The Gathandrian Trilogy 01 - The Gifting

may, if you will permit it, also help him.”
    “How?” she gasped and swung around, dislodging the elder’s grip. “And besides you have no right to taunt me. He does not think of me in that way.”
    The elder frowned. “Perhaps that is true. I do not know. The gods do not reveal the outcome of the loves of our people to us. Only their needs. But love—in whatever form it will take—is a strong power for life. Your affection for Montfort may yet help our quest.”
    Annyeke said nothing, though her throat was crowded with words. She simply nodded; her thoughts and intentions elsewhere. She hated the way the elder had so casually revealed her heart. He had no right to do that. Her feelings were not up for discussion, no matter who was discussing them. Because of this, she would not tell him what had happened to her. Let him not know everything.
    When, later, the elders left the park, taking the now dimmed mind-circle with them, she waited until they had gone. Something in the mind-circle was keeping her thoughts and new-found insights secret then. She was glad of it. Before making her way to the Place of Tutors to collect her charge, driven by an impulse she could not explain, she smoothed her hand across the grasses where her companions had knelt. Thoughts not her own tingled her fingers and warmed a path from her skin up to her mind. Fragments only, but with a common theme of guilt she could not ignore. What did it mean? Tonight she would need to ponder them further, but she already knew what she must do.
    Whatever lies the elders of Gathandria were telling, or the truths they were keeping silent, she was determined to uncover them. Whatever it took.

Chapter Nine: Simon’s First Story

    Simon

    Simon opened his eyes and gazed at grey stone. His companions were waiting for his story, but he didn’t see them. He saw only his past.
    “When I first met Ralph Tregannon, Lord of the Lammas Lands,” he said, “it felt as if someone had gripped me with a fierce hand from within and wouldn’t let go.”
    As Simon said the words he hadn’t expected to say, his mind tumbled back over the corridor of two long year-cycles to the man he’d been then.
    Lord Tregannon’s soldiers had come for him, just when he’d assumed he was safe. He’d been sleeping near the well, the mill-woman’s home only having been offered for one night, and the scent of the earth had been filled with water and life. A rich autumn night, heavy with the sound of the night ravens in the sky and small animals burrowing underneath the soil. Before Simon settled down, he’d gazed upwards at the stars, but had seen only cloud, with the hint of rain to come.
    Still, his sleep had been peaceful. He’d arrived only three days before, offering the usual fare of herbal remedies, which the Lammas people couldn’t source themselves, and mental trinkets to the hard-worked villagers—a few meditations to keep fears at bay; a trick to encourage love, or to kill it; a simple mind-joining to stimulate the memory. Even though his trade in mind-games was illicit, punishable by death, there would always be a few prepared to take the risk, and pay enough for it too for him to get by.
    Usually, Simon stayed no more than a week anywhere, and always in places where the area Lord was willing to look away while he plied his trade. Some even paid for his writing skills and the wages earned then would be enough for half a moon-cycle of food. Lord Tregannon was known to be liberal-hearted; the Lammas people ploughed their own fields and kept themselves aloof from the surrounding rural states. Simon had calculated no harm would come to him there, and he sensed no threat from the people he’d already met. They were, for the most part, simple farmers, born to live and die on the land. The men laboured in the fields, or in the associated trades of blacksmith, clothier, ironmonger, and the women baked, sewed, healed the sick where possible, and taught their families to do the same. Their society was the same as a hundred others he had passed through.
    He estimated that a week would bring enough fresh clothes and provisions to move on without being noticed by those he wished to avoid.
    It was not to be. He should never have trusted the mill-woman.
    Sometime when the moon flowed through the sign of the Fox on that third night, scattering the stars once more, Lord Tregannon’s men came for him. Back then Simon was sharper, mentally, than he became later, and when he