Forest Mage

Two weeks after I had buried my dead, I decided that the household was close enough to normalcy that I would fetch my sister Yaril home from the Poronte manor. I ordered up the carriage, and made the same trip that only a few months ago had taken us to my brother’s wedding. Now I went to visit his widow. I wore my best clothing, the suit that my mother had made for me for Rosse’s wedding. It was now uncomfortably tight on me.

The plague had passed the Poronte estates by. It was strange to see an aspect of normality when I arrived. Men were working in the fields, cattle grazed peacefully, and the liveried servant who opened the door smiled a gracious welcome. Even so, when I entered the chambers that had been so full of flowers and music at my last visit, I found them decked for mourning. Cecile’s parents came to meet me in their parlor. I formally thanked Lord and Lady Poronte for taking in my sister. They replied awkwardly that it was the least they could do for Yaril at such a dreadful time.

I had expected to bring both Cecile and Yaril home with me. But Cecile’s mother begged me to allow her daughter to stay until the greatest blackness of her grief had passed. She said that the shock of passing from the joys of being newly wed to the horrors of disease and widowhood had been too much for Cecile’s gentle spirit. She had been bedridden for days after she arrived there, and even now only rose for a few hours each day. She needed time, her mother said, time to recover and find her way into her sad new life. I wondered uneasily if they intended to let Cecile return at all. It was Cecile’s duty to return to her husband’s home and take up the management of it, but I did not have the heart to demand that. Instead I said that when my father was better, they could all take counsel together to decide what was best.

I was disappointed that Yaril had not come to greet me, but Cecile’s mother told me they had asked her to wait in the garden until “things were settled.” With the matter of Cecile decided, they released me to find her. When I saw Yaril walking alone on the sandy path between the meticulously tended herb knots, my heart went out to her. She looked so small and so young in her deep blue mourning dress. “Yaril?” I said softly, prepared to discover that she was still disgusted with me.

At my voice, she whirled about. There were dark circles under her eyes and she had lost flesh, but even so her face lit up and she ran toward me. I wanted to catch her up and whirl her about as I used to do when she was much younger. Instead she crashed into me and then clung to the front of my shirt with both hands, rather like a little squirrel trying to climb the trunk of a massive tree. I hugged her awkwardly, and for a moment we didn’t speak at all. I stroked her hair and patted her back, and after a moment, she lifted a tearstained face to me. “Elisi didn’t die, did she? That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, Yaril,” I said, and that was all I needed to say. She put her face against my chest again, her fists tightened on my shirt, and her shoulders heaved. After an endless time, she said, “We’re all alone now, Nevare. Just you and me.”

“We still have father,” I pointed out to her. “And Vanze.”

Her voice was full of bitterness. “Vanze belongs to the priests now. Our family gave him away. I never had Father. You did, for a time, while you were a good little soldier boy. But now you are worthless to him. You have even less value than I do. No, Nevare. We are alone. And I’m sorry for how I treated you. I’m sorry. It just seemed that Carsina and Remwar would not like me if I sided with you. And so I abandoned you, my own brother. And then, at home, if anyone said one good thing about you, Father became furious. He and Mother fought so much about that…she’s gone. They’ll never fight about anything again.”

I wanted to tell her that somehow we would find a way through the difficulties we now faced. I knew that someday we would again have a life that seemed normal and routine, even boring. Boredom sounded so attractive to me now. I tried to imagine a day when a dozen problems didn’t confront me and sorrow did not weight my every breath. I could not conceive of it.

“Come,” I finally said with a sigh. “Let’s go home.” I took her small hand in mine and led her to say our farewells to the Porontes.

Our lives did resume. Young as she was, Yaril still knew more about the internal workings of the household than I did, and proved to be effective at undertaking dire reforms when needed. She removed Nita as head of housekeeping by deftly putting her in sole charge of my father’s well-being, and replaced her with a woman who had been a maid with the family for years and knew what was required to run the household. I suspected that she also took the private opportunity to reward those servants who had befriended her over the years and rebuke those who had treated her as insignificant within the family. I let her do as she saw fit. I was only too happy to allow Yaril to assume responsibility for the household, for not only did she make things run more smoothly, but also it kept her from dwelling on all we had lost.