered every moment of the night before. I confess that I derived as much pleasure from imagining telling Rory and the fellows about my dallying with the farm maid as I did from recalling it. In early afternoon, I reached the town that my father had listed as my next stop on my itinerary. Despite the hours of daylight left, I decided I would overnight there, not only because I’d had two warnings of highwaymen but also because I’d had no sleep the night before. I found a likely inn and bought myself a meal, then retired to my small room and slept until early evening. I occupied myself for a time with updating my journal, but when that was completed, I still felt restless. I longed for an adventure such as I’d had the night before.

I went downstairs, hoping for some company, music and lively conversation. Instead I found only a few fellows swilling cheap ale and a grumpy innkeeper who obviously wished his customers would either spend more money or take themselves elsewhere. I was half-hoping that some girl of easy virtue would be wiping the tables, as there always was in poor Caleb’s lurid papers, but there was not a female anywhere in sight. When I went out for a stroll about the little town, I found the streets deserted. I told myself it was probably just as well, and returned to my inn. After three beers, I went back to my bed, and fell asleep.

My next few days of travelling passed without incident. My father had very accurately judged the distance Sirlofty could cover in a day. One night I took lodging at a hostelry with several obvious whores ensconced in the taproom. I plucked up my courage to approach the youngest, a slight woman with a halo of yellow curls around her face. She was wearing a pink gown trimmed with plumes all around its low collar. Thinking to be clever, I opened my conversation by asking her if the feathers tickled.

She looked me up and down, and then said bluntly, ‘Two silver bits. Your room.’

I was taken aback. In all the stories I’d heard from Trist or read in Caleb’s magazines, whores were flirtatious and flattering. I had expected at least some conversation. ‘Right now?’ I asked stupidly, and she immediately stood up.

There was little I could do then but lead the way up to my room. She demanded my silver in advance, tucking it down the front of her dress. I was unbuttoning my trousers when she took me firmly by the upper arms and backed me towards the bed, pushing me onto my back. I was not averse to this, even when she said, ‘Don’t think I plan on being on the bottom side of you. A heavy bloke like you could break a girl’s ribs!’

With that, she bundled her skirts up around her hips to reveal her nakedness and straddled me as if I were a horse and very quickly finished me. Afterwards, she lifted herself from my body, and shook her skirts out as she stood by the bed. I sat up on the bed with my trousers around my ankles. She walked to the door.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked in confusion.

She gave me a puzzled look. ‘Back to work. Unless you’ve another two silvers to spend?’

I hesitated, and she took it as a ‘no’. Sneering slightly, she said, ‘I thought not. Fat men are usually tight-fisted with their money.’ Without another word, she let herself out. I stared after her in shock, numbed and insulted by her words. As I fell back onto my bed, I suddenly realized I’d just learned the difference between a very friendly kitchen maid and a real whore. Remorse and trepidation closed in on me, and I decided I could use a good washing. Before I fell asleep that night, I resolved to stay away from common prostitutes. Sternly I reminded myself that I was as good as engaged, and had a duty to keep my body free of disease, for Carsina’s sake. Nonetheless, I was glad to have finally gained some experience in that essential area.

The farther east I travelled each day, the less settled the land became. On the last leg of my journey, I entered the true Midlands, and followed the King’s Road as it somewhat paralleled the river. The quality of the new high road varied greatly from stretch to stretch. There were supposed to be way stations at regular intervals, to offer clean water, a resting place and food for the King’s messengers. Some of these were small hamlets, but most were meagre places of doubtful shelter with little to offer an ordinary traveller. The worst was little more than a hut swayed to one side with a roof that threatened to collapse at any moment. I learned to be sure my water bags were full and that I had provisions for a noon meal before I departed from my lodging each morning.

Once, I passed a long coffle of prisoners and guards headed east. Rather than being flogged or losing a hand for their crimes, these men would become forced labour pushing the King’s Road ever closer to the Barrier Mountains. After a term of work, they’d be given land and an opportunity to begin life anew. Thus, in one stroke, the King offered the felons a second chance, advanced his road building, and peopled the new settlements of the east. Nonetheless, the shackled men I passed did not look as if they were anticipating a new life, while the wives and children riding behind the coffle in mule-drawn wagons looked even more dismal. Dust coated their faces and clothing, and several babies were wailing as Sirlofty and I cantered past them. I will never forget one small boy who sat near the tail of the wagon, his little head jogging miserably with every jolt of the wheels. I thought to myself at the sight of his dull eyes, ‘That child is near death.’ Then I shuddered, wondered how I could even imagine I knew such a thing, and rode past them.

My cavalla cadet uniform, I am sorry to say, suffered from constant wear. The buttons strained on my chest and the seams at the shoulders and thighs threatened to give way. Finally, I bundled it up as best I could and packed it away in my crowded panniers. After that, I wore my ordinary clothes, which were actually much looser and more comfortable for such a journey. I had to admit that I’d put on flesh, and more than I thought I had. I was hungry as I rode, for such exercise consumes a man, and yet I was grateful for the short rations I was on. Surely I’d be my lean and fit self again by the time I reached home.

THREE

Spindle Dance

The deeper I went into the Midlands, the more familiar the land became to me. I knew the prairies and plateaus, the green smell of the river in the morning, and the cry of the sage hens. I knew the name of every plant and bird. Even the dust tasted familiar in my mouth. Sirlofty seemed to sense that we were nearing home, for he went more eagerly.

One mid-morning, I reined in Sirlofty and considered an unexpected choice. A crudely lettered sign on a raw plank leaned against a pile of stacked stone by the side of the road. ‘SPINDLE DANCE’ was spelled out on the coarse slab. The roughly drawn characters were the work of a hand that copied shapes rather than wrote letters. A rough cart track led away from the well-travelled river road. It crested a slight rise; its hidden destination was beyond that horizon.

I debated with myself. It was a diversion from my father’s carefully planned itinerary, and I did not know how long a detour it might prove. Yet I recalled a promise from my father to show me some day the monuments of the plains-people. The Dancing Spindle was one of them. I suddenly felt it was owed to me. I set the rein against Sirlofty’s neck and we turned aside from the road.

The trail was not badly rutted, but enough traffic had passed this way that it was easy to follow. When I reached the top of the ridge, I found myself looking down into a pleasant little vale. Trees at the bottom indicated a watercourse. The cart track sidled down to the trees and then vanished into them.

Smelling water, Sirlofty quickened his pace and I allowed him his head. When we reached the brook, I allowed him to water freely, and knelt to quench my own thirst. Refreshed, I re-mounted and rode on. The cart track followed the brook for a short way and then crossed it. I resolutely pushed aside worry over how much time I was wasting. An inexplicable excitement was building in me; I felt compelled to follow the trail.

We followed the track as it climbed up out of the valley, over a rocky ridge and onto a rather barren plateau. A short distance away, the plateau gave way abruptly to a substantial canyon, as if some angry god had riven the earth here with an immense axe. The trail plunged down sharply to the distant floor. I reined in Sirlofty and sat looking down at a strange and marvellous sight.

The cracked earth of the canyon walls displayed seams of coloured stone, sparkling white and deep orange and red, and even a dusky blue. A roofless city, the walls worn to knee-high ridges and tumbled rubble, floored the canyon. I wondered what war or long-ago disaster had brought the city down. Dominating the canyon and dwarfing the city at its base was the Dancing Spindle of the plainsmen. No tale could have prepared me for the sight. The immense pillar leaned at a sharp, impossible angle. I shivered at the sight.

The Spindle was named for the woman’s spinning tool, and in truth it resembled a rounded rod with tapered ends, but of such a size that it beggared comparison. It had been chiselled out of red stone striated with bands of white. One end towered high above the canyon floor while the other was set in a deep depression in the earth, as if it drilled a bed for itself in the stony ground. The spiralling white stripes on the pillar and a heat shimmer rising between me and it created a convincing illusion that the Spindle was truly spinning.

The monument cast a long, black shadow over the ground at its base. The lone building that had survived whatever had slain the rest of the city was a tower edged with winding steps that spiralled up to almost reach the lower side of the tilted Spindle’s topmost tip. For the life of me, I could not see why the Spindle had not toppled ages ago. I sat on my horse grinning and enjoying the deception of my eyes. At any moment I expected the spinning Spindle to waver in its gyration and fall to the earth, spent.

But it did not. As I started down the steep wagon track that led to the canyon floor, I was surprised at how well the illusion held. I was so intent on staring at it that I almost didn’t notice the ramshackle hut built in the Spindle’s shadow. It hunched on the edge of the depression that cradled the tip of the Spindle. The surrounding ruins were of stone and clay, but the dilapidated cottage was more recently built of slabs of rough wood, gone silver with weathering. It looked abandoned. I was startled when a man emerged from the open door, wiping his mouth on a napkin as if my arrival had interrupted his meal.

As I rode closer, he turned and tossed the cloth to a plainswoman who had followed him out to stare at me. She caught it deftly, and at a sign from her master, the servant returned to the hut’s dubious shelter. But the man came towards me, waving a large hand in an overly friendly way. When I was still a good way off, he bellowed at me, ‘So you’ve come to see the Spindle?’

It seemed a ridiculous question. Why else would anyone have followed the track here? I didn’t respond, for I did not feel like shouting a reply to him. Instead, I rode steadily forward. He was not deterred.

‘It’s a wonder of primitive design. For only one hector, sir, I will show it to you and tell you its amazing history! From far and wide, from near and far, hundreds have come to behold its wonder. And today you shall join the ranks of those who can say, “I myself have seen the Dancing Spindle and climbed the steps of the Spindle’s Tower.”’

He sounded like a barker outside a carnival tent. Sirlofty regarded him with suspicion. When I pulled in my horse, the man stood grinning up at me. His clothes, though clean, were shabby. His loose trousers were patched at the knees and scuffed sandals were on his large dusty feet. He wore his shirt outside his trousers, belted with a brightly woven sash. His features and language were Gernian, but his garments, stance and jewellery were those of a plainsman. A half-breed, then. I felt both pity and disgust for him, but by far the largest measure of what I felt was annoyance. The sheer size and unlikeliness of the Spindle moved me to awe. It was majestic and unique, and I could not deny the soaring of spirit that it woke in me. I wanted to contemplate it in peace without his jabbering to distract me.

I thought the man a fool when he reached for Sirlofty’s headstall to hold my horse while I dismounted. Didn’t he recognize a cavalla steed when he saw one? Sirlofty, long schooled against such a tactic, reared and wheeled in one smooth motion. As he came down, he plunged half a dozen steps forward to be clear of the ‘enemy’. I pulled him in quickly before he could launch a savage kick at the man. Dismounting, I dropped his reins and he stood in obedient stillness. I looked back at the half-breed, expecting him to be shaken by the experience.

Instead, he was grinning obsequiously. He shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands in an exaggerated gesture of astonishment. ‘Ah, such a mount, such a proud creature! I am full of envy at your fortune in possessing him.’

‘Thank you,’ I replied stiffly. The man made me uneasy and I wished to be away from him. His Gernian features contrasted with his plainsman mannerisms. His choice of words and vocabulary were those of an educated man, the guttural notes of a plains accent almost completely suppressed, and yet he stood before me in his worn sandals, his clothes little better than rags while his plains wife peered out at both of us from the shadowed doorway of their hovel. The contrast made me uncomfortable. He drew closer to me, and launched into a rehearsed monologue.

‘No doubt you have heard of the fabled Dancing Spindle, the most enigmatic of the five great monuments of the Midlands! And at last you have come to behold for yourself this marvel of ancient stonework. How, you must wonder, did the forerunners of the plainspeople, with their simple tools, create such a wonder? How does it balance and never fall? How does it create an illusion of motion when seen from a distance? And what, I am sure you ask yourself, did such an amazing creation signify to those who wrought it?

‘Well, you are not alone in asking these questions, sir! Learned scholars and philosophers and engineers have all, in their turns, ruminated upon these mysteries. From as far as Skay and Burry, they have come, and I who share the heritage of both the Plains and Gernia, have been pleased to assist them, just as I will gladly enlighten you, for the modest sum of one hector!’

His glib pitch reminded of the singsong cant of the freak show barkers on Dark Evening in Old Thares. The memory of that evening and all that followed flooded through me. I pushed aside his pleading palm with the back of my hand and stepped away from him. He flinched at my touch, although I was not rough.

‘I’ve come to see a rock formation that was doubtless mostly carved by the forces of nature, and only embellished by your people. I do not need to pay you to see what is right before my eyes! Please stay out of my way.’

For an instant, his eyes narrowed and I thought he would snarl at me. Then, his eyes widened, and to my surprise, he mimed another of his elaborate shrugs. He gestured towards the towering stone, making a small bow as he did so. ‘Do as you will, sir,’ he said. Then he bowed again and backed away from me. I stared after him, puzzled, for I had detected no sarcasm or rudeness in his words.

But as he turned away from me, I lifted my eyes and perceived the real reason for his sudden loss of interest. Creaking down the steep trail was a team and wagon. The open wagon had been decked as if for a holiday outing. A sunshade of bright yellow was suspended over its passengers. A banner painted on the side of the wagon proclaimed, ‘See the Wondrous Spindle!’. Within, a dozen passengers of all ages sat on cushioned benches, the ladies holding parasols against the spring sunshine. As my erstwhile guide hastened towards them, I saw my error. I had stumbled into his commercial endeavour unawares. Now that his true prey had arrived, he was forsaking me for a richer prize. That was as well with me. I turned my back on the tourists’ arrival and set my attention on the Spindle.

It was taller than the tallest building I’d ever seen, and far more massive. My eyes travelled to the towering tip, and then down the rod. It appeared to dwindle to a single sharp point touching the ground. I walked to the edge of the depression that cupped it and looked down. The sides of the bowl sloped steeply down, and the narrow point of the Spindle was lost in deep shadow, like a giant pen plunged into an inkwell. The whole structure leaned at a sharp angle, not touching the sides of the well, apparently supported by a small joining hidden within the well. That ran counter to my engineer’s instincts. How could such a small anchorage of rock support that weight? Even at this closer perspective, it still maintained its illusion of motion.

For a time I stood there, my neck craned, staring down at the Spindle’s tip in the deeply shadowed bowl. What had seemed when viewed from a distance a fine point in proportion to the gargantuan Spindle was in fact a substantial girth of stone. Where it disappeared from sight in the depths of the hole it had seemingly drilled in the earth, the cylinder’s girth was still as wide as a watchtower’s base. It must have been still. If it hadn’t been still, the grinding of the stone tip against the depths would have been deafening, as if a giant mortar and pestle were at work. But my gullible eyes still insisted that the Spindle spun. I shook my head to clear it of the optical illusion and tried to focus my mind on the real puzzle: What kept it in place? Given its mass and how it leaned, why hadn’t it fallen ages ago?

I had been certain that a closer view would reveal the trick of it. But now, standing as close to the base as I could get without tumbling into its well, I was as puzzled as ever. A lone tower edged with winding steps spiralled up to almost reach the lower side of the tilted Spindle’s topmost tip. I resolved that I would hike to the standing tower and climb the stairs. It looked as if the tower came so close to the Spindle’s tip that I could actually put my hands on it, to prove to myself that it could not be rotating. All thoughts of keeping this side trip to a brief detour had vanished from my mind. I would satisfy my curiosity at all costs. I lifted my eyes to pick out the best route over the broken land and immediately saw a faint footpath across the stony earth. Obviously, I was not the first gawker to have such an ambition. Confident that Sirlofty could mind himself, I left him standing and followed the track.

When my path led me directly beneath the Spindle and through its shadow, I went with trepidation. At the heart of the shadow, the day seemed to dim. I could swear I felt a distant chill wind, manufactured of the Spindle’s turning, brush my cheek. I felt in my chest rather than heard the deep rumbling of the Spindle’s eternal motion. The ghost wind seemed to slide a hand across the top of my head, stirring an uncomfortable memory of how the Tree Woman had caressed me. I was glad to step out of that shadow and away from those strange fancies, even though the day now seemed brighter and the sun too hot on my skull.

My path was not straight, but wandered through the broken walls and sunken roads of the fallen city that intersected my route. The stubs of the walls gave witness to the half-breed guide’s claim that the Spindle was a man-made wonder, for some were built of the same reddish stone as the Spindle and still bore odd patterns, an alternation of checkering and spirals, at once foreign and familiar. I walked more slowly, and began to see the suggestions of sly faces eroding from leaning slabs of wall. Hollow mouths fanged with now dulled teeth, carved hands reduced by time to blunt paws, and voluptuous women whittled by the wind to become sexless boys teased my eyes.

I climbed up on one corner of wall and looked around me. From that vantage point I could almost make sense of the tumbled walls and collapsed roofs. I jumped down and once more began to thread my way through … what? A temple town? A village? A graveyard of ancient tombs? Whatever it was, it had fallen, leaving the Spindle and its tower to lord it over the time-gnawed remains. How could a folk with tools of stone, bone and bronze have shaped such a vast creation? I even considered giving the guide a hector on my return, to see if he had a believable answer to the question.

When I reached the base of the tower, I discovered two things. The first was that it was in much poorer condition than it had seemed from a distance. The second was that it was not a proper building at all. It consisted only of a spiralling stair that wound up and around a solid inner core. You could not enter the tower at all; you could only ascend to its peak by the outer stair. A crude barrier of ropes and poles had been thrown up in front of the tower’s first step, as if to warn people off. I paid no heed to it. The lips of the stairs were rounded. The centre of each step dipped, tribute to the passage of both feet and years. The walls of the stair’s core had once been tiled with mosaics. Glimpses of them remained: an eye and a pair of leering lips, a paw with claws outstretched, the fat-cheeked face of a little child with eyes closed in bliss. Round and round I climbed, ever ascending. I felt a giddy familiarity yet could recall no similar experience in my life. Here, in the mosaic, the head of a red and black croaker bird gaped its beak open wide. Then, a tree, arms reaching up to the sun with its face turned to its rays. I had passed it by a dozen steps before it came to me that a tree should have neither arms nor a face. There was graffiti, too, the ever-present proclamation that someone had been here, or that someone loved someone forever. Some of it was old but most of it was fresh.

I expected to grow weary with the climb. The day was warm, the sun determined, and I was carrying more flesh than I’d ever had in my life. Yet there was something exhilarating about being up so high with nothing between me and a sheer drop to the rocky ground below the spire. With every step I took, the music of the spinning Spindle grew louder; I could feel the vibration in my bones. I felt the wind of its passage on my face. There was even a peculiar scent that I knew was generated by the stone’s movement, a warm smell, delicious: like singed spices. I stopped watching the stairs and looked up to the Spindle. I could see the striated stone core. It, perhaps, was still. But there was a hazy layer of air or mist that surrounded the Spindle, and it spun. I cannot explain the fascination and delight that this woke in me.

The top of the tower culminated in a platform the size of a small room. A low stone wall edged it, but on one side a crack had corrupted it and the stone had eroded away to an uneven mound only about the height of my knee. I walked to the centre of the platform, and then stood, looking straight up at the tip of the Spindle above me. I am a tall man, but its stony heart was still out of my reach. It puzzled me. Why had they built this spire, to bring someone so close to the wondrous monument and still have it be out of reach? It made no sense. The wind of the spinning stuff’s passage was warm on my face and redolent with spice.

I took a moment and stared out at the view. The ruined city was cupped in the canyon. The sightseers had disembarked from the wagon and stood in a respectful mob around the half-breed. I knew he was speaking to them, but not a sound reached my ears save the soft hum of the turning Spindle. I gazed up at it. I suddenly knew I had come here for a reason. I reached a slow hand up over my head.

Suddenly, a voice spoke near by.

‘Don’t touch it.’

I jumped and looked to see who had spoken. It was the plainswoman from the guide’s hut, or someone very like her. She must have followed me up the steps. I scowled. I wanted no company. My hand still wavered above my head.

‘Why not?’ I asked her.

She came a step closer to me, cocked her head slightly and looked at me as if she had thought I was someone she knew. She smiled as she said jestingly, ‘The old people say it’s dangerous to touch the Spindle. You’ll be caught in the twine and carried—’

My fingers brushed the spinning stuff. It was mist, said my fingers; but then the gritty stone surface swept against my hand. I was snatched out of my skin and borne aloft.

I have watched women spinning. I had seen the hanks of wool caught and drawn out into a fine thread on a spinning wheel. That was what happened to me. I did not keep my man’s shape. Instead, something was pulled out of me, some spirit or essence, and was drawn as fine as yarn and wrapped around the immense Spindle. It twisted me as it pulled me into a taut line. Thin as string I was and I spiralled around it like thread. My awareness was immersed in the magic of the Spindle. And in that immersion, I awoke to my other self.

