Gifts (22 page)

“If the domains were joined, you could live here with us,” Gry said.

“I could.”

“Do you want to?”

“Do you want me to?”

She was silent.

“What would we do here?”

“What we do now,” she said, after a while.

“Would you be willing to go away?”

It was harder to say aloud than I had expected. It sounded stranger, spoken, than it did thought.

“Away?”

“Into the Lowlands.”

She said nothing. She looked out over the dappled, shining water of the pool, looking far past it.

“Emmon took the spoons, but maybe he spoke the truth. What we can do is useless here, but down there, maybe…”

“What we can do,” she repeated.

“We each have a gift, Gry.”

She glanced at me. She nodded, a deep, slow nod. “It may be that I also have a grandfather or grandmother in the city of Derris Water.”

She stared at me with wide eyes then. That had never entered her head. She laughed with surprise. “Why, you do! And you’d walk in, out of the blue, and say, ‘Here I am, your grandson the witch!’ Oh, Orrec. How strange that is!”

“They might find it so.” I took out the little opal that I wore on its chain round my neck and showed it to her. “I have this, though. And all she told me…I’d like to go there.”

“Would you?” Her eyes had begun to shine. She thought for a while and said, “You think we could make a living? The way Emmon said? We’d have to.”

“Well, we could try.”

“If we couldn’t, we’d be among strangers, strange people.”

That is a great fear among Uplanders: to be among strangers. But where is it not?

“You’ll train their colts, I’ll tell them poetry. If we don’t like them, we can move on. If we don’t like them at all, we can come back home.”

“We might go as far as the ocean shore,” Gry said, looking now very far away through the sunlight and the nodding willows. Then she whistled three notes; and the bird answered.

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that we left, and I will leave our story there, on the south road down through the hills, a young man on a tall red horse, and a young woman on a bright bay mare, and a black dog running before them, and following peacefully along behind them the most beautiful cow in the world. For that was the wedding gift of my domain to me, the Silver Cow. Not a very practical one, it seemed, until Parn reminded us that we would need money and could sell her for a good price in Dunet, where they might still remember the white cattle of Caspromant. “Maybe they’ll remember what they gave Canoc, too,” I said, and Gry said, “Then they’ll know you’re the gift’s gift.”