Hyden considered the mood of his clansmen. Here they were, wandering through a beautiful forest, heading towards a place of peace and fellowship, on the cusp of a great and exciting competition. Very soon, they would be seeing their wives and children for the first time in weeks. The Summer’s Day Festival lasted for days and days, but on the first day of summer, it was the greatest celebration Hyden had ever known. Yet his people moved lethargically, as if they were dragging an enormous weight behind them and wading in sludge. Heads were down and shoulders were slumped. The exhilaration and bravado that had ignited them like a wildfire on their way to harvest the hawkling eggs had been completely extinguished. Wendlin and Jeryn’s fall from the nesting cliff had sapped the joy completely out of them.
It was like this nearly every year, Hyden reflected. He couldn’t remember a harvest where someone hadn’t fallen to their death, or somehow left them all disheartened. In the first year he had attended the Summer’s Day Festival, no one had perished. The long walk from the nesting cliffs, through the great forest toward Summer’s Day that year, had been as hope filled and exciting as all his trips to harvest combined. But since then, the trip to the festival from the egg harvest was always bittersweet. This year, one set of brothers and a father, were mourning, while the rest of the clan were trying to get past it so that they could enjoy the upcoming festivities. It was the cruelest of clan rituals, or maybe just bad timing on nature’s part, that the harvest and the Summer’s Day Festival were almost always tainted with sorrow and death.
“It’s a reminder from the goddess,” Uncle Condlin had said, after burying Wendlin in the canyon. “We, as a people, may climb high and reach farther than nature intended, we may reap great strength, and we may profit from these deeds, but we must remain humble, for it as a gift we are granted to be able to do such things. Every gain has its cost, and every loss is the cost of our gain.”
Uncle Condlin had looked directly at Hyden as he spoke of gain and loss. Hyden wanted to scream out that he had nothing to do with this year’s harvest. He hadn’t asked for, or even earned, the God’s Gift that had found its way to him. But he held his tongue. Condlin had already lost one son, and another was lying broken on a travois. Condlin carried one end, and refused to let anyone else ease his burden. Hyden’s father, Harrap, and a few others, took turns carrying the other end. Hyden had a deep respect for the determination and strength his Uncle Condlin showed day in and day out, but he refused to feel guilty for anything. He may have been the recipient of a gift from the gods, and his cousins may have paid a price for it, but he had done no wrong.
The somber mood caused Gerard to give up on finding more devious ways to use the ring he had found. He had long ago exhausted the fun out of the trick of having someone tell someone else something that got them clobbered. The thrill of that was gone. Instead, he kept to himself and stayed out of the way, while trying to do other things through his mind with the ring. One night, he spent the whole evening by the campfire, trying to levitate a small stone, but it never once moved. He tried to make a stick catch fire and also to extinguish a flame, but it was all for nothing. What he did manage to do, was halt a deer in its tracks the previous afternoon. Gerard might have even called the animal to them, but there was no way to be sure. All he knew was that he had called out to the forest to send them a fat doe and one actually came.
Gerard, Hyden, and Little Condlin, had ranged ahead of the rest of the clan to hunt. They weren’t really short on meat, Hyden just wanted to keep sharp with his bow. The boys hadn’t even been quiet. It shocked them all when the deer bound out of the woods into their path. As soon as it saw them, the doe started to bolt away, but Gerard cried out, “Stop! Wait!” and amazingly, the creature stayed rooted there. Gerard had been about to call the deer to him, when Hyden’s arrow pierced its heart with a “Thrump!” The Doe just stood there, with its eyes locked on Gerard’s, until its front legs crumpled underneath it. As soon as the animal fell onto its side, Gerard felt the tingling, burning rush of the ring’s magic fill his blood. It was a grand feeling, and it was all the proof he needed to know that the ring had caused the deer to freeze in place. What else the ring might have caused, he was left to wonder about.