back was bent over and hunched, the way it is now. If he tries to stand up, his wife said, he screams with the pain.”
“And how did the brantor do this to him?”
Emmon had learned the word from us; he said he’d never heard it in the Lowlands. A brantor is the master or mistress of a domain, which is to say the chief and most gifted of a lineage. My father was Brantor of Caspromant. Gry’s mother was Brantor of the Barres of Roddmant and her father Brantor of the Rodds of that domain. We two were their heirs, their nestling eaglets.
I hesitated to answer Emmons question. His tone had not been mocking, but I didn’t know if I should say anything at all about the powers of the gift.
Gry answered him. “He’d have looked at the man,” she said in her quiet voice. In my blindness her voice always brought to me a sense of light air moving in the leaves of a tree. “And pointed his left hand or finger at him, and maybe said his name. And then he’d have said a word, or two, or more. And it was done.”
“What kind of words?”
Gry was silent; maybe she shrugged. “The Gere gift’s not mine,” she said at last. “We don’t know its ways.”
“Ways?”
“The way a gift acts.”
“Well, how does your gift act, what does it do, then?” Emmon asked her, not teasing, alive with curiosity. “It’s something to do with hunting?”
“The Barre gift is calling” Gry said.
“Calling? What do you call?”
“Animals.”
“Deer?” After each question came a little silence, long enough for a nod. I imagined Gry’s face, intent yet closed, as she nodded. “Hares?—Wild swine?— Bear?— Well, if you called a bear and it came to you, what would you do then?”
“The huntsmen would kill it.” She paused, and said, “I don’t call to the hunt.”
Her voice was not wind in leaves as she said it, but wind on stone.
Our friend certainly didn’t understand what she meant, but her tone may have chilled him a little. He didn’t go on with her, but turned to me. “And you, Orrec, your gift is—?”
“The same as my father’s,” I said. “The Caspro gift is called the undoing. And I will not tell you anything about it, Emmon. Forgive me.”
“It’s you must forgive my clumsiness, Orrec,” Emmon said after a little silence of surprise, and his voice was so warm, with the courtesy and softness of the Lowlands in it, like my mother’s voice, that my eyes prickled with tears under the seal that shut them.
He or Gry built up our end of the fire. The warmth of it came round my legs again, very welcome. We were sitting in the big hearth of the Stone House of Caspromant, in the south corner, where seats are built deep into the stones of the chimneyside. It was a cold evening of late January. The wind up in the chimney hooted like great owls. The spinning women were gathered over at the other side of the hearth where the light was better. They talked a little or droned their long, soft, dull spinning songs, and we three in our corner went on talking.
“Well, what about the others, then?” Emmon asked, irrepressible. “You can tell about them, maybe? The other brantors, all over these mountains here, in their stone towers, eh, like this one? on their domains— What powers do they have? What are their gifts? What are they feared for?”
There was always that little challenge of half-disbelief, which I could not resist meeting. “The women of the lineage of Cordemant have the power of blinding,” I said, “or making deaf, or taking speech away.”
“Well, that’s ugly,” he said, sounding impressed, for the moment.
“Some of the Cordemant men have the same gift,” Gry said.
“Your father, Gry, the Brantor of Roddmant—has he a gift, or is it all your mother’s?”
“The Rodds have the gift of the knife,” she said.
“And that would be…”
“To send a spellknife into a man’s heart or cut his throat with it or kill him or maim him with it how they please, if he’s within sight.”
“By all the names of all the sons of Chorm, that’s a nice trick! A pretty gift! I’m glad you take after your mother.”
“So am I,” Gry said.
He kept coaxing and I couldn’t resist the sense of power it gave me to tell him of the powers of my people. So I told him of the Olm lineage, who can set a fire burning at any place they can see and point to; and the Callems, who can move heavy things by word and gesture, even buildings, even hills; and the Morga lineage, who have the innersight, so that they see what you’re thinking—though Gry said what they saw was any illness or weakness that might be in you. We agreed that in either case the Morgas could be uncomfortable neighbors, though not dangerous ones, which is why they keep out of the way, on poor domains far over in the northern glens, and no one knows much about them except that they breed good horses.
Then I told him what I had heard all my life about the lineages of the great domains, Helvarmant, Tibromant, Borremant, the warlords of the Carrantages, up on the mountain to the northeast. The gift of the Helvars was called cleansing, and it was akin to the gift of my lineage, so I said no more about it. The gifts of the Tibros and the Borres were called the rein and the broom. A man of Tibromant could take your will from you and make you do his will; that was the rein. Or a woman of Borremant could take your mind from you and leave you a blank idiot, brainless and speechless; that was the broom. And it was done, as with all such powers, with a glance, a gesture, a word.
But those powers were hearsay to us as much as to Emmon. There were none of those great lineages here in the Uplands, and brantors of the Carrantages did not mix with us people of the low domains, though they raided down the mountain now and then for serfs.
“And you fight back, with your knives and fires and all,” Emmon said. “I can see why you live so scattered out!… And the folk on west of here that you’ve spoken of, the big domain, Drummant, is it? What’s their brantor’s way of making you unhappy? I like to know these things before I meet a fellow.”
I did not speak, “The gift of Brantor Ogge is the slow wasting,” Gry said.
Emmon laughed. He could not know not to laugh at that.
“Worst yet!” he said. “Well, I take it back about those people with the innersight, is it, who can tell you what ails you. After all, that could be a useful gift.”
“Not against a raid,” I said.
“Are you always fighting each other, then, your domains?”
“Of course.”
“What for?”
“If you don’t fight, you’re taken over, your lineage is broken.” I treated his ignorance rather loftily “That’s what the gifts are for, the powers—so you can protect your domain and keep your lineage pure. If we couldn’t protect ourselves we’d lose the gift. We’d be overrun by other lineages, and by common people, or even by
My mother had been a calluc. They had called her that at Drummant.
I could hear Emmon poking with a stick in the ashes, and after a while he said, “So these powers, these gifts, run in the family line, from father to son, like a snub nose might do?”
“And from mother to daughter,” said Gry, as I said nothing.
“So you’ve all got to marry in the family to keep the gift in the family. I can see that. Do the gifts die out if you can’t find a cousin to marry?”
“It’s not a problem in the Carrantages,” I said. “The land’s richer up there, the domains are bigger, with more people on them. A brantor there may have a dozen families of his lineage on his domain. Down here, the lineages are small. Gifts get weakened if there are too many marriages out of the lineage. But the strong gift runs true. Mother to daughter, father to son.”
“And so your trick with the animals came from your mother, the lady-brantor”—he gave the word a feminine form, which sounded ridiculous—“And Orrec’s gift is from Brantor Canoc, and I’ll ask no more about that. But you
