While he was with us all those months, Gry and I had not talked as we used to, in complete frankness. There were matters we hadn’t spoken of at all. It had been winter, a time of waiting, a suspension. Now all we had kept back burst out.
I said, “Gry, I’ve seen Coaly.”
Coaly’s tail thumped once at her name.
“I forgot to put her out. I looked down and she was there, and she saw me see her. So…since then…I haven’t put her out.”
Gry thought this over for a long time before she spoke. “So you think… it’s safe… ?”
“I don’t know what I think.”
She was silent, pondering.
“I think that when I—when my gift went wrong, when it was out of my control—I’d been trying to use it, my power—trying and trying, and not able to. And it made me angry, and ashamed, and my father kept pushing me and pushing me, so I kept trying, and getting angrier and more ashamed, till it broke out and went wild. So, if I never try to use it, maybe… It might be all right.”
Gry pondered this too. “But when you killed the adder— You hadn’t been trying to use your gift then, had you?”
“Yes, I had. I worried all the time about it, about not having it. Anyhow, did I kill the adder? Listen, Gry, I’ve thought about that a thousand times. I struck at it and Alloc did and my father did, all almost at once. And Alloc thought it was me, because I did see it first. And my father—” I paused.
“He wanted it to be you?”
“Maybe.”
After a while I said, “Maybe he wanted me to think it was me. To give me confidence. I don’t know. But I told him, I said I did what I was supposed to do, but it didn’t feel as if I did anything. And I tried to make him tell me what it was like when he used his power, but he couldn’t. But listen, you must know it when the power goes through you! You must! I know it when the power comes into me when I’m making a poem. I know what it’s like! But if I do as Father taught me, if I try to use that power, use eye and hand and word and will, nothing happens, nothing! I’ve never felt it then!”
“Even… Even there, by the Ashbrook?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was so angry, with myself, with my father. It was strange. It was like being caught in a storm, in a gust of wind. I tried to strike and nothing happened, but then the wind struck, and I opened my eyes, and my hand was still pointing, and the hillside was all writhing and melting and turning black—and I thought Father was standing there in front of me, where I was pointing, that he was shrinking and shrivelling—but it was the tree. Father was standing behind me.”
“The dog,” Gry said after a while, in a whisper. “Hamneda.”
“I was on Branty, and he spooked when Hamneda came running at him. All I know I did was try to keep on Branty and keep him from rearing. If I looked at the dog, I didn’t know it. But Father was on Greylag. Behind me.”
I suddenly fell silent.
I put my hands up to my eyes as if to cover them, though they were covered with the blindfold.
Gry said, “It could…” and stopped.
“It could have been Father. Every time.”
“But…”
“I knew that. I knew it all along. But I didn’t dare think it. I had to—I had to believe it was me. That I had the gift. That I did those things. That I killed the adder, that I killed the dog, that I can make Chaos. I had to believe it. I have to believe it so other people will believe it, so they’ll be afraid of me and keep away from the borders of Caspromant! Isn’t that the good of the gift? Isn’t that what it’s for? Isn’t that what it does? Isn’t that what a brantor does for his people?”
“Orrec,” Gry said, and I stopped.
She asked, low-voiced, “What does Canoc believe?”
“I don’t know.”
“He believes you have the gift. The wild gift. Even if—”
But I broke in. “Does he? Or did he know it was himself, his gift, his power, and he was just using me, because I didn’t have it, didn’t have the gift? I couldn’t destroy anything, anybody. All I’m good for is being a bogey. A scarecrow. Better keep away from Caspromant! Keep away from Blind Orrec, he’ll destroy everything he sees if he doesn’t wear a blindfold! But I wouldn’t. I don’t, Gry. I don’t destroy everything I see. I can’t! I saw Mother. I saw her when she was dying. I saw her. I didn’t hurt her. And the—books— And Coaly—” But I could not go on. The tears I had not cried all through the dark years caught up with me, and I put my head in my arms and wept.
With Coaly on one side of me, pressed against my leg, and Gry on the other, her arm round my shoulders, I cried it out.
WE DID NOT TALK more that day. I was exhausted by my weeping fit. Gry bade me goodbye with a little soft kiss on my hair, and I told Coaly to take me to my room. When I was there, I felt the blindfold, hot and soaking wet, pressing on my eyes. I pulled it off, and the wet pads with it. It was an April afternoon, a golden light I had not seen for three years. I stared dumbly at the light. I lay down on my bed, and closed my eyes, and slipped back into the dark.
Gry came back the next day, about midday. I was standing blindfolded in the doorway letting Coaly have a run, when I heard Star’s light hoofs on the stones.
We went back to the kitchen gardens and into the orchard, a good way from the house. We sat on the log of an old tree there that was waiting for the woodsman to saw it up.
“Orrec, do you think that… that you don’t have the gift?”
“I know it.”
“Then I want to ask you to look at me,” Gry said.
It took me a long time to do it, but I lifted my hands at last and untied the blindfold. I looked down at my hands. The light dazzled me for a while. The ground was full of lights and shadows. Everything was bright, moving, shining. I looked up at Gry.
She was tall, with a thin, long, brown face, a wide, thin mouth, and dark eyes under arched eyebrows. The whites of her eyes were very clear. Her hair was shining black, falling loose and heavy. I put out my hands to her, and she took them. I put my face down into her hands.
“You are beautiful,” I whispered into her hands.
She leaned forward to kiss my hair, and sat up straight again, serious, stern, and tender.
“Orrec,” she said, “what are we going to do?”
I said, “I’m going to look at you for a year. Then I’m going to marry you.”
She was startled; her head went back and she laughed. “All right!” she said. “All right! But now?”
“What about now?”
“What do we do? If I won’t use my gift, and you…”
“Have none to use.”
“Then who are we now?”
That I could not answer so easily.
“I have to talk to Father,” I said at last.
“Wait a little. My father rode over with me today to see him. Mother came home yesterday from the Glens. She says that Ogge Drum and his older son have made peace with each other, and the younger son’s the one he’s quarreling with now. And the rumor is that Ogge’s planning a foray, maybe to Roddmant or maybe to Caspromant—to get back the white cows that he says Canoc stole from him three years ago. That means, to raid our herd, or yours. Father and I met Alloc, coming.
They’re all in your north fields now, planning what to do.”
“And how do I come into their plans?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the good of a scarecrow that doesn’t scare the crows?”
But her news, bad as it was, could not darken my heart, not while I could see her, and see the sunlight on the sparse flowers of the old, split-trunked apple trees, and the far brown slopes of the mountain.
“I have to talk to him,” I repeated. “Until then, can we go walking?”