He knew the purpose of the Spindle. It pulled the widely scattered threads of magic out of the world and gathered them into yarn. The Spindle concentrated the magic. And he knew the spire’s purpose. It gave access to the gathered magic. From here, a plainsman of power, a stone mage, would work wonders. This spinning spindle was the heart of plains magic. I’d found it. This was the well that not only the Kidona but all the plainspeople drew from. The suppressed other self inside me suddenly surged to the fore. I felt him seize the magic and glory in the richness of it. Some, he took into himself, but there was only so much this body could hold. As for the rest, well, now that he knew the source, no plainsman would ever unleash this magic against the Specks of the mountains again. I’d see to that. All their harvested magic was at the tips of my fingers. I laughed aloud, triumphant. I would destroy—

I strained, striving to grip what I could not see. It was too strong. I was abruptly flung back into my body with a jolt as shocking as if I’d been flung to my back on paving stones.

‘… to the edges of complete power. It is not a journey for the unprepared.’ The plainswoman finished her sentence. She was smiling, sharing a silly old superstition with me.

I swayed and then folded onto my knees. I saved some of my dignity by collapsing back onto my heels rather than falling on my face. My hands, I saw, rested on faded patterns carved into the stone. She frowned at me and then asked, more in alarm than concern, ‘Are you ill?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. I took a deep steadying breath and became aware of a voice lecturing. It was coming closer. I was dizzy and I did not want to turn my head, but I did. The guide advanced slowly up the steps. He had donned a straw hat that gave him a comical dignity. Behind him came a gaggle of sightseers, the hardy ones who had made the climb. One woman held her parasol overhead. Two others fanned themselves against the day’s warmth. There were only two men in the party, and they seemed to be escorting the young ladies rather than here by their own inclination. A dozen boys and girls traipsed along behind the adults. The girls were trying to imitate the ladies but the lads were exhibiting the universal signs of bored boys, nudging one another, scuffling to be first onto the platform, and parodying the guide’s posture and remarks behind his back.

‘I beg of you all to be most careful and to stay well away from the edge. The wall is not sound. And, to answer your question, miss, the spire has four hundred and thirty-two steps. Now, please lift your eyes to the Spindle itself. Here you will experience the clearest view of it. You can now see that the illusion of motion is created by the use of the striated rock. At this distance, of course, the illusion ceases and one can see that the Spindle is fixed in place.’

Without standing up, I turned my eyes to the Spindle again. ‘It spins,’ I said quietly, and heard, aghast, the distance in my own voice. ‘For me, it spins.’ Despite my effort to clear my voice, I sounded like Epiny, when she spoke through her medium’s trance. That other self inside me struggled for ascendance. I suppressed him with difficulty.

‘You are not well, sir.’ The plainswoman stated this with emphasis. I sensed that she spoke to inform the others of my situation. ‘You should leave here.’

I stared at her. I had expected her to urge me to rest or offer me water. Instead, her grey gaze was narrow with distrust. I closed my eyes for a moment.

‘I don’t know if I can,’ I said. I had been about to do something, something of vast importance. I could not get my bearings. My pulse beat in my ears. I staggered to my feet and then blinked at the scene around me. Only a moment had seemed to pass for me, but the tourists were not as I had last glimpsed them. The guide had concluded his lecture and was pointing out over the valley, answering questions for an earnest young man. The other sightseers likewise stood beside him looking out across the wide vista. Two of the women had opened sketchbooks. The parasol woman was working from an easel her male companion had carried for her, her watercolour already sketched and half-painted. He stood behind her shoulder, admiring her skill. An older woman had gathered the girls round her and was repeating the key points of their tour. One dutiful boy held a sheet of paper against a block of stone as a stout older woman made a charcoal rubbing of the bas-relief etched there. The guide turned away from his party and started towards me.

The plainswoman had remained beside me. ‘What’s happening to me?’ I asked her. She knit her brows and shrugged at me. She stood by me, almost as if I were in her custody.

The guide approached me with a sanctimonious smile. ‘Well? And have you satisfied your curiosity, sir? I am sure you must be very impressed with the winds that managed to sculpt these wondrous carvings.’

His sarcasm was justified. Possibly that was why it angered me. ‘I’m leaving,’ I announced. I heaved myself to my feet. I was turning away when I felt a sudden wave of queasiness. The earth seemed to rock under my feet. ‘Is it an earthquake?’ I asked frantically, although I suspected that the unrest was within my own body. I lifted my hands to my temples and stared bleakly at the guide and the plainswoman. They regarded me with alarm.

A terrible whine like an ungreased axle shrieked through my ears. I turned my head in search of the source of it. To my horror, three of the boys had gathered at the centre of the platform. Two acted as support to hold a third aloft. Thus lifted, the middle boy could reach the stone of the Spindle. He had taken out a sheath knife and set the blade to the stone. As I watched, he tried to scratch a line into the ancient monument. The self that the Tree Woman had tutored stabbed me with fear. There was danger, vast danger, in suddenly loosing that magic.

‘Stop!’ I shouted the warning. Against all common sense, I expected to see the young fool snatched up and away by the momentum of the Spindle. ‘Don’t do that! Stop that immediately!’ The iron was tearing the magic free of the Spindle in wild, flapping sheets. It could go anywhere, do anything. I was deafened and dizzied by its buffeting but the others apparently felt nothing.

The boy stopped, glared at me and said scornfully, ‘You’re not my father. Mind your own business.’

The moment he had lifted his knife from the stone, the screeching had stopped. Now as he deliberately set his blade to the monument again, it began again. As he bore down on the iron blade, the sound soared in volume and pitch. I clapped my hands over my ears against the harsh shriek. A ghostly smoke rose from the point at which blade met stone. He seemed oblivious to all of it.

‘Stop!’ I roared at him. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, you idiot!’

Now every member of the touring party had turned to stare at me. For myself, I did not know how they could be immune to the shrieking of the Spindle as the cold iron bore into it. Wave after wave of vertigo washed through me. The humming of the Spindle, a constant that had been so uniform I had scarcely been aware of it, now warbled as the blade’s contact slowed its turning. ‘Make him stop!’ I shouted at them. ‘Can’t you see what he’s doing? Can’t you sense what he’s destroying?’ My hidden self warned me of magic unravelling around me. I felt the tattered threads of it score my skin as it dispersed into the empty air. It felt like tiny swift cuts with a razor-sharp knife. It threatened me; it threatened to strip from me all the magic I had so painstakingly stored away.

‘Stop him, or I shall!’ I made the threat, but the wavering of the magic unbalanced me. It wasn’t just the air; it was the reality around me that seemed uneven and fickle. I didn’t think I had the strength to swat a fly. Nonetheless, I moved to stop the boy.

I must have looked a madman as I lurched and staggered towards the young fool who was whetting his blade on ancient magic. The women had lifted their hands, covering their mouths in horror. The two boys supporting the vandal staggered back, one dropping the leg he had held. One young man stepped forward as if he would protect the boy from me. Only one matron, the one making the rubbing, added her voice to my protest. ‘Stop that, you young hooligan! I brought you here to teach you about primitive culture, not to have you ruin it! Stop defacing these ancient works! Your father will hear of this!’ She dropped her charcoal and advanced on the lad. Behind her, her assistant rolled his eyes wearily.

With a surly snarl, the boy flung the knife down so hard it bounced. ‘I wasn’t doing anything! Just making my initials to show I’d been here, that was all! What a fuss about a stupid striped rock! What’s it going to do, make it fall down?’ He turned to glare at me. ‘Are you happy, fat man? You’ve got your way! I never even asked to come on this stupid outing to look at a stupid rock!’

‘Jard? Where are your manners?’ the matron snapped. ‘Regardless of the man’s mental condition, he is your elder. You should speak to him with respect. And I have warned you before about your endless carving on things. It’s disrespectful. If you cannot behave any better than that, and if Ret and Breg have nothing better to do than assist you in being a fool, then I think it is high time we all left! Boys and girls. Gather your things and follow me. This has not been the outing that I had expected it to be. Perhaps all of you prefer to sit in the classroom and study from a book rather than see the real world. I shall remember that the next time I think of taking you out.’

There was a chorus of whines and dismayed denial from her students, but she was adamant. The guide shot me a vicious look. Plainly I had ruined his trade for the day. The other tourists were folding sketchbooks and taking down the easel. I caught sideways, uneasy looks from them. They seemed to think I was mad, and the guide apparently shared their opinion. I did not care. The boy stooped to snatch up his knife, and then made a rude hand gesture at me before he followed the others to the top of the winding stair. As before the guide went with them, offering them many warnings about going carefully and staying close to the inner edge of the steps. After a time, I became aware that I was alone on the top of the tower, except for the plainswoman. I felt as if I were caught between dreaming and wakefulness. What had just happened?

‘The Spindle does turn,’ I said to her. I wanted her to agree with me.

Her lip curled in disgust. ‘You are a madman,’ she told me. ‘A fat and stupid madman. You have driven away our customers. Do you think we get tour wagons every day? Once a month, perhaps, they come. And you have spoiled their pleasure with your shouting and your threats. What do you think they will tell their friends? No one will want to come and see the Spindle. You will destroy our livelihood. Go away. Take your madness elsewhere.’

‘But… don’t you feel it? The Spindle turns. Lift your hands. You’ll feel the wind of it. Can’t you hear it? Can’t you smell the magic of it?’

She narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously. She gave a quick, sideways glance at the Spindle and then looked back at me. ‘Do I look like a foolish savage?’ she asked me bitterly. ‘Do you think because I am a plainswoman that I am stupid? The Spindle does not turn. It never turned. From a distance, it tricks the eye. But always, it has been still. Still and dead.’

‘No. It turns.’ I wanted someone to confirm what I had experienced. ‘It turns for me, and when I lifted my hands, it happened, as you warned me it might. It lifted me up and—’

Anger flared in her face and she lifted a hand as if she would slap me. ‘NO! It did not. It has never turned for me, and it could not turn for you, Gernian! It was a legend. That was all. Those who say they see it turning are fools, and those who claim to have been lifted by it are liars! Liars! Go away! Get out of here! How dare you say it turns for you! It never turned for me and I am of the Plains! Liar! Liar!’

I had never seen a woman become so hysterical. Her hands were clenched in fists and spittle flew from her lips as she shrieked at me.

‘I’m going!’ I promised her. ‘I’m leaving now.’

The clamber down the circling steps seemed endless. My calves screamed with cramp. Twice I nearly fell, and the second time, I bloodied the heels of my hands when I caught myself on the wall. I felt sick and dizzied. I felt angry, too. I was not crazy and I resented how I had been treated. I did not know if I should blame the blindness of the other people or the foreign magic that had polluted me and taken me for its own. What was real? What was illusion?

For the moment, the battle for control that I’d had with my other self had subsided. There was no comfort in that. When I’d previously confronted him, I’d been able to set him apart from me, to comprehend him as ‘other’ to myself. There was no such separation now. He permeated my being, and I recognized him as comprising the harder parts of my soldier self. Had Tree Woman deliberately chosen those parts when she had seized a lock of my hair and jerked a core out of my awareness? I stole a cautious peek at that part of my self, as if I were peeking at an adder in a box. I was both fascinated and repelled by what I glimpsed. There were the bits of myself that I’d lacked in my first year at the Academy. He was the one who had enabled me to take my petty vengeance on the new noble sons. He had fierce pride and recklessness and daring. He was also ruthless and single-minded in what he would do for his people. The frightening part of that was that it was not to Gernia that he pledged his loyalty, but to the Specks. I’d been imagining that I’d reintegrated him into myself. Now I wondered if the flow were not the other way; was he absorbing my knowledge and memories for his own ends? He’d had a goal, up there near the Spindle, one that I still didn’t grasp.

I suddenly decided it was time to leave.

The guide seemed to have calmed his customers on the way down. As I followed the path back through the ancient city, I saw that the teacher and her charges had dispersed throughout the ruins. The easel woman was hard at work again. One of the women with a sketchbook was drawing the other as she sat picturesquely beside a tumbled wall. I passed them all, enduring their glances as I did so. Something nagged at me, some task had been left undone, but I recognized that concern as belonging to my other self. Nevare only wanted to be away from that place.

As I drew near to the base of the Spindle and the shabby little shack there, I saw the guide again. He leaned in the shade against the wall of his pathetic house and watched me come. I could see him trying to decide if he would say anything to me or would let me pass unchallenged. His furtive glances told me that he both despised and feared me as a madman.

I heard voices. As I passed the edge of the bowl in which the Spindle rested or spun, I glanced over the rim. The boys were there. This time, his two companions gripped his legs while Jard lay, belly down, in the slanting cup of the bowl. His knife was busy again. Large letters proclaimed that Jard had been there. Ret’s name was in the process of being added. All three were so intent that they didn’t see me staring at them. I looked at the guide and our eyes met across the distance. His face paled with fear. I smiled.

‘If my illustrious ancestors had carved this, I’d protect it from young vandals,’ I advised the half-breed sarcastically.

He narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth to respond. But before he could, one of the boys holding Jard’s legs yelped, ‘It’s that crazy fat man! Get out of there, Jard!’ At the same moment, he helpfully let go of Jard’s leg as he sprang away and fled, intent on saving himself from my supposed insanity. Jard, supported now only by Breg’s grip on his other leg, gave a wild yell as he suddenly slid deeper into the bowl. He flailed his arms wildly, seeking a grip on the smooth surface and finding nothing. Breg, surprised by Ret’s desertion, was himself tugged to his knees at the edge of the bowl. ‘I can’t hold him!’ he wailed. I heard a tearing sound and saw the fabric of Jard’s trousers starting to give way.

In two steps, I reached the rim of the Spindle’s bowl. I flung myself to my knees and reached to grab Jard by the knees. He screamed and kicked at me, evidently thinking I intended to tear him from Breg’s grip and let him plunge headfirst into the Spindle’s well. I didn’t. I hauled him back to the lip of the bowl. He jabbed his knife at me, still struggling against his rescue. My blood seethed with anger at his insolence. I seized his wrist and slammed it flat against the stone of the bowl. His knife flew free. An instant later, I had dragged him back over the edge and to safety. I released him and tried to stand up. Magic was singing triumphantly through my blood. Something was happening, something vast and not of my volition, but of my doing all the same. The forest mage within me laughed wildly, victoriously, and then slid back into the leafy shadows of my subconscious. I could not discern what his victory was, and then I did.

Even as the other tourists were running towards me, and Jard fled sobbing to his teacher, I watched his knife sliding down the bowl towards the unseen depths at the centre. As the bowl became steeper, the knife slid faster across the polished stone. When it entered the darkness of the centre, I felt my heart stand still.

The half-breed had seized my hand and was pumping it while stuttering out his thanks and apologizing for misjudging me. The fool. I heard Ret shouting to the rapidly gathering tourists that, ‘No, it’s all right, he didn’t try to hurt Jard, he saved him! Jard nearly fell head first into that hole. The man pulled him out.’ Jard was sobbing like a small boy as he clung to his teacher. I alone seemed to hear the terrible grinding noise at the edge of the worlds. The blade of the knife had wedged beneath the Spindle’s tip. I knew that tip existed, deep inside the well the magic had drilled for all those years. The vast momentum of magic met the iron knife and wedged against it. The Spindle ground to a halt. I felt the moving magic foul and tangle, thwarted by a small iron blade. I sank down and pressed my brow to the edge of the stone bowl. It was like the death of the windwizard all over again, but this time I could not claim innocence for myself. What had I done? What had the forest magic done through me?

‘Best leave him alone!’ I heard the guide say. ‘I think the man just wants to be left alone.’

Then all sound halted around me. Like the harsh kiss of a sandstorm the harnessed magic of the plainsmen suddenly burst free and scattered. For a blink of my lifetime, I swear the world went black and still. Raw power abraded my senses and engulfed me. I struggled to stand, to lift my arms to defend myself from it.

When time started up again, I seemed once more to have fallen behind the rest of the world. The guide had rounded up his tourists and was herding them back towards their wagon. Several of them glanced back at me and shook their heads, speaking quickly to one another. The knife-boy was already sitting on a wagon seat. Ret said something to Breg and they both hooted with laughter. Jard’s brush with death was already a joking matter for them. They had no idea of what had just happened.

The flash of anger I felt subsided before I even felt its heat. Surely the sun had moved in the sky? I gave my head a small shake and let my clenched fists fall to my sides. My arms ached. My nails had left deep red indentations in my palms. I had no idea how long I had stood there. I did know what my Speck self had done. The Dancing Spindle no longer danced. The magic of the plainspeople was broken. I found Sirlofty. It was all I could do to clamber onto his back. I held to the horn of the saddle as I kicked him into a lope and fled that place. The driver of the wagon shouted at me angrily as I passed his team on the steep trail. I paid him no mind.

By the time I reached the road again, I had almost recovered. The farther I went from the Spindle, the clearer my head became. The forest mage inside me ceased his chortling and grew still.

Evening fell, and I pushed Sirlofty on, journeying through the dusk to make up the time wasted in my foolish detour. I wished I’d never left the road. I tried to stuff what I’d discovered back into the darkness, but it rode with me now. I shifted in my saddle and felt it slip under me. Gently I reined Sirlofty in; I dismounted as if I were as fragile as an eggshell. With a feeling of ineffable sadness, I tightened the cinch on my saddle.

It was the first time in my life that I’d ever had to do that.

Night was deep by the time I reached the town. I found an inn that would admit me. Before I fell asleep, as had become my habit, I wrote carefully of the day’s events. Then I scowled at the words. Did I really want these wild thoughts in the first volume of my soldier-son journal? Only the teaching that it was my duty to record what I observed each day comforted me.

In the days that followed, I did not again diverge from my father’s itinerary for me. I fixed my mind on my carefully planned life, on my brother’s wedding, my reunion with Carsina, my education at the Academy, my service and my eventual marriage. My father had mapped out my future as precisely as he had mapped out my journey home. I had no time for illusions, no time to question where my reality ended and someone else’s began. I refused to think about the magic of the Plains and a ‘keep fast’ charm that no longer seemed to work. Everyone knew that the magic of the plains folk was fading. There was no reason to blame myself for its demise. With the destruction of the Spindle, that other self in me seemed to subside. I dared to hope that it was the last I would sense of him. I practised believing that until I was able to think and live as if I were certain it was so.

Although the Midlands are often referred to as flat, they rise and fall with subtle grace. Thus it was that the trees and walls of my father’s home were concealed from me until I rode up a slight rise in a bend of the road and suddenly perceived my home. My father’s manor was set on a gentle rise overlooking the road. I gazed up at it and thought that it looked smaller and more rustic than when I had last seen it. Now that I knew what the estates and manors of the west looked like, I could see that my father’s house was a pale imitation of their grandeur. I could also see how clearly our home was modelled upon my uncle’s house. They had made improvements since I’d left for the Academy. River gravel had been hauled up to surface the drive, and young oak trees, each little more than a shovel-handle high, now edged it. Some day they would be tall and grand, and this would be a fine carriageway to our home. But for now, they looked spindly and forlorn, exposed to prairie dust and wind. Each had a damp circle of soil around its base. I wondered how many years they’d have to be watered daily before their roots reached deep enough to sustain them. This copying of our ancestral home suddenly seemed both sentimental and a bit silly to me.

But nonetheless, it was home. I’d arrived. For an instant, I had the foolish thought that I could pass it by and keep travelling east, on and on, all the way to the mountains. I imagined tall trees and inviting shade and birds calling in the shadowy thickets. Then Sirlofty took it on himself to turn from the main road and break into a canter. We were home! We woke dust all up the long driveway from the King’s Road to my father’s front door. There I pulled him in with a flourish, as our family’s dogs swirled around us in a barking, wagging pack and one of the stablehands came out to see what had roused them. I didn’t know the man, and so I was not offended when he asked, ‘Are you lost, sir?’

‘No, I’m Nevare Burvelle, a son of the house, just returned from the Cavalla Academy. Please take Sirlofty for me and see that he is well treated. We’ve come a long way, he and I.’

The man gaped at me, but I ignored that and handed him my reins. ‘Oh, and send the contents of his panniers up to my room, if you would,’ I added, as I climbed the front steps. I let myself in, calling out, ‘Mother! Father! It’s Nevare, I’m home. Rosse, Elisi, Yaril? Is anyone home?’

My mother was the first to come out of her sewing room. She stared at me, her eyes growing round and then, embroidery in hand, she hurried down the hall. She embraced me, saying, ‘Oh, Nevare, it’s so good to see you. But the dust on you! I’ll have a bath drawn for you immediately. Oh, son, I’m so glad you are home and safe again!’

‘And I am glad beyond words to be here again, Mother!’

The others had arrived by then. Father and Rosse looked startled, even when I turned and strode towards them, smiling. Rosse shook my hand but my father held back from me, demanding, ‘What have you done to yourself? You look like a wandering peddler! Why aren’t you wearing your uniform?’

