The Gift by Alison Croggon

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