“But it made me think of Melle…Coaly, you have ashy paws. Give me your paw. Yes.” Some cleaning operation ensued, and Coaly stood up and shook herself with great vigor. “Let’s go out,” said Gry, and she too stood up, but I sat still.
“Come see what Star can do,” she coaxed.
She said “see,” and so did I usually, for it’s laborious to find some other, more exact, exclusive word every time; but this time, because something had changed in me, because I had turned around and did not know it, I broke out—“I can’t see what Star does. I can’t see anything. There’s no use in it, Gry. Go on home. It’s stupid, you coming here. It’s no use.”
There was a little pause. Gry said, “I can decide that for myself, Orrec.”
“Then do it. Use your head!”
“Use your own. There’s nothing wrong with it except that you don’t use it any more. Exactly like your eyes!”
At that the rage broke out in me, the old, stifling, smothering rage of frustration I had felt when I tried to use my gift. I reached out for my staff, Blind Caddard’s staff, and stood up. “Get out, Gry,” I said. “Get out before I hurt you.”
“Lift your blindfold, then!”
Goaded to fury, I struck out at her with the staff-blindly The blow fell on air and darkness.
Coaly gave a sharp, warning bark, and I felt her come up hard against my knees, blocking me from going forward.
I reached down and stroked her head. “It’s all right, Coaly,” I muttered. I was shaking with stress and shame.
Gry spoke presently from a little distance away. “I’ll be in the stable. Roanie hasn’t been out for days. I want to look at her legs. We can ride if you want to.” And she left.
I rubbed my hands over my face. Both hands and face felt gritty I was probably smearing ash on my face and hair. I went to the scullery and stuck my head in the water and washed my hands, and then told Coaly to take me to the stable. My legs were still shaky. I felt as I thought a very old man must feel; and Coaly knew it, going slower than usual, taking care of me.
My father and Alloc were out on the stallions. Roanie had the stable to herself and was in the big stall, where the horse could lie down. Coaly led me to her. Gry said, “Feel here. That’s the rheumatism.” She took my hand and guided it to the horse’s foreleg, the hock and powerful, delicate cannon bone up to the knee. I could feel the burning heat in the joints.
“Oh, Roanie,” Gry said, softly whacking the old mare, who groaned and leaned up against her as she always did when she was petted or curried.
“I don’t know if I should be riding her,” I said.
“I don’t know. She should have some exercise, though.”
“I can walk her out.”
“Maybe you should. You’ve got so much heavier.”
It was true. Inactive as I had been for so long, and though food had little taste or savor to it ever since I had put on the blindfold, I was always hungry, and Rab and Sosso and the kitchen girls could feed me if they could do nothing else for me. I had put on weight, and grown taller so fast that my bones ached at night. I was always knocking my head on lintels that hadn’t been anywhere near it last year.
I put the lead on Roanie’s bridle—I had considerable skill at doing such things by now—and led her out, while Gry took Star to the mounting block and got up on her bareback. So we went out of the courtyard and up the glen path, Coaly leading me and I leading Roanie. I could hear how uneven her steps were behind me. “It’s like she’s saying
“She is,” said Gry, riding ahead.
“Can you hear her?”
“If I make the link.”
“Can you hear me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t make the link.”
“Why not?”
“Words get in the way. Words and… everything. I can make a link with little tiny babies. That’s how we know when a woman’s pregnant. We can make a link. But as the baby gets human, it goes out of reach. You can’t call, you can’t hear.”
We went on in silence. The farther we went, the easier it seemed to be for Roanie, so we circled round to the Ashbrook path. I said, “Tell me what it looks like, when we come to that place.”
“It hasn’t changed much,” Gry said when we came past the ruined hillside. “A little more grass. But it’s still what’s-its-name.”
“Chaos. Is the tree still there?”
“Just a snag of it.”
We turned back there. I said, “You know, what’s strange is that I can’t even remember doing that. As if I opened my eyes and it was done.”
“But isn’t that how your gift works?”
“No. Not with your eyes closed! Why else am I wearing this damned bandage? So I can’t do it!”
“But being a wild gift— You didn’t mean to do it— And it happened so fast—”
“I suppose so.” But I had meant to do it, I thought.
Roanie and I plodded on while the others danced before us.
“Orrec, I’m sorry I said to lift your blindfold.”
“I’m sorry I missed you with that staff.”
She didn’t laugh, but I felt better.
IT WAS NOT THAT day, but not very long after, that Gry asked me about the books—meaning what Melle had written in the autumn and winter of her illness. She asked where the books were.
“In the chest in her room.” I still jealously thought of it as her room, though it was where Canoc had sat and slept for a year and a half now.
“I wonder if I could read them.”
“You’re the only person in the Uplands that could,” I said with the random bitterness that came into all my words now.
“I don’t know. It was always so hard. I can’t remember some of the letters now… But you could read them.”
“Oh yes. When I take the blindfold off. When pigs fly.”
“But listen, Orrec.”
“That’s the one thing I can do.”
“You could try reading. You could try just for a little while, just with one of the books. Not looking at anything else.” Gry’s voice had gone husky. “You aren’t going to destroy everything you look at! If all you look at is what your mother wrote! She wrote it all for you.”
Gry did not know that I had seen Melle’s face before she died. No one knew that but my father. No one knew what I knew, that I would never have hurt Melle. Would I destroy, now, the one thing she had left me?
I couldn’t answer Gry at all.
I had never promised my father not to lift the blindfold. There was no bond of words, but there was a bond, and it held me. Yet it had held me when there was no need for it—it had kept me from seeing my mother all the last year of her life, and made me useless to her, for no reason. Or rather, for the reason that my blindness was useful to my father, making me his weapon, his threat against enemies. But was my loyalty only to him?
I could not get any further than that for a long time. Gry said no more about it, and I thought I had put it out of my head.
But along in the autumn, as we were in the stable together, I rubbing liniment into Roanie’s knees and Canoc paring at a hoof that was giving Greylag trouble, I said abruptly, “Father, I want to see those books Mother