‘It needs a bit of mending, I’m afraid. I hope Mother can have it ready in time for Rosse’s wedding. Elisi, Yaril? Am I a stranger now? Aren’t you going to say hello even?’

‘Hello, Nevare. Welcome home.’ Elisi spoke stiffly, and looked aside from me as if I’d done something rude and she wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

‘You’re so fat!’ Yaril exclaimed, tactless as she had ever been. ‘What have you been eating at that place? Your face is round as the full moon! And you’re so dirty! I thought you’d ride up, all glorious in your uniform. I didn’t even recognize you at first.’

I chuckled weakly, and waited for my father to rebuke her. Instead, he muttered, ‘Out of the mouths of babes.’ Then, speaking more strongly, he said, ‘I’m sure you’ve had a long trip, Nevare. You’re a few hours earlier than I expected you, but I think you’ll find your room is waiting, with wash water. After you’ve cleaned yourself and changed, please come and see me in my study.’

I made a final effort. ‘I’m so glad to see you, Father. It’s good to be home.’

‘I’m sure it is, Nevare. Well. I’ll see you again in a few minutes.’ There was restraint in his voice, and the edge of command. Plainly he wished me to obey him immediately. And I did. The habit of not questioning his authority and commands was still strong in me, but as I washed the dust from my face and hands, I experienced something I hadn’t felt before about my father. Resentment. It wasn’t just for the way he ordered me about, but for his obvious displeasure with me. I had only just arrived home. Could not he have suppressed whatever it was that annoyed him long enough to shake my hand and welcome me back? Must I immediately fall completely under his domination again? I thought of his rigid itinerary for my journey home, and suddenly saw it not as a helpful aid, but as oppression. Did he or did he not trust me to make my own way in the world?

My anger gave way to a greater frustration as I tried to find some clothing that would still fit me. When I had left for the Academy, I had emptied my room. My mother, ever thoughtful of such things, had hung two of Rosse’s old shirts and a pair of his trousers in my closet, for my use until my travelling clothes could be washed and pressed. When I put them on, I looked ridiculous. The trousers were too short on me as well as far too tight. I had to let my stomach bulge out over the top of them. Both shirts strained on me. I took them off and vindictively threw them on the floor before putting my travel-stained clothes back on. But a glance in my mirror showed me that they were ill-fitting and dirty to boot. The seams in the seat of the trousers looked ready to part. The shirt was already slightly torn at both shoulders, and barely met over my middle.

Well, I decided, if I must look silly, I would at least be clean. I retrieved Rosse’s clothes, put them on, wiped the worst of the dust off my boots and descended the stairs. The house was silent. My mother and sisters seemed to have vanished completely. I did not even hear their voices in a different room. I tapped at the closed door to my father’s study and then walked in. My father was standing with his back to the room, staring out the window. My brother Rosse was there also. He glanced at me and then away, plainly uncomfortable. My father held his silence.

I broke the silence at last. ‘Father, you wished me to come to your study?’

He did not turn around. He did not immediately reply. When he did speak, he seemed to be addressing the trees outside the window. ‘Your brother’s wedding is scarcely four days away,’ he said heavily. ‘How can you possibly think to undo in four days what sloth and gluttony have accomplished in six months? Did you give a thought to anyone beside yourself when you were allowing your gut to become the size of a washbasin? Do you wish to humiliate your entire family by appearing at a festive occasion in such a state? I am humiliated to think that you have presented yourself thus to the Academy, to my brother, and to everyone who knew your name on your journey home. In the good god’s name, Nevare, whatever were you thinking when you allowed yourself to descend to such a state? I sent you off to the Academy a fit and able young man, physically suited to be an officer and a soldier. And look what comes back to me less than a year later!’

His words rattled against me like flung stones. He gave me no opportunity to reply. When he finally turned to face me, I could see that his quiet stance had been a deception. His face was red and the veins stood out in his temples. I dared a glance at my brother. His face was white and he was very still, like a small animal that hopes not to draw the predator’s attention to himself.

I stood in the focus of my father’s anger with absolutely no idea of how to defend myself. I felt guilty and ashamed of my body, but I honestly could not recall that I had overeaten since I had begun my journey, nor had my pace been what I would call slothful. I spoke the truth. ‘I have no explanation, sir. I don’t know why I’ve gained so much weight.’

The anger in his eyes sharpened. ‘You don’t? Well, perhaps a three-day fast will refresh an elementary truth for you. If you eat too much, you get fat, Nevare. If you lie about like a slug, you get fat. If you don’t overeat and if you exercise your muscles, you remain trim and soldierly.’

He took a breath, obviously to master himself. When he spoke again, his tone was calmer. ‘Nevare, you disappoint me. It is not just that you have let yourself go; worse is that you try to shrug off the responsibility for it. I must remind myself of your youth. Perhaps the fault is mine; perhaps I should have delayed your entry into the Academy until you were more mature, more capable of regulating yourself. Well.’ He sighed, clenched his jaw for a moment and then went on. ‘That cannot be mended now. But the mess you’ve made of yourself is something I can remedy. We cannot undo it in four days, but we can put a dent in it. Look at me, son, when I speak to you.’

I had been avoiding his gaze. Now I brought my eyes back to meet his squarely, trying to mask my anger. If he saw it, he ignored it. ‘It won’t be pleasant, Nevare. Do it willingly, and prove to me that you are still the son I trained and sent off with such high hopes. I ask only two things of you: restrict your food and demand performance from your body.’ He paused and seemed to be weighing his options. Then he nodded to himself. ‘Sergeant Duril has been supervising a crew clearing stones from the land for a new pasture. Go and join them, right now, and I don’t mean to supervise. Start working off that gut. Confine your appetite to water for the rest of this day. Tomorrow, eat as sparingly as you can. We’ll do what we can to trim some of that off you before your brother’s wedding day.’

He turned his attention to my brother. ‘Rosse. Go out to the stables with him, and find him a mule. I won’t have one of the good horses broken down by lugging him over broken terrain. Take him out to the new alfalfa field.’

I spoke up. ‘I think I could find a mule for myself.’

‘Just do what you are told, Nevare. Trust me. I know what is best for you.’ He sighed heavily, and then with the first hint of kindness I heard from him, he said, ‘Put yourself in my hands, son. I know what I’m doing.’

And that was my welcome home.

FOUR

The Fast

Rosse and I rode silently out to the work site. Several times I glanced at my brother, but he was always staring ahead, his face expressionless. I supposed he was as disappointed in me as my father was. We said a perfunctory goodbye, he rode off leading my mule and I joined my work crew. I didn’t recognize any of the four men and we didn’t bother with introductions. I simply joined them at the task.

The future pasture was on a sunny hillside by a creek. Coarse prairie grass and buck-brush grew there now. The ground was littered with stones, some loose on top of the earth and others nudging up out of the soil. The larger ones had to be moved before a team and plough could break the thin sod. I’d watched our men do this sort of work before though I’d never bent my back to it myself. It should have been well within my ability, but Academy life had softened me. My first hour of prising rocks from their beds and lifting them into a wagon first raised and then broke blisters on my hands. The work was both tedious and demanding.

We used iron bars to prise the larger stones from the hard earth. Then each had to be lifted, sometimes by two men, and loaded onto a buckboard wagon. When the wagon was full we followed it as the team hauled the stone to the edge of the field. There we unloaded it in a neat line of rock. It became a rough stone wall to mark the edge of the sown pasture. The other men talked and laughed among themselves. They were not rude; they just ignored me. Doubtless they had decided I wouldn’t last long and that there was little point in getting to know me.

Sergeant Duril was supervising the work. The first time he rode by to check on our crew, I don’t think he recognized me. I was glad to escape his notice. The second time he rode up to ask how many wagon loads of stone we’d hauled since he last spoke to us, he stared at me and then visibly startled.

‘You. Come here,’ he commanded me roughly. He didn’t dismount, but rode his horse a short distance while I walked beside him. When we were out of earshot of the work crew, he pulled in and looked down at me. ‘Nevare?’ he asked, as if he could not believe his eyes.

‘Yes. It’s me.’ My voice came out flat and defensive.

‘What in the good god’s name have you done to yourself?’

‘I’ve got fat,’ I said bluntly. I was already tired of explaining it. Or rather, I was tired of not being able to explain it. No one seemed able to believe that it had simply happened and that I had not brought it on myself by sloth and greed. I was beginning to wonder about that myself. How had this befallen me?

‘So I see. But not in a way I’ve ever seen a lad put on weight! A little gut from too much beer, that I’ve seen on many a trooper. But you’re fat all over! Your face, your arms, even the calves of your legs!’

I hadn’t stopped to consider that. I wanted to look down at my body, to see if it was truly so, but suddenly felt too ashamed. I looked away from him, across the flat plain that soon would be a pasture. I tried to think of something to say but the only words that came were, ‘My father has sent me out here to work. He says hard work and short rations will trim me down before Rosse’s wedding.’

His silence seemed long. Then he said, ‘Well, a man can only do so much in a few days, but the intention is what matters. You’re stubborn, Nevare. I would never have imagined that you’d let yourself go like this, but I know that if you’re determined to get back to what you were, you’ll do it.’

I couldn’t think of any response to that, and after a short time, he said, ‘Well, I have to finish my round of the crews. Your da says that a year from now, this will all be alfalfa and clover. We’ll see.’

Then he tapped his horse and rode off. I walked back to the work crew. They had been loitering, watching us talk. I went back to levering up stones and loading them on the wagon. They didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t volunteer anything.

We worked the rest of the day, until Duril rode past again and gave the sign for quitting time. We still had to unload the rock we had on the wagon at the fence line. Then we all rode on the wagon back to my father’s manor house. The other men went off to the help’s quarters. I entered the back door of the house and went up to my room.

I blessed my mother when I arrived there. She had left out wash water and towels, and some of my old clothes, along with an old pair of plains sandals. I could see that she had hastily let out the seams of the trousers and shirt as far as they could go. I washed. When I dressed, I found that my old clothes were still snug on me, but they were bearable and far more presentable than Rosse’s cast-offs had been.

I had come in late and the rest of the family was already at dinner. I was in no hurry to join them. Instead, I crept into my sister Yaril’s room.

My father had always said that vanity was too costly a vice for any soldier to afford. In my own room, I had a mirror large enough for shaving, and that was all. My sisters, on the other hand, were expected to be continually aware of their appearances. They had full-length mirrors in each of their bedrooms. When I stood in front of Yaril’s, I had a shock.

Duril was right. The weight I had put on was distributed all over me, like thick frosting on a cake. No wonder others had been reacting to me so strangely. No part of me had escaped. As I stared at my face, I was certain that instead of losing weight on my journey home, I’d added to it. This was not the face I’d seen in my shaving mirror at the Academy. My cheeks were round and jowly and my chin was padded. My eyes looked smaller, as if they were set closer together. My neck looked shorter.

The rest of my body was even more distressing. My shoulders and back were rounded with fat, to say nothing of my chest and belly. My gut was more than a paunch; it was starting to hang. My thighs were heavy. Even my calves and ankles looked swollen. I lifted a fat hand to cover my mouth and felt cowardly tears start in my eyes. What had I done to myself, and how? I could not grasp the changes the mirror showed to me. Since I’d left Old Thares, I’d ridden each day and my meals had been ordinary ones. How could this be happening?

Prior to looking in the mirror, I had planned to go down and join my family at the dinner table, if only for talk. Now I did not. I hated what I had become and heartily endorsed my father’s plan. I went to the kitchen, intending to get a mug of water. A kitchen maid and a cook stared at me, surprised, and then looked aside. Neither spoke to me, and I ignored them. The sight of a bucket of fresh milk temporarily overwhelmed my resolve to fast, and I took a mug of that instead. I drank it down thirstily, and yearned for more. Instead, I contented myself with plain water. I drank mug after mug of it, trying to assuage the feeling of emptiness in my belly. It felt as if the liquid splashed into a void. At last, I could drink no more, and yet felt no fuller. I left the kitchen and went upstairs to my room.

There, I sat on the edge of the bed. There was little else for me to do. I had emptied my room before I left for the Academy. I had my schoolbooks and my journal from my panniers but little else. Doggedly I sat down and made a complete entry in my journal. Afterwards I sat with no refuge from my nagging hunger or my dismal evaluation of myself.

I could not recall that I had changed any habit that would lead to this result. I had eaten the same rations allotted to any man at the Academy mess, and done the same marching. How had I swollen up to this toadish size? Belatedly, it occurred to me that I’d never seen Gord eat more than what was portioned to us at the mess, and yet his bulk had persisted. I had to wonder if mine would do the same. In sudden fear, I resolved it would not. I had three days before Rosse’s wedding, three days before Carsina and her family would arrive to be guests. I had three days to do something about my appearance before I was disgraced before all our friends. I firmly resolved that not a morsel of food would pass my lips for those days, and yet oh, how I ached with hunger. I rose abruptly, determined to go for a brisk walk to distract myself. Standing up quickly woke every aching muscle in my back and legs. I gritted my teeth and left the room.

I didn’t wish to face anyone. I stood silently in the hallway for a few moments, confirming that my father and Rosse were in his study. My father was talking, his words indistinguishable but his disapproval plain. Obviously Rosse was hearing a lecture on all the ways I had failed the family. I strode quickly past the door of the music room. I heard Elisi’s harp and recalled that often my mother and sisters gathered there to play music or read poetry after dinner. I opened the front door quietly and slipped out into the Widevale night.

My father had created an oasis of trees around his house. It was an island of illusion, a way to pretend that we did not live far from civilization on the endless sweep of prairie. Over one hundred carefully nurtured trees cut the wind and screened a nearly flat vista. My father had even had water piped up from the river to form a little pond and fountain for my sisters’ pleasure in their private garden. The soft splashing drew me towards their bower.

I followed a gravelled pathway through an arched gateway. The latticework I had helped to erect years ago was now completely cloaked in vines. Small night lamps with glass chimneys hung from the branches of a golden willow, illuminating their silver reflections in the pond’s surface. I sat down on the edge of the stone-banked pool and peered into the dark water to see if the ornamental fish had survived.

‘Planning to eat one?’

I turned in shock. I had never heard my sister Yaril sound so sarcastic and cruel. We had always been close as children. She had not only been my faithful correspondent while I was at school, but she had also managed to smuggle Carsina’s letters to me, so that we might carry on a private correspondence away from our parents’ supervision. She was sitting on a wrought-iron bench under a graceful trellis of pampered honeysuckle. Her dove-grey dress had blended her into the shadows when first I approached the pond. Now she leaned out into the light, and anger hardened her face. ‘How could you do this to us? I am going to be so humiliated at Rosse’s wedding. And poor Carsina! This is certainly not what she was anticipating! The last two weeks, she has been so excited and happy. She even chose her dress colour to go well with your uniform. And you come home looking like this!’

‘It’s not my fault!’ I retorted.

‘Oh? Then who has been stuffing food down your throat, I’d like to know?’

‘It’s … I think it has something to do with the Speck plague.’ The words jumped out of my mouth as quickly as the idea had suddenly come into my mind. On the surface, it seemed a silly thing to say. Everyone knew that Speck plague was a wasting disease. But the moment I said it aloud, odd bits of memories suddenly fell into an accusing pattern. A long-ago conversation I’d overheard between Rosse and my father combined with the dour words of the Fat Man in the carnival freak show tent in Old Thares. He’d claimed he’d once been a cavalla soldier until the plague had ruined him. Even Dr Amicas’s fascination with my weight gain now took on a darker significance.

But those seemed trivial clues compared to words recalled from a dream. Tree Woman had encouraged my Speckself to gorge himself on the magical essence of dying people. I suddenly recalled how I had seen myself in that dream; I’d been full-bellied and heavy-legged. Tree Woman herself was an immense woman. In my dreams, my arms could not encompass the rich curves of her body. I felt a disturbing flash of arousal at that memory and thrust it from me, but not before I heard like a whisper in my ear, ‘Eat and grow fat with their magic.’ I stood absolutely still, my every sense straining, but all that came to my ears was the gentle splashing of the water and the shivering of the leaves in the evening wind. They were followed by my sister’s snort of disdain.

‘Do you think I’m a fool, Nevare? I may have had to stay here and be tutored by some silly old woman from Old Thares while you were sent off to the grand city to learn at your fine school, but I’m not stupid. I’ve seen men who have had Speck plague! And one and all, they have been thin as rails. That is what the Speck plague does to a man. Not fatten him like a hog raised for bacon.’

‘I know what I know,’ I said coldly. It was a brotherly remark, one that I’d often used to end our childhood arguments. But Yaril was no longer the innocent little golden-haired sister that I’d left behind most of a year ago. She would no longer be cowed by a simple assertion of superior knowledge.

She merely sniffed and replied, ‘And I know what I know! And that is that you are as fat as a hog and you’re going to humiliate all of us at Rosse’s wedding. What will Remwar’s family think of me, having such a brother? Will they fear that I, too, will inflate like a bladder? I was hoping that this wedding might be a chance for me to make a good impression on his parents, so that his offer for my hand might become formal. But they won’t even see me. I’ll be eclipsed behind you!’

‘I didn’t choose this, Yaril. You might stop for one moment to think of my feelings.’ All the resentment I felt at my father’s harsh treatment of me was blossoming into fury at Yaril’s childish concern for her dignity. ‘You’re such a selfish little girl. Every letter you sent me, you begged me for gifts. And fool that I am, I sent them. And now that I’ve returned home after nearly dying in the filthy city, you disdain me because of my physical appearance. A fine welcome I’ve received from any of you! The only one who has shown one jot of sympathy for my situation is Mother!’

‘And why shouldn’t she?’ Yaril flashed back at me. ‘You were always her favourite! And now that you’ve ruined yourself for being a soldier, she can keep you here with her, always! Carsina won’t have you, fat as a hog, and when she looks around, she and her family will take Remwar away from me! He was her father’s first choice for her anyway. You’ve ruined it for everyone, Nevare, you selfish pig!’

Before I could even reply to that, she played a woman’s trump card. She burst into tears and then ran off into the darkness, sobbing into her hands. ‘Yaril!’ I called after her. ‘Come back here! Yaril, come back!’

But she did not, and I was left standing alone by the stupid fishpond that I’d helped to build. At the time it had seemed like an enchanting concept. Now I saw it for the folly it was. The fishpond and fountain were completely at odds with the land that surrounded us. To build something which could not be sustained save by daily effort was a vanity and a waste and an insult to the beauty of the true nature that surrounded us. What had seemed a shady retreat from the harsh plains that surrounded our home now seemed foolish self-indulgence.

I sank down onto Yaril’s bench and considered the words she had flung at me. She’d been angry and she’d used her best ammunition to wound me. But how much of it was true? Would Carsina ask her father to break his agreement with my father? I tried to worry about it but a wave of hunger washed through me, leaving me feeling both nauseous and hollow. I rocked forward over my belly and embraced it as if it were an ally instead of my enemy.

I was in that undignified posture when I heard a light footstep on the pathway. I straightened up and prepared for battle but it wasn’t Yaril returning. Instead it was my mother, holding a lantern to guide her steps as she came softly down the walk.

‘There you are,’ she said when she saw me. ‘Why didn’t you come down to dinner?’ Her tone was gentle.

‘I thought it better to stay away.’ I tried to make my voice jovial. ‘As you can see, perhaps I’ve had too many dinners of late.’

‘Well. I won’t deny that your appearance surprised me. But I did miss you. I’ve scarcely had a chance to speak to you. And…’ She hesitated a moment and then went on delicately, ‘I do need you to return to the house and come to my sewing room with me.’

I stood, grateful for an ally. ‘Are you going to let out my cadet uniform to fit me?’

She smiled but shook her head. ‘Nevare, that is simply impossible. There isn’t enough fabric to let out, and even if I could, it would show badly. No, my son. But I have several folds of a very nice blue fabric, and if I put the seamstresses to work on it tonight, we should have something presentable by the wedding.’

My heart sank at the thought that I was hopelessly too large for my uniform but I squared my shoulders to bear the truth. Presentable. My mother would help me, and I would not look ridiculous at my brother’s wedding. ‘Seamstresses?’ I asked, keeping my voice light. ‘When did we become so prosperous as to employ seamstresses?’

‘Since your brother decided to wed. The decision has little to do with prosperity and more to do with necessity. I sent for two from the west two months ago. I was fortunate that I did, for between making new curtains and hangings and bedclothes for your brother’s chambers and ensuring that the entire family would have wedding clothes as well as ball gowns for your sisters, well! It would be impossible for your sisters and me to do that much sewing in such a short time and still have time for all the other preparations.’

She led the way, holding her little lantern up to guide us. I watched my mother’s trim figure as she stepped lightly along and I suddenly felt monstrous and misshapen, some great beast hulking after her. The house was quiet as we went down the hall to her sewing room. I imagined that my father and Rosse had settled down to quieter talk and that Elisi had gone off to bed. I thought of mentioning that I’d spoken with Yaril and she’d run off in tears, but my old habit of protecting my little sister was still strong. My mother would scold her for being outside at this hour on her own. Annoyed as I was at Yaril, I still had no desire to get her in trouble. I let it go.

