My father’s voice had hardened, and I well knew what lecture would follow. He believed that a man determined his own fate, regardless of the class or circumstances he was born into. He himself was an example of this. He had been born the second son of a noble family, and thus society expected only that he become an officer in the military and serve his king and his country. And so he had, but with service so exemplary that he had been one of those the king had chosen to elevate to the status of lord. He was not asking any man any more than what he had demanded of himself.
I waited for him to explain this, yet again, to my brother, but instead it was my mother’s raised voice that reached my ears. She was calling to my sisters in their garden retreat. “Elisi! Yaril! Come in, my dears! The mosquitoes will make you all over with blotches if you stay out much later tonight!”
“Coming, Mother!” my sisters called, their obedience and reluctance both plain in their responses. I did not blame them. Father had had an ornamental pond dug for them that summer, and it had become their favorite evening retreat. Strings of paper lanterns provided a pleasant glow without drowning out the stars above them. It had a small gazebo, the latticed walls laced with vines. The walks around it had been landscaped with all sorts of fragrant night-blooming bushes. It had been quite an engineering project to find a way to keep the pond filled, and one of the gardener’s boys had to guard it nightly to keep the little wild cats of the region from devouring the expensive ornamental fish that now inhabited it. My sisters took great pleasure in sitting by the pond, weaving dreams of the homes and families they would someday possess. Often I shared those evening conversations with them.
I knew that Mother calling them meant she would next be wondering what had become of me, and so I slipped from my hiding place and followed the gravel path around to the main door of our manor house and slipped inside and up to my schoolroom. I gave no more thought to the Speck plague at that time, but the next day I had many questions for Sergeant Duril about whether he thought the quality of foot soldiers had declined since the days when he and my father had served together along the borders. As I might have expected, he told me that the quality of the soldier directly reflected the quality of the officer who commanded him, and that the best way for me to ensure that those who followed me were upright was to be an upright man myself. Even though I had heard such advice before, I took it to heart.