Darice

Darice, the mother of Mabel Peloponnese, is a cautious presence in a household shaped by her daughter’s refusal to fit the life expected of village girls. She wants Mabel safe and accepted, but their bond is affectionate rather than controlling: when they are briefly together again, Darice asks for time alone with her, and Mabel promises to return. Darice’s death turns that intimate promise into one of the losses that propels Mabel toward a life beyond the domestic future her mother imagined.

Identity and Household

Darice is presented through a contrast between the social expectations surrounding her daughter and the life Mabel actually leads. Girls of Mabel’s age might be at village fairs, buying provisions from traders, choosing fabric for gala dresses, or learning sewing and cooking at home as preparation for marriage. Mabel instead spends her days in the fields with her father, Amyntas. Darice knows where to find her: in the same place, doing the same work, a routine that reaches back to Mabel’s earliest years. When Mabel returns from the field, she is dirty and disheveled, unlike the composed girl who left that morning.

Darice is the member of the family most troubled by Mabel’s conspicuous difference. Mabel has golden skin and wild, burnt hair, and neither she nor Amyntas minds that she stands out in Navon. Darice, by contrast, believes that a good life may be easier if a person blends in and avoids notice. Her concern registers as protective caution in a community with strong expectations for women, not as a lack of affection. The narrative leaves the tension unresolved: Darice hopes her daughter can be safer by fitting in, while Mabel’s attachment to the fields and to her father keeps drawing her outside the conventional role.

The Royal Summons

When the king’s servants arrive looking for Mabel, Darice meets them at the door and asks what her daughter has done wrong. The question makes the encounter sound less like an honor than an impending reprimand. The servant Amir explains that the king has ordered the reason for the summons to be kept secret, assures Darice that there is nothing serious to fear, and says that good news will follow. Darice does not take comfort from that reassurance. The scene describes her as skeptical and introspective, inclined to doubt that good news arrives unexpectedly at this point in life.

Her answer is practical and immediate: Mabel is with her father, as usual. It reveals how well Darice knows her daughter’s habits, even as royal business intrudes on their ordinary household. The withheld reason for the summons also exposes the limits of Darice’s position. She is the person who knows where Mabel is and must receive the king’s representative, but she is not given the information that would allow her to understand what is happening to her family. Her suspicion is therefore not mere pessimism; the secrecy surrounding the visit gives her little ground for trust.

Affection and Separation

When Mabel returns home, she greets Amyntas first, then turns to Darice and assures her that she has missed her too. Darice’s response is a gently teasing complaint: the first opportunity Mabel had, she came to see her father. Beneath the humor is a clear request for closeness. Later, she asks to have a moment with her daughter, preferably without Amyntas present. Mabel agrees, kisses her mother again, and says she will be back soon.

These exchanges give Darice a distinct place in Mabel’s family life. Amyntas and Mabel share the field and a powerful bond around military experience; Darice’s claim is more domestic and private, expressed through the wish to have her daughter to herself. Yet Mabel does not treat that wish as a demand to choose between her parents. She reassures Darice, kisses her, and promises to return. The ordinary warmth of the exchange makes the later loss more severe: the promise is made within a family life that the coming violence will abruptly destroy.

Death and Its Consequences

After Navon is attacked, Mabel finds Darice beside an unfinished dress. Its simple red fabric is marked by a darker, cruelly permanent red. The dress, a domestic task left incomplete, becomes the scene’s stark image of a future cut short. The account does not specify the precise circumstances of Darice’s death, but it places her loss amid the attack and the destruction of Mabel’s home.

Mabel has little strength as she drags herself through the house. She holds her mother by the arms, embraces her, and cries out in a child’s grief, calling her “mammy” for the first time since childhood. At first she can only ask why events had to happen this way. Only later, alone in the small house that now seems too large, does she fully understand that she is an orphan and has lost the only people who cared for her. Darice’s death is thus both an immediate bereavement and a delayed recognition: Mabel experiences the loss physically before she can comprehend its lasting meaning.

The loss also changes what home and obligation mean for Mabel. The king leaves her three days to grieve, after which she is expected to return to the palace, but with both parents dead she sees no reason to go back. She goes instead to the military base, where young people from across Navon have been summoned into an army, and decides that she wants to belong to something that matters. Her wish to make up for those killed in the attack begins with her parents. Darice’s hopes for a life in which Mabel could avoid notice cannot survive the violence around them; her absence becomes part of the force driving Mabel into public danger.