Read Online To Kill a Sorcerer by Greg Mongrain - Free Book Online Page B

was six years old, I worked the fields with my father. By the time I was seven, I noticed one difference between the rest of my family and me: I did not need to eat.
    Meals were rituals in which I participated out of habit. I had never felt hunger. Good food smelled and tasted delicious, so eating was a pleasure, but it did not occur to me until much later that everyone else felt a physical compulsion to consume food, a pang born of survival—an instinctive impulse I did not share.
    I understood what starvation was. We had seen the funeral procession for a young boy from our village who had died from lack of food. During the service, I noted his parents were also skeletally thin. Most of the congregation was the same, as was my family. Leanness was normal.
    Lying on the straw rushes the night of the funeral, I thought about it. If I did not need to eat, then I could not starve, could I? What did that mean? Did it mean I could not die? How was that possible? I thought about Marguerite and James, sleeping next to me. They needed food. They could die of starvation and so could my parents.
    The realization that I was different from them in such a fundamental way frightened me so badly, I refused to acknowledge it. It was too big for my child’s mind to cope with.
    My parents knew there was something different about me. They hadn’t questioned me about it directly. I believed that was because they didn’t know what it meant, so weren’t sure what to ask.
    I definitely never brought it up.
    But my dearest Marguerite. Some nights, when our parents let us keep the rushlights lit, she would watch me before we went to sleep, and her drowsy gaze told me she knew the truth.
    My younger brother and sister had always viewed me with skeptical awe. It didn’t help that we all slept together. Our house had two rooms: one for the five of us and one for our oxen and chickens. We kids slept on the ground, matted straw beneath us. Mother and Father slept in a raised bed on the other side of the room.
    One October night when I was eleven, with a fierce storm shaking our house, James and Marguerite pestered me with questions late into the night. James was the youngest at six, and Margie a wise old nine. Marguerite and I were dark-haired and green-eyed like Father. James was fair like Mother.
    Wind gusted outside, and the rain was an intermittent patter on the thatched roof. The room was cold, but Father had decided it was not chilly enough to burn our precious firewood.
    “Father said you fell right out of that tree picking apples and that you broke your leg,” James said. He was on his back on the hard-packed earth floor, in between Marguerite and me, the rushes underneath his shoulders crackling. He pulled his cloak tightly around his thin body as a draft ran along the floor.
    “It didn’t break. It just looked that way to him. I was fine when we got back, wasn’t I?” I was on my left side, my head supported by my hand, looking over James at Marguerite. Though I was always aware of the temperature and humidity of my surroundings, they never affected me. As soon as my body found any condition uncomfortable, it compensated. However, I had learned it was wise to complain about the weather.
    “He told us he heard it break,” Marguerite said, shivering. “You always tell us stories.”
    “That’s right,” James said.
    “There’s something unusual about you.”
    “Don’t say that, Margie. I told you, I don’t like it.” I reached over James and twisted her hair. She squealed and slapped my hand.
    “Stop it!”
    “You kids keep it quiet!” My father boomed at us, and thunder rumbled after, as if he were Zeus shouting down from Olympus. The timber crucks holding up our roof creaked in the new wind.
    “She’s right,” James said. His voice throbbed with excitement. He loved being between Marguerite and me when we argued. “You always tell us stories. I saw that time you cut your thumb when you were fixing Father’s boots.