I had a very uncomfortable session in the sewing room as my mother measured me and jotted down her notes. She frowned as she did so, and I knew that she tried not to be shocked. As she was measuring my waist, my stomach rumbled loudly, and she actually jumped back from me. Then she laughed nervously and went back to her task. When she was finished, she said worriedly, ‘I hope I have enough blue fabric.’

A pang of hunger cramped me. When it passed, I said, ‘Carsina was particularly hoping that I would wear my uniform to the wedding.’

‘And how would you know that?’ my mother asked with a sly smile. Then she quietly added, ‘Don’t even hope for that, Nevare. In truth, I think we shall have to have a new uniform made for you when you go back. I don’t know how you managed to wear the one you brought home.’

‘It fit me when I left the Academy. Well, it was tight, but I could still put it on. Mother, I truly don’t understand what is happening to me. I’ve travelled hard and eaten no more than I ordinarily would, but even since I left the Academy, I’ve put on flesh.’

‘It’s that starchy food they feed you at that school. I’ve heard about places like that, trying to save money by feeding the students cheap food. It’s probably all potatoes and bread and—’

‘It’s not the food, Mother!’ I cut in almost roughly. ‘I’ve only gained this weight since I recovered from the plague. I think that somehow the two are connected.’

She stopped speaking abruptly, and I felt I had been rude to her, though I had not intended to. She rebuked me gently for lying. ‘Nevare, every young man that I’ve ever seen who has recovered from the plague has been thin as a rack of bones. I don’t think we can blame this on your illness. I do think that a long convalescence such as you had, with many hours in bed with little to do save eat and read could change a man. I said as much to your father, and asked him not to be so harsh with you. I cannot promise you that he will heed me, but I did ask.’

I wanted to shout that she wasn’t listening to me. With difficulty, I restrained myself and said only, ‘Thank you for being my advocate.’

‘I always have been, you know,’ she said quietly. ‘Now when you finish your work tomorrow, take care to wash well and then come here for a fitting. The ladies will be here to help me then.’

I took a deep breath. My anger was gone, consumed in a dark tide of dejection. ‘I shall take care to be clean and inoffensive,’ I told her. ‘Good night, Mother.’

She reached up to kiss me on the cheek. ‘Don’t despair, son. You have confronted what is wrong, accepted it, and now you can change it. From this day forth, things can only improve.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ I replied dutifully, and left her there. My stomach was clenching so desperately with hunger pangs that I felt nauseous. I did not go up to my room, but went to the kitchens instead. I worked the hand pump at the sink until cooler water came, and then drank as much as I could bear. If anything, it made me more miserable.

I went up to my room and tried to sleep until just before dawn. I was standing with the rest of the crew when the wagon came for us, and went out for another day’s work. The catalogue of my misery: blisters, hunger, aches, nausea and, roiling beneath it all, a sense of bewilderment and outrage at the injustice of life.

By the second half of the day, I was staggering. When the rest of the work crew broke out their simple packets of meat and bread for their noon meal, I had to walk away from them. My sense of smell had become acute, and my stomach bellowed its emptiness at me. I wanted to wrestle the food away from them and devour it. Even after they had consumed it all and I came back for my share of the water, it was difficult to be courteous. I could smell the food on their breaths when we huffed and strained to lift the larger rocks, and it tormented me.

When we finally received the signal to quit, my legs were like jelly. I did not do my fair share at the final unloading of the wagon. I saw the other men exchange glances over it and felt ashamed. I staggered back to the wagon and barely managed to climb aboard.

When the wagon dropped us off, the other men strode towards the town. I tottered up the drive and into the back door of the house. I had to pass the kitchen. The air was thick with wonderful smells; the cook had begun to prepare the special cakes and breads for the wedding. I hurried away from that torture. My father had not told me to fast entirely. I could, I knew, have a small meal. But that thought seemed a weakness and a betrayal of my determination to change. Fasting wouldn’t kill me, and I would return to my normal self that much sooner.

The steps to my room seemed long and steep, and once there all I wanted to do was curl up around my miserable belly. Instead, I stepped into the low tub that had been left for me and washed myself standing. I stank. Now that I was heavier, I sweated more and the sweat lingered in every fold of my flesh. Left too long, the perspiration made a scald mark on my skin, painful to touch.

Rosse’s old clothes, freshly washed and newly let out, awaited me. They felt tight and awkward against my damp skin. My cadet haircut had begun to grow out. I towelled it dry and then, mindful of embarrassing my mother, I shaved before I went down to her sewing room.

My mother awaited me with the two seamstresses. The last time I’d been measured for clothing, the tailor had done it and I had been fit and trim. It was inexpressibly humiliating to undress to my small clothes and then have three women hold pieces of fabric against me, pinning the parts together around me. One seamstress glanced at my belly and rolled her eyes in disdain at the other seamstress. I went hot with a blush. They pinned my new clothing around me, stood back, consulted like hens clucking in a barnyard, and again surrounded me, moving pins and having me turn and lift my arms and raise my knees. The fabric was a very sombre dark blue, nothing at all like the brave green of my cadet uniform. By the time I retired behind a screen to get dressed again, I felt that nothing worse could happen to me.

I climbed up the endless stairs to my room. With grim determination, I decided to avoid the dinner table entirely. I did not think I could withstand the wonderful aromas of cooked food. I went to bed.

In my dream, I was my other self, and I was ravenously hungry. I recalled with sorrow all of the magic that had been wasted at the Dancing Spindle. I was proud that I had halted the Spindle’s dance and ended the plainsmen’s magic, but I regretted that I had not been able to absorb more of it into myself. It was a bizarre dream, filled with the elation of triumph underpinned with a grating hunger for foods that would properly nourish my magic. I woke at dawn still feeling both hungry and vaguely triumphant. The first I could understand; the latter made me feel ashamed. I shook the cobwebs from my head and faced my day.

That day was a repeat of the previous one, only more miserable. I felt dull and weak. I was late to meet the wagon, and it took a great effort for me to lever myself up into the back of it. Terrible hunger cramps wracked me. My head pounded. I crossed my arms on my stomach and slumped over them.

When we reached the field and the wagon stopped, I jumped down with the others, only to have my legs fold under me. The rest of the crew laughed, and I forced myself to join in. I staggered upright and took my levering bar from the back of the wagon. It felt twice as heavy as it had the day before, but I set to work. I tried to jab it into the hard soil at the edge of an embedded stone, but it only skipped across the surface. I wanted to shout with frustration. I felt no strength in my arms. I used my weight instead, and spent a miserable morning. After a time, I got my second wind. The nagging of my hunger receded slightly. My muscles warmed up, and I devoted myself to doing my share of the work. I still walked apart from the men when they took out their noon packets of food. My sense of smell had become a special torment. My nose told me all that my mouth was forbidden to taste, and my saliva ran until I thought I would drown in it.

I tried to remind myself that this was not the first time I had fasted, or even the longest time. Certainly in my days with Dewara, I had eaten very sparsely and still retained a leathery energy in my body. I was at a loss to explain why I now suffered so acutely when I had previously been able to discipline myself and endure. I came to a reluctant conclusion. I had lost self-discipline at the Academy. From there, I had to make the next logical assumption: that I had brought this on myself. It was foolish for me to go on insisting that, since I had only eaten what had been placed before me, I had no culpability for what I had become. It did not matter that my fellow cadets had not gained weight as I had. Obviously what was enough for them had been too much for me. Why had I stubbornly resisted seeing that? Hadn’t the doctor attempted to point that out to me when he so carefully asked me what I’d been eating and how much? Why hadn’t I taken alarm then, and cut down on my food?

My father was right.

I had only myself to blame.

Strangely, with the guilt came an odd relief. I’d finally found a cause for what had befallen me, and it was myself. Suddenly, I felt I had control again. Before, when I’d been unable to admit I’d been doing anything wrong, the fat had seemed like a curse, something that had befallen me, an effect with no cause. I thought of how I’d wanted to blame it on the plague and shook my head at myself. If that were so, then every cadet who recovered from the plague should have been affected as I had. I took a deep breath and felt the strength of my resolution surge within me. I’d finish out my fast today.

Tomorrow, I’d rise and go to my brother’s wedding. I’d face the humiliation that I’d brought upon myself, and I would practise great self-discipline in what I ate, not just on that festive day, but on every day that followed. When I returned to the Academy, I intended to go back as a thinner man. And I promised myself that by high summer, I’d be moving the buttons on my uniform back to their proper positions.

With determination strong in me, I returned to the after-noon’s work and drove myself relentlessly. I raised and broke new blisters on my hands, and didn’t care. I rejoiced at how my back and shoulders ached as I punished my recalcitrant body with hard work and deprivation. I thrust my hunger pangs out of my mind and toiled on. Towards the end of the day’s work, my legs literally shook with fatigue, but I felt proud of myself. I was in charge. I was changing myself.

That was my attitude when I returned home, washed, and went down for a final fitting. The seamstresses were both tired and frenetic as they rushed me into my new suit. They had brought a mirror into the room, for my sisters were likewise having the final touches put on their clothes. What it showed me rattled me. I did not look any thinner than I had when I arrived home. The weight made me look older, and the sombre blue made me look middle aged and staid. I glanced at my mother, but she was preoccupied with picking stitches out of something pink. There was no reassurance for me there. I could not focus on the seamstresses as they pinched and tugged at the fabric, poked in pins and marked lines with bits of chalk. I stared at my own face, round as a full moon, and my stout body beneath it. I did not recognize the miserable man who stared back at me.

Then they all but snatched the clothes off me and chased me from the room, ordering me to return in two hours, for Elisi was waiting her turn. I gathered from their talk that a neckline had gone wrong and would require many tiny stitches to alter. As they turned me out of the room, Elisi rushed in.

I trudged up to my room. Only an hour ago, I had felt I’d recovered control. Now I had to confront that the wedding was tomorrow, and Carsina was not going to find a dashing and handsome young cadet waiting to escort her. No. She’d find me. Fat me. I thought of Gord’s girl, and how she seemed to adore him despite his fat. Then I thought of Carsina and didn’t even dare to hope for the same response. Gord, I suspected, had always been fat. Cilima had probably never seen him any other way. But Carsina had seen me fit and lean. I hated how I appeared now; how could she not also hate it?

I was light-headed with hunger. All the fasting, all the toiling of the past three days had done nothing. It was so unfair. I tried not to think about all the rich and wonderful things that were simmering in the kitchen or stored in the pantry right now. The wedding day would be at the bride’s home. We’d arise early and ride there in the carriage for the ceremony. But the festivities that followed, with dancing and eating and singing, were to be held here in Widevale Hall, and the food and drink necessary to such an occasion now awaited the guests. At the thought of it, my stomach growled loudly. I had to swallow.

I rolled over on my bed and stared at the wall. At the appointed hour, I roused myself again and went back for the final fitting. I wished I hadn’t. In the hallway, Elisi rushed past me in tears, calling over her shoulder, ‘Then I shall look like a cow! That’s all that can be said, I shall look like a cow!’ As she passed me, she snarled, ‘I hope you’re satisfied, Nevare! But for you and your stupid belly, there would be plenty of time to reset the neckline of my dress!’

Confused and alarmed, I entered the sewing room. My mother was sobbing into her handkerchief as she stood in the corner of the room by the window. The seamstresses, both of them red-cheeked, were endeavouring not to notice. Their heads were bent over their tasks and their needles winked in the lamplight as they diligently sewed. I sensed that I walked into the aftermath of a storm. ‘Mother? Are you all right?’ I asked her gently.

She wiped her eyes hastily. ‘Oh, weddings! My own was just such a disaster as this one is, right until the moment when it all went perfectly. I’m sure we will all be fine, Nevare. Try on your suit.’

‘Elisi seemed quite upset. And she seemed to blame it on me.’

‘Oh. Well.’ My mother sniffed and then hastily wiped her nose and eyes again. ‘Well, we had assumed you would wear your uniform, so we did not allow time to sew clothing for you. So there has been less time to work on Elisi’s dress, and the pattern for the neckline was quite difficult. That new fashion, with the standing ruffle, has gone all wrong. Still, even without the ruffle, it looks nice. She is just upset. There will be a young man at the wedding, Derwith Toller. He is a guest of the Poronte family. We don’t know the Tollers well, but his family has made an offer for Elisi, and of course she wishes to look lovely when she meets him.’

I continued to nod as she unwound a long and convoluted tale about a young man that might be a good match for Elisi and the difficulties of the standing ruffle when the lace was wider than what had been ordered and too soft to stand well. I fear it all seemed vapidly trivial to me, but I had the sense not to say so. Privately I thought that if this young man were going to make a marriage proposal based on how well the lace stood up on Elisi’s neckline, then he wasn’t much of a catch, but I forbore saying it.

At last my mother’s tongue ran down, but strange to say, she seemed relieved to have rattled off her woes to me. I think her telling moved the seamstresses, for one suddenly stood up and said, ‘Let me have one more try with that lace. If we back it with a piece of the dress goods and use a goodly amount of starch, it might be a pretty effect and make that dratted ruffle stand.’

I tried to get away with carrying my suit off to my room, but had no luck. I had to try it on yet again, and although I thought I looked dreary and dull in the mirror, the three women pronounced it a ‘respectable fit for such short notice’ and sent me on my way with it.

FIVE

Rosse’s Wedding

We were all roused when the sky was barely grey. The girls ate in their rooms from trays lest a breakfast mishap soil their travelling dresses. I joined my father and brothers at the table. It was the first time I’d seen Vanze since I’d returned. My priest-brother had journeyed home for the ceremony, only arriving last night. My father and Vanze were serving themselves from the sideboard when I entered the room. Vanze had shot up while he was at seminary. Despite being the youngest, he was now the tallest of us.

‘You’ve grown!’ I exclaimed in surprise.

When he turned to greet me, his shock was evident. ‘And so have you, but not taller!’ he blurted out, and both my elder brother and my father laughed aloud. After a painful moment, I joined in.

‘But not for long,’ I promised him. ‘I’ve been fasting for the last three days. I’ve resolved to take this off as quickly as I put it on.’

My father shook his head dolefully. ‘I doubt it, Nevare. I hate to say it, but you don’t look a bit thinner to me. I fear it will take more than three days of fasting. Have a bite now, to get you through the start of the day. Can’t have you fainting at your brother’s wedding!’ Again they all laughed at me.

His remarks stung me, for all that they were true. Nevertheless, his tone was affable, for the occasion had sweetened his mood. I swallowed the hurt, resolving not to say or do anything that might reawaken his displeasure with me.

I found eggs, meat, bread, fruit and milk set up on the sideboard. The sight and smell of the food dizzied me. My discipline might have failed me if my father had not been frowning over every morsel I put on my plate. I felt as furtive as a wild animal stealing food. I put a piece of toast on my plate, glanced at my father, and added two small sausages. I took up the spoon for the scrambled eggs. A small frown creased his brow. I took a tiny serving. I decided I would risk his wrath by adding one other item.

It was an agonizing decision. I finally settled on a serving of apple compote. The aroma of the warm, sugary fruit almost made me swoon. I filled a mug with hot black coffee and took my feast to the table. I wanted to fill my mouth with huge bites of food. I wanted to feel the substance of chewing and swallowing a mouthful of eggs and spicy sausage heaped on crisp buttered toast. Instead, I forced myself to divide my meal into small bites and eat it very slowly. I filled my coffee mug twice, hoping the hot liquid would help satisfy my hunger. Yet when my plate was scraped clean of the last crumb, my body still clamoured for more. I took a deep breath and pushed my chair back from the table. I would not starve, I told myself severely. This discipline of tiny meals would not last forever, only until I had regained my previous state. Besides, there would be a feast following the wedding today, and I must partake of that to avoid giving offence to the bride’s family. Such thoughts were consolation.

I glanced up to find Rosse and Vanze pointedly not looking at me. My father was regarding me with distaste. ‘If you are finished, Nevare, perhaps we can depart for your brother’s wedding?’

They had been waiting for me while I stretched out my meal. A flush of shame rose to my face. ‘Yes. I’ve finished.’ I followed them from the room, full of loathing for myself and anger at them.

The carriage awaited us, festooned with wedding garlands. My mother and sisters were already inside. Blankets draped them to keep the dust away from their carefully arranged dresses. There were seven of us in the family, and at any time that would have meant a crowded ride. Today, with the voluminous gowns the women wore and my voluminous body, it was a hopeless fit. Before I could volunteer, my father said, ‘Nevare, you will ride with the coachman.’

It was humiliating to climb up to my seat while they watched. The seams of my new trousers strained and I could only hope that the stitches would hold. The driver, dressed all in bright blue for the occasion, looked directly forward as if by gazing at me he might share my shame. My father and brothers managed to fit themselves into the carriage, the door was closed and we were away at last.

It was a morning’s ride to the Poronte estate. For most of the journey, we followed the road along the river, but for the last hour and a half the carriage jolted and bumped along a lesser road that wound its way into the heart of the Poronte lands. Lord Poronte had built his manor on an immense upthrust of stone. It commanded a wide view of all the plains and reminded me more of a citadel than a gentleman’s home. Rumour said that he was still in debt to the stonemasons who had come from Cartem to erect the thick rock walls of his mansion. Lord Poronte had taken the motto ‘Stone Endures’ and it was etched into a stone arch that framed the entry to his grounds.

When I look back at my brother’s wedding day, my memory shies like a badly trained horse. I felt that every person who greeted me betrayed a jolt of shock at my appearance. At first sight of me, Lord Poronte pursed his lips as if he were trying to restrain a lively goldfish in his mouth. His lady actually lifted a hand to smother a giggle and then quickly excused herself, saying that she must assist the bride in her final preparations. I both felt and saw my family’s embarrassment.

A servant led us upstairs, while others followed with the ladies’ luggage. A suite of rooms had been set aside for my family to freshen ourselves after our journey and where the girls and my mother could change from their travelling dresses into their wedding clothes. We men more quickly put ourselves to rights. My father and brothers were eager to descend and join the festive gathering. I followed with trepidation.

The Poronte ballroom was not so large as ours, but it was still a gracious room, and at that moment it bustled with guests. The fashion that year was for very full skirts, with layers of fabrics in different tints of the chosen colour. From the landing at the top of the stairs, it reminded me of a garden, with the women as lovely blossoms of every hue. A few months ago, I’d have been eager to descend those stairs and find my Carsina amongst the bouquet. Now I dreaded the moment when she would see me. Reluctantly, I descended the steps. My father and brothers made themselves convivial amongst the guests. I did not attempt to follow them or to stand near them as they hailed old friends and renewed acquaintances. I did not blame them for disassociating themselves from me.

Everyone I greeted reacted uncomfortably to my body’s change. Some smiled stiffly and kept their eyes firmly on my face. Others frankly stared and seemed hard put to find anything intelligent to say. Kase Remwar gave a hoot of mirth and jovially asked me if the cavalla had been feeding my horse as well as it had me. Mockery countenanced as a shared jest was most common among the males of my acquaintance. I forced myself to smile and even to laugh along with them at first. At last, I retreated to concealment.

I sought a quiet eddy in the room. Several large ornamental trellises had been draped with floral garlands to frame the family altar where the couple would make their vows. A few chairs had been placed behind the angle of the alcove. I quickly claimed one. No one approached me, let alone sought to converse with me. This was very different from the triumphant homecoming I had imagined. I had dared to imagine Carsina at my side as I cheerfully told my friends about my studies and life in Old Thares. From my vantage I could quietly observe the gathering. My father was obviously pleased with the day; he was affable and magnanimous. He and Lord Poronte, arms linked, moved through the gathering, greeting the guests. They were a powerful duo, and their alliance through the marriage would make them even more formidable in the Midlands. They paraded as if they were the happy couple rather than their offspring.

Rosse was nervous as any bridegroom, and endured the jibes and jests of his male friends. They had cornered him near the garden entrance, and from the roars of laughter that burst intermittently from the group, I guessed the crude nature of the banter. Vanze, my priest-brother, was a fish out of water. His time at the seminary had accustomed him to a more sophisticated company than prevailed at this frontier manor. He carried his book of Holy Writ with him, for he would assist at the oath-giving of the pair, clutching it like a drowning man holds to a piece of wood. He spoke little and smiled much. I imagined he was already counting the days until he could return to the genteel atmosphere of his school. He had lived so long at his monastery that I suspected it was more of a home to him than our family abode was.

I didn’t blame him. I strongly wished I were back at the Academy.

