Gry said I was a disgusting sight with gravy all over my face, and I said let her try eating what she couldn’t see, and she said she had tried it—she had blindfolded herself for a full day, to find what it was like for me. When we had eaten we went back outdoors, and Coaly took me for a walk in the dark. There was a half moon that gave Gry some light to see her way by, but she said Coaly and I were getting on better than she was, and fell over a root to prove it.
When we were children together at Roddmant, Gry and I used to sleep wherever we fell asleep, like any young animals; but since then there had been talk of betrothals and such matters. We said goodnight like adults. Ternoc took me to my parents’ room. Roddmant had no such array of bedrooms and beds as Drummant. Ternoc whispered to me that my mother was asleep in the bed, my father in the chair; he gave me a blanket, and I rolled myself up on the floor and slept there.
In the morning my mother insisted she was quite well. She had taken a little chill, nothing more. She was ready to go home. “Not on horseback,” Canoc said, and Parn seconded him. Ternoc offered us a hay cart and the daughter of the droop-lipped mare that had borne him into battle at Dunet. So Mother and Coaly and I traveled to Caspromant in luxury, on rugs spread on straw in the cart, while Canoc rode Branty, and Greylag and Roanie followed willingly behind, all of us glad to be going home.
Coaly seemed to accept her change of house and owner with a tranquil heart, though she had to do an immense amount of sniffing around the house, and pissed her mark on various bushes and stones outside it. She politely greeted the few old hounds we had, but kept aloof from them. Her sheep-herding breed wasn’t sociable and democratic as they were, but reserved and intent. She was like my father: she took her responsibilities seriously. I was her chief responsibility.
Gry soon rode over to continue our training, and came every few days. She rode a colt called Blaze, who belonged to the Barres of Cordemant. They had asked Parn to break him, and Parn was training both the colt and her daughter in horsebreaking. Callers use that word, though it has little to do with how they train a young horse. Nothing is broken in that education; rather something is made one, made whole. It’s a long process. Gry explained it to me thus: we ask a horse to do things which the horse would by nature rather not do; and a horse doesn’t submit its will to ours the way a dog does, being a herd animal not a pack animal, and preferring consensus to hierarchy. The dog accepts; the horse agrees. All this Gry and I discussed at length, while Coaly and I went about learning our duties to each other. And we talked about it when we went riding, Gry and Blaze learning and teaching their duties to each other, and I on Roanie, who had long since learned all she needed to know. Coaly came along with us, off her leash, on holiday, free to trot, stop, sniff, take side trails, and start rabbits without worrying about me. But if I said her name, she was there.
Coaly and Gry made such a difference to my life that I remember that summer, the first I spent in darkness, as a bright one. There had been so much trouble and stress before it, I had been in such perplexity and terror concerning my gift. Now, with my eyes sealed, I had no possibility of using it or misusing it, and need not torment myself or be tormented. Once the nightmare of Drummant was past, I was among my own people. And the awe I inspired in some of the simpler ones was a compensation, though I didn’t admit it, for my helplessness. While you’re groping and blundering your way across a room, it can hearten you to hear somebody whispering, “What if he lifted his blindfold! I’d die of fear!”
My mother was unwell for a while after we got home and kept to her bed. Then she got up and began to go about the house as before; but one night at supper I heard her rise and say something in a frightened voice, and there was a commotion, and she and my father both left the room. I sat at table bereft, confused. I had to ask the women of the house what had happened. At first no one would tell me, but then one of the girls said, “Oh, she’s bleeding, her skirts were all bloody.” I was terrified. I went to the hall and sat in the hearth seat alone in a kind of daze. My father found me there at last. All he could say was that it was a miscarriage, and she was doing well enough. He spoke calmly, and I was reassured.
I grasped at reassurance.
