The Gift (7 page)

He sighed. “It’s not a spell, not as such. At least, I would do nothing
to
you, apart from look.”

Maerad still said nothing.

“I don’t like to ask,” Cadvan said. “I brought you out of that place in good faith, and I would not ask if all that were at risk were myself.”

“What if I don’t agree?” she asked.

“Then I won’t do it,” said Cadvan. “And we shall continue with our journey.” His face was suddenly inscrutable, and he bent to pick up his pack.

“What do you have to do?”

Cadvan paused.

“I look into your eyes. I see into your mind. That’s all.”

“That’s
all
?” Maerad considered for a short time. It seemed important to Cadvan. And she didn’t believe he would hurt her; he had had plenty of opportunity already, if that was what he wished to do. “All right, then,” she said, shrugging. “If it makes you feel better. What do you have to do?”

“Are you sure?”

“Do you want to do it, or not?” she said.

Cadvan dropped his pack again. “Then stand square in front of me, like you did in the byre. And place your hands on my shoulders.”

She did so, and he put his hands on her shoulders. They stood face-to-face, and Cadvan looked into her eyes. Maerad had a sudden desire to giggle.

“Don’t laugh, Maerad,” said Cadvan softly. “Empty your mind.”

He spoke words in the Speech, very rapidly so Maerad couldn’t catch them. It seemed to Maerad that the light around them darkened, and that all she could see were Cadvan’s eyes. They were a very dark blue and burned with an inner fire that seemed at first cold, but then, she realized, was hot at the center, hot enough to burn. And what was that sadness in them? A deep sadness, a wound . . . a face much loved, she could almost see it . . . and something else, a darkness, like a scar. . . . But then suddenly she was overwhelmed with memories of her own life: memories she had forgotten, or pressed into the back of her mind. They came in a flood, in no particular order, almost as if her whole life were occurring in a single second; but some stood out.

Memory after memory of Gilman’s Cot, numbing exhaustion and boredom and pain, the humiliations of the riots and beatings, playing with Mirlad when she was a child, and listening to his dour teaching . . . Her mother, and an old woman, blue-eyed, holding her, and a garden full of sweet-scented flowers . . . Singing and music and laughter in a great hall filled with men and women and children in fine clothes and lit with great branches of candles . . . Her mother clutching her in terror and sickness and grief, lurching in a wagon . . . A small table, piled high with fruit . . . Her mother holding a small baby, her brother Cai, who was chortling and reaching for a red flower . . . Her mother’s despair and her mother dying. Her mother yellowed and wasted on a pallet, her lips cracked and ulcerated, her voice a whisper, brushing back her hair and saying, “Maerad, be strong. Be strong. . . .” And the death rattle . . . Crows wheeling in a dark sky, and men shouting, and terrible screams, a man she knew was her father felled with a blow from a mace, falling among many bodies, and a high tower burning in the night and a shout as the roof caved in, sending forth a leap of flame . . .

An intolerable anguish possessed Maerad, beyond even the grief she had felt at her mother’s death; it was as if all the pain she had ever experienced gathered into a white-hot node in the center of her mind. It grew and grew, a distressing coruscation of her whole being, until she could no longer bear it. Beyond her conscious will, she screamed
No!
and burst into a storm of scalding tears.

She was aware of nothing else for some time. After a while, she realized she was on the ground, weeping on Cadvan’s shoulder, and he was stroking her hair. Her sobs subsided at last and she sat back, thrusting Cadvan away and rubbing the back of her hand over her eyes.

Cadvan looked pale and distressed. “Maerad, I am truly sorry,” he said. “I am very, very sorry.”

She wasn’t sure if he was sorry for the scrying, or for what the scrying had revealed. She felt limp, and the beginnings of a slight headache pulsed behind her brow. She hid her face in her hands.

“It
did
hurt,” she said in a muffled voice.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” Cadvan said, after a silence. “For all your power, you are not much more than a child, and even the great find scrying a hard thing. I was in such doubt, whether you were a spirit of the Dark, sent to trick me.”

