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Gry came with her parents or her father to Caspromant, there were no disasters. My mother was very fond of Gry. She would say suddenly, “Stand there, Gry!” Gry would stand still, and my mother would gaze at her till the seven-year-old became self-conscious and began to wriggle and giggle. “Now be still,” my mother would say. “I’m learning you, don’t you see, so that I can have a girl of my own exactly like you. I want to know how to do it.”
    “You could have another boy like Orrec,” Gry offered, but my mother said, “No! One Orrec is quite enough. I need a Gry!”
    Gry’s mother Parn was a strange, restless woman. Her gift was strong, and she seemed half a wild creature herself. She was much in demand to call animals to hunters, and was often away, half across the Uplands, at a hunt at one domain or another. When she was at Roddmant she seemed always to have a cage around her, to be looking at you through bars. She and her husband Ternoc were polite and wary with each other. She had no particular interest in her daughter, whom she treated like all other children, with impartial indifference.
    “Does your mother teach you how to use your gift?” I asked Gry once, in the self-importance of being taught by my father how to use my gift.
    Gry shook her head. “She says you don’t use the gift. It uses you.”
    “You have to learn how to control it,” I informed her, solemn and severe.
    “I don’t,” said Gry.
    She was wilful, indifferent—too much like her mother, sometimes. She would not argue with me, would not defend her opinion, would not change it. I wanted words. She wanted silence. But when my mother told stories, Gry listened from her silence, and heard every word, heard, held, treasured, pondered it.
    “You’re a listener,” Melle said to her. “Not just a caller, a listener too. You listen to mice, don’t you?”
    Gry nodded.
    “What do they say?”
    “Mouse things,” Gry said. She was very shy, even with Melle, whom she loved dearly.
    “I suppose, being a caller, you could call the mice that are nesting in my storeroom and suggest to them that they go live in the stable?”
    Gry thought about it.
    “They would have to move the babies,” she said.
    “Ah,” said my mother. “I never thought. Out of the question. Besides, there’s the stable cat.”
    “You could bring the cat to your storeroom,” Gry said. Her mind moved unpredictably; she saw as the mice saw, as the cat saw, as my mother saw, all at once. Her world was unfathomably complex. She did not defend her opinions, because she held conflicting opinions on almost everything. And yet she was immovable.
    “Could you tell about the girl who was kind to the ants?” she asked my mother, timidly, as if it were a great imposition.
    “The girl who was kind to the ants,” my mother repeated, as if reciting a title. She closed her eyes.
    She had told us that many of her stories came from a book she had had as a child, and that when she told them, she felt as if she were reading from the book. The first time she told us that, Gry asked, “What is a book?”
    So my mother read to us from the book that was not there.
    Long, long ago, when Cumbelo was King, a widow lived in a village with her four daughters. And they went along well enough till the woman fell ill and couldn’t get over it. So a wise woman came and looked her over and said, “Nothing can cure you but a drink of the water of the Well of the Sea.”
    “Oh me, oh me, then I’ll surely die,” says the widow, “for how can I go to that well, sick as I am?”
    “Haven’t you four daughters?” says the wise woman.
    So the widow begged her eldest daughter to go to the Well of the Sea and fetch a cup of that water. “And you shall have all my love,” she said, “and my best bonnet.”
    So the eldest girl went out, and she walked a while, and sat down to rest, and where she sat she saw a huddle of ants trying to drag a dead wasp to their nest. “Ugh, the