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.”