“
Me
trick
you
?” Maerad looked up in surprise. Cadvan grinned at her crookedly.

“You have the consolation that I have paid for my doubt. The cry you sent out threw me over to those trees. I was lucky my neck wasn’t broken!”

“I did that?” She stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment.

“Indeed you did. But it wasn’t your fault.” He grimaced, rubbing his head, and Maerad saw there was a mark on his forehead. “You need to learn how to control your power.”

“You’ll have a bump there,” she said.

“Yes, I will.”

“Is it all right, then?”

“What?”

“I mean, it’s all right?”

“Oh, yes.” Cadvan answered her almost distractedly. “There is no Darkness in you, if that’s what you mean; I know that, even though I couldn’t finish the scrying. If there were, I would have found different walls and different kinds of refusals.” He looked at her oddly — almost, she thought, shyly. “It’s a strange business, scrying. I haven’t done it very often. But I can tell you, Maerad, that I have not scried one with so much anguish as you. I shan’t do it again in a hurry, and you almost scried me instead!” He shook his head, and they both sat unspeaking for some time. Maerad’s headache ebbed away. She felt dazed and emptied; but there was also a strange sense of relief, as if she had been lanced of a large abscess.

Abruptly Cadvan stood up and brushed himself off. He seemed possessed by a new decisiveness, as if the doubts that had troubled him earlier had now been resolved. “We must leave here,” he said. “The sun is already high, and we have a long way to go.”

Maerad squinted up at him. “Where are we going?”

“I think I must take you to Norloch. But that is a long way from here. First we must find food, and maybe some horses.”

He stood in the middle of the dingle and bowed to the trees, signaling to Maerad to do the same. She scrambled to her feet. “We must thank the trees for their hospitality,” he said. “They have been good to us.” Then he picked up his pack and walked out of the dingle.

Maerad lingered briefly before they left the shelter of the birches, for a last glimpse of the early sunlight shafting through the spring leaves. She thought the grove was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. The light scattered itself in silver and gold glints over the ground, and the intricate shadows of the branches danced with the gleams over the soft grasses, which rippled gently in the spring breeze.
Thank you,
she said silently, and bowed, feeling the ceremony strangely appropriate: the birches seemed more alive than most trees. For a moment she almost felt they were about to speak back to her, and they seemed to rustle a little sadly, as if they were friends waving farewell.

“WHY is it so quiet?” Maerad asked. “Is it always like this around here?”

  “No, it’s not. I don’t like it,” Cadvan said. “There are birds, very high up. I can’t see what they are. Perhaps they watch us. It’s like the quiet before a storm, but there will be no storm tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps. No, it’s something else.”

“Can you guess what it might be?”

“Yes. But I might be wrong. What I guess is that the Landrost has sent his messengers out, and that the hunt is on. I have only seen crows today; all other birds are in hiding.”

“The hunt?” said Maerad, faltering. She realized Cadvan was correct about the crows; she had seen no other birds all day.

They were steering southeast, with the mountains on their right and the forest on their left. The sky was clear and cold, a high pale blue, and all through the morning the sun scarcely warmed them. All around them the earth was alive with the pale green of early spring; snowdrops and jonquils pushed through the tangled herbs and grasses, and marjoram and wild mint released sharp fragrances as they bruised beneath their feet. Low thorny trees and scruffy clumps of pines grew in the lees of the hills, bent by the winds, surrounded by tangles of gorse and bramble. Everywhere crept a pale blue flower shaped like a star, which Cadvan said was called
aëlorgalen.
“Dawnflower, in the Speech,” Cadvan explained. “It only grows this far north.” Maerad tried repeating the name, but found that her tongue stumbled over it, and afterward she couldn’t remember it at all.

