Ogge had gone there with his demands. The Brantor of Rimm had met him at the door, defiant, ready to use his power of fire throwing, and told him to begone. But Ogge crept round their house at night and made his spells, so they said—for his power was not a matter of a glance and a word, but of whispering and naming and passes of the hands, that took some time to weave. And from that time, every soul of the family of Rimm had sickened, and in four years all were dead.
Canoc doubted this story as it was commonly told. “Drum couldn’t do that, in darkness, he outdoors and they in,” he said with certainty. “His power is like ours, it works through the seeing eye. Maybe he left some poison there. Maybe they died of illness that was nothing to do with him.” But however it happened, Ogge was seen as the cause of it, and certainly got the profit of it, adding Rimmant to his properties.
All this did not concern us directly for a long time. Then the two Corde brothers fell to feuding over who was heir and true brantor of their domain, and Ogge moved some of his people into the southern half of Cordemant, claiming that he was protecting it. The brothers went on quarreling and making claims, fools that they were, while Ogge took over the best part of their land. And that brought Drummant right up against Caspromant, along our southwest border. Now Ogge was our neighbor.
From that time on my father’s temper took a turn towards darkness. He felt that we, all the people of his domain, were at risk, and that we had only him to defend us. His sense of responsibility was strong, perhaps exaggerated. To him, privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom. If he had been a young man without wife or child, I think he might have mounted a foray against Drummant, running all the risks at once, staking himself on one free act; but he was a householder, a burdened man, full of the cares of managing a poor estate and looking after its people, with a defenseless wife and no kinsman of his gift to stand with him, except, perhaps, his son.
There was the screw that tightened his anxiety. His son was thirteen years old now and still had shown no sign of his gift.
I had been trained perfectly in the use of it, but I had nothing to use. It was as if I had been taught to ride without ever getting up on a horse’s back.
That this worried Canoc sharply and increasingly I knew, for he could not hide it. In this matter, Melle could not be the help and solace to him that she was in everything else, nor could she mediate between the two of us or lessen the load we laid on each other. For what did she know of the gift and the ways it took? It was entirely foreign to her. She was not of Upland blood. She had never seen Canoc use his power but that once, in the marketplace of Dunet, when he killed one attacker and maimed another. He had no wish to show her his power to destroy, and no call to. It frightened her; she did not understand it, perhaps only half believed it.
After he left the line of dead trees in the ash wood to warn Erroy, he had used his power only in small ways to show me how it was done and the cost of doing it. He never used it to hunt game, for the disruption and collapse of the animal’s flesh and bones and organs left a horror no one would think of eating. In any event, to his mind, the gift was not for commonplace usage but for real need only. So Melle could more or less forget he had it, and saw no great reason to worry if I didn’t have it.
Indeed, it was only when—at last—she heard that I had shown my power that she was alarmed.
And so was I.
I WAS OUT RIDING with my father, he on the old grey stallion and I on Roanie. With us came Alloc, a young farmer. Alloc was of Caspro lineage through his father, and had “a touch of the eye”—he could unknot knots and a few such tricks. Maybe he could kill a rat if he stared long enough, he said, but he’d never found a rat willing to stay around long enough for him to make sure. He was a good-natured man with a love of horses and a hand with them, the trainer my father had long hoped for. He was on Roanie’s last colt. We were training that two-year-old carefully, for my father saw reborn in him the tall red horse he rode to Dunet.
We were out on the southwestern sheep grazings of our domain, keeping an eye out, though Canoc didn’t say so, for any sign of men from Drummant straying on our land, or their sheep mixed in among our flocks so that Drum’s shepherds could “reclaim” some of ours when they rounded up theirs—a trick we had been warned of by the Cordes, who had long had Drum for a neighbor. We did indeed spot some strangers in among our wiry, rough- wooled Upland ewes. Our shepherds put a spot of yellow-onion stain on the woolly ear so we could tell our sheep from Erroy’s, who used to let Gere sheep stray onto our grazing and then claim we had stolen them—though he had not done so since my father marked the ash grove.
We turned south to find our shepherd and his dogs and tell him to cut the Drum sheep out and send them back where they belonged. Then we rode west again to find the break in the fence and get it mended. A black frown was on Canoc’s face. Alloc and I came along meek and silent behind him. We were going a pretty good gait along the hillside when Greylag put a forefoot onto slick slate rock hidden by grass and slipped, making a great lurch. The horse recovered, and Canoc kept his seat. He was swinging off to see if Greylag had strained his leg, when I saw on the slanting stone where his foot would touch down an adder poised to strike. I shouted and pointed, Canoc paused half off the horse, looked at me, at the snake, swung his left hand free and towards it, and recovered his seat on the horse, all in a moment. Greylag made a big, four-footed hop away from the adder.
It lay on the stone like a cast-off sock, limp and misshapen.
Alloc and I both sat on our horses staring, frozen, our left hands out stiffly pointing at the snake.
Canoc quieted Greylag and dismounted carefully. He looked at the ruined thing on the rock. He looked up at me. His face was strange: rigid, fierce.
“Well done, my son,” he said.
I sat in my saddle, stupid, staring.
“Well done indeed!” said Alloc, with a big grin. “By the Stone, but that’s a wicked great poisonous pissant of a snake and it might have bit the Brantor to the bone!”
I stared at my father’s muscular, brown, bare legs.
Alloc dismounted to look at the remains of the adder, for the red colt wouldn’t go near it. “Now that’s destroyed,” he said. “A strong eye did that! Look there, that’s its poison fangs. Foul beast,” and he spat. “A strong eye,” he said again.
I said, “I didn’t—”
I looked at my father, bewildered.
“The snake was unmade when I saw it,” Canoc said.
“But you—”
He frowned, though not in anger. “It was you that struck it,” he said.
“It was,” Alloc put in. “I saw you do it, Young Orrec. Quick as lightning.”
“But I—”
Canoc watched me, stern and intent.
I tried to explain. “But it was like all the other times, when I tried—when nothing happened.” I stopped. I wanted to cry, with the suddenness of the event, and my confusion, for it seemed I had done something I did not know I had done. “It didn’t feel any different,” I said in a choked voice.
My father continued to gaze at me for a moment; then he said, “It was, though.” And he swung up onto Greylag again. Alloc had to catch the red colt, which didn’t want to be remounted. The strange moment passed. I did not want to look at what had been the snake.
We rode on to the line fence and found where the Drum sheep had crossed; it looked as if stones had been pulled out of the wall recently. We spent the morning rebuilding the wall there and in nearby places where it could use a bit of mending.
I was still so incredulous of what I had done that I could not think about it, and was taken by surprise when, that evening, my father spoke of it to my mother. He was brief and dry, as was his way, and it took her a little while to understand that he was telling her that I had shown my gift and maybe saved his life by doing so. Then she, like me, was too bewildered to respond with pleasure or praise, or anything but anxiety.
“Are they so dangerous then, these adders?” she said more than once. “I didn’t know they were so venomous. They might be anywhere on the hills where the children run about!”
“They are,” Canoc said. “They always have been. Not many of them, fortunately.”
That our life was imminently and continually in danger was something Canoc knew as a fact, and something Melle had to struggle reluctantly, against her heart, to believe. She was no fool of hope, but she had always been sheltered from physical harm. And Canoc sheltered her, though he never lied to her.
