1 Vaqrin 941
9:16 a.m.
Pazel's breath came short. The animal in his mind was waking, stretching, flexing its claws. He did not know what it was, or why it lived in the cave between his ears, but he knew what it did to him. It gave him language. And took language away.
His mother Suthinia was to blame. It happened at home in Ormael, just months before the Arquali invasion. Winter was breaking up in storms, and in such weather Suthinia was at her strangest and most disagreeable. She quarreled with Chadfallow, who came to dine and found Pazel and Neda chewing last year's wrinkled potatoes: Suthinia had been too distracted to go to market. At times she seemed almost mad. In electrical storms she climbed the roof and stood with arms outstretched, although Chadfallow swore that to do so was to provoke the lightning. The night she fought with Chadfallow, Pazel had lain awake, listening, but even in their fury the adults kept their voices low, and all he heard was one exceptionally desperate cry from his mother:
"What if they were yours, Ignus? You'd do just the same! You couldn't send them away into the night as they are, friendless, lost-"
"Friendless?" came the wounded reply. "Friendless, you say?"
Moments later Pazel heard the doctor's footsteps in the garden, the sharp clang of the gate.
The next morning, Pazel's mother, surly as a bear and twice as dangerous, began cooking again. She made corn cakes with plum sauce, their father's recipe no doubt, and when they had finished she poured them each a generous mug of custard-apple pulp.
"Drink this," she told them. "For your health."
"It's sour," said Pazel, sniffing his mug.
"From special fruits, very expensive. Drink, drink!"
They choked the bad pulp down. After lunch she filled the mugs again, and the taste was even worse. Neda, who was seventeen and very wise, told him their mother was suffering "a lady's discomforts" in a tone of such gravity that Pazel felt ashamed for not liking anything she served. But as evening came they saw her in the garden, furiously squeezing custard-apple pulp through her fingers into a big stone bowl, and she had to resort to threats to bring her children to table. When they were finally seated she placed a tall pitcher of the translucent gruel before them.
"Can't we at least start with the meal?" Neda sniffed.
Suthinia filled their mugs. "This is your meal. Drink."
"Mother," said Pazel gently, "I don't care for custard apple."