I wanted to shout that she wasn’t listening to me. With difficulty, I restrained myself and said only, “Thank you for being my advocate.”
“I always have been, you know,” she said quietly. “Now when you finish your work tomorrow, take care to wash well and then come here for a fitting. The ladies will be here to help me then.”
I took a deep breath. My anger was gone, consumed in a dark tide of dejection. “I shall take care to be clean and inoffensive,” I told her. “Good night, Mother.”
She reached up to kiss me on the cheek. “Don’t despair, son. You have confronted what is wrong, accepted it, and now you can change it. From this day forth, things can only improve.”
“Yes, Mother,” I replied dutifully, and left her there. My stomach was clenching so desperately with hunger pangs that I felt nauseous. I did not go up to my room, but went to the kitchens instead. I worked the hand pump at the sink until cooler water came, and then drank as much as I could bear. If anything, it made me more miserable.
I went up to my room and tried to sleep until just before dawn. I was standing with the rest of the crew when the wagon came for us, and went out for another day’s work. The catalogue of my misery: blisters, hunger, aches, nausea, and, roiling beneath it all, a sense of bewilderment and outrage at the injustice of life.
By the second half of the day, I was staggering. When the rest of the work crew broke out their simple packets of meat and bread for their noon meal, I had to walk away from them. My sense of smell had become acute, and my stomach bellowed its emptiness at me. I wanted to wrestle the food away from them and devour it. Even after they had consumed it all and I came back for my share of the water, it was difficult to be courteous. I could smell the food on their breaths when we huffed and strained to lift the larger rocks, and it tormented me.
When we finally received the signal to quit, my legs were like jelly. I did not do my fair share at the final unloading of the wagon. I saw the other men exchange glances over it and felt ashamed. I staggered back to the wagon and barely managed to climb aboard.
When the wagon dropped us off, the other men strode toward the town. I tottered up the drive and into the back door of the house. I had to pass the kitchen. The air was thick with wonderful smells; the cook had begun to prepare the special cakes and breads for the wedding. I hurried away from that torture. My father had not told me to fast entirely. I could, I knew, have a small meal. But that thought seemed a weakness and a betrayal of my determination to change. Fasting wouldn’t kill me, and I would return to my normal self that much sooner.
The steps to my room seemed long and steep, and once there all I wanted to do was curl up around my miserable belly. Instead, I stepped into the low tub that had been left for me and washed myself standing. I stank. Now that I was heavier, I sweated more and the sweat lingered in every fold of my flesh. Left too long, the perspiration made a scald mark on my skin, painful to touch.
Rosse’s old clothes, freshly washed and newly let out, awaited me. They felt tight and awkward against my damp skin. My cadet haircut had begun to grow out. I toweled it dry and then, mindful of embarrassing my mother, I shaved before I went down to her sewing room.
My mother awaited me with the two seamstresses. The last time I’d been measured for clothing, the tailor had done it and I had been fit and trim. It was inexpressibly humiliating to undress to my small clothes and then have three women hold pieces of fabric against me, pinning the parts together around me. One seamstress glanced at my belly and rolled her eyes in disdain at the other seamstress. I went hot with a blush. They pinned my new clothing around me, stood back, consulted like hens clucking in a barnyard, and again surrounded me, moving pins and having me turn and lift my arms and raise my knees. The fabric was a very somber dark blue, nothing at all like the brave green of my cadet uniform. By the time I retired behind a screen to get dressed again, I felt that nothing worse could happen to me.
I climbed up the endless stairs to my room. With grim determination, I decided to avoid the dinner table entirely. I did not think I could withstand the wonderful aromas of cooked food. I went to bed.
In my dream, I was my other self, and I was ravenously hungry. I recalled with sorrow all of the magic that had been wasted at the Dancing Spindle. I was proud that I had halted the Spindle’s dance and ended the Plainsmen’s magic, but I regretted that I had not been able to absorb more of it into myself. It was a bizarre dream, filled with the elation of triumph underpinned with a grating hunger for foods that would properly nourish my magic. I woke at dawn still feeling both hungry and vaguely triumphant. The first I could understand; the later made me feel ashamed. I shook the cobwebs from my head and faced my day.