It was a beautiful countryside, but Maerad thought it curiously lonely. Their footsteps sounded loudly in the emptiness; they seemed to be the only things moving as far as the eye could see. There was no sign of habitation anywhere, although strange grass-covered ridges and mounds, which seemed too regular to be natural, constantly threatened to trip them up; perhaps they were remains of buildings long vanished. And she saw few animals — only some rabbits running in the distance, but that was all.

“I thought the Landrost was just a mountain,” she said, looking back at its high, snow-tipped peak. “You talk as if it were a man. . . . And what’s the hunt?”

“The Landrost is a power, yes, a person. . . . The mountain is merely his dwelling. But he is not a man, and never was.”

“Like the Nameless One?” said Maerad.

“Not so powerful as him, although the Nameless was once a man. The Landrost is but one of his slaves. I will not speak his name here, although I know it.” Cadvan paused, and Maerad noticed again the exhaustion on his face: it was, she saw, a deep exhaustion born of long struggle and pain. “He captured me, and held me in his fastness, deep in the mountain. I saw things there that he would rather I did not know, because in his pride he thought to make me tremble before I died. But I escaped, and his vengefulness is deadly, and we are not beyond his reach, not yet. I only just held him back in the valley, with your help; he would have brought the mountain down on us, else. His power wanes the farther we go, but here we are still too close.

“He does not easily countenance escape from his claws. I think he sends out the wers, and that is why it is quiet. Their shadows track us, although they can do nothing while the sun still shines. Only in the dark can they take their forms. It will be a bad night.”

He was silent for some time. His words seemed to magnify the stillness around them, and Maerad again looked around her uneasily. The landscape seemed peaceful and unthreatening, but some more subtle sense told her otherwise. Her skin began to creep with an indefinable dread.

“Maerad,” said Cadvan at last. “I think I should have left you, rather than draw you into my own danger. I didn’t think enough, when I stumbled across you in that cot. I was too astonished, and too weary. And now it is too late to turn back.”

“No,” said Maerad warmly. She thought of the suffocating despair of Gilman’s Cot. At least here, now, she could breathe freely. “No, you were right to ask me to leave. I would rather die than stay there.”

“Well, you might die,” said Cadvan.

“At least I won’t die a slave,” Maerad answered.
Proud words,
she thought, but she meant them.

Cadvan pushed the pace and they walked in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts.

Maerad still couldn’t quite believe she had escaped the cot. Every now and then she caught herself thinking idly that she should be performing some task — weeding the fields or churning butter or spinning the rough wool that made all their clothes — and then she would catch herself, with a tiny shock: perhaps she would never have to do any of those things again. Even with the increasing sense of watchfulness, a feeling that the very stones were spying on them, the present moment overwhelmed her. She couldn’t imagine anything more amazing than the mere fact of her freedom. Where she was going, or why, were questions she couldn’t even contemplate. And this Cadvan — who was he? Why did she have this strange feeling she could trust him? She knew nothing about him. She had never trusted a man before, save Mirlad, and even that trust had taken years to establish. Why start now?

They stopped for the midday meal beside one of the many streamlets that ran down from the mountains. Maerad’s ankle was beginning to swell, and she eased it out from the boot and held it in her hands, massaging the muscles.

“It hurts?” asked Cadvan. “Let me see.” He took her foot in his hands and gently turned it. “It’s a little swollen. Nothing very bad. Now, breathe in.” He pressed his hand hard over her ankle and Maerad gasped with pain; then she gasped again, because the swelling and pain had vanished.

“It’s gone!” she said. “Are you a healer as well?”

“All Bards are healers,” said Cadvan softly, still holding her foot. “You should have shown me before.” He smiled at her, and Maerad felt suddenly uneasy and withdrew her foot abruptly, wriggling her toes in relief.

“What’s happening?” she asked. “I mean, there’s so much I don’t understand. Maybe I could help?” She looked up at him from under her tangled hair. “You said you were wounded, but I can’t see any wounds on you. Did you heal yourself too?”