The Gift Read Online Free PDF Page B

down on the ground, just where he was, and gratefully Maerad sat down next to him. Her legs were shaking. Cadvan opened his pack and drew out a bottle. “This helps weariness,” he said. He drank some, then offered it to Maerad. It tasted like water, but with a faint hint of herbs. A fiery tingling rushed through her body, and some of her exhaustion immediately lifted. In the sudden quiet, the valley felt oppressively silent, and when Cadvan began to speak again, Maerad almost jumped.
    “Afinil, as I said, fell in part because of its generosity. In the south there arose a king who feared to die like ordinary men and sought instead endless life, freed from the doom of the world’s circle. He envied the powers of the Light and desired them for his own. Masking his intent, he approached the gentle Bards of Afinil and asked for tutelage, and harboring no suspicion in their hearts, gladly they gave it to him. He was an apt pupil and in time became more powerful in the ways of Speech, more subtle in the Lore, more skilled in the arts of Making and Unmaking, than any before him. When he was satisfied he had learned enough, he returned to his own land in the south, the kingdom of Dén Raven.
    “The intention of the knowledge of Light is to make fair, to make grow, to keep the sacred Balance. But this king bent this knowledge to his own purpose. His first wrong was to cast off his Name.”
    “How can you cast off your name?” asked Maerad, fascinated and puzzled. “What did they call him, then?”
    Cadvan laughed. “He still has a usename, this sorcerer, though it is seldom said. He is usually called the Nameless. Every Bard has a secret Name,” he continued. “You do not know my Name. You do not even yet know yours. A Bard’s Name is given at enstatement, when you come into your powers: it is, if you like, your true Name in the Speech. It says who you are. To cast it off is to reject yourself.”
    “But that’s impossible!” Maerad objected. “How can you not be who you are?”
    “Alas, it’s not impossible at all,” replied Cadvan. “The king rejected his Name, because then he could also reject death. But with the gift of death, he cast away also the knowledge of those who die, and found his heart was empty, a pain sharper than any that he had known. For he was not of the immortals, and had not the right to deathlessness. He looked out on the world, and his eye was dark. He sought then the dominion of all on the earth and the destruction of all that rebuked him with its beauty, and he challenged the Law of the Balance, and overthrew it. And then, with massed armies and Black Sorcerers — those corrupt Bards that we call Hulls — he marched on the lovely citadel of Afinil, and cast down its fair towers and darkened the mere, so the moon no longer bathed there and the stars fled its lifeless face. Then began the Great Silence, when the Song was no longer heard in the wide lands of Annar.
    “That was not the total of his evil, but it was among the most grievous. Many things then were lost to the world, beyond restoration.”
    Cadvan sighed. Maerad listened in silence, overwhelmed with wonder, not only at the tale, but at the sweet tautness the names began to awaken within her:
Afinil,
Loresinger,
the Light.
They recalled much of the scent and sound of her mother, her voice as she plucked the lyre, the dark fall of her hair as she kissed her, and other memories that she could not trace. She sighed also, and looked around them. They were now more than halfway down the valley, and the stars were massed above them, bright around a moon waxing to the full. She picked out the Five Gemmed Daughters, swinging high over them in their ceaseless dance. Ilion was now sunk beneath the horizon.
    Cadvan stood up. “We should move on,” he said. Maerad scrambled to her feet, and they began again the slow trudge down the valley. Maerad felt her exhaustion beginning to return, but she forced herself on, and Cadvan returned to his