Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

that he gave a deep sigh, his only sign of disappointment or impatience, and turned away. Then he fished in his coat pocket and brought out a bit of lacing. He always carried ends of cord for all the thousand uses of a farmstead. He knotted it and tossed it onto the ground between us. He said nothing, but looked at it and at me.
    “I’m not a dog, to do tricks for you!” I burst out in a shrill, loud voice. It left an awful, ringing silence between us.
    “Listen, Orrec,” he said. “At Drummant, that’s what you’ll be, if you choose to see it that way. If you don’t show your gift there, what will Ogge think, and say? If you refuse to learn the use of your power, our people will have no one to turn to.” He took a deep breath, and for a moment his voice shook with anger. “Do you think I like killing rats? Am I a terrier?” He stopped, and looked aside, and finally said, “Think of your duty. Of our duty. Think of it, and when you’ve understood it, come to me.”
    He stooped and picked up the length of cord, unknotted it with his fingers, put it back in his pocket, and strode away, uphill, towards the ash grove.
    When I remember that now, I think of how he saved that bit of lacing, because cord was hard to come by and must not be wasted, and I could cry again; but not with the tears of shame and fury that I wept as I went down the stream valley from that place, that day.

♦ 8 ♦
    A fter that nothing could be the same between my father and me, because now there lay between us his demand and my refusal. But his manner to me did not change. He did not return to the matter for several days. When he did it was not to command but to ask almost casually, one afternoon when we were riding back from our eastern boundary: “Are you ready to try your power now?”
    But my determination had grown up round me like a wall, a stone tower-keep in which I was protected from his demands, his questions, my own questions. I answered at once: “No.”
    My flat certainty must have taken him aback. He said nothing in reply. He said nothing to me as we rode on home. He said nothing to me the rest of that day. He looked tired and stern. My mother saw that, and probably guessed the cause.
    The next morning she asked me to come up to her room on the pretext of fitting the coat she was making for me. While she had me standing with my arms stuck out like a straw doll and was going round me on her knees taking out basting stitches and marking buttonholes, she said through the pins in her mouth, “Your fathers worried.”
    I scowled and said nothing.
    She took the pins out of her mouth and sat back on her heels. “He says he doesn’t know why Brantor Ogge acted as he did. Inviting himself here, and inviting us there, and dropping hints about his granddaughter, and all. He says there’s never been any friendship between Drum and Caspro. I said, ‘Well, better late than never.’ But he just shakes his head. It worries him.”
    This was not what I’d expected, and it drew me from my self-absorption. I didn’t know what to say but sought for something wise and reassuring. “Maybe it’s because our domains border now,” was the best I could come up with.
    “I think that’s what worries him,” Melle said. She replaced one pin between her lips and set another in the hem of the jacket. It was a mans coat of black felt, my first.
    “So,” she said, removing the pin from her mouth and sitting back again to judge the fit, “I’ll be very glad when this visit’s over with!”
    I felt guilt weigh me down, as if the black coat were made of lead.
    “Mother,” I said, “he wants me to practice the gift, the undoing, and I don’t want to, and it makes him angry.”
    “I know,” she said. She went on adjusting the hang of the jacket, and then stopped and looked at me, up at me, because she was kneeling and I standing. “That’s something I can’t help either of you with. You see that, don’t you, Orrec? I don’t understand