I found myself studying people’s bodies as I never had before. I had always accepted that with age, men and women became stouter. I had never thought less of a woman whose heavy bosom and rounded belly spoke of years of childbearing. Men of a certain age became portly and dignified. Now I found myself speculating on who was larger than I was and who was smaller. My girth would not have been shocking in a man in his mid-thirties, I decided. It was the coating of fat on a young man that made me so offensive to their eyes. A few of the younger men carried substantial bellies, but they did not sport fat on their arms and legs as I did. It made me look indolent and lazy. It was a false impression, for under my fat, I was as muscular as I’d ever been. I watched the staircase that led to the upper storeys of the house with dread. I longed to behold Carsina, but feared what I would see in her face as she confronted my change. Despite my trepidation, when she appeared at the top of the stairs, I lunged to my feet like a dog that has been promised a walk. She was a vision. Her dress, as she had promised me, was a delicate pale green, with an overskirt of a richer green with trim of darker green that was the exact shade of my Academy uniform. It was both modest and provocative, for the high collar of white lace emphasized the delicacy of her pale throat. A small yellow rose was pinned in her upswept hair. My sister Yaril was beside her. A simple change of clothing had transformed her from girl to woman. She wore a gown of rich turquoise, and her golden hair was netted up in an elaborate concoction of gold wire and turquoise ribbons. The cut of the dress revealed her tiny waist and the gentle swell of her hips and bosom. Despite my recent irritation with her, I felt proud of her beauty. Each of the girls wore a bracelet of silver bells for the wedding ceremony.

Kase Remwar appeared as if by magic at the bottom of the stair. He looked up at my sister and Carsina like a dog contemplating unguarded meat. Yaril had set her heart on him, but as of yet, neither of my parents had mentioned any formal engagement. Indignation flashed in me that he dared look at my sister in such a way. I took two steps and halted, a coward. A year ago, my mere physical presence would have reminded him to respect our family, with no threats verbalized. Now, if I bobbed up beside her, I feared that I would look pompous and silly rather than properly protective of my sister’s honour. I halted where the trellised flowers still screened me.

I should have known that my sister would have warned Carsina that I was not the dapper trooper that she had seen off to school in the fall. The girls halted strategically midway down the stair. Surely my sister was aware that Kase’s eyes devoured her. I felt she immodestly gave him the opportunity to stare. As for Carsina, her eyes roved over the gathered folk, looking for me. My sister leaned towards her and said something. The sneer of it twisted her pretty mouth. I guessed the nature of her remark, that I would not be hard to spot among the crowd. Carsina’s smile was uncertain. She hoped that my sister was teasing her, and feared she was not.

Hope congealed in me, replaced by harsh determination. I’d face it and get it over with. I stepped out of my concealment and made my way through the guests to the base of the stair. The moment Carsina saw me, her eyes widened in disbelief and horror. She clutched at my sister’s arm and said something. Yaril shook her head in disgust and sympathy. Carsina actually retreated a step before she mastered herself. As she and Yaril descended the stairs, Carsina’s face was set in a stubbornly bland expression, but there was despair in her eyes.

As I drew closer, I could almost feel the anger that boiled off her. I bowed to her gravely. ‘Carsina. Yaril. You both look lovely.’

‘Thank you, Nevare.’ Carsina’s voice was cool and correct. ‘More than lovely, I think.’ Kase circled behind me to stand next to Yaril. ‘As beauteous as blossoms. I declare, a man would be hard pressed to say which of you were more gorgeous.’ He included them both in his smile. ‘May I offer to escort you to the altar alcove? The ceremony is soon to begin.’

Carsina turned to him with a wide smile. A shadow of discontent passed over Yaril’s face. She shot me a look of pure fury, then hastily claimed Kase’s right arm. Carsina promptly stepped past me to take his left. Kase laughed with delight, and Carsina tipped her face to smile up at him. Yaril smiled grimly. ‘I shall be the envy of every man in the room for the next few minutes,’ Kase proclaimed.

‘That you shall,’ I said quietly, but my hope that I would win some sort of response from Carsina was a vain one. They swept off towards the altar. Most of the people in the room were moving in that direction. I followed disconsolately. When I realized I was scowling, I deliberately straightened my spine and put a pleasant expression on my face. Today, I reminded myself, was my brother’s wedding day. I would not let my personal disappointment spoil it for anyone. I refused to follow the threesome or attempt to join them. Instead, I took a place sufficiently near my older sister Elisi to be recognized as her brother, yet not so close as to embarrass her. She did not look at me. A young man and an older couple that I judged to be his parents stood not far from her. I wondered if he were the prospective suitor my mother had mentioned.

We all gathered before the good god’s altar. Silence descended over the assembly. Vanze and a priest I did not know entered the room. The priest carried a lamp, the god’s light, and Vanze carried a large, empty silver basin, the symbol of an end to blood sacrifice. Once, I knew, a wedding would have required Rosse to preside over the slaughter of a bull, a goat and a cat. Both he and the bride would have had to endure a ritual flogging of three lashes, to symbolize their willingness to suffer for each other. The enlightenment of the good god had changed all that. The old gods had demanded blood or pain be the coin that paid for any oath. I was grateful such days were gone forever.

Rosse and my parents came to the altar to accept Cecile’s pledge. She made a grand entrance, descending the staircase to the ringing of silver bells. Her gown was blue and green, with elaborate sleeves that nearly reached the floor and an embroidered blue train that trailed several steps behind her. Every single woman in the room wore a bracelet of tiny bells, and they raised them over their heads and shook them merrily as the bride descended. Her parents followed her down the stairs. Between them they bore a large basket. As they passed through the crowd, people surged forward, to toss in jingling handfuls of coins to wish the young couple wealth in their lives. Among our class, it was merely a charming tradition. Among the lower classes, such an offering might furnish the couple with a goat or a few chickens and truly become a foundation for later wealth.

Rosse and Cecile had chosen a simple ritual for their ceremony. The day was beginning to warm, and I’m sure I was not the only guest who was grateful that we would not be required to stand in witness for too long.

Their fathers exchanged pledges of friendship and loyalty first, and then their mothers exchanged vows to comfort, help and refrain from gossip. I stood stoically through them. But when Cecile and Rosse made their pledges of loyalty, trust and mutual faithfulness, my throat constricted and tears pricked my eyes. I do not know if I wanted to weep because Carsina betrayed our fledgling love or for my scratched pride. This moment with Carsina should have been mine, I thought fiercely. It should have been a memory that we would cherish through our years together. Instead, I would have to remember always that she had forsaken me at this moment. I set my teeth and forced my lips into a rubbery smile, and when I wiped a tear from my eye, I told myself that everyone who observed it would think it was a tear of joy at my brother’s good fortune.

Rosse and Cecile shared the tiny cake of bitter herbs followed by the more generous honey cake that represented the bad and the good times that they would share. Then they turned from the altar and lifted their joined hands. The gathered witnesses erupted with cries of joy and congratulations and the musicians on the dais awoke their instruments. As lively and celebratory music filled the ballroom, the guests cleared the floor and formed a circle for Cecile and Rosse. My brother had never been a graceful dancer, so he must have practised quite a bit to perform as well as he did. Not once did he step on Cecile’s trailing blue train. At the end of the dance, he swept her up in his arms and spun around and around as he held her, making her sleeves and train fly out around them, much to the delight of the onlookers. A single misstep would have sent bride and groom tumbling to the floor, but he managed to set his giddy bride squarely on her feet. Flushed and laughing, they bowed to their audience.

Then came the most important part of the ceremony, not just for Rosse and Cecile but for both families as well. My father and Lord Poronte broke the seals on the congratulatory scrolls that had come from King Troven. As all the gathered folk expected, the scrolls contained a substantial land grant to each family to ‘celebrate the joyous union of two of my most loyal noble families, and with fond wishes that both your houses will continue to flourish’. The land allotted to the Burvelle holdings increased our holdings by a third. The satisfaction on my father’s face shone. I could almost see him totting up how much additional acreage the King would gift him as each of his other four children married. I suddenly realized that this was how King Troven encouraged alliances between the new noble houses, thus keeping their loyalty safely in his pocket.

‘Please join us in dancing and feasting!’ Cecile invited her guests, and to a loud burst of applause, all did just that. The doors to the adjacent dining room were opened wide, to reveal long tables. I was not near the doors, yet I was abruptly aware of the savoury aromas of the fresh breads and roasted meats and sweet fruit tarts. A wedding in our part of the country was an all-day celebration. When one travelled long distances for such an event, the host endeavoured to make it memorable. The talk and dancing and eating would continue all day at the Porontes’ home. Servants would be kept busy constantly replenishing the tables. Many of the guests would spend the night with the Porontes, and then join us at our home tomorrow for a second day of socializing and feasting. At one time, I had anticipated a merry occasion, and had planned several opportunities to be alone with Carsina. I had even imagined stealing a kiss or two. Now I dreaded several days of torment. My stomach growled at me urgently. I listened to it in horror, as if a monster had taken up residence in my flesh and demanded sustenance. I tried to tell myself that I was too saddened to be hungry, but my belly asserted otherwise. The sight of Kase Remwar leading Carsina to the dance floor only reinforced the emptiness I felt. I was famished, I discovered, and trembling with hunger. Never before had my sense of smell seemed so keen. From where I stood, I could tell that the prairie-fowl had been roasted with sage and onion, and that the lamb had been prepared plainsman-fashion, rubbed with wild celery root and cooked in a pot with a tight lid. I thought it the limit of my self-control that I walked around the edge of the dance floor rather than elbowing my way through the dancers to reach the food.

Halfway around the room, I encountered my father talking to Carsina’s father. Lord Grenalter was laughing at something my father had just said. They both seemed very jovial and convivial. I’d intended to slip past them unacknowledged. But as Grenalter drew breath from laughing, our eyes met. Courtesy forced me to greet him. I stopped, bowed to him, and then as I advanced, he said, quite loudly, ‘Good god’s breath, Burvelle! Is that Nevare?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ my father said levelly. His look told me I was a fool for having called attention to myself. He forced a grin to his face. ‘I think the Academy doctor went too far in putting flesh back on him after the plague. He’ll soon have it off, if I have anything to say about it.’

And what could I do, save grin shamefacedly and agree? ‘Very soon, sir,’ I assured him. And then, lying through my teeth, I added, ‘The doctor told me that a temporary weight gain like this is not unknown among plague survivors. He told me that I should be grateful to have gone this way, rather than lost flesh and stamina.’

‘Well … I’m sure the doctor would know what he is talking about. Still. It is a startling change, Nevare, as I’m sure you know.’ Lord Grenalter seemed determined to make me admit that the transformation was horrifying.

‘Yes, sir, it is that. Thankfully, as I’ve said, it is temporary.’

‘Well. I suppose we should thank the good god for your health, and never mind the rest for now.’

‘Yes, sir. I do that every morning when I awaken alive. It’s not a thing a man takes for granted, once he has experienced the plague.’

‘Was it very bad, then, in the city?’

And I was pathetically grateful to horrify the poor man with a lurid telling of just how bad it had been. When I spoke of the dead stacked like cord wood on the snowy grounds, I realized that even my father was listening to me. So I deliberately told, with genuine sorrow, of my fellows whose health had broken so badly that they would never soldier at all, let alone continue a career at the Academy. I finished with, ‘And so, of course, ungainly as I find myself at present, you can understand why I am grateful to have come through the experience with my future intact. And with Colonel Rebin in charge of the Academy once more, I anticipate continuing my studies with more pleasure than ever.’

‘A remarkable tale! And did they ever find what wayward son of a dog brought plague to Old Thares?’ Carsina’s father was completely in thrall to my tale now.

I shook my head. ‘It is suspected that it came to the city with some Specks who were being displayed at a Dark Evening carnival.’

‘What?’ Horrified, he turned to my father. ‘Had you heard of Specks being allowed to travel to the west?’

‘It was inevitable that someone would try to smuggle some to the city eventually,’ my father said with great resignation. ‘The greatest folly was that one of them was a female. From correspondence I’ve had with authorities at the Academy, she was the likely source of the plague.’

‘No!’ Carsina’s father was aghast. He turned to me, and suddenly a new light kindled in his eyes, as if he had suddenly worked an equation and was appalled at the answer. His eyes appraised me warily. How had I contracted the dread disease? The question was in his gaze if not on his lips and I answered it directly.

‘There are other ways of transmission besides sexual contact,’ I hastily insisted. ‘I’ve been working with Dr Amicas at the Academy, simply because of the unique aspects of my case. Some of my fellows, I will admit, fell to the plague after having congress with a Speck whore. I, sir, was not one of them. Nor, for example, was the young son of the former Academy commander. And of course, my own girl-cousin Epiny was also a victim of the plague.’

‘And did she die?’ I suddenly realized that the circle of my audience had grown. This query came from another listener, a middle-aged woman unwisely dressed in a virulent pink gown.

‘No, ma’am, I’m happy to say she did not. Her case was very mild and she recovered with no side-effects. Unfortunately, that was not true for the young new noble cadet she married. Cadet Kester was forced to withdraw from the Academy. He is determined that he will recover his health sufficiently to return, but many feel that his military career is over.’

Several of my listeners now spoke at once.

‘I served with Kester! It must be his son. That’s a damnable shame! Who else fell to the plague, from the new noble ranks?’

‘What saved your cousin from the plague? What herbs did she take? My Dorota is with her husband at Gettys. She and her two little ones. They haven’t had it in the household yet, but she fears it’s just a matter of time!’ There was great worry in that matron’s voice as she pushed closer to me.

But the voice I heard most clearly was that of Carsina’s father. Grenalter said slowly to my father, ‘Epiny Burvelle – that would be your brother’s elder daughter. She married a new noble soldier son who’ll have no career? Surely you told me that your brother planned to marry her to an old noble heir son?’

My father attempted a tolerant laugh. That was when I knew I’d said too much. ‘Well, you know young people today, Grenalter, especially the city-bred ones. They have small respect for the plans of their parents. And in a time of plague, permissions are given that ordinarily would be refused. Just as soldiers facing battle will sometimes commit acts that they would otherwise recognize as foolhardy.’

‘Foolhardy. Indeed. I’ve witnessed a few acts like that,’ Grenalter conceded heavily. I could tell he was distracted, and I could almost see him totting up and subtracting the advantages and disadvantages of his marital agreement with our family as if he were an accountant. Suddenly Epiny’s words about being sold as a bride to the highest bidder didn’t seem so melodramatic. Obviously, my weight gain was a debit to the transaction, but an even larger one was that the branch of the Burvelle family in Old Thares had not sold off their daughter to an old nobility family. Did connections and marriages actually carry that much political and social weight, I wondered, and then instantly knew that they did.

‘Well?’ demanded the woman anxiously, and my mind leapt back to her question.

‘Lots of water and rest were the chief treatment, I’m afraid. I wish I could tell you something more specific. Dr Amicas is making the prevention of the plague his specific area of study. He’s a very dedicated man. If anyone can come up with solid recommendations to protect families from transmission, it will be him.’

‘And which other new nobles perished?’ the other man demanded. I recognized him but could not call up his name. He was not a new noble, but was a very successful ranker who had followed Grenalter into retirement much as my father’s men had congregated around him. I suddenly realized that men like him would be pinning their hopes on the rise of the new noble class. Old nobles and heir sons would have little respect for a ranker like him. The new nobles who had directly commanded him recognized his worth. And if they came to power, that recognition might extend to his own soldier sons.

So I recited reluctantly the names of those new noble sons who had died from the plague, and those whose health had been badly compromised. When I mentioned that Trist Wissom had lost his health, I was surprised at the collective sigh of sympathy. And I was shocked when I recounted the names of those who had recovered well, and people exchanged glad glances when they heard that Rory and Gord were unscathed. They did not know my fellow cadets, but they knew or had known of their fathers. There was a sense of connection there. The old nobles were right to fear our rise to influence. The real power lay not in the new nobles and their sons who would follow wherever the King led, but in the ranks of the military that felt loyalty and alliance to the new nobles.

‘Damn shame what’s happened to our Academy. Damn shame!’ This from the ever-excitable Lord Blair, a little bald man who always bounced on his toes when he spoke. ‘We needed those young officers, what with the rumours of trouble on the border near Rely. Looks like we might start up with Landsing all over again! You’d be sorry to miss out on that, wouldn’t you, Cadet? Fast promotions wherever the fighting’s thick, as I’m sure you know.’

I was at a loss. I hadn’t heard we were skirmishing with Landsing again.

‘Gettys is where the real opportunity is!’ This from a man I didn’t recognize. ‘The King’s Road has been at a standstill for damn near two years. Farleyton went out there to replace Brede’s regiment, but from what I hear, they’ve not done well. Same problems Brede had. Disease, desertion and dereliction of duty! The King won’t stand for it any more. I hear he’s sending Cayton’s Horse and Doril’s Foot to reinforce them. I feel sorry for Farleyton. They were a top-notch regiment, not too many years ago. Some say that Gettys will just do that to a regiment. Disease breaks down the morale and destroys the chain of command. Haren’s got the command now. A good enough man for a second, but I’m not sure he’s up to ramrodding an operation like the King’s Road.’

‘Colonel Haren’s a good officer!’ someone else broke in sharply. ‘Careful what you say about him, man. I served beside him at the Battle of Dell.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen! Now is not the time for war stories.’ My father quickly broke in on the lively conversation. ‘Nevare, I am sure we are all grateful for the information you have shared with us, but let us not forget that we are here to celebrate a wedding! Surely some of you would rather be on the dance floor than listening to tales of disease and death? Or is there so little hardship in our life that we are drawn to such stories?’

He gained a general laugh with that gently bitter question. It was, indeed, part of our common lot that life was harder here on the edges of civilization.

‘Let us celebrate life while we can!’ one of the men suggested. ‘Death and disease will always be waiting for us.’ And with that dark toast, my audience began to fragment. Some moved towards the musicians and dancing, others towards the tables of food. Grenalter himself left rather hastily. I surreptitiously tracked his flight and saw him join his wife and Carsina at a refreshment table. I saw him send Carsina off to join a group of other young women, and then take his wife’s arm and escort her to a quieter corner. I suspected I knew the topic of conversation. Without intending it, I sought for Kase Remwar, and found him dancing with my sister. She looked blissful. Remwar, an heir son, had been the Grenalters’ first choice as a match for Carsina. Had I just gossiped away my marriage arrangement? And if I had, had I dashed Yaril’s dreams as well? I felt queasy.

My father was not consoling. ‘You should talk less and listen more, Nevare. I will say no more on that topic now, but suggest that for the rest of the day, you become a very good nodder and listener. Keep your tongue from wagging. Why you saw fit to share here such information that you had not previously divulged to me, I shall never know. For the rest of this day, if you must speak, speak only of your brother’s happiness and good fortune. If you must speak of gloom, deplore the dry weather we’ve had!’

With that admonition, he left my side, striding away as if I’d insulted him. Perhaps by his lights, I had. He never liked to be second to know anything. I seethed. It was his own fault. If he had given me a chance to talk to him since my return, he would have known all my news and could have advised me what not to repeat. He had treated me unjustly, but worse, I had foolishly blathered out my tidings without considering if it was wise to do so. I already regretted my lie about what Dr Amicas had said. I felt sure it was true, but I wished I had not quoted the doctor to give greater authority to my belief. The lie shamed me.

That bleakness of spirit suddenly quenched my hunger. I abruptly felt that selecting the food and taking it to a table and making small talk with my fellow guests would require more energy than I could summon. I glanced back at the dance floor. The musicians still played and Carsina was dancing with a young man I didn’t recognize. He was short, freckled and he didn’t dance well, but he wasn’t fat. I stood rooted, watching them and trying not to watch them. I saw her laugh at something he said. A perverse part of me dared me to stay in the room and ask her for the next dance. Her certain refusal would end my hope and put me out of my misery.

I loitered there, at the edge of the crowd, building my courage, denouncing it as foolhardy, rebuilding it, deciding that she was promised to me and it was my right to speak to her, losing my courage again … never had a dance lasted so long, it seemed. When it ended and her partner bowed over her hand and then stepped away from her, it was all I could do to make myself walk in her direction.

She saw me coming. She fled.

And, fool that I was, I hastened after her, cutting through the crowd to close off her retreat. When she realized she could not escape me, she slowed. I closed the remaining distance between us. ‘Carsina. I’ve been hoping to have a dance with you. And a chance to speak to you, and explain what has befallen me.’

It was my misfortune that the musicians suddenly struck up a lively tune rather than the stately waltz I had hoped for. Carsina saved herself and me by saying stiffly, ‘I am weary of dancing at present. Perhaps later.’

‘But perhaps we could talk now. Shall we walk in the garden?’

‘I fear it would not be proper, for we should be unchaperoned.’

My smile at her comment was bitter. ‘That did not stop us, the last time.’

She looked away from me and gave a vexed sigh. ‘That was last time, Nevare. Obviously, much has changed.’

