Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series soon.

The present chapter also depicts abusive relationships. It additionally details deaths and the physical results thereof.

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The ninth chapter of Forest Mage, “Plague,” starts with Nevare waking with the dawn, rising and waiting to be put to work. He watches a messenger arrive from Burvelle’s Landing, and he sees his father and brother follow the messenger away. The scenes distract him from his attempts at study, and he resolves to bide his time, aligning with the alternative self that yet dwells within him, and sleeps again, settling into a tree-like quiescence.

Nevare is woken in the dark by the delivery of his dinner, and he presses the servant making the delivery for details of the day, learning that a physician has called on the house. The servant seeks to disregard Nevare, but Nevare disabuses him of the idea, and after the servant leaves, Nevare sets to his meal: a small loaf of bread. Nevare delights in it, savoring the loaf slowly. After, he attempts his studies again, finding little success, and he retires, worried about events.

The next morning, Nevare finds a day much like the last. In the evening, he learns that sickness has beset Burvelle’s Landing. The following day sees no delivery of food, only the sounds of another servant uncertain of how to proceed. Two more days pass in which Nevare has neither food nor drink, and he calls out in vain. The next day, Nevare attempts to escape confinement, without success. More days pass, and Nevare finds himself sinking toward somthing like hibernation. At length, Duril rescues him.

As Nevare makes for the kitchen to eat and drink after his privations, he and Duril confer, the old sergeant reporting events. He had, himself, taken the Speck plague, which had ravaged the Burvelle home, taking Rosse, Selethe, and Elisi. Nevare moves to check on his father and is excoriated by the mourning Keft, who laments the deaths and having sent Yaril and Cecile to the Poronte estate. Nevare then begins to tend to the dead, finding the bodies of his kin and considering them, and searching out the other dead. He begins the work of gravedigging, laboring against the stony soil. And after, he eats.

Duril and another servant, Nita, come upon Nevare as he eats, and after some conference, Nevare goes off to wash. The next morning finds him at work as an undertaker again, burying his mother and brother and sister as best he can, acknowledging the ending that has come upon him.

To address the chapter-length issue: the present chapter, in the edition of the novel I’m rereading, runs 20 pages in length, approximately 2.74% of the novel. In that, it duplicates the previous chapter, and if it is the case that that chapter ends a narrative arc, then beginning a new one in much the same mode seems to work well, as repetition suggests patterns. Or perhaps it is the case that the repetition, coupled with the final line of the chapter–“And that was how my old life ended forever” (202)–indicates the close of a narrative arc, something like playing a single strain again before the stinger in a march. I do still need to do more with matters of chapter-length to see if there’s some there there, admittedly.

Also, for indexing purposes, the following: Bellock, Bread, Burvelle’s Landing, Cecile Burvelle, Croaker bird, Dewara, Dr. Reynolds, Elisi Burvelle, Franner’s Bend, Graves, Keft Burvelle, Nevare Burvelle, Nita, Orandula, Plague, Pomegranate, Poronte, Rosse Burvelle, Selethe Burvelle, Sergeant Erib Duril, Speck, Spond tree, Tulip, Varnian, Warfare, Widevale, Yaril Burvelle. It is a remarkably short list, but that seems fitting to the intensely personal-to-Nevare focus of the chapter and its events.

Once again, Hobb repeats chapters, this time from Shaman’s Crossing‘s 23rd chapter. As ever, one thing that suggests itself to a critical reading (and I do harbor some pretense that my rereadings are in at least some ways critical) is reading the chapters against one another. The present case offers a pronounced contrast to the previous; while Nevare is again surrounded by the plague and its effects, and several characters for whom he cares again die from it, and he suffers, he does not suffer the plague, itself. At one level, this mimics Nevare’s increasingly outsider status; he is separated out from his family by his family, and that separation works at least partly to his benefit, suggesting (if backhandedly) that he very much should leave his background behind.

Again,* however, rereading the chapter and its depictions of pandemic illness in the wake of COVID-19 lends…things to the rereading. Given the work I was doing at the time,** I was not subjected to the prolonged isolation that typified the experience of the pandemic for many, but I was in contact with many who were thus subjected and whose situations were not improved by such confinement. And I can easily, if again affectively, imagine that there were some who, requiring care and losing access to their caretakers, or otherwise dependent upon others no longer able to attend to them, suffered such privations as Nevare experiences in the chapter–and without the benefit of magic that allows subsistence if at the cost of sloth. I do not have to imagine the rapid onset of symptoms, however, or the suddenness of deaths, remembering reports and testimonies of the same, nor yet do I have to imagine the panic caused by them, having felt it, myself.

As a side-note, I know I have not been finding as much to say about recent chapters as about earlier ones in the series. The fault lies with me and not with the text. There is more to be unpacked than I seem at the moment to be able to do…but that is why I have so many scholarly somedays to address already; I can hope there will be time to come back around, and I have to leave something for future projects to do…

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* See my remarks on Shaman’s Crossing‘s “Sword and Pen.”

** It’s on my biography page, but I was administering a substance use treatment center, so I counted as an essential worker.

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