“Yes. But your gift. Or Father’s. To destroy. To kill.”
“There has to be somebody who can do it.”
“I know. But did you know… Father can take a splinter out of your finger, or a thorn out of your foot, with the knife gift. So neat and quick, it only bleeds one drop. He just looks, and it’s out… And Nanno Corde. She can make people deaf and blind, but did you know she unsealed a deaf boy’s ears? He was deaf and dumb, he could only make signs with his mother, but now he can hear enough to learn to talk. She says she did it the same way she’d deafen somebody, only one way goes forward and the other backward.”
That was intriguing, and we discussed it a little, but it didn’t mean much to me. It did to Gry. She said, “I wonder if all the gifts are backward.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not the calling. You can use it forward or backward.
But the knife, or the Cordes’ sealing—maybe they’re backward. Maybe they were useful for curing people, to begin with. For healing. And then people found out they could be weapons and began to use them that way, and forgot the other way…Even the rein, that the Tibros have, maybe at first it was just a gift of working with people, and then they made it go backward, to make people work for them.”
“What about the Morgas?” I asked. “Their gift isn’t a weapon.”
“No— It’s only good for finding out what people are sick with, so you know how to heal them. It doesn’t work for making them sick. It only goes forward. That’s why the Morgas have to hide out back there where nobody else comes.”
“All right. But some of the gifts never went forward. What about the Helvars’ cleaning? What about my gift?”
“They could have been healing, to begin with. If there was something wrong inside a person, or an animal, something out of order, like a hard knot—maybe it was a gift of untying it—setting it right, putting it in order.”
That had an unexpected ring of probability to me. I knew exactly what she meant. It was like the poetry I made in my head, the tangled confusion of words that fell suddenly into a pattern, a clarity, and you recognised it: that’s it, that’s right.
“But then why did we stop doing that and only use it to make people’s insides into an awful mess?”
“Because there are so many enemies. But maybe also because you can’t use the gift both ways. You can’t go backward and forward at the same time.”
I knew from her voice that she was saying something important to her. It had to do with her use of her own gift, but I wasn’t certain what it was.
“Well, if anybody could teach me how to use my gift to do instead of undo, I’d try to learn,” I said, not too seriously.
“Would you?” She was serious.
“No,” I said. “Not till I’d destroyed Ogge Drum.”
She gave a great sigh.
I brought my fist down on the stone of the hearth seat and said, “I will. I will destroy that fat adder, when I can! Why doesn’t Canoc? What’s he waiting for? For me? He knows I can’t—I can’t control the gift—
I had never said this before to Gry scarcely to myself. I was hot with sudden anger as I spoke. Her reply was cold.
“Do you want your father dead?”
“I want Drum dead!”
“You know Ogge Drum goes about day and night with bodyguards, men with swords and knives, cross- bowmen. And his son Sebb has his gift, and Ren Corde serves him, and all his people are on the watch for anyone from Caspromant. Do you want Canoc to go striding in there and be killed?”
“No—”
“You don’t think he’d kill from behind—the way
“No,” I said, and put my head in my hands.
“My father says he’s been afraid for two years now that Canoc’s going to get on his horse and ride to Drummant to kill Ogge Drum. The way he rode to Dunet. Only alone.”
I had nothing to say. I knew why Canoc had not done so. For the sake of his people who needed his protection. For my sake.
After a long time, Gry said, “Maybe you can’t use your gift forward, only backward, but I can use mine forward.”
“You’re lucky.”
“I am,” she said. “Though my mother doesn’t think so.” She got up abruptly and said, “Coaly! Come for a walk.”
“What do you mean about your mother?”
“I mean she wants me to go back to Borremant with her for the winter hunts. And if I won’t go with her and learn to call to the hunt, she says then I’d better find myself a husband, and soon, because I can’t expect the people of Roddmant to support me if I won’t use my gift.”
“But—what does Ternoc say?”
“Father is troubled and worried and doesn’t want me to upset Mother and doesn’t understand why I don’t want to be a brantor.”
I could tell that Coaly was standing, patient, but ready for the promised walk. I got up too, and we went out into the drizzling, windless air.
“Why don’t you?” I asked.
“It’s all in the story about the ants. —Come on!” She set off into the rain. Coaly tugged me after her.
It was a disturbing conversation, which I only half understood. Gry was troubled, but I had no help for her, and her reference to finding a husband had brought me up short. Since my eyes had been sealed, we had said nothing of our pledge made on the rock above the waterfall. I could not hold her to it. But what need to? I could dismiss all that. We were fifteen, yes. But there was no need to rush into anything, no need even to talk about it. Our understanding was enough. In the Uplands, strategic betrothals may be made early, but people seldom marry till they are in their twenties. I told myself that Parn had been merely threatening Gry. Yet I felt the threat hung over me as well.
What Gry had said about the gifts made some sense to me, but seemed mostly mere theory: except for her own gift, the calling. It went both forward and backward, she said. If by backward she meant calling wild beasts to be killed, forward meant working with domestic animals—horsebreaking, cattle calling, training dogs, curing and healing. Honoring trust, not betraying it. That was how she saw it. If she saw it so, Parn could not move her. Nothing could move her.
But it was true that training and horsebreaking were thought of as trades that anyone might learn. The gift of the lineage was calling to the hunt. Indeed she could not be a brantor at Roddmant or anywhere else, if she did not use that gift. If—as Parn saw it—she did not honor her gift, but betrayed it.
And I? By not using my gift, by refusing it, not trusting it—was I betraying it?
SO THE YEAR went on, a dark year, though now each day had that one bright hour at its dawn. It was early winter when the runaway man came to Caspromant.
He had a narrow escape, though he didn’t know it, for he came onto our land from the west, down in the sheep pastures where we had met the adder, and Canoc was riding the fence there, as he rode our borders with Drummant and Cordemant whenever he could. He saw the fellow hop over the stone wall and come, as he said, sneaking up the hill. Canoc turned Branty and charged down on him like a falcon on a mouse. “I had my left hand out,” he said. “I thought sure he was a sheep thief, or come after the Silver Cow. I don’t know what stayed my hand.”
Whatever it was, he didn’t destroy Emmon then and there, but reined up and demanded who he was and what he was doing. Maybe he’d seen even in that flick of an eye that the man was not one of us, not a cattle thief from Drummant or a sheep thief from the Glens, but a foreigner.
And maybe when he heard how Emmon spoke, that soft Lowland accent, it softened his heart. In any case,
