the gift if I didn’t use it. I said I’d rather train horses. She said anybody can train horses, but they need us to call the elk. She said, ‘You can’t withhold the gift from need.’ So I went with the hunt. And I called the elk.” She seemed to be watching the elk come pacing to her through the air, on our high perch. She gave a deep sigh. “They came… The bowmen shot five of them. Three young bulls and an old bull and a cow. Before we left they gave us a lot of meat, and presents—a cask of mead, and yarn, and woven goods. They gave me a beautiful shawl. I’ll show it to you. Mother was really happy about the hunt. They gave us a knife, too. It’s a beauty. It has an elkhorn handle mounted in silver. Father says it’s an old war dagger. They sent it for him, as a kind of joke. Hanno Corde said, ‘You give to our need, we give to your not-need!’ But Father likes it,” Hugging her knees, she sighed again, not unhappily, yet as if something oppressed her.
I didn’t know why she had told me the story. Not that she needed a particular reason; we told each other everything that happened to us, everything we thought. She was not boasting; she never boasted. I did not know what the elk hunt had meant to her, if she was happy about it or proud of it or not. Maybe she didn’t know herself, and told the story to find out. Maybe by telling it she was asking for my story, my triumph. But I could not tell it.
“When you call,” I said, and stopped.
She waited.
“What does it feel like?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t understand my question; I hardly did myself.
“The first time your gift worked,” I said, trying another tack, “did you know it was working? Was it sort of different from, from the times it didn’t work?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes.” But nothing more.
I waited.
“It just works,” she said. She frowned, and wriggled her toes, and thought, and finally said, “It’s different from your gift, Orrec. You have to use the eye, and…”
She hesitated and I filled in, “Eye, hand, word, will.”
“Yes. But with calling, you just have to find where the creature is, and think about it, and of course it’s different with each one, but it’s just sort of like reaching out, or like calling aloud, only you don’t use your hand, or your voice, mostly.”
“But you know when it’s working.”
“Yes. Because they’re there. You know where they are. You feel it. And they answer. Or they come… It’s like a line between you and them. A cord, a string, from here,” and she touched her breastbone, “between you and them. Stretched. Like a string on a fiddle—you know? If you just touch it, it calls out?” I must have looked blank. She shook her head. “It’s hard to talk about!”
“But you know you’re doing it, when you do it.”
“Oh yes. Even before I could call, sometimes I could feel the string.
Only it wasn’t stretched enough. It wasn’t tuned.”
I sat hunched up, despairing. I tried to say something about the adder. No words would come.
Gry said, “What was it like when you killed the adder?”
So simply, she gave me my release from silence.
I could not accept it. I started to speak, and broke into tears. Only for a moment. The tears made me angry, shamed me. “It wasn’t like anything,” I said. “It was just—just nothing. Easy. Everybody makes this fuss about it. It’s stupid!”
I stood up and walked right to the end of the ledge of rock, put my hands on my knees and stooped far over to look down to the pool below the falls. I wanted to do something daring, courageous, foolhardy. “Come on!” I said, turning. “Race you to the pool!” Gry was up and off the rock quick as a squirrel. I won the race, but skinned both knees doing it.
I RODE BRANTY HOME over the sunlit hills, and walked him to cool him down, toweled him and brushed him, watered him and fed him, left him whuffling at Roanie in his stall, and came in conscious of having fulfilled my responsibilities, as a man should do.
My father said nothing, and that too was as it should be: he took it for granted that I had done what should be done. After supper Mother told us a story from the
“Come out with me, Orrec,” my father said late in the morning, and I thought he meant we would ride together, but he only walked with me some way towards the ash grove, till we were out of sight of the house, in the lonely, grassy swale of the Ashbrook. He said nothing as we walked. He stopped on the hillside above the brook. “Show me your gift, Orrec,” he said.
I’ve said that obedience to my father had always been a pleasure to me, though often not an easy pleasure. And it was a very deep habit, a lifelong, unbroken custom. I had simply never thought of disobeying him, never wanted to. What he asked of me, even if difficult, was always possible, and even if incomprehensible, always turned out to be reasonable, to be right. I understood what he was asking of me now, and why he asked it. But I would not do it.
A flint stone and a steel blade may lie side by side for years, quiet as can be, but strike them together and the spark leaps. Rebellion is an instant thing, immediate, a spark, a fire.
I stood facing him, the way I always stood when he spoke my name that way, and said nothing.
He gestured to a ragged clump of grasses and bindweed near us. “Unmake that,” he said, his tone not commanding but encouraging.
I stood still. After one glance at the clump of weeds, I did not look back at it.
He waited some while. He drew breath, and there was some slight change in his stance, an increase of tension, though he still said nothing.
“Will you do it?” he said at last, very softly.
“No,” I said.
Silence between us again. I heard the faint music of the brook and a bird singing away over in the ash grove and a cow lowing down in the home pasture.
“Can you do it?”
“I won’t.”
Silence again, and then he said, “There’s nothing to fear, Orrec.” His voice was gentle. I bit my lip and clenched my hands.
“I’m not afraid,” I said.
“To control your gift you must use it,” Canoc said, still with that gentleness that weakened my resolve.
“I won’t use it.”
“Then it may use you.”
That was unexpected. What had Gry told me about using her gift and being used by it? I could not remember now. I was confused, but I would not admit it.
I shook my head.
Then at last he frowned. His head went back as if he faced an opponent. When he spoke, the tenderness had gone out of his voice.
“You must show your gift, Orrec,” he said. “If not to me, to others. It’s not your choice to make. To have the power is to serve the power. You’ll be Brantor of Caspromant. The people here will depend on you as they do on me now. You must show them they can rely on you. And learn how to use your gift by using it.”
I shook my head.
After another unbearable silence, he said, almost in a whisper, “Is it the killing?”
I didn’t know whether it was that, the idea that my gift was to kill, to destroy, that I rebelled against. I had thought that, but not very clearly, though I had often thought with sick horror of the rat, the adder…. All I knew by now was that I refused to be tested, refused to try out this terrible power, refused to let it be what I was. But Canoc had given me an out, and I took it. I nodded.
