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.