Forest Mage

  I chopped wood all that day. No one spoke to me or paid me much attention. Once, Sergeant Duril wandered casually by and then walked away again. I suspected he had some thought or news he wanted to share with me, but I wouldn’t acknowledge him in front of my guard. Blisters came up and broke on my hands and were torn away. Knowing that I could only ask for water three times, I schooled myself to wait until my body demanded it. Then I drank deeply. Evidently my father had not given the man any limit for how much water I could have.

  It must have been boring duty for Narl. He sat on a section of log and watched me. He wore a floppy brimmed hat, and as the shade of the woodshed moved, he scooted his log section along to stay within it. Most of our wood was either skinny pole wood that I could chop with almost one blow or long heavy logs of spond wood salvaged from the river.

  At the end of the day, Narl escorted me back to my room. As I entered, I noticed that a large, new hasp had been fitted to the outside of my door. So I was to be locked in at night, to prevent any midnight kitchen visits. Thank you, Father. My room was stuffy when I entered it. The window was shut, and a quick glance showed me that it, too, had been fastened closed from outside. My father wasn’t taking any chances, not even that I would risk a drop from my upstairs window to the gardens below. I could vividly imagine what that would do to my knees and ankles.

  My guard shut the door behind me, and I sat down on my bed. I waited to hear the hasp secured in some way, but all I heard was the guard’s departing footfalls. The maid had refilled my water ewer. I noticed with distaste that a chamber pot had been added to my room. The wash water was welcome, though I would have preferred a bath or even a dip in the river shallows.

  I did not wait long until I heard a different step on the stair. There was a tap on my door, and when I opened it, my father himself entered with a covered tray. He didn’t look at me. I think even he was somewhat embarrassed by what he was doing to me. “This is your food,” he announced, as if I could have mistaken it for something else. I could smell meat, and instantly my mouth began to water. My hunger, which I could somewhat ignore in the absence of food, became an obsession the moment I could smell or see anything edible. I was glad that he set the tray down without uncovering it. I feared that if he had shown me what he carried, I could not have focused on his words.

  He spoke stiffly. “I hope you realize that I’m doing this for your own good, Nevare. Trust me, and I promise you that by the end of the week, those clothes will be hanging on you. I will prove to you that your fat is a result of your greed, not some ‘magic spell. ’”

  “Sir,” I said, confirming that I’d heard his words but offering no comment on what I thought of them. He decided that was rude, and left my room. He shut the door smartly and this time I did hear him fasten the hasp shut. Fine. I wasted no time in sitting down to my meal.

  In a way, he was fair. I suppose he could have fed me bread and water. Instead, there was a meager portion of everything that my family was enjoying downstairs, even half a glass of wine. The cloth that had covered the tray became my napkin. I did not allow myself a morsel until I had divided every food on my plate into meticulously carved small bites. Then I began, eating each bite as if it were my last and trying to savor the taste in an attempt to make the small quantity satisfying. I had cut the meat so fine that I had reduced it to tiny bundles of fibers. I ground them between my back teeth and let them linger in my mouth until the flavor faded. I ate the peas individually, squeezing the tender insides out of their tiny jackets and savoring the difference in texture. I chewed the bread endlessly, delighted to discover that each tiny square somehow became sweet when it lingered on my tongue.

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  My father, perhaps from some sense of fairness, had even provided me with a tiny portion of a sweet pudding with three tart cherries in it. This I ate in bits that scarcely covered the tips of the fork’s tines. Had I ever before been so aware of the sharp contrast between sweet and sour, ever mapped so clearly what portions of my tongue responded to each? My deprivation became an exercise in sensory exploration.

  And when the last trace of stickiness had been scraped from the dish, I savored the half glass of wine. I wet my lips with it and then ran my tongue over them. I breathed the taste and then, drop by drop, consumed the rest of the glass. A meal I would have devoured in a few minutes at the academy lasted more than an hour in the privacy of my room.

