My mother paled at my words. Then she carefully corrected me. “Cecile is a Burvelle now, Nevare. Cecile Burvelle.” She stepped past me and opened the sage drawer of the cabinet. Sage for wisdom. She took out a fist-sized greenish brick of incense and carried it to the worship brazier. With gilded tongs, she held it to the slumbering coals, stooping to blow through pursed lips to wake their ashed red to glowing scarlet. A slender tendril of smoke rose to scent the room, and one corner of the sage brick caught the charcoal’s red kiss. She did not look at me as she bore the sage incense to the alcove for health and tucked it safely inside.
She stood for a moment in silent prayer. Habit urged me to join her there and I suddenly wished I could. But my soul felt dry and bereft of faith. No words of praise or entreaty welled in me, only hopelessness. When my mother turned aside from the mural, I said, “You knew the Porontes worship the old gods, didn’t you? Does Father know?”
She shook her head impatiently. I don’t know if she was answering my question or dismissing it. “Cecile is a Burvelle now,” she insisted. “It no longer matters what she did in the past. She will worship the good god alongside us every Sixday, and her children will be raised to do the same.”
“Did you see the dead birds?” I asked her abruptly. “Did you see that ghastly little carousel in their garden?”
She pursed her lips as she came to take a seat on the bench. She patted a space beside her and I sat down reluctantly. She spoke softly. “They invited me to witness it. Cecile’s mother sent an invitation to your sisters and me. The words were cloaked but I understood what it was about. We arrived too late. Deliberately.” She paused for a moment and then advised me sincerely, “Nevare, let this go. I don’t think that they truly worship the old gods. It is more a tradition, a form to be observed, rather than any true belief. The women of their family have always made such offerings. Cecile made the Bride’s Gift to Orandula, the old god of balances. The slain birds are a gift to the carrion bird incarnation of Orandula. His own creatures are killed and then offered back to him to feed his own. It’s a balance. The hope is that the woman offering the sacrifice will not lose any children to stillbirth or cradle death.”
“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.”