And she gave it back to Emmon, as I knew by his saying, “No: it’s for you and Orrec. If you can read it, do. And if you can’t, maybe somebody will happen by someday who can, and they’ll think you great scholars, eh?” He laughed his merry laugh, and we thanked him, and he put the book back in my hands. I held it. It was indeed a precious thing.
In the earliest, greyest light of morning I saw it, the gold leaf, the red word
Coaly shifted position at my feet and looked up. I looked down at her. I saw a middle-sized dog with a close, curly, black coat that grew very short and fine on her ears and face, a long nose, a high forehead, clear, intent, dark-brown eyes looking straight up into mine.
In my excitement of anticipation, I had forgotten to put her out of the room before I took off the blindfold.
She stood up, without ceasing to look into my eyes. She was very much taken aback but far too dignified and responsible to show it in any way except by that intense, puzzled, honest stare.
“Coaly,” I said in a shaky voice, and put out my hand to her muzzle.
She sniffed it. It was me all right.
I knelt down and hugged the dog. We did not go in much for displays of affection, but she pressed her forehead against my chest and kept it there a while.
I said, “Coaly, I will never hurt you.”
She knew that. She looked at the door, however, as if to tell me that though this was much pleasanter, she was willing to go and wait outside, since that was the custom.
I said, “Stay,” and she lay down beside the chair, and I went back to my book.
¦ 16 ¦
Emmon left soon after that. Though Canoc’s hospitality would not permit any lapse in courtesy, it was clear that his welcome was wearing thin. And in fact life in the Stone House in late winter and early spring was thin, with the hens not laying, and the sausages and hams long since eaten, and no beef cattle to slaughter. We lived mostly on oat porridge and dried apples; our one meat and luxury was smoked or fresh trout or salmon-trout caught in the Spate or the Ashbrook. Having heard our talk of the great, wealthy domains of the Carrantages, Emmon maybe thought he’d eat better there. I hope he got there. I hope they did not use their gifts on him.
Before he left he talked seriously with Gry and me, as seriously as such a light-souled, light-fingered man could talk. He told us we should leave the Uplands. “What is there here for you?” he said. “Gry, you won’t do as your mother wishes and bring the beasts to the hunters, so you’re considered useless. Orrec, you keep that damned bandage on, so you
And so he went off northward on a bright April day, waving a jaunty farewell no doubt, wearing a good warm coat Canoc had given him, and carrying his old pack, in which were a couple of silver spoons from our cabinet, a brooch of jasper and river-gold which had been Rab’s great treasure, and the one silver-mounted bridle from our stable gear.
“He never did clean it,” Canoc said, but without much rancor. If you take in a thief, you expect to lose something. You don’t know what you may gain.
While he was with us all those months, Gry and I had not talked as we used to, in complete frankness. There were matters we hadn’t spoken of at all. It had been winter, a time of waiting, a suspension. Now all we had kept back burst out.
I said, “Gry, I’ve seen Coaly.”
Coaly’s tail thumped once at her name.
“I forgot to put her out. I looked down and she was there, and she saw me see her. So…since then…I haven’t put her out.”
Gry thought this over for a long time before she spoke. “So you think… it’s safe… ?”
“I don’t know what I think.”
She was silent, pondering.
“I think that when I—when my gift went wrong, when it was out of my control—I’d been trying to use it, my power—trying and trying, and not able to. And it made me angry, and ashamed, and my father kept pushing me and pushing me, so I kept trying, and getting angrier and more ashamed, till it broke out and went wild. So, if I never try to use it, maybe… It might be all right.”
Gry pondered this too. “But when you killed the adder— You hadn’t been trying to use your gift then, had you?”
“Yes, I had. I worried all the time about it, about not having it. Anyhow, did I kill the adder? Listen, Gry, I’ve thought about that a thousand times. I struck at it and Alloc did and my father did, all almost at once. And Alloc thought it was me, because I did see it first. And my father—” I paused.
“He wanted it to be you?”
“Maybe.”
After a while I said, “Maybe he wanted me to think it was me. To give me confidence. I don’t know. But I told him, I said I did what I was supposed to do, but it didn’t feel as if I did anything. And I tried to make him tell me what it was like when he used his power, but he couldn’t. But listen, you must know it when the power goes through you! You must! I know it when the power comes into me when I’m making a poem. I know what it’s like! But if I do as Father taught me, if I try to use that power, use eye and hand and word and will, nothing happens, nothing! I’ve never felt it then!”
“Even… Even there, by the Ashbrook?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was so angry, with myself, with my father. It was strange. It was like being caught in a storm, in a gust of wind. I tried to strike and nothing happened, but then the wind struck, and I opened my eyes, and my hand was still pointing, and the hillside was all writhing and melting and turning black— and I thought Father was standing there in front of me, where I was pointing, that he was shrinking and shrivelling—but it was the tree. Father was standing behind me.”
“The dog,” Gry said after a while, in a whisper. “Hamneda.”
“I was on Branty, and he spooked when Hamneda came running at him. All I know I did was try to keep on Branty and keep him from rearing. If I looked at the dog, I didn’t know it. But Father was on Greylag. Behind me.”
I suddenly fell silent.
I put my hands up to my eyes as if to cover them, though they were covered with the blindfold.
Gry said, “It could…” and stopped.
“It could have been Father. Every time.”
“But…”
“I knew that. I knew it all along. But I didn’t dare think it. I had to—I had to believe it was me. That I had the gift. That I did those things. That I killed the adder, that I killed the dog, that I can make Chaos. I had to believe it. I have to believe it so other people will believe it, so they’ll be afraid of me and keep away from the borders of