  Do not mistake me. I was not satisfied. Hunger opened its maw and roared within me, demanding more. If there had been anything remotely edible in my room, I would have eaten it. I longed for bulk, for large mouthfuls of food that I could masticate and swallow in huge gulps. If I had allowed myself to dwell on my hunger, I would have gone mad. Instead, I reminded myself that I had gone for days on far less in the time when I had traveled with Dewara. I was deprived but not starving. I set each dish back on the tray and covered it with my napkin. I took out my neglected schoolbooks.

  I set myself a lesson from each text and doggedly completed it. I read and took notes from Gernia’s military history. I studied a chapter of math, working each exercise and diligently checking my answers. I translated several pages of Varnian from Bellock’s Warfare.

  And when I was finished, I took out my soldier’s journal and made a complete and unvarnished entry about the entire day. Afterward, I put out my lamp and went to bed in my stuffy little room.

  The next morning I was awake and dressed when my guard unlocked my door. That day I worked on whitewashing several outbuildings. The work was not heavy, but it was constant. My shoulders ached and my raw hands could scarcely close around the brush. Nevertheless, I set my teeth and toiled on. I saw my mother once. She came out and stood silently at a distance, watching my toil. When she saw she had caught my eye, she lifted her hand, as if she pleaded with me to understand there was nothing she could do. I nodded to her and turned away. I did not wish her to interfere. This was between my father and me.

  My guard allowed me to bathe that day before returning me to my cell. My room was stuffier than ever, for all the smells of my occupation of it were trapped inside it. My evening was a repetition of the previous one. My father himself brought me a small meal that I savored obsessively, and I set myself another night of lessons. If, against all my expectations, my father’s plan worked and I managed to return to the academy, I did not intend to be behind my classmates. My hopes were torn. I desperately wanted to return to my old life. But I was equally obsessed with finally proving to my father that he was wrong and I was right. I tried to tell myself that either outcome would have its reward, but I found I longed for the former rather than the latter.

  I don’t recall how many days I passed with that routine. Every Sixday, I had a small reprieve. My father released me to attend his prayers with my elder brother, and then returned me to my solitude for an afternoon of meditation. But every other day followed the pattern of the first. I rose, I worked all day, I returned to my confinement and my meal and my lessons. My father shifted me from task to task. I gained muscle in my arms, so that my shirt strained more than ever at my shoulders. If my belt notch was any indication, I lost no girth. My guard was a man of few words, and I had even less to say to him.

  There were few events of any note during those days of my life. One evening I asked my father for more paper and ink. I think he was shocked to discover that I was continuing my education. He brought me paper and ink, and, as a reward I think, a letter that had come from Epiny and Spink.

  It was a welcome distraction. In her letter, my cousin told me that she and Spink were both recovered well from their most recent bout with the plague. Spink in particular showed marked improvement from when they had last seen me. He was much more like his old self, full of energy and ideas. Unfortunately, she wrote, it made him restless and more prone to being dissatisfied with living as a dependent on his brother’s goodwill. He had too many ideas about how the family holding could be i
mproved, and how tasks should be done. He and his older brother often quarreled, which made everyone miserable. Epiny wished there was some way Spink could return to the academy, but the expense was presently too great, especially since she would also need to be housed in the city while Spink was at school.

  She thanked me belatedly for sharing her letters to me with her father. After a dearth of communication for several months, they were now corresponding regularly. Without stating it plainly, she implied that perhaps her mother had somehow blocked earlier letters between them. Lady Burvelle seemed to have lost all interest in Epiny and was focusing her efforts on grooming Purissa to be a consort fit for the very young prince. Epiny thought it disgraceful and heartless. But she also believed that her father was now far less disappointed in her than she had feared. I sensed a great relief in her penned words.

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  I wrote her a long reply in which I told her all that had befallen me, including my meeting with Dewara. Then, as I decided it was extremely likely my father would read all my mail before he posted it, I tore that letter up. The next one was very circumspect. I said only that my return to the academy was delayed due to some health difficulties that I hoped to resolve soon. I filled up the rest of two pages with generalities about life at home and best wishes for her and Spink.

