“Does trading dead birds for live children make any sense to you?” I demanded. And then, rudely, I added, “Do you really find any sense in burning a block of leaves to make the good god give us what we ask?”

She looked at me strangely. “That’s an odd question to be troubling a soldier son, Nevare. But perhaps it is because you were born to be a soldier that you ask it. You are applying the logic of man to a god. The good god is not bound by our human logic or measurements, son. On the contrary, we are bound by his. We are not gods, to know what pleases a god. We were given the Holy Writ so that we might worship the good god as will please him, rather than offering him things that might please a man. I, for one, am very grateful. Imagine a god who dealt as men do: what would he demand of a bride in exchange for future children? What might such a god ask of you as recompense to restore your lost beauty?

Would you want to pay it?”

She was trying to make me think, but her last words stung me. “Beauty?

Lost beauty? This is not a matter of vanity, Mother! I am trapped in this bulky body and nothing I do seems to change it. I cannot put on my boots or get out of bed without being bound by it. How can you assume you can even imagine what it is like for me to be a prisoner in my own flesh?”

She looked at me silently for a few moments. Than a small smile passed her lips. “You were too small to remember my pregnancies with Vanze and Yaril. Perhaps you cannot even remember what I looked like before my last two children were born.” She lifted her arms as if inviting me to consider it. I glanced at her and away. Time and childbearing had thickened her body, but she was my mother. She was supposed to look that way. I could, vaguely, recall a younger, slender mother who had chased me laughing through the freshly planted garden in our early years at Widevale. And I did recall her last pregnancy with Yaril. I most recalled how she had lumbered through the rooms of the house on her painfully swollen feet. “But that’s not the same thing at all,” I retorted. “The changes then and now, those are natural changes. What has befallen me is completely unnatural. I feel as if I am trapped in some Dark Evening costume that I cannot shed. You are so caught up in looking at my body that all of you, Father, Yaril, and even you, cannot perceive that within I am still Nevare! The only thing that has changed is my body. But I am treated as if I am these walls of fat rather than the person trapped behind them.”

My mother allowed a small silence to settle between us before she observed, “You seem very angry at us, Nevare.”