Stung, I replied, ‘What has not changed is that we are promised to one another. Surely you owe me at least the opportunity to tell you what I’ve been through—’

‘I owe you nothing, sir!’ she flared at me. Her companion from the last dance suddenly reappeared, carrying two glasses of wine. His eyes widened with disapproval that I had forced a lady to give me such a stern response.

I warned him off with a glare. ‘The lady and I are having a conversation.’

He was a head shorter than me, but probably thought my weight made me soft. ‘It did not sound like a conversation to me. It sounded as if she wished you to leave her alone.’

‘We are promised to one another. I have the right to—’

‘Not formally!’ Carsina cut in quickly. ‘And I do wish you to leave me alone.’

‘You see, sir, the lady has wearied of your company. Be a gentleman, and allow her to withdraw.’ He stepped bravely between us. He was all long neck and freckled nose. I could have snapped him like a twig. I looked over his head at Carsina.

‘Perhaps she should be a lady and do me the courtesy of hearing me out,’ I said levelly.

‘Do you insinuate I am not a lady?’ Carsina flared at me. ‘Nevare Burvelle, you insult me. I shall tell my father of this!’

Anger sang in my blood and rang in my ears. I seethed with fury. Words burst from me, coming from whence I knew not. ‘And you have ignored me, fled from me and thus insulted me thrice today, and this shall be the last time. There will come a time before you die, Carsina, when you will crawl on your knees and beg pardon for how you have treated me this day.’

Her mouth fell open at my harsh words. She looked, in her astonishment, both childish and common. All the prettiness fled from her face as anger flooded it. I’d said too much, spoken too rashly. I could not have done a more awkward, awful thing at my brother’s wedding.

Carsina’s face went scarlet. In horror, I saw tears flood her eyes. Her freckled dance partner glared up at me. ‘Now, see here, sir, I insist—’

‘Insist to yourself, then,’ I said to him, and strode away. But a fat man is hard pressed to stride with dignity. I tried in vain to compose my face as I departed the scene. Not that many people, I told myself, had noticed our spat. Neither of us had shouted. I glanced back, but Carsina was gone. I felt a moment of relief, until I saw her hurrying up the stairs, both hands lifted to cover her face. Several women turned to watch her go. My own sister was following her. I cursed myself and wondered where that blaze of temper and my ugly words had come from.

I should have chosen to keep my misery and my pathetic hope, I told myself savagely. I left the ballroom for the terrace, and from there descended stone steps to the garden. It was hotter there, not cooler. Many of the flowering bushes had gone yellow with drought; the young trees were spindly and offered no shade. My collar choked me and my jacket was too warm. How could I have been so stupid? Why had I forced such a confrontation? I should have let her snub me. The next time I saw her, I’d be a thinner man, and there would have been no harm done. She’d have rebuked herself for avoiding me. Now what I had said to her must always stand between us. Uneasily, I wondered if she had fled to her mother. She was already with my sister. I wondered which would be worse for me.

A thick hedge and the sound of a fountain beyond it promised me a shadier retreat. The garden was poorly planned, for I had to walk some distance and follow a turning in the hedge before I found a very small gate. It was closed but not locked. I entered the second garden.

Here, no expense had been spared. I wondered that guests were not thronging it. A paved walkway led me in a meandering spiral towards the heart of the garden. The beds of flowers were lush, despite the heat and dryness of the last week. Bees hummed amongst the fairie rose bushes and battled the tall lavender for nectar. The fragrance of flowers and the aromas of herbs were heavy in the still air. I passed an ornamental fishpond. Spatterdock opened the fat petals of its yellow blossoms there, and fish transformed from shadow to gleams as they moved in and out of their shelter. Beyond was a dovecote, styled as a quaint little cottage, full of the preening, cooing creatures. The birds were sunning themselves in the fly-pen attached to their shelter. I stood there for some time, letting the restful sound soothe me. Then I followed the winding footpath towards the decorative fountain at the centre of the garden and the musical splashing of its waters.

I never reached the fountain. A sudden reek hit my nostrils, a stench so bad that I nearly gagged. I turned my head at the same time I lifted my hand to cover my nose and mouth. I could not believe what met my eyes. The altar was white marble, but the top of it was spattered with gore and bird droppings. A brass pole arched over the altar. Suspended from the arch was something that might have been a lovely chandelier, save that the arms of it ended in hooks, not lamps, and a dead dove was impaled on each hook. In the centre of the altar, a bird had been split open and its entrails spread for reading. Bloody fingerprints smeared the white feathers. A black-and-white croaker bird was perched on top of the brass arch, a streamer of dove gut hanging from his beak. Flies and wasps buzzed heavily around the dead birds. They were grotesque. One white dove was more red than white now, its entrails hanging from its pecked anus. As I stared, dumbfounded, a slow drip of blood dropped to spatter on the altar.

This had been done today.

That chilling thought was followed by another. The altar and the hook chandelier were permanent fixtures. Poronte and his family worshipped the old gods on a regular basis. This was a marriage offering. In all likelihood, my brother’s bride and her mother and sisters had sacrificed these birds to celebrate Cecile’s wedding day.

I had not thought my horror could deepen. But as I stared, transfixed, the unthinkable happened. One bird abruptly twitched on its hook. Its wings shuddered spasmodically, causing the carousel of dead birds to turn slightly. It unlidded a dull eye at me while its small beak opened and closed soundlessly.

I could not stand it.

I had to stand on tiptoe to reach him, and my stretch strained the shoulders of my jacket perilously. I made a grab at him, caught him by the wing, and pulled the gruesome merry-go-round towards me. When I could get both hands on him, I lifted his body from the hook. I’d intended to end his misery by wringing his neck. Before I could, his body gave a final shudder and was still. I stepped back from the altar and looked at my pathetic trophy. The anger I had felt at Carsina suddenly transmuted to fury at the unfairness of it all. Why had this little creature had to die as sacrifice to celebrate a wedding day? Why was his tiny life so insignificant to them? It was the only life he could ever know. ‘You should not have died.’ My blood pounded through me, thick with rage. ‘They were wicked to kill you! What sort of a family has my brother joined to us?’

The bird’s eyes opened. I was so shocked I nearly dropped it. It gave its head a shake, and then opened its wings. I did drop it then, releasing it to a fall that it changed into a frantic launch. One of its wings brushed my face as it took flight. In an instant, it was gone. Small downy neck-feathers clung to my fingertips. I shook my hands and they ghosted away to float eerily in the still air. I was not sure what had happened. I looked again at the gory carousel of dead birds and at the smear of blood on my hand. Repulsed, I wiped my hand clean on my dark trousers. How had the bird survived?

I stared too long. In the branches of a nearby bush, a croaker bird suddenly cawed loudly. It lifted its black and white wings and opened its red beak wide at me. It had orange wattles on its bare neck; they were fleshy and wobbled cancerously at me as it cawed.

I retreated a step, but he still challenged me with three loud caws. The cries were immediately echoed by a couple of his fellows perched in nearby trees. As they raised the alarm, I turned and hastily walked away. My thoughts were in turmoil. It was one thing to hear tales of what the worship of the old gods had demanded; it was another thing to see a carrion tree set up for their delight.

Did Rosse know of his wife’s beliefs?

Did my father? My mother?

I breathed through my mouth as I walked swiftly away from that place. When I reached the lavender beds and the drowsing bumblebees mining them, I stopped. I took deep calming breaths of their fragrance. I was sweating. I’d glimpsed something dark and it filled me with a sudden foreboding.

‘Sir. This is a private garden for the family’s meditation and repose. The wedding festivities do not extend to this area.’

The woman was dressed as a gardener, in rough brown tunic and pantaloons and sandals. A broad-brimmed straw hat shaded her face. She carried a little basket on one arm with a trowel in it.

I wondered if she was in charge of burying the birds. No. From what I knew of those rites, they had to remain as an offering until the elements and the scavengers had reduced them to bones. I met her direct look and tried to read her eyes. She smiled at me politely.

‘I’ve lost my way, I’m afraid.’

She pointed. ‘Follow the pathway to the gate. Please latch it behind you, sir.’

She knew. She knew I wasn’t lost and she knew about the sacrifice and she guessed that I had seen it. Her eyes moved over me. Her gaze disdained me.

‘Thank you. I’ll be glad to find my way back.’

‘You’re welcome, sir.’

We were so polite. She made my skin crawl. I walked away from her, trying not to hurry. When I reached the gate, I glanced back. She had quietly followed me down the path to make sure that I left. I lifted my hand and flapped it at her foolishly, as if waving goodbye. She hastily turned away from me. I left the garden, closing the gate firmly behind me.

My first childish impulse was to run to my father and tell him all I’d seen. If Rosse and Cecile had not already said their vows, I might have done so. But they were already joined, and my mother and father had given oaths equally binding to Cecile’s parents. It was too late to stop them from joining our good name with the heathen Poronte family. I made my slow way back through the first garden and to the terrace. As I went, I decided that I would wait until I could privately pass my knowledge to my father. As the head of our family, he would decide what to do about it. Would it be sufficient grounds for him to contact the High Temple in Old Thares and have the marriage voided? Cecile and the other Poronte family members had called the good god to witness their pledges. Did the sacrifice in the garden mean they did not feel bound by their oaths before the good god? Had they smiled at my parents and mouthed words empty of intent?

On the terrace, people were resting and talking, the women fanning themselves against the rising heat of the day. I kept my smile in place and avoided making eye contact with anyone. No one spoke to me as I passed.

The musicians were still playing in the ballroom. Dancers still spun to their notes. I told myself there was no sense in dwelling on the ugliness I’d witnessed. I’d set it out of my mind until I could consign it to my father’s judgment. The spinning dancers made a lovely picture, and I was almost calm when Carsina, apparently fully recovered from our scene, swept by me, once more in the arms of Kase Remwar. I turned and moved on to the dining room.

There, the hubbub of conversation was nearly as loud as the music in the ballroom. Servants bustled around the room, setting out fresh platters of food, refilling glasses, serving people, clearing away dirty plates and putting out fresh settings. The smells of food assaulted me. My stomach rolled over inside me and my hunger became a sharp ache that reached all the way up the back of my throat. I stood still for a moment, swallowing saliva. My conservative breakfast that morning had not assuaged the insult done to my body by my days of fasting. I felt that I could have cleared one of the laden tables by myself.

Guests were helping themselves and chatting with others as they meandered amongst the tables, taking a serving of fruit there, a sweet from that platter, and a pastry from another. I knew I could not trust myself. I found an empty chair at a clean setting without anyone near me. It seemed to take decades before a servant noticed me. ‘May I bring you anything, sir, or would you care to make your own selection?’

I swallowed and had to take a breath. I ached with emptiness. ‘Could you bring me a small portion of meat, a roll of bread and perhaps a glass of wine?’

He startled as if I’d flung cold water at him. ‘And that is all, sir?’ he asked me solicitously. ‘Or shall I select other foods for you and bring them to you?’ His eyes roved over my bulk as if disputing my request.

‘Just meat and bread and a glass of wine. That will be fine for me,’ I assured him.

‘Well. If you are certain? Only meat, bread and wine?’

‘I am. Thank you.’

He hurried off, and I saw him summon an underling. The servant gestured at me as he passed on my request to the man. The new servant met my glance and his eyes widened. He grinned, bowed obsequiously and hurried off. I realized my hands were clenched at the edge of the table and folded them in my lap. Food. I was trembling with need for it. The intensity of my awareness of the smells and of my urgency frightened me. For the first time, I wondered if this was an unnatural appetite. Despite my fast, my clothing had become tighter. How could I not eat and become fatter? A frightening suspicion came to me. Magic. Was this the lingering effects of Tree Woman’s intrusion on my life? I recalled my vision of my ‘other self’ in her world. He had been heavy of belly and thick-legged. When I took him back into me, had I taken those attributes into my body as well?

It could not be. I didn’t believe in magic. I didn’t believe in magic desperately, in the same way that a badly wounded soldier did not believe in amputation. Take it away, take it away, I prayed to the good god. If this be magic, put it out of my life and save me from it.

Dancing Spindle had moved for me. I had ridden it and I had witnessed it stopping. Did I not believe that had happened? I thought of my cinch that had not stayed tight on Sirlofty. But the modern rational man in me wondered if I deceived myself. Could not my saddle’s cinch loosening be a result of my greater weight? If the halting of the Spindle meant that all plains magic was failing, would not it affect every cavallaman’s cinch?

I thought that I could ask Sergeant Duril about his recent cinch experiences. Then I sighed, thinking that right now I didn’t have the courage to seek him out for anything. I’d disappointed him, and in some ways, disappointing my old teacher was a more personal failure than disappointing my father. And where was that food? The hunger boiled up in me again, driving all other thoughts from my mind.

Yet it was not food that came to my table next, but my father and mother. I had not noticed them enter the room, and yet there they were. My father took the chair next to me, and my mother seated herself just beyond him. A glance at their faces reassured me that, as yet, they had heard no gossip about my confrontation with Carsina. A servant followed them, carrying their prepared plates. As he set the food before them and the aroma of the rich foods floated towards me, I nearly swooned.

My father leaned over to hiss at me, ‘Don’t take it to extremes, Nevare. You should eat at least something, to show your enjoyment of what was prepared for the wedding. To sit here at a wedding feast with nothing in front of you makes it seem you don’t approve of the joining. It’s an insult to our host. And may the good god save us, here he comes with his lady.’

It could not have been worse timing. Lord and Lady Poronte had not entered the room to dine, but were merely strolling among their guests, greeting them and accepting congratulations and compliments on the gathering. They approached us, smiling, and there I sat, literally the starving man at the feast. I wanted to vanish.

Lady Poronte reached us, smiled at us, and then looked puzzled at the empty place before me. As if she were talking to a child, she wheedled in dismay, ‘Could not you find anything to tempt your appetite, Nevare? Is there something I could ask our cook to prepare for you?’

‘Oh, no, but many thanks, Lady Poronte. Everything looked and smelled so wonderful, I did not trust myself to make a choice. I’m sure the serving man will be here directly.’

Then came the final blow to my dignity and to my father’s pride. The serving man arrived with my food. He carried a filled platter on each arm. Not two plates, but two platters, and each were laden to overflowing. Meat of every kind was heaped on one, slices of ham, half a smoked chicken, slices of beef cut so thin that they folded into ripples, tender lamb cutlets, each mounded with a spoonful of quivering mint jelly, and a spicy pâté ensconced on a special round of bread. On the other platter was the extreme opposite of my request for a simple roll of bread. There were two croissants, a scone, two muffins, rye bread in dark rounds nestled against its paler wheaten cousin and dumplings in a ladling of rich brown gravy. Grinning as if he had accomplished some marvellous feat, the serving man placed both platters before me. He bowed, well pleased with himself. ‘Never fear, sir. I know how to properly serve a man like yourself. As you requested, only meat and only bread. I shall return immediately with your wine, sir.’ He turned with a flourish and left me surrounded by food.

I stared at the wealth of bread and meat before me. I knew my father was aghast at my wanton display of gluttony. My shocked hostess was striving to look pleased. Worse, I knew that I could consume every bite of it with relish and pleasure. My mouth was running with so much saliva that I had to swallow before I could speak. ‘This is far too much food. I asked for a small portion of meat and bread.’

But the serving man had already hastened away. I could not stop looking at the food and I knew that no one at the table believed me.

‘But it is a wedding!’ Lady Poronte ventured at last. ‘And surely if there is a time to celebrate in plenty, it is at a wedding.’

She meant well. She probably intended to put me at my ease over possessing such an undisciplined appetite and displaying such wanton greed at her table. But it put me in a very strange social situation. If I sampled only a tiny portion of the food now, would it appear that I had disdained her hospitality, or found her cook lacking in talent? I did not know what to do.

‘It all looks absolutely wonderful to me, especially after the very plain food they serve us at the Academy,’ I ventured. I did not pick up my fork. I wished they would all vanish. I could not eat with them watching me. Yet I also knew I could not refuse to eat, either.

As if he could read my thoughts, my father said in a chill voice, ‘Please, Nevare, don’t let us inhibit you. Enjoy the wedding feast.’

‘Please do,’ my host echoed. I glanced at him but could not read his face.

‘Your serving staff is far too generous,’ I ventured again. ‘He has brought me much more than I requested.’ Then, fearing that I would sound ungracious, I added, ‘But I am sure he meant well.’ I picked up my knife and fork. I glanced at my parents. My mother was attempting to smile as if nothing were amiss or unusual. She cut a tiny bite from her portion of meat and ate it.

I speared one of the dumplings swimming in gravy. I put it in my mouth. Ambrosia. The inner dumpling was fine-grained and tender, the outer layer softened with the savoury broth. I could taste finely-chopped celery, mellowed onion and a careful measure of bayleaf simmered with the thick meatiness of the gravy. Never before had I been so aware of the sensations of eating. It wasn’t just the aroma or flavour. It was the sweet briny ham versus the way the spicy pâté contrasted with the tender bread beneath it. The croissant had been made with butter, and the layers of the light pastry were delicate as snowflakes on my tongue. The chicken had been grain fed and well bled before it had been carefully roasted in a smoky fire to both flavour it and preserve the moistness of the flesh. The rye bread was delightfully chewy. I washed it down with wine, and a servant brought me more. I ate.

I ate as I had never eaten before. I lost awareness of the people beside me and of the festivity that swirled around me. I gave no thought to what my father might be thinking or my mother feeling. I did not worry that Carsina might chance by and be aghast at my appetite. I simply ate, and the intense pleasure of that exquisite meal after my long fast has never left me. I was a man caught up in a profoundly carnal pleasure. I felt a deep satisfaction at replenishing my reserves and I gave no thought to anything else. I cannot even say how long it took me to consume both platters, or if there was any conversation around me. At some point, Lord and Lady Poronte passed some pleasantry with my parents and then drifted away to socialize with their other guests. I scarcely noticed. I was a soul consumed with the simple and absolute pleasure of eating.

Only when both platters were empty did I glide back into awareness of my surroundings. My father sat in stony silence. My mother was smiling and making vapid small talk in a hopeless effort to preserve the image of a couple having a conversation. My belly now strained against my belt. Embarrassment battled with a strong urge to rise and seek out the sweets table. Despite what I had consumed, I was still aware of the scent of warm vanilla sugar hanging in the air, and the fragrance of tart strawberries packed into sweet little pastries.

‘Have you quite finished, Nevare?’ My father asked the question so softly that someone else might have thought him a kind man.

‘I don’t know what came over me,’ I said contritely.

‘It’s called gluttony,’ he callously replied. He had excellent control over his features. As he spoke so quietly to me, his eyes roved around the room. He nodded to someone he saw there. He smiled as he said, ‘I have never been so ashamed of you. Do you hate your brother? Do you seek to humiliate me? What motivates you, Nevare? Do you think to avoid your military duty? You will not. One way or another, I’ll see you serve your fate.’ He turned his head, waved at another acquaintance. ‘I warn you. If you will not maintain your body and your dignity and earn a commission at the Academy and win a noble lady as your wife, why then you can go as a common foot soldier. But go you shall, boy. Go you shall.’

Only my mother and I could hear the venom in his questions. Her eyes were very wide and her face pale. I suddenly realized that she feared my father, and that right now her fear was extreme. He flicked a glance at her. ‘Excuse yourself, my lady, and flee this scene if it distresses you. I give you permission.’

With an apologetic look to me, she did. Her eyes were anxious, but she put a bright smile on her face, rose, and gave us a tiny wave of farewell as if she regretted having to leave us for a time. Then she fled across the room and out of the hall.

I glued a smile on my lips and cursed my own creeping fear of him. ‘I spoke the truth to you, Father. I told the servant to bring me a small serving of meat and bread. Once that quantity had arrived, and Lady Poronte had witnessed it, what was I to do? Waste the abundance they shared with us? Claim the food did not suit me and turn it away? The servant placed me in a bad position. I made the best of it that I could. Tell me. What should I have done?’

‘If you had served yourself a simple meal, instead of waiting to be attended like an old noble’s heir son, none of this would have happened.’

‘And if I had been born with prescience, that is precisely what I would have done,’ I retorted tightly. Where, I wondered in the shocked silence that followed my words, had that retort come from?

Astonishment that I would stand up to him jolted my father’s smile off his face. I was tempted to believe that I had seen a brief flash of respect in his eyes before he narrowed them at me. He took a short sharp breath as if to speak, and then snorted it out in disdain. ‘This is not the place nor the time, but I promise you, I will have a reckoning with you over this. For the rest of the day, say little and eat nothing. That isn’t a request, Nevare. It’s an order. Do you understand me?’

I thought of a dozen things I could say. But that was after I had given him a tight nod, and he had pushed his chair back and left me. The two large empty platters on the table rebuked me. There was a swallow of wine left in my glass. I reflected bitterly that he had said nothing about drinking and took it down.

