Read Powers for Free Online Page A

come back, little one.” She held him a while, her cheek against his hair; then she put him back in his crib and said, “Now go to sleep again, and when you wake up your sister will be here.”
    “All right,” Miv said, and curled up and shut his eyes.
    “What a lamb,” the Mother said. She looked at me. “Ah, you’re up, you’re afoot, good for you,” she said. She did look like her slender daughter Astano, but her face, like her body, was full and smooth and powerful. Astano’s glance was shy; the Mother’s gaze was steady. I looked down at once, of course.
    “Who hurt you, lad?” she asked.
    Not to answer old Remen was one thing. Not to answer the Mother was quite another.
    After an awful pause I said the only thing that came to me: “I fell into the well, Mistress.”
    “Oh, come,” she said, chiding but amused.
    I stood mute.
    “You’re a very clumsy boy, Gavir,” said the musical voice. “But a courageous one.” She examined my lumps and bruises. “He looks all right to me, Remen. How’s the hand?” She took my hand and looked at the splinted finger. “That’ll take some weeks,” she said. “You’re the scholar, eh? No writing for you for a while. But Everra will know how to keep you busy. Run along, then.”
    I bobbed the reverence to her and said, “Thank you,” to old Remen, and got out. I ran to the pantry, and found Sallo there, and even while we were hugging and she was asking if I was really all right, I was telling her that the Mother knew my name, and knew who I was, and called me the scholar!
    I didn’t say that she had called me courageous. That was too immense a thing to talk about.
    When I tried to eat, it didn’t go down very well, and my head began thumping, so Sallo went with me to the dormitory and left me on our bed there. I spent that afternoon and most of the next day there, doing a lot of sleeping. Then I woke up starving hungry and was all right, except that I looked, as Sotur said, as if I’d been left out on a battlefield for the crows.
    It was only two days since I’d been in the schoolroom, but they welcomed me back as if I’d been gone for months, and it felt that way to me too. The teacher took my injured hand in his long, strong-fingered hands and stroked it once. “When it heals, Gavir, I am going to teach you to write well and clearly,” he said. “No more scrawling in the copybook. Right?” He was smiling, and for some reason what he said made me extremely happy. There was a care for me in it, a concern as gentle as his touch.
    Hoby was watching. Torm was watching. I turned around and faced them. I reverenced Torm briefly; he turned away. I said, “Hello, Hoby.” He had a sick look. I think seeing all my swellings and bruises in their green and purple glory scared him. But he knew I had not told on him. Everybody knew it. Just as everybody knew who had attacked me. There might be silence, but there were no secrets in our life.
    But if I accused nobody, it was nobody’s business, not even the masters’.
    Torm had turned from me with a glowering look, but Yaven and Astano were kind and friendly. As for Sotur, she evidently felt she’d been thoughtless or heartless saying that I looked like I’d been left for the crows, for when she could speak to me without anybody else hearing she said, “Gavir, you are a hero.” She spoke solemnly, and looked near tears.
    I didn’t understand yet that the whole matter was more serious than my small part of it.
    Sallo had said little Miv was to be kept in the infirmary till he was quite well, and knowing he was in the Mother’s care I thought no more about him or my fever dreams of the burial ground.
    But in the dormitory that night, Ennumer, who mothered Miv and Oco, was in tears. All the women and girls gathered about her, Sallo with them. Tib came over to me and whispered what he’d heard: that Miv was bleeding from his ear, and they thought his head had been broken by Torm’s blow. Then I remembered