  Having started writing letters, I decided I would also answer the missive from Caulder and his uncle. I tried to describe the area in which I’d “found” the stone that Caulder had stolen from me. I recalled only too well how I’d come by that rock. It had dug its way into my flesh when Dewara had dragged me home. I even made a rough sketch that didn’t merit being dignified with the name “map” and sent it with my letter. With that final, grudging courtesy, I resolved that I was now finished with Caulder and all his kin forever.

  My days continued to be full of menial and backbreaking tasks, which didn’t bother me. It left my mind free to ponder other things. I thought through, from beginning to end, my “love affair” with Carsina. I thought of how abruptly it had begun: I’d become infatuated with her the night my father told me that she was going to be given to me. And since the day when I had seen her at Rosse’s wedding and she had so completely disdained me, I could think of her only with anger.

  I am human. I had my boyish revenge fantasies about her. I would regain my formerly trim body, and then I would disdain her. I would do some magnificent and heroic act for her family, perhaps saving her mother from certain death when she was attacked by a prairie cat, and then when her father offered me anything that I could desire as a reward for my heroism, I would coldly ask only that he release me from my promise to marry his heartless and shallow daughter.

  I played such scenarios over and over in my mind, until I was forced to admit that they would not have given me such pleasure if I were not still fixed on possessing Carsina. It was not, I realized one day between shovels of manure, that I loved her. It was simply that she had been part of the perfect future I’d envisioned for myself. In that golden fancy, I completed the academy, gained a good post as a young lieutenant, moved up in rank quickly, and then claimed the young woman of good family who had been promised to me. Any modification to that future somehow lessened it. I could no more imagine substituting another woman for Carsina than I could imagine following a different profession than soldiering. And anytime I imagined that Carsina’s father might cancel his understanding with my father and bestow Carsina on Remwar instead, my blood seethed. I could not tolerate the idea that they might speak of me with laughter, or that Carsina might thank Remwar for rescuing her from the dismal fate of being my wife. The blow to my pride had quenched any love or affection I might have had for Carsina, but it had only sharpened my sense of possession of her. Sometimes I wondered what my Cousin Epiny would have said to me about such an attitude.

  It bothered me that my mother and siblings never sought me out at all. I supposed that my father had forbidden the contact lest they be moved to bring me food. I don’t know how many days I was into my ordeal when my guard asked me, “So your Pa is trying to make you lose some weight, right?”

  “So it seems,” I grunted. Narl was watching me load rocks onto a wagon, to be hauled off to build a stone wall.

  “You don’t look any thinner since you started. ”

  I heaved a particularly large rock onto the wagon. I caught my breath. My mouth was dry, but I didn’t want to use up one of my precious water breaks yet. “Yes,” I agreed. I walked back to the pile to pick up another rock.

  “So, you can tell me. Where and when do you get the food?”

  “My father gives me one meal a day. ” I wondered if my father had directed him to ask me that question. Did he set a spy upon me now? I squatted down and maneuvered another rock up onto its side and then into my arms. I grunted as I stood up, crab-walked with it to the back of the wagon, and heaved it in. “That’s a load,” I gasped.

  “Reckon it is. Follow ’long, now. ” In his wisdom, the guard had decided that I would benefit more from staggering along behind the wagon than riding on it to our unloading site. I hadn’t argued. Perhaps some part of me now hated my body as much as my father did, and desired to punish it as severely as possible.

  “Then why aren’t you getting skinny?”

  He stood with one leg up on the wagon, ready to mount to the seat. On a whim, I told him the truth. “I’m under a curse. It’s magic. I’m doomed to be fat forever. ”

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  “Huh,” he said. And that was all. Narl didn’t talk to me much more that day, but almost every day after that, he ventured some conversational gambit. I learned that he was an orphan and abandoned and had no idea whose son he was or what he was supposed to be. So he’d come east, looking for a life, and found Burvelle’s Landing and a job with my father. He’d been a pig tender before my father chose him for this task. He chuckled as he said it, and I suppose to him there was some humor in it. He had a girl across the river. She was a shopkeeper’s daughter, and he hoped that when he got enough money, her father would let him marry her. Her father had no sons, so maybe any sons they had could be shopkeepers and have a real place in the world. He envied sons who knew what they were born to be.