Gry came over on Blaze the next day. We went up to see my mother in her small tower room. There was a cot-bed there, and the room was warmer than the bedroom. A fire burned on the hearth, though it was full summer. Melle had her warmest shawl round her shoulders, as I knew from her embrace. Her voice was a little weak and hoarse but she sounded entirely herself. “Where’s Coaly?” she said. “I need a visit from Coaly.” Coaly was of course there in the room, for she and I were inseparable now; and she was invited up onto the bed, where she lay tensely alert, apparently believing my mother needed a guard dog. Mother asked about our lessons at guiding and being guided, and about Gry’s horsebreaking, and we chatted along just as usual. But Gry got up before I was ready to go. She said we must be going, and as she kissed my mother she whispered, “I’m sorry about the baby.”
Melle murmured to her, “I have you two.”
My father was gone from daybreak to evening every day at the work of the domain. I had begun to be of use to him, but was useless now. Alloc took my place at his side. Alloc was a clear-hearted man, without ambitions or pretensions; he thought of himself as stupid, and some people agreed with him, but though slow to think, he often grasped an idea without thinking about it, and his judgment was usually sound. He and Canoc worked together, and he was what I could not be. I was both jealous and envious of him. I had the self-respect not to show it; for it would have hurt Alloc, angered my father, and done me no good.
When my uselessness and helplessness carked me, when my own resolution weakened and I yearned to untie my blindfold and take back my whole lost inheritance of light, I came up against the immovable figure of my father. Seeing, I was a mortal danger to Canoc and to all his people. With my eyes sealed, I was his shield and support. My blindness was my use.
He had talked to me a little about the visit to Drummant, saying that he thought Ogge Drum had feared us both, but me most, and that his cruel teasing and scoffing had been a bluff, a show, to save face among his people. “What he most wanted was to drive us away. He was longing to test you, all right, but every time he was about to force you to act, he drew back. He didn’t dare. And he didn’t challenge me, for fear of you.”
“But that girl—he was using her to humiliate us!”
“He’d set that up before we knew of your wild gift. Caught himself in his own trap. He had to go through with it, to show he didn’t fear us. But he does, Orrec. He does.”
Our two white heifers were back at Caspromant, in with the herd in the high pastures, a long way from the borders of Drummant. Drum had said nothing about them and had made no retaliatory move on us or Roddmant. “I gave him his out, and he took it,” Canoc said with the vindictive glee that seemed to be his only cheer these days. He was always tense, always grim. With me and with my mother he was tender and cautious, but he never was with us for long, out at his work, or coming in silent with weariness, heavy with sleep.
Melle grew stronger slowly. There was a meek, patient note in her voice when she was unwell that I hated to hear. I wanted to hear her clear laugh, her quick step through the rooms. She went about the house now, but tired easily, and whenever there was a rainy day or the wind coming down from the Carrantages chilled the summer evening, she had a fire in the tower room and sat huddled by it in the heavy shawl of undyed brown wool that my father’s mother had woven for her. Once, sitting there with her, I said without thinking about it, “You’ve been cold ever since Drummant.”
“Yes,” she said. “I have. That last night. When I went to sit with the little girl. That was so strange. I don’t think I ever told you about it, did I? Denno had gone downstairs to try to stop her sons from quarreling. Poor Daredan was so worn out, I told her to go sleep a while, I’d stay with Vardan. The poor little thing was asleep, but she always seemed to be just about to wake up, with the twitches and spasms that ran through her. So I put out the light and was drowsing along beside her, and after a while I thought I heard somebody whispering or chanting. A kind of droning. I thought I was in our house in Derris and Father was leading a service downstairs. I must have been nearly asleep myself. And it went on and on and then it died away And I realised that I wasn’t back home but at Drummant, and the fire had burned nearly out, and I was so cold I could hardly move. Cold to the bone. And the little girl was lying still as death. That scared me, and I got up to look at her, but she was breathing. And then Denno came in, and gave me a candle to come back to our room with. And Canoc wanted to go find Parn, so he left, and the door closing blew out the candle. And the fire was out. You woke, so I sat there in the dark with you, and I couldn’t get warm. You remember that. And the whole ride home, my feet and hands were like lumps of ice. Ah! I wish we’d never gone there, Orrec!”
“I hate them.”
“The women were kind to me.”
“Father says Ogge was afraid of us.”
