Well, well, well . . .
. . . look what I found. The First Third Damar Novel. I’d mislaid it. I’m not sure for how long: possibly since the house move, so coming up five years. It was starting to worry me that I didn’t know where it was, because it’s so old it only exists in hard copy off a typewriter. And three hundred pages of hard copy should be fairly hard to lose. I found it, by the way, because I was going through ten or twelve years of computer gudge, you know, spare batteries, external drives, leagues of various cables with strangely shaped devices on either end, and wholly unidentifiable stuff that I’m assuming has to do with computers because it’s with stuff that is, and I can’t imagine what else it can be.
Plus KIRITH.
Chapter One
He saw her first when he was eight years old. He did not realize at the time that he had discovered the focus for his life.
He had heard of her before. It seemed to him as if she had always been a favourite subject of fireside gossip, but it was only that when she had come to the dlor–and therefore first began getting into trouble–was also the time when he had grown old enough to pay some attention to the adults’ conversation among themselves, and not only to the stories they told just for him, about monsters and kings and cavalry charges.
He wasn’t yet interested in the weather and the crops, for he was still too young to understand that the weather and the crops had a direct bearing on his own comfort; but he knew all too well about rules, and about what happens when you break them. And so his attention was caught by tales of someone who broke rules, and who didn’t seem to care about being punished. This fascinated him. He wondered if perhaps being one ftha among many was different from being one child among seven grown-ups; when he was in disgrace no one spoke to him, and they were all bigger than he was. Nor was he allowed to sit by the fire and listen to the talk; nor to do much else, except chores. It was as if his world–the part of it that mattered–stopped. Maybe for her, at the dlor, where there were more than seven first-years alone, it was different, no matter how angry the dtha were at you.
“The first time she injures one of the horses, she’ll be out,” said Jafe. “They won’t care how brilliant she is.”
“I don’t understand how she’s gone on the way she does this long,” said Kay.
Gadge, who spoke less often than the others, snorted. “You know why; you just don’t want to say it aloud. She must be a horse-witch, that they let her in at all, at her age, and that she’s got on as fast as she has. If she’s a horse-witch she’s got kelar. Kelar,” he repeated. “Rare enough now–having it like that, and no sol she–some Algiav sheep-herder’s daughter from the back of beyond. It’s not the horses she’ll injure, after all, it’s the dlor. Hope that soghur knows what he’s doing. Don’t,” he began, looking at them each in turn with an expression the boy couldn’t interpret. No one caught everyone else’s eyes like that except Bar, and no one was afraid of Gadge. Gadge, as he looked around, visibly changed his mind about what he was going to say and finished mildly, but his words were drained of his earlier energy. “Try not to be any sillier than you were made.”
The others had shifted or frozen where they were, according to their natures, at the mention of kelar. Kay, as the next to last to have spoken, made the warding sign, as it was obvious Gadge would not. “The Algiav,” she said faintly. “The Algiav are all mad–you know that. They cannot tell their visions from the waking world. But they do not . . . talk to horses.”
The boy was so interested he almost forgot to breathe.
“Don’t play the fool,” said Gadge, still wearily, but as if he couldn’t help himself.
“It is you who are the fool,” said Bar.
“You, Bar, of all of us –” began Gadge again.
“Stop it!” said Kay. “The boy’s here,” she added, lamely, as if this were her only reason. He had wondered sometimes what the grown-ups had done for an excuse to stop discussion of uncomfortable things–which seemed to mean, for the other adults as well as for him, anything likely to make Bar angry–when he still went to bed before supper.
Gadge looked down at him. The boy looked up hopefully. Gadge told the best stories. His were even better than Alel’s, though she made you see the things she talked about in the way she moved her hands. Gadge’s stories came on wet days, usually, when his side was too painful to let him do any work but hand mending near the heat of the fire. Sometimes the boy, who was still almost as much underfoot as a help anywhere on the farm, was allowed to stay with him. Gadge’s voice was low on those days, and he made no extravagant gestures, but his stories drew you in, and then you saw pictures more wonderful than anything Alel’s quick, graceful hands could suggest, as if you really saw them, saw what Gadge was telling you about.
There was a pause, but Alel, despite the nearly averted row, was unable to keep away from the topic. “It’s because she’s an orphan that she’s so wild, of course,” she said. The boy wondered if even a grown-up might be fascinated by someone who got away with breaking rules; and Alel was the youngest of the grown-ups.
The boy liked this part of the story; he’d heard it before, with various flourishes. How Kirith had been raised by an uncle and an aunt who found her a nuisance, and were glad when she decided to go off to some dlor–sometimes the story said that they’d been prepared to pay her way in if she were not good enough to be accepted freely, although they had little enough money themselves (the Algiav did not often concern themselves with money), because they knew that was the only way they could get her off their hands. But she had been accepted, of course. The boy sometimes thought that perhaps he didn’t belong to this family either, and that when he was a little older he’d try his luck at the dlor too. It bothered him that he didn’t seem to feel any particular kinship with the big farm horses, but perhaps the ghiliah horses would be different.
“Have it your way,” said Gadge. “But I don’t believe she’s an orphan either.”
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