The Gathandrian Trilogy 01 - The Gifting

life, but with the curse of being fully in neither. Able to pick up on the basis of thought and feeling, but lacking the ability to interpret it. From what Simon understood, mainly from his mother, such people tended to die young or were never born. If they lived long, it was said that they lived in pain and their ending was in torment. He could well believe it. How could anyone exist with the knowledge of power, but without the means to use it? There had been none such in Hartstongue. His mother would have known.
    It would have been simple to force the stranger to let him go. Simon’s powers were greater than his; he had only tumbled the scribe here by the easy trick by surprise. But such an act would tear the membrane of his mind, and already Simon could tell by the wild roughness of the sky and the bite of the sand that the man was unschooled in any meditation technique that could heal him. Simon couldn’t understand how he could have survived until adulthood, except that the strength of the place told of a determination he could never hope to comprehend. His only non-violent recourse would be to contact the man here. Directly. In taking either action, Simon would indeed give himself away, but he had no wish to stay. Outside this mind, or within it, the stranger held the greater power. In his sword, in his greater physical strength, and in his cunning. Simon would find that was always so.
    Closing his eyes, he let his thoughts drift outwards, into the darkness the man held within, up to the fire-filled clouds and down, deep into the salt-rich sand. I am here , Simon said in his heart. I am here. I sense you, and I understand. Now you understand also. Let me go. Your power over me away from here is greater than mine over you.
    Stilling his mind and trying to match his heartbeat to the rhythm of the man’s own, Simon waited. Above, the clouds rolled their splendour across the blue-black sky. The glory of them filled the air and then, suddenly, Simon was lifted up, and a tunnel of darkness – the same one by which he had travelled here—opened and he was being pulled back and upwards into it. This time, however, it was his own power which drove the door open, the man’s being already weakened by what he’d asked of it.
    A sensation of flight, of soaring, a sudden flare of pleasure, and a deepening light. Then, the shiver of a breeze over his skin and, blinking, he opened his eyes.
    The stranger still held his hand. Around them, the wood of the real world—its grass, its whisper of leaves, the sky, the air—spun out from where they stood. Their breathing rose and fell in unison. Reluctantly, slowly, Simon withdrew his thoughts from the man’s.
    By then, of course, Simon understood quite well who he was and, the moment the man released his hand, he dropped to his knees.
    “Lord Tregannon, forgive me. I should have known who you were,” he whispered, head bowed, fighting both the need to run and the sudden, unaccountable desire to stay. “But, tell me, my Lord, why the need to hide yourself?”
    In the moonlight, as Simon looked up, Lord Tregannon’s eyes glinted as he smiled.
    “I didn’t hide myself,” he replied. “I simply wished for you and you came to me. Without question.”
    And that was the beginning of it all.
    * * * *
    He paused in his telling of the story—the strange choice that he’d made—hoping that the others would see this as an ending. A time of service, a personal obsession, then a love affair begun and, later, violently ended. Nothing more. And certainly nothing to his glory. But instead of the usual satisfied sighs that would accompany the end of any tale told throughout the lands, there was only silence.
    Then Isabella spoke.
    “But there is more, isn’t there?” she said, leaning towards Simon as if she would pierce him with her gaze. “More that you need to tell, if the mountain is to hear the truth of it. Isn’t there?”
    He swallowed.
    “Yes,” he said. “There is.”
    * * * *
    Her question stripped away the last layer of defence around Simon’s memory. He could see clearly the things he would do to live, to have Ralph’s good opinion, even his smile. The knowledge of them. He had hoped to leave them behind in the distant village and castle. But the mountain, and Isabella, had decreed otherwise. He would not escape so easily.
    “For a few days,” he continued, “I did not understand what Lord Tregannon wanted with me.”
    The night they met, Lord Tregannon