The Gift by Alison Croggon Page A

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