[2] The Gift was a short-list nominee in both the 2002 Aurealis Award for best fantasy novel and the best horror novel but lost to Sean Williams' The Storm Weaver and the Sand and A. L. McCann's The White Body of Evening respectively.

After their brief but enjoyed stay at Innail, Cadvan takes Maerad across the country of Annar to the school of Norloch, intending to have her instated as a full Bard and given her Name, and also to see his old teacher Nelac.

En route, they discover that the Nameless One's corrupt Bards, the Hulls, are roaming freely, so that non-users of magic are terrified and terrorized; that Maerad is descended on her mother Milana's side from Lady Ardina, a faerie creature, in the book called an Elidhu, who still lives in the forest as monarch of a Lothlórien-like settlement; and that Maerad has a younger brother, called Hem or Cai, who like her is an inheritor of the Gift.

When Maerad and Cadvan, who has become her tutor, reach Norloch, they discover that corruption has penetrated even here, in that the First Bard Enkir has fallen under Sharma's influence.

Largely as a result of this, and partly on account of his own misogyny, Enkir refuses to admit that Maerad is the Foretold One, or even to let her be instated as a Bard.