  He was good for bits and pieces of news from time to time. From him, I learned that the Kidona had simply vanished from the Bejawi village. One day they’d been there; the next time someone had visited the village to deliver supplies, they were gone. They hadn’t even taken the tents or supplies that the troops at Franner’s Bend had given them. Ungrateful savages. He told me, too, that the reinforcements for the fort at Gettys were due to pass the Landing any day now. For a moment my heart leapt as I recalled how I’d used to sit Sirlofty on the hill overlooking the road and watch the passing of the regiments on their way to assignments in the wild east. The rows of horse, the marching men, the wagons decked out with their regimental colors were as much pomp and heraldry as our part of the world ever witnessed. But I wouldn’t even get to see Cayton’s Horse and Doril’s Foot as they passed, let alone have dinner with the officers if they paused at the Landing. It was likely my father would do all he could to keep me out of their sight.

  And from Narl, I learned that there was sickness in Franner’s Bend. Some poor families, half-breeds most likely, had come down with it first. Rumor was that they’d recently arrived at Franner’s Bend. Dirty folk, was what he’d heard. And they’d brought a sickness to Franner’s Bend, and rumor had it that those who caught it were dropping like flies from it. Fever, he told me, and vomiting. Diarrhea, too. That’s what came of living dirty like that.

  A chill went up my spine. “Does my father know about it? That there’s disease in Franner’s Bend?”

  My guard shrugged. Narl hadn’t supposed that my father took an interest in such things.

  That night, when I was returned to my room, I paced it until my father arrived at my door with dinner. When he finally ope
ned the lock and came in, I greeted him with, “Speck plague is spreading through Franner’s Bend. I fear Burvelle Landing will be next. ”

  “What?” He set my dinner tray down with an angry clack. He never received bad news graciously.

  Tersely, I told him what I knew.

  He shook his head at me. “That could be any of a dozen maladies, Nevare. When did you become such a nervous Nellie? Those people could have drunk bad water, or eaten spoiled meat. You’d do better to be focusing on what we’re trying to accomplish here instead of imagining death and disaster on your doorstep. Speck plague. How would Speck plague come here?”

  Then he added, coldly, “Stand straight. I want to look at you. ”

  I made no verbal response. I stood as if at attention while he walked a slow circle around me. When he came back to face me, the color in his face was higher. “You haven’t lost a pound that I can see. You’ve corrupted your guard, haven’t you? He’s bringing you food. That’s the only possibility. What are you bribing him with, Nevare? Promises of money to be given to him later? Or do you have resources that I don’t know about?”

  Rage roared up in me, stronger than the hunger that still clawed at my inner ribs. “I’ve done no such thing! I’ve held myself exactly to our bargain. I’ve worked each day as you commanded me, and eaten only what you’ve brought to me with your own hands, Father. It’s as I’ve tried to tell you; my weight has nothing to do with greed or lack of self-discipline. It’s magic. What will it take to convince you of that? Or is it impossible for you to ever admit that not only are you wrong, but that your actions are responsible for how I look?”

  His face contorted with rage. “You superstitious ignoramus!” He snatched up my food tray so hastily that the wine glass fell over. I smelled the sharp scent of the spilled wine. Against my will, my hands flew out to clutch at the tray and keep him from dumping the precious food. With a roar of fury, he snatched it away from me. It tipped and he deliberately swung the tray to dash the contents against the wall. I stared in horror at the splattered food and broken crockery. A large piece of the wine glass had stuck in the thick gravy of the meat pie. As I stared, its weight pulled it free and it fell to the floor with the rest of the mess. I turned my aghast gaze on my father.