By the time evening arrived and I again mounted to the top of the carriage for the journey home, I was more sodden with brandy than a well-soaked fruitcake. But that, of course, was civilized and acceptable behaviour for a soldier son. No one ever rebuked me for that.

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.

SEVEN

Dewara

I knew when my father decided to inform everyone of my utter failure. When I descended the stairs the next morning and went to the kitchen for a quick bite of food, the servants already knew of my disgrace. Previously they had treated me with a puzzled deference. I was a son of the household, and if I chose to eat in the kitchen instead of with my family, it was my own business. Now I sensed my diminished status, as if they had been given permission to disdain me. I felt like a stray dog that had crept in and was hoping to snare a few bites of stolen food. No one offered to serve my meal to me; I was reduced to helping myself to whatever was there and ready, and all the while, stepping back and out of the way of servants who suddenly found me invisible.

The gossip of the servants revealed that my brother and his new bride would be returning that evening. There would be a welcoming dinner tonight, and perhaps guests on the morrow. No one had bothered to tell me any of this. The exclusion from the family news was as sharp as a knife cut.

I left the house as soon as I could, taking a fishing pole from the shed, and going down to the river. I baited for the big river carp, some the size of a hog, and each time I caught one, I battled it to the river’s edge and then cut it free. I wasn’t after fish that day, but after something I could physically challenge and defeat. After a time, even that ceased to occupy me. The heat of the sun beat down on me and I started to get hungry. I went back to my father’s manor.

I tried to go in quietly. I’m sure my father was laying in wait for me. The moment I was through the entry, he appeared in the door of his study. ‘Nevare. A word with you,’ he said sternly.

I knew he expected me to follow him into the study. My Speck obstinacy surfaced. I stood where I was. ‘Yes, Father. What do you want of me?’

He tightened his lips and anger flared in his eyes ‘Very well, Nevare. It can as well be said here. Your mother shared with me the wild tale you told her.’ He shook his head. ‘Was that the best excuse you could manufacture? Mocking our god because you ruined your future? Now that you have destroyed all your prospects and cannot return to the Academy, you think that we must support you for the rest of your days. I warn you, I will not shelter and feed a lazy leech. In the doctor’s opinion, you are incapable of soldiering for the King in your present condition. But I intend to change your condition, while wringing some worthwhile work out of you, and eventually I intend to send you off to enlist as a foot soldier. You will never be an officer, but I will not support you in thwarting the good god’s plan for you.’

I held up my hand, palm towards him. I met his gaze in a forthright manner. ‘Simply tell me what tasks you want me to do. Spare me a lecture I’ve already heard from you.’

His surprise lasted only for a moment. Then he gave me his list of dirty tasks. All involved heavy labour and most had something to do with dirt, excrement or blood. A manor is like a farm, and tasks of those sort abounded, but always before, he had assigned them to hirelings. Now he chose them for me, and I was well aware it wasn’t because he thought I could do them well but because he found them distasteful and therefore assumed that I would. I lost most of the remaining respect I had for him, then. All the education he had poured into me, and in a fit of pique, he would waste it. I did not let my thoughts show. I nodded to him gravely and promised to begin my work. It involved a shovel and a lot of manure and a farm wagon. Actually, it was fine with me, and in accord with what Sergeant Duril had suggested, that was how I spent my afternoon. When I judged I’d put in a fair day’s work, I left my task and walked down to a shoal water of the river. Thick brush guarded the riverbank, but there was a deer trail through it. The slower water in the shallows was sun warmed. I stripped and waded out and washed away the sweat and grime of my work. I’d often swum here as a boy, but now it felt strange to stand naked under the sun, even in such an isolated place. I was ashamed of my body and afraid I’d be seen, I realized. The increased weight I carried brought more problems than simply ill-fitting clothes. My feet ached just from carrying my weight. I sweated more and smelled stronger after a day’s labour. My clothing often chafed me. Nevertheless, after I’d sloshed water over myself, it was restful to lie in the shallows and feel the contrast between the warm sun on my skin and the cooler water flowing past me. When I finally came out, I sat on a large rock and let the sun dry me before dressing again. I’d regained a small measure of peace.

I stole an evening meal from the kitchen, much to the annoyance of the cooking staff. They were overtaxed that night, serving an elaborate meal to my family and the new daughter of the house. I wondered how my father would react if I walked into the room in my rough, ill-fitting clothes and took a seat at the table. There was probably no place set for me there. I ate a modest meal sitting in a corner of the kitchen, and left.

That became the pattern of my days. I arose, chose a task from my father’s list, and worked all day at it. He intended such work to humiliate me but I found it strangely satisfying. By my labour, I would either prove to my father that my fat was a magical result of the plague, or I would regain my former condition and perhaps be able to reclaim my place at the Academy. I pushed myself each day, deliberately striving to tax my body even beyond the chores my father had given me. When frustration or humiliation gnawed at me, I shoved them resolutely aside. This, I told myself, was exactly what I needed to be doing. I ate frugally and worked my body steadily. And it responded, though not as I had hoped. Beneath the fat, my arms and legs bulked with new muscle. I gained stamina. I could lift more weight than I’d ever been able to lift in my life.

It was not easy. My heavy body was unwieldy for a man accustomed to being lithe and limber. I had to plan how I moved, and likewise plan my tasks. Strange to say, that too was satisfying. I applied what I’d learned in my engineering. When my father set me to building a stone wall to enclose a hog sty, I went at it as if I were establishing a fortification, laying it out to grade, levelling the first run of stone, making it wide at the base and less so at the top. I would have felt more satisfaction if it had won approval from anyone besides myself and the croaker bird that watched me all day. My father seldom bothered to view what I accomplished every day. He had written me off as a bad investment, like the peach trees that had gone to leaf curl and insects. Rosse made no effort to see me, and I responded in kind. I became invisible to my family. I still gave my mother ‘good day’ if I saw her in passing. I did not bother speaking to my sisters and they were likewise silent to me. I resolved that it did not bother me.

A simple life of arising, working and going to bed held its own sort of peace. The physical labour of each day was not nearly as demanding as my studies at the Academy. I wondered if other men lived this way, rising, working, eating and sleeping with barely a thought beyond doing the same thing the next day. I’ll confess that I felt a strange attraction to such a simple life.

When a week had passed by, and I’d heard nothing from Sergeant Duril, I sought him out one afternoon. When he opened his door to my knock, the first words he said were, ‘You didn’t tell me you’d been kicked out of the Academy for being fat!’ I couldn’t tell if he was outraged on my behalf or angry with me for holding back information.

I spoke evenly, without anger. ‘That’s because it isn’t true.’

He stared at me, waiting.

‘Dr Amicas gave me a medical discharge from the Academy. I wasn’t kicked out. He felt I couldn’t serve as a cavalla officer as I am. If I manage to regain my old shape, I’ll be able to continue my studies.’ I wasn’t sure of that, but I had to hold on to the hope or sink into despair.

Duril stood back from his door and motioned me in. His apartments were stuffy after the sunny day, even with the door left ajar. I took a seat at his table.

Slowly he sat down across from me and admitted, ‘I took a lot of pride in your being at the Academy. It meant a lot to me to think of you being there and being one of them, and knowing just as much as any of them fancy city boys, thanks to what I’d taught you.’

That took me by surprise. I’d never paused to consider that my success might mean a personal triumph to Sergeant Duril. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I was doing well until this befell me. And once I’ve straightened it out and returned to the Academy, I’ll do you proud. I promise.’

As if his first admission had opened a door, he suddenly added, ‘You never wrote to me. I had sort of hoped for a letter from you.’

That surprised me even more. ‘I thought you couldn’t read!’ I said, and then flinched to how blunt my words were.

‘I could have had someone read it to me,’ he retorted testily. After a pause he added, ‘I sent you a letter. When I heard you’d been sick and nearly died.’

‘I know. It reached me right before I came home. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said stiffly. He looked aside from me as he added, ‘I’m not an educated man, Nevare. I’m not even, as you well know, a proper soldier son, born to the career. What I know about soldiering, I taught myself or learned the hard way. And I did my best to pass it on to you. I wanted you to be an officer that, well, understood what it was to really be a soldier. Not the kind of man who sits in his tent and orders men to go out and do what he couldn’t or wouldn’t do himself. Someone who knew what it was like to have to go a couple of days with no water for yourself or your horse, someone who knew about the salt and sweat of soldiering for himself. So you could be a good officer.’

And here was another man I’d failed. My heart sank but I tried not to let it show. ‘You didn’t waste your time, Sergeant Duril. I’ve no intention of giving up my career. Even if I have to enlist as a common soldier and rise as a ranker, I’m determined to do it.’ As I said those words, I was a bit surprised to find how deeply I meant them.

He cocked his head at me. ‘Well. I guess I can’t ask more of you than that, Nevare.’ He smiled suddenly, pleased with himself. ‘And I think you can’t ask more of me than what I have for you. Fancy an evening ride?’

‘I’m not averse to it,’ I replied. ‘Where are we going?’

His smile broadened. ‘You’ll see.’ He went back into his apartments, and then emerged with a fat set of saddlebags slung over his shoulder. I wanted to ask what was in them, but I knew he was enjoying making his revelations as we went along. I held my tongue.

It had been some days since I’d ridden Sirlofty. Ever a willing mount, he reached for the bit, eager to go. Duril had the use of a clay-coloured gelding. As we stood together in the paddock, saddling our mounts, we both glanced at one another. Then, as one, we made the ‘keep fast’ sign over the cinches. I feared it would soon be an empty ritual, with no more true power than the acorns that some troopers carried for luck in finding shade at the day’s end. We mounted, he took the lead and I followed.

We struck the river road, and travelled east for a short way before Duril turned his horse away from the river to follow a dusty, rutted trail. We topped a small rise, and in the distance I saw the Bejawi village. An upthrust of stone granted it some respite from the endless sweep of the prairie winds. Brush grew in the shelter of the stone barrier, and even a few trees. My father had chosen the location for it and laid out the original village for them. My father’s men had built the dozen houses that stood in two neat rows. At least twice that number of traditional Bejawi tents surrounded the houses. ‘Is that where we’re going? The Bejawi village?’

Duril gave a nod, silently watching me.

‘Why?’

‘Talk to some Kidona there.’

‘In the Bejawi village? What are they doing there? Kidona and Bejawi are traditional enemies. And the Kidona don’t have villages. The only reason the Bejawi live here is that my father built it for them and they had nowhere else to go.’

‘And wasn’t that a rousing success?’ Duril asked with quiet sarcasm.

I knew what he meant but was still a bit shocked to hear him say something even mildly negative about my father.

In the era before the Gernian expansion the plainspeople had been nomads. Different tribes followed different livelihoods. Some herded sheep or goats. Others followed the migrations of the herd deer that roamed the plains and plateaus, supplementing that meat with the gardens they planted in one season and harvested in another. Some of them built temporary mud huts along the river, little caring that they did not last long. The plainspeople had few towns or what we Gernians would recognize as one. They built a few monuments, such as the Dancing Spindle. They kept rendezvous points where they came together each year to trade and negotiate marriages and truces, but for the most part they wandered. To a Gernian eye, it meant that the plains remained an empty place, unclaimed and scarcely used by the migratory folk that criss-crossed it in patterns that were generations old. Such land was ripe for settling, awaiting development of its full potential. The plainsmen, I suspected, saw it differently.

Our ‘tame’ Bejawi, as my father referred to them, were an experiment that had largely failed. He went into it with good intentions. When he set out to save them, the Bejawi had been reduced to mostly women, children and old men. The Bejawi had been herders; killing their herds and a generation of their men had been the fastest way to subdue them. Deprived of their livelihood, the Bejawi were reduced to being thieves and beggars. My father took them in. Not all of them were willing to surrender their old ways in exchange for what he offered. My father bribed them with his promise that he would not let them starve. He had a village built for them, two rows of simple sturdy cottages. He gave them two teams of oxen, a plough and seed for a crop.

Within two weeks, they had eaten the oxen and most of the seed grain. He then gave them goats, with far better success. Perhaps the goats reminded them of the woolly antelope they had once tended. Those creatures were extinct now, slaughtered during our running battles with the Bejawi. The boys took the goats to pasture each day and brought them back. The animals yielded meat, hides, and milk. When last I had discussed them with my father, he admitted that he still had to supplement their food supplies, but that some of the women were learning to make a cheese that he hoped they would be able to market. But in other areas, his success was more tarnished. A people who had no traditions of living in a settled village, they were used to moving on when a piece of land became tired of them.

The ‘village’ stank. The smell of it hung on the still summer air. The tidy little cottages my father had erected with such pride were now derelict shacks. The Bejawi had no concept of how to maintain them. After several seasons of hard use had ruined the cottages, they had returned to their tents, and set up a secondary settlement around the row of cottages. Offal and garbage, a problem that nomads left behind for the elements and scavengers to deal with, were heaped between the mouldering cottages or piled into noxious waste pits. The children played in the rubbish-strewn street, tangle-haired moppets with scabby faces and dirty hands. Few of the young men stayed once they became adults. Too many of the girls went to Franner’s Bend to work as whores as soon as they were developed enough to pass themselves off as women. They returned to the village with their half-blood offspring when their brief blossoming of beauty had been eroded by the hard life of a post whore. The village my father had built never developed beyond houses to live in. There was no store, no school, nothing that offered the people anything beyond eating and sleeping indoors. It was a place where people waited, but did not know what they were waiting for.

Yet the Bejawi were not a foolish people, nor were they stupid. They were not even a dirty people, when they followed their own ways. They had been dealt a hard blow by fate, and had not, as yet, discovered how to recover. I wondered if they ever would, or if they would vanish, leaving only a legend of what they had once been. Once they had been a proud folk, renowned for their beauty and handiwork.

I had read accounts of them, written by Darsio, a merchant trader who had bartered with the plainspeople in the old days before the Gernian expansion. His writing always made me wish I had been alive then. The descriptions of the Bejawi men in their flowing white robes mounted on their swift horses leading their people, while the women, the children and the elderly followed, some shepherding the animals and others on the sand sleds pulled by their sturdier draught animals, were the stuff of epic poetry. The women manufactured beads from a certain petrified tree stone, and this jewellery had been the trade good that Darsio had sought from them. They made delicate ornaments from bird bone and feather, charmed to bring good luck to the owner. Every woman of marriageable age wore a veritable cloak of beads and ornaments and bells. Some of the cloaks, Darsio wrote, were passed down for generations. The children, he wrote, were exceptionally beautiful, open-faced and bold, easily laughing, the treasure of their people. The Bejawi flocks were a peculiar heavybodied antelope, prized for the thick undercoat they grew for the winter and shed in spring. This lightweight, warm wool was the basic of Bejawi textiles at the time of Darsio’s writings. The first time I had visited the Bejawi village with my father, that romantic image was what I had expected to see. I had come away disappointed and oddly shamed. I had no wish to visit the village again, but my curiosity was piqued by Sergeant Duril’s assertion that Kidona were there. I knew the Bejawi hated the Kidona with a loathing that went back generations.

Every creature has a predator that preys on it. The Bejawi had the Kidona. The Kidona did not herd nor harvest nor hunt. They raided. They had always been raiders, descending on trading caravans or summer villages, or they stole, creeping up on herds, flocks and tents to take whatever they needed. By their tradition, it was their right to do so. They travelled constantly on their pot-bellied striped-legged taldi, creatures that had little of a horse’s beauty, but even less of a horse’s weaknesses.

Dewara had been Kidona. I touched the double ridges on my ear, the healed scars from the notches he’d cut there when I’d disobeyed him. The man had starved and brutalized me, and then, in a turnabout that still baffled me, he had befriended me and attempted to induct me into his people’s culture and religion. He’d drugged me into a shamanic trance, and in that trance I had first encountered Tree Woman. That spirit journey had changed my life and warped my concept of reality. All of it had been my father’s doing. He hadn’t really wanted me to be Dewara’s student so much as he’d hoped Dewara’s harsh treatment of me would finally force me to make my own decisions and stand on my own two feet.

Well, I supposed it had, but not in the way my father had hoped, nor in any way that had brought me confidence or satisfaction in my life.

I had come to a deep understanding of Kidona ways before Dewara and I had parted. Theirs was a strange morality, in which the clever thief was held in high esteem, and the clumsy one could claim no protection from anyone’s vengeance. Dewara paid great respect to any man who could beat him, and disdained any fellow he could dominate. Prosperity was the equivalent of the blessing of his strange gods, and thus the opinion of a wealthy man was not to be disputed, while a poor man, no matter how experienced or kindly, was seen as a fool, unloved by the gods. Despite their skewed beliefs, or perhaps because of them, the Kidona were a tough, resourceful and savagely efficient people. Even though Dewara had damaged my life, I grudgingly admired him, in the same way that one might admire any exceptionally competent predator, without any element of fondness or trust.

Sergeant Duril hadn’t answered my most important question. I asked it again. ‘Why are Kidona in the Bejawi village?’

Sergeant Duril cleared his throat. ‘I suppose your father didn’t write to you about it. It was an ugly incident, while you were away at school. Not too long after you’d left, farms around here began to lose stock. At first, we thought it was wolves returning to this territory. Then someone pointed out that wolves leave carcasses, and we hadn’t found any. The Bejawi were blamed at first, because of some trouble a while back, but there was no sign of them having more meat than they should.

‘Well, when the dust settled, it turned out that Kidona were up to their old tricks. A band of them camping mostly out of sight of settled places had been raiding flocks and herds and gardens. They got bold and took a dozen yearlings from a herd that belonged to the garrison at Franner’s Bend. The commander there didn’t take kindly to it and sent some of the fellows out to track down the raiders and teach them a lesson.’ Sergeant Duril’s tone was light but his face was grim. ‘The soldiers at Franner’s Bend … well, you know how it is; you’ve seen the place. Those troopers never see any real action. It’s a soft post. And in a way that makes the recruits antsy for it, and when they do have a reason to crack down on something, they get carried away, as if they have to prove they’re as tough as real soldiers out on the border. Well, they got carried away with the Kidona raiding party they tracked down. Killed them all, and that was just about every male that wasn’t still sucking on a titty. Well, that stirred up trouble with the other Kidona groups that were in the area. Especially when it come out that the group our troopers had slaughtered hadn’t stolen the cows themselves. They’d traded for them with the thieves. So, we had troopers slaughtering “innocent” Kidonas, and the other Kidona in the area on the verge of an uprising.’

‘Why didn’t they just buy them off? The Kidona feel no shame about taking blood money.’

He nodded. ‘That’s what we did. But that left the women and tykes from the dead raiders to provide for. You know the Kidona. Practical and hard as stone. The survivors had nothing left in the way of resources. No taldi, no sheep, tents burned. The other groups of Kidona saw them as a liability. They didn’t want to take them in, but they didn’t want to see them starve, either. So this was the compromise. Your father said the Franner’s Bend commander could settle them here, as long as he supplied shelters, food and a pair of taldi for them to get started with again.’ He shook his head. ‘Putting Kidona in a village. That’s like putting your foot in a hat.’

I could easily distinguish the cottages and tents of the Bejawi from the shelters of the Kidona newcomers. There was not one village but two, forced into proximity. A line had literally been drawn, a row of stones and trash set as a boundary between the Bejawi area and the four military tents given to the Kidona survivors. As we approached, a Bejawi youth came to his feet. He appeared to be about fourteen and wore what looked like a dirty nightshirt and a drooping hat felted from goat hair. His pale eyes fixed on us accusingly as we approached. He leaned on a stave, watching us silently, no sign of welcome on his face. When Duril reined his horse towards the Kidona area, the young man sat back down and pointedly ignored us.

‘Have they always kept a sentry like that?’ I asked Duril.

‘Doubt it. I think he’s there to keep an eye on the Kidona, not us. But I could be wrong. I don’t come here unless I have to. It’s depressing.’

It was. We rode past the wall of garbage that fenced the Kidona from the Bejawi settlement. The insult was obvious. Equally obvious was the misery of the Kidona tent village. The thin wailing of children was as pervasive as the ripe smell of the rubbish. The tents were pitched with a military precision; so the troopers had at least set up the shelters for the widows and orphans. There were two cook fires, one burning and one a nest of banked coals. Sticks had been wedged against boulders to form a sort of drying rack, and two blankets festooned the ramshackle invention. About ten women, all middle-aged, sat on makeshift benches in front of the tent. One sat and rocked from side to side, droning a song under her breath. Three of them were employed in tearing old rags into long strips that one of them was braiding. I surmised they were making rag rugs to soften the tent floor. The others sat, empty-handed and still. Several taldi, one a pregnant mare, grazed on whatever they could find at the edge of the campsite.

A scatter of children idled in the area around the cook fires. Two were toddlers who sat bawling near a granny’s feet. She did not appear to be paying any attention to their cries. Three girls of seven or eight years of age were playing a game with pebbles and lines drawn in the dirt. Their faces were dirty, and their braids looked like fuzzy blonde ropes. A single boy of thirteen sat by himself and glared at us as we approached. I wondered how he had survived and what would become of him in this settlement of old women and children.

