The Gathandrian Trilogy 02 - Hallsfoots Battle

as if she was being crushed by something red. She could have been no more than seventeen or eighteen moon-cycles old. When she opened her eyes, she could see two fierce-looking eyes, rivers of green, but the fire that came from them was of the darkest crimson. Annyeke did the first thing that came to mind. She opened her mouth to scream and, at once, strong hands that brooked no gainsaying picked her up and held her tight. But the voice that crooned in the unread depths of her child’s mind was not one that aimed to soothe, but to command.
    Be quiet, little Annyeke. Now is not the time for crying. You will wake your mother. She needs to rest.
    Heart beating fast and struggling to respond to the shock of hearing another in her thoughts for the first time, Annyeke held herself rigid against the woman’s body. She remembered thinking how odd it was that, in the warmth of her home, she could suddenly feel so chilled. The next moment she was colder still for the woman swept her out of the shelter of her room, through the front door with its glass carved top and into the early morning garden.
    The wind was bitter through her thin night tunic.
    Little granddaughter, what will you be? What will you be?
    The mind-words, though whispered to a tune she’d heard her mother sing, somehow managed to pierce her thoughts with more of the strange cruelty of red, and Annyeke drummed her small fists on her grandmother’s deep green gown.
    At this, her grandmother laughed and this time, when she spoke, it was aloud also. “Ah, little Annyeke, you’ll be a fighter, then. Come what may.”
    Desperate to escape, Annyeke managed to squirm round in those encompassing arms and face the grass and cedar trees, herbs and rock roses of her parents’ garden. She opened her mouth and, despite her grandmother’s disapproval, began to scream.
    Just at that moment, a forest owl swooped up from where it had been hiding in the long grasses near the roses. Annyeke’s small angry cries must have disturbed it. She could remember great talons stretched towards her, the stink of bitter feathers and the glancing blow as the bird’s beak caught her on her left ear. She screamed yet louder. Then the earth came up to meet her and there was nothing.
    When she woke later, with a scarlet headache that seemed to overshadow her whole body, she could feel the gentle comfort of her mother’s hands on her head, beyond that, her grandmother’s words.
    The child is too fearful. It was only a bird. It would not have harmed her.
    Annyeke did not hear her mother’s response, though in the moon- and year-cycles to come, she grew to understand her grandmother’s power and her mother’s loving weakness. All that then filled her mind was the reality that her fear had been there even before the bird. Fear of the strange woman who had taken her from the comfort of home and into the chill of the garden. The owl had only deepened it. When she was able to put a name to what she felt that day, she would call it injustice, and anger, too, at her grandmother’s assumption. What remained with her was the slight scar on the side of her head, and the fear.
    From that day forward, the untamed strength both of birds and of her grandmother was forever linked in a red haze of memory in her blood, and she never lost her wariness of either.
    *****
    “Did it not help,” Simon asked, “to have the knowledge of this? You understood where your fear started. Can your mind-skills not overcome it?”
    She shook her head. “No. Because there is more to the tale. That is only the beginning.”
    “Tell me then, Annyeke.”
    *****
    It was as if he had given her permission. Strange how she had told no one of this, not even Johan, through all the seasons until now because Yeke had never understood her granddaughter’s fear or how it was bound up with herself. In that moment, when Annyeke had experienced mind-contact for the first time, she had also discovered how to hide her privacy. Some of the crimson of Yeke’s mind stayed with her always since that first unwanted link, and she found she had no need to attend to the later childhood lessons of how to hide her thoughts from others. She already knew; the crimson was a curtain beyond which few were permitted entry.
    Her grandmother took it upon herself to tease Annyeke into courage. Now, in the calmer light of adulthood, Annyeke told herself that it had been done in good faith, but at the time she had been beaten down, almost defeated