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.