When we dismounted, all activity ceased. Duril took his saddlebags from his horse’s back and slung them over his shoulder. ‘Follow me and be quiet,’ Sergeant Duril instructed me. ‘Don’t look at anyone.’ I did as he told me. They stared at my body and a slow flush crept up my cheeks, but I didn’t make eye contact with any of them. Duril walked up to the granny and her howling charges. He spoke Jindobe, the trade language of the plains. ‘I bring you fat meat.’ He lowered the saddlebags to the ground and opened them. He took out a side of bacon wrapped in cheesecloth and offered it to her. Her mouth twitched, carrying her chin with it. Then she lifted her old blue eyes to his and said, ‘I have nothing to cut it with.’

He didn’t hesitate. He unhooked his belt and slid both knife and sheath from it. He offered them to her. She stared long at the proffered gift, as if weighing what she lost by taking it against what she gained. The boy had drawn closer and was watching the exchange intently. He said something in rapid Kidona. In response, she made a quick flipping gesture with her hand, as if throwing something aside. His face set in an expression of anger, but he made not a sound as she took the knife and sheath from the sergeant. Turning, she handed it immediately to the woman next to her. ‘Cut meat to cook for the children,’ she said. Then she stood up, grunting with the effort. She stepped over the small children who had never ceased their wailing, turned and went into the tent behind her. We followed.

It was a grey canvas barracks tent, long and wide, with side walls. It was dim and stuffy inside the tent. To one side, there was a row of army blankets arranged as pallets. On the other side, there were several casks of hardtack, a tub of dried corn and a wooden crate of withered and sprouted potatoes. Neatly arranged beside these donations were the remnants of their former lives. Tin and copper cooking pots were stacked beside a row of baked clay jars and plates next to folded bedding with the characteristic Kidona stripes.

They had cut a flap in the sidewall of the tent. She unpegged the sewn strips that had fastened it shut, and sat down beside the small rectangle of light and fresh air it admitted. After a moment, Sergeant Duril sat down facing her and I took my place beside him. ‘Did you bring it?’ she asked him.

I thought the bacon had been his bribe, but evidently that had only been for show. He reached into his shirt and took out his wallet. He opened it, and removed something I recognized from my childhood. I’d only seen it once before but it was not a thing to forget. He held out the darkened and shrivelled ear on his palm. Without hesitation, she took it.

She held it to the light, and then brought it close to her eyes, examining it closely. I was surprised when she sniffed it, but tried not to show my disgust. I knew the tale. In a moment of youthful rage, Sergeant Duril had taken the ear as a trophy from the body of a warrior he’d killed. In the same fracas, he’d gained the scar that had severed part of his own ear. He’d once told me that he was ashamed of cutting off the dead warrior’s ear, and would have undone the deed if he could. But he couldn’t return it to the body for decent burial, and he’d felt it would be wrong to discard it. Perhaps he’d finally found a way to be rid of it. She held it in her hand, looking down at it with a contemplative air. Then she nodded decisively. She rose and went to the tent door. She shouted something, a name I guessed, and when the boy came, she spoke to him rapidly. He argued back, and she slapped him. That seemed to settle his disagreement. He looked past her at us.

‘I’ll take you now,’ he said in Jindobe. And that was all he said.

By the time we were mounted, he was on the taldi stallion and riding out of the camp. We had to hurry the horses to catch up with him. He didn’t look back to see if we followed him, and never spoke another word to us. Instead he rode inland, away from the camp and towards the broken lands where the plains gave way to the plateaus. He kneed his taldi into a gallop. If he followed a trail or path, I could not see it, but he never hesitated as he led us on. As the shadows grew longer, I began to question the wisdom of what we were doing. ‘Where are we going?’ I finally asked Sergeant Duril.

‘To see Dewara,’ he said curtly.

It hit me like one of Duril’s ambush rocks when I was a boy. ‘We can’t be. My father did everything he could to find Dewara after he dragged me home. There was no sign of him, and the Kidona said they didn’t know where he went or what became of him.’

Sergeant Duril shrugged. ‘They lied. Back then, Dewara was something of a hero for what he’d done to your father’s son. But petty glory is faded, and Dewara has fallen on hard times. That woman back there believed me when I said I’d give her brother’s ear back to her if she’d give us Dewara.’

I rode for a time in shocked silence. Then, ‘How did you know it was her brother’s ear?’

‘I don’t. But it could have been. I left it up to her to decide.’

We followed the boy into a narrow, steep-sided canyon. It was a perfect site for an ambush, and I rode with a chill spot on my back. The boy’s taldi still had a good lead on us. He started up a narrow path across a rock face and I had to rein Sirlofty back to follow Duril’s horse up the treacherous way. I was becoming more and more dubious of our mission. If the boy was leading us to another Kidona encampment, I didn’t like the odds. But Sergeant Duril appeared calm, if watchful. I tried to emulate him.

There was another switchback in the trail, very tight for our horses, and then the ground suddenly levelled out. We had reached a long, narrow ledge that jutted out from the rock face. As soon as Duril and I were out of the way, the boy turned his taldi and silently started back down the path. Before us was a patched tent set up with a neat stack of firewood beside it. A blackened kettle hung from a tripod over a small smokeless fire. I smelled simmering rabbit. Dewara stood looking at us with no trace of surprise on his face. He had seen us coming. No one could approach this aerie without his being aware of it.

He was a changed man from the tough warrior I’d known. His clothing was worn and rumpled: dust stood in the ridges of the fabric. His dingy long-sleeved robe reached just past his hips and was belted with a plain strip of leather. The brown trousers he wore beneath it were faded to white at the knees and frayed at the cuffs. His swanneck hung at his hip, but the hair sheath looked dirty and frayed. The man himself had aged and not well. Four years had passed since I had last seen him, but to look at him, it had been twenty. His grey eyes, once so keen, had begun to cloud with cataract. He had a stoop in his back. He had allowed his hair to grow, and it hung in a thin yellowish white fringe to his shoulders. He licked his lips, giving us a brief glimpse of his filed teeth. No fear showed in his face as he greeted me. ‘Well. Soldier’s son. You come back to me. You want a new notch in your ear, maybe?’ His bravado did not fool me. Even his voice had aged, and the bitterness in it surprised me.

Sergeant Duril had not dismounted and he did not speak. I sensed he deferred to me, but I didn’t know what to say or do. The old Kidona warrior looked shrivelled and small. I remembered belatedly that when I first met him, he had been shorter than I, and I had grown since then. But that was my ‘real life’ memory of him. In the far more vivid dream memory, he had been much taller than I, and had the head of a hawk and feathered arms. I struggled to reconcile those memories with the withered man who stood squinting up at me. I think that puzzle kept me from feeling any one emotion clearly.

I dismounted and walked up to him. Behind me, I heard Sergeant Duril do the same. He stood behind my shoulder when I halted, allowing me this battle.

Dewara had to look up at me. Good. I stared down at him and spoke sternly. ‘I want to know what you did to me, Dewara. Tell me now, without riddles or mockery. What happened to me that night when you said you would make me Kidona?’ My Jindobe had come back to me without hesitation. I felt as if I had leap-frogged back through the years to confront the man that had abused, befriended and then nearly killed me.

He grinned, his pointed teeth shiny with saliva. ‘Oh, look at you, fat man. So brave now. So big. Still knowing nothing. Still wishing you were Kidona. Eh?’

I towered over him, dwarfing him in girth as well as height. Still he did not fear me. I summoned all my disdain. ‘If you are Kidona, then I do not wish to be Kidona.’ I drew on all my knowledge of his people to make my insults sting. ‘Look at you. You are poor! I see no women here, no taldi, no smoke rack of meat. The gods despise you.’

I saw my words hit him like flung stones. Shame tried to stir in me, that I would attack someone in his situation, but I held it down. He was not beaten. If I wanted to wring answers from him, I must first dominate him. From some depth of courage in his soul, he summoned a grin and retorted, ‘Yet I am still Kidona. And you, you are still her plaything. Look at you, all swollen up with her magic like a sore toe full of pus. The fat old woman claimed you, and made you her puppet.’

His words jabbed me and I retorted without thinking, ‘Her puppet? Her plaything? I think not. I did what you could not do. I crossed the bridge, and with the iron magic of my people, I laid her belly open. I defeated her, old man. What you could not do, even using me as your tool, I did alone.’ I struck a pose I remembered from our days together. I threw out my chest and lifted my head high, the same posture he had held whenever he wished to express how far above me he was. ‘I have always been stronger than you, Dewara. Even when I lay unconscious before you, you still dared not kill me.’

I watched him, trying to gauge his weakness in this battle of exchanged brags. To the west of us, the sun was dying in a welter of reds and purples. It was hard to read his features in the fading light. Perhaps a shadow of doubt brushed Dewara’s eyes, but he brazened it out. ‘I could have killed you if I wished,’ he said disdainfully. ‘It would have been like crushing a hatchling in the nest. I thought of it. You were useless to me. You claim to have killed her? Well, where is your proof? You brag like a child. When I sent you against her, you fell like a child. I witnessed that! The weakness of your people made you fail, not my Kidona magic. You were not strong of heart; you did not have the will to do what you should have done. If you had not spoken to the guardian, if you had rushed forward and killed her as I commanded, then all of our lives would be better now. But no! You are so wise, Soldier’s Boy, you think you know more than a Kidona warrior. You look, you think, oh, just an old woman, so you talk, talk, talk, and all the while her wormy white roots sink into you. Look at you now, like a fat grub from under a rotting log. You will never be a warrior. And you will ever belong to her. She will puff you up full with her magic, and when you are full, you will do whatever her magic makes you do. Or maybe you have already done it. Has the magic turned you against your own people?’ He laughed triumphantly and pointed a crooked finger at me. ‘Look at you! I didn’t need to kill you. Better to leave you alive. Think. Is there a better revenge on your father? Fat one! You belong to the Dappled People now. You’ll never be a soldier. Your father put iron in me to kill my magic. But I had enough magic left in me to give his son to my other enemy. I had enough magic to make my enemies become the enemies of each other. Long after I am dead, you will fight and kill one another. The corpses you make will pile up at my feet in whatever afterlife I am banished to.’

I cannot describe how his words affected me. I had expected him to profess ignorance of everything I said. I hadn’t wanted him to admit that somehow we had shared that dream, and that he recalled as clearly as I did what the Tree Woman had done to me. He had just confirmed my worst fears. A terrible cold welled up inside me. I crossed my arms on my chest and held myself tightly, afraid I would start shivering. The last walls inside me were breaking; it felt as if cold blood was leaking inside my gut. I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering. My heart thundered in my chest. Then, out of that turmoil, a terrible black calm emerged in me. I spoke in a soft voice I scarcely recognized.

‘You still lost, Kidona. You lost to her and you lost to me. I went to your Dancing Spindle. I am the one who put the iron in the Spindle’s path. I am the one who destroyed the plains magic. You can no longer draw on its strength. I made you an old man. It is done, Kidona. Done forever. You cling to shreds and threads, but the fabric is gone. And I come here tonight to tell you, I am the one who tore it from your people and left you cold and shivering in the dark. I, Soldier’s Boy of the People. Look at me, Dewara. Look at the end of your magic and your folk.’

There paraded across his face such a progression of emotions that they were almost laughable. He did not comprehend what I said, and then suddenly he did. Disbelief dawned on his face, and then I saw him admit the truth of what I’d told him. I’d killed his magic and the knowledge of that was killing him.

His face turned a terrible colour and he made a strangling noise.

I never even saw him draw his swanneck. Foolish me, I had never thought it would come to blows. Aged he might be, but fury renewed his strength and speed. The curved blade swept through the air towards me, the bronze catching the red of the firelight and the sunset, as if it were already bloodied. I skipped back, feeling the wind of its passage in front of my face. As I drew my own sword, Dewara, his face purpling with effort, leapt forward. All the weight of his hatred was behind the sharpened blade. I had scarcely cleared my own sword of its scabbard before the tip of his swanneck sank into my belly. I felt the sharp bite of it, felt the ripping of my shirt as the fabric gave way to the metal and then, oddly, nothing. I grunted and my sword fell from my hands as I clutched at my gut as he pulled his weapon free of me. I stood there, my hands clutched over my wound, feeling blood seep out through my shirt and between my fingers. Shock stilled me. What a stupid way to die, I thought as he swept his blade back for the strike that would behead me. His lips were pulled back from his pointed teeth and his eyes bulged out of his head. I thought how disgusted my father would be with his soldier son for dying in such an ignominious fashion.

The explosion behind me jolted me with a shock of light and sound. The impact of multiple balls striking Dewara’s chest stopped him in mid lunge. For an instant, he hung suspended, caught between his momentum and the stopping power of the lead. Then he fell like a puppet with his strings cut, his swanneck bouncing free of his nerveless hand as he struck the earth. I knew he was dead before his body even fell to the ground.

There was a moment that seemed to last as long as a whole day. The sulphurous stench of black powder hung in the air. The magnitude of so many things happening at once paralysed me. I stood, clutching my belly, knowing that a gut wound could fester and kill me as surely as being beheaded. I could not comprehend my injury, any more than I could grasp that Dewara sprawled dead at my feet. I’d never seen a man shot to death. Instantaneous death was shocking enough, but Dewara had been more than just a man to me. He’d figured in my most horrendous nightmares. He’d nearly killed me but he had also taught me and shared food and water with me. He had been an important figure in my life, and when he died, a significant part of my experiences died with him. Of all that we had experienced together, I alone remained to recall it. And I might die. My own blood sang in my ears.

As if from the distance, I heard Sergeant Duril say, ‘Well, I didn’t think much of this at first, but now I’m glad I bought it. The shopkeeper called it a pepper-pot. Guess I peppered him, didn’t I?’

He stepped past me to crouch over Dewara’s body. Then he stood up with a grunt and came towards me. ‘He’s dead. Are you all right, Nevare? He didn’t get you, did he?’

Duril still held a small, multiple barrelled gun in his hand. I’d heard of them, but never seen one before. They were only good at short range, but fired several balls at once, making it more likely that even without a chance to aim, you’d hit your target somewhere. My father had spoken of them as a coward’s weapon, something that a high-priced whore or a table gambler might carry concealed in a sleeve. I was surprised that Sergeant Duril would carry such a weapon. Surprised, and very glad.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. There wasn’t much pain. But I’d heard that the shock of a wound could keep a man from feeling pain at first. I turned away from Duril and staggered a few steps towards the fire, fumbling at the front of my shirt as I went. It seemed a private thing; I wanted to be alone when I discovered how bad it was. I managed to unbutton my shirt and pull it open just as he caught up with me.

‘Good god, help us!’ he muttered, and it was a prayer the way he said it. Before I could stop him, he leaned forward to probe the injury with his fingers. ‘Oh, thank all that’s holy. It’s just a jab, Nevare. You’re hardly hurt at all. A flesh wound. And there was a lot of flesh there to wound, begging your pardon. Oh, thank the good god! What would I have said to your da, before he killed me?’

His knees seemed to give out on him and he sank down to sit beside Dewara’s fire. I turned a bit away from him, strangely embarrassed that I was not hurt more severely. I wiped my bloodied hands on my shirt and then gritted my teeth as I prodded at the cut on my belly. The sergeant was right. It was scarcely bleeding now. I felt humiliated that such a minor injury could have stopped me in my tracks and made me drop my own sword. A fine soldier son I was! The first time I actually faced an enemy in combat, the old man had disarmed me with a minor poke in the gut. The thought of my own proud sword lying in the dust shamed me. I went to retrieve it.

The light was going rapidly. I found my blade by touch, sheathed it, and then stooped to pick up Dewara’s swanneck. For one boyish instant, I thought of keeping it as a trophy. In the next, I felt repulsed by such a vainglorious thought. I hadn’t even killed the man who’d wielded it. I shifted it in the firelight, and watched as it illuminated the gleaming bronze blade. Then I went queasy at what I saw. A full four fingers of the blade’s tip was bloodied. It had gone that deep. With my free hand, I groped at my injury. No. There was almost no pain.

It made no sense.

I carried the swanneck back to the fire where I could look at it more clearly. Sergeant Duril was recovering from his fright at my injury. He stood up as I approached the fire. ‘Leave that!’ he ordered me harshly. ‘Leave everything, just as it is. We need to get down that trail before it gets any darker.’

He walked away from me. I stood alone in the firelight and stared at my blood on the blade. I lied to myself, pretending that perhaps it had run there. I knew it hadn’t. The swanneck had pierced me, had gone right into my gut. And my flesh had simply closed itself when he pulled it free. The blade fell from my hand and landed in the flames. I turned and walked away from it.

I didn’t look at Dewara’s body as I passed. When Duril announced, ‘We’re leading the horses down the trail, at least as far as the switchback,’ I didn’t argue with him. Instead, I followed him just as trustingly as I had always followed him when I was a boy.

I didn’t dwell on what we left behind us. I doubted that either the boy or the old woman would admit to anyone that they had betrayed Dewara’s hiding place. Even if they did, even if we were connected to his death, he had attacked me, and Duril had saved my life. It felt strange to leave him lying where he had fallen, but it would have felt even more wrong to take his body and bury it elsewhere.

Darkness filled the narrow canyon like water fills a bucket. ‘Can you ride?’ Sergeant Duril asked me gruffly.

‘I’ll be fine. It wasn’t much more than a scratch.’ I hesitated, and then asked him, ‘Are you going to report this to my father?’

‘I’m not going to report this to anyone. Neither are you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, relieved to have that decision taken from me so firmly. We mounted our horses and he led the way back towards home.

We rode without speaking through the deeply shadowed canyon. When we emerged onto the plain, we came back out of night into evening. The last light of the setting sun still washed red across the flat lands. Duril stirred his mount to a faster pace and I pushed Sirlofty up alongside him. He didn’t turn to look at me when he spoke.

‘Well. You got what you were after?’

‘I did and I didn’t. Dewara’s dead. I wasn’t after that, not really. But I don’t think he would have let it end any other way, once he knew what I’d done. But I don’t think I solved anything tonight. I’m still fat. According to Dewara, I’m still in Tree Woman’s power.’ I shook my head wildly. ‘And it all sounds like a strange old tale told by a fireside. How can I believe anything so bizarre?’

He didn’t say anything. I kept my eyes straight ahead as I pondered everything that had happened. ‘He knew,’ I said at last. ‘Dewara knew what had happened in my dream. And he couldn’t possibly know that, unless he was there. And to him, it was just as real as our visit today. According to what he believed, the Tree Woman somehow enslaved me with her magic and doomed me to be, to be – this!’ I could scarcely contain my disgust. ‘If I believe him, I’m doomed to be this for the rest of my life, and perhaps worse things will befall me. Maybe I will go on to betray all of Gernia!’

‘Easy, boy. Don’t give yourself too much importance,’ Duril warned me, a sour touch of humour in his voice. It jabbed me.

‘But if I don’t believe him, if I say magic doesn’t exist or has no power over me, well, then, none of it makes sense. Then there’s no reason for me being fat, and that makes it even harder for me to know what I’m going to do about it. How do I manage it, Sergeant? What do I do? Believe Dewara’s truth, and give up because the magic will use me as it wills, or believe in my father’s world, where I don’t know why I got fat and nothing I do seems to change it?’

‘Hold up a minute,’ he suggested. He reined his horse in and I pulled Sirlofty to a halt beside him. He dismounted and tightened his cinch. ‘Came loose coming down that trail,’ he observed. Then he looked up at me, squinting his eyes against the fading sunset. ‘Never used to do that, Nevare. The “keep fast” charm held it tight. And now it doesn’t. That’s proof enough for me. The plains magic is fading. Will you think me a fool if I say I’m sorry to see it go?’

‘I’ll never think you a fool, Sergeant Duril. But are you saying that you believe in magic? You believe I went somewhere with Dewara and that Tree Woman stole part of my soul, and that I took it back and killed her? And you believe that my being fat is not my fault but the magic affecting me?’

Duril mounted his horse again. He didn’t say anything as he kicked him to a trot. I started Sirlofty after him, and in a few moments we were cantering. Before full night fell, we were back on the river road. We went more slowly in the dark and finally he answered me.

‘Nevare, I don’t know how to tell you what to believe. On the Sixday, I worship the good god, same as you. But every time I saddled my horse for the past thirty years, I’ve made the “keep fast” sign over my cinch. I’ve seen a windwizard, and I’ve seen gunpowder send a bullet on its way. I don’t really understand how either one worked. I guess what I believe in is whatever works best for me at that time. I think most men are like that.’

‘What am I going to do, Sergeant?’ I didn’t expect him to have an answer. I was shocked when he did. His voice was grim.

‘We both have to pray to the good god that you can find a way to turn the magic against itself, I suppose.’

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