Chapter 2

Wide-eyed and fearful, Farnor stepped back and swung his staff up to point at the rustling shrubbery.

The noise came nearer. Farnor stepped back further to give himself more space in which to manoeuvre. Whatever might be coming towards him, he knew that to attempt to flee from a predator would be to draw it after him inexorably.

The shrubbery parted.

‘Rannick!’ Farnor exclaimed in a mixture of anger and relief as he lowered his staff. ‘You frightened me to death.’

The newcomer’s lip curled peevishly. It was his characteristic expression. He ignored Farnor’s outburst.

‘What’re you doing up here, young Yarrance?’ he said, twisting Farnor’s family name into a sneer.

Despite his relief at encountering a person instead of some blood-crazed animal, Farnor took no delight in Rannick’s arrival. Few in the community liked the man but, for reasons he could not identify, Farnor felt a particular, and deep, antipathy to him. It was not without some irony, however, that while on the whole Rannick reciprocated the community’s opinion of him he seemed to have a special regard for Farnor — in so far as he had regard for anyone. For although life had not presented Rannick with any special disadvantages, his general demeanour exuded the bitterness and envy of a man unjustly dispossessed of some great fortune. When he spoke, it was as if to praise or admire something would be to risk choking himself to death. And when he undertook a task it was as if to create something willingly, or for its own sake, might wither his hands.

‘Don’t let him near the cows,’ Farnor’s mother would say if she saw him wandering near the farm. ‘That face of his will sour the milk for a week.’

He had wilfully neglected the quite adequate portion of land that his father had left him and now he earned his keep by casual labouring on the valley farms and, it was generally agreed, by some judicious thieving and poaching, though he had never been caught at such.

Worse, it was rumoured that on his periodic disappearances from the valley he was thick with travellers and the like from over the hill.

Apart from his invariably unpleasant manner however, perhaps his most damning feature was his intelligence; his considerable intelligence. In others such a gift would have been a boon, an affirmation, but in Rannick it was what truly set him apart. It gleamed with mocking scorn in his permanently narrowed eyes when they were not full of anger or malice, and it could lend a keen and vicious edge to his tongue, too subtle to provoke an immediate angry rebuke but cruel and long-lasting in its wounding nonetheless.

And, perhaps, there were other things.

Farnor remembered a soft, incomplete conversation between his mother and father overheard one night when he had crept down the stairs to eavesdrop on that mysterious world of adult life that awoke only as the children went to sleep.

‘Rannick has his grandfather in him, I’d swear. He knows and sees more than the rest of us.’ His father’s voice, muffled.

Ear close to the door, Farnor had sensed his mother nodding in agreement. ‘It’s to be hoped not,’ she said. ‘Not with that dark nature of his. It’ll do neither him nor anyone else any good.’

And that had been all. But unspoken meanings had permeated the words, an