Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

the Waylord’s right hand and Caspro at his left, Sosta next to Bomi down the table, Gudit next to me, and the place at the foot empty, because Ista would never sit with us till late in the meal. “A cook at the table, a burnt dinner,” she said, which may have been true when there were more people to be served and more dinner to burn. She stood while my lord gave the man’s blessing and I the woman’s, and then she vanished while we ate her excellent bread and fish stew. I was glad for the honor of our house that the food was so good.
    “You of Ansul do as we do in the Uplands,” Caspro said. His voice was the most beautiful thing about him; it was like a viol. “The household eats at one table. It makes me feel at home.”
    “Tell us something of the Uplands,” the Waylord said.
    Caspro looked about at us, smiling, not knowing where to begin. “Do you know anything of the place at all?”
    “It’s far to the north,” I said, as no one else spoke, “a hilly land, with a great mountain—” and the name came to me then as if I was seeing Eront’s map—“the Carrantages? And the people are said to practice wizardry. But that’s only what Eront says.”
    Bomi and Sosta stared, the way they always did when I knew anything they didn’t. I thought it very stupid—as if I should stare every time they talked about how to hem a gusset, or gusset a hem, whichever it is. I didn’t always understand them, but I didn’t stare at them as if they were crazy for knowing what they knew.
    Caspro said to me, “The Carrantages is our great mountain, as Sul is yours. The Uplands are all hill and stone, and the farmers poor. Some of them have powers, indeed; but wizardry is a dangerous word. We call them gifts.”
    “Among the Alds, we called them nothing at all,” said Gry in her dry, slightly teasing way. “Not wishing to be stoned to death for the sin of coming from a gifted people.”
    “What,” Bomi began, and then stuck. For once she was shy. Gry encouraged her, and Bomi asked, “Do you have a gift?”
    “I get along with animals, and they with me. The gift is called calling, but it’s more like hearing, actually.”
    “I have no gift,” Caspro said with a smile.
    “I cannot believe you so ungrateful,” the Waylord said, not joking.
    Caspro accepted the reproof. “You’re right, Waylord, I was indeed given a great gift. But it was…It was the wrong one.” He frowned and sought almost desperately for words, as if it were the most important thing in the world that he should answer honestly. “Not wrong for me. But for my people. So it took me from them, from the Uplands. I have great joy in my art. But there are times—times I’m sick at heart, missing the rocks and bogs and the silence of the hills.”
    The Waylord looked at him patiently, unjudging, approving. “One can be sick for home in one’s own city, in one’s own house, Orrec Caspro. You are an exile among exiles here.” He raised his glass. There was water in it; we had no wine. “To our homecoming!” he said, and we all drank with him.
    “If your gift is the wrong one, what would the right one have been?” asked Bomi, whose shyness once gone is gone forever.
    Caspro looked at her. His face changed again. He might have given a light answer to her light question and she’d have been satisfied, but that wasn’t in him to do.
    “My family’s gift is the unmaking,” he said, and involuntarily put both hands over his eyes for a moment—a strange moment. “But I was given the gift of making. By mistake.” He looked up as if bewildered. I saw Gry watching him across the table, intent, concerned.
    “No mistake about it,” said the Waylord with a calm, genial authority that lightened the uncanny mood. “And all you were given you give to us in your poetry. I wish I could come hear you.”
    “Don’t encourage him,” Gry said, “he’ll spout you poems till the cows come home.”
    Sosta giggled. I think it was the first thing