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.”

“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 opened 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?”