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“That was ill spoken. All is spoken ill between the living and the dead.
All I know is that it is changing. It is all changing.” There was no fear in his voice, only fierce exultation. Alder could not share that. He had lost too much and was too worn out by his struggle against forces he could not control or comprehend. But his heart rose to that gallantry. “May it change for the good, my lord,” he said. “Be it so,” the old man said. “But change it must.”
“It’s all beyond me,” he had said. The old man looked at him a while and then, calling him by his true name, said, “The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
“My lord, I am sorry to my heart to bring news that troubles you!” “Any word from the man who sent you is a grace to me and to its bearer. And I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,”
Lebannen saw him. He always saw the people around him.
He knew he did well what he had been called to do. He knew he was good at playing king. But only with his mother and with Tenar had he ever known beyond any self-doubt what it was to be king.
“If I am a plague bringer, you must send me away!” he said. The wizard Onyx spoke, not imperiously but with finality. “If Roke sent you to Gont, and Gont sent you to Havnor, Havnor is where you should be.”
“It was for us Orm Embar died. He opened the way for us into the dark land.” They were all silent for a while. Tenar’s quiet voice broke the silence. “Once Sparrowhawk said to me—let me see if I can remember how he said it: that the dragon and the dragon’s speech are one thing, one being. That a dragon does not learn the Old Speech, but is it.”
He told the startled maid who answered their door to ask if he might speak with the White Lady and the Woman of Gont. So they were known to the people of the palace and the city. That each bore her true name openly, as the king did, was so rare a matter, so defiant of rule and custom, of safety and propriety, that though people might know the name they were reluctant to say it and preferred to speak around it.
The young woman shrank from his words, turning towards her mother. But Tenar did not offer her any shelter. She stood unmoving. After a while she said, “Tehanu, long ago I told you: when a king speaks to you, you answer. You were a child then, and didn’t answer. You’re not a child now.”
“Go now,” Tenar said. She embraced her and laid her hand on the great scar that was half her face. “You are Kalessin’s daughter as well as mine.”
He felt estranged from himself, no longer possessed but emptied.
“The living should not take counsel of the dead.”
“And you would accept the touch of the wizardry of Paln?” Seppel asked Alder. His tone was softly ironic. His eyes were bright and hard as jet. Alder’s lips were dry. “Master,” he said, “we say on my island, the man drowning doesn’t ask what the rope cost.
“You come to the bourne in dream, not by your own will, that is so?” “So I believe.” “Wisely said.” Seppel’s keen glance approved him. “Who knows his own will clearly? But if it is in dream you go there, I can keep you from that dream—for a while. And at a cost, as I said.” Alder looked his question. “Your power.” Alder did not understand him at first. Then he said, “My gift, you mean? My art?” Seppel nodded. “I’m only a mender,” Alder said after a little time. “It’s not a great power to give up.” Onyx made as if to protest, but looked at Alder’s face and said nothing. “It is your living,”
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How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another—then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being laid. Of course they were right. Women were likely, as women, to take the next generation’s part, not this one’s; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.
She and Seserakh were indeed in league against him and ready to betray him, if he truly was nothing unless he was independent. If he was only air and fire, no weight of earth to him, no patient water . . .
She liked his honest, handsome face, and his silver tongue. What was the harm in adding a grace note or two to ordinary speech? Ged had trusted him.
“Barefaced,” Seserakh muttered in Kargish. And then in Hardic, thoughtfully, almost inaudibly, “Fearless.”
The Old Powers were the Old Powers. You used them at your risk. Seppel had told him what he must pay, and he had paid it. He had not understood quite how much there was to pay; but that was not Seppel’s fault. It was his own, for never having valued his gift at its true worth.
The wizards’ talk of this was hard to follow, not so much because they hid anything but because they themselves were groping after things lost in the cloudy past, the time before memory. Words of the Old Speech came into their talk of necessity, and sometimes Onyx spoke entirely in that tongue. But Seppel would answer him in Hardic. Seppel was sparing with the words of the Making. Once he held up his hand to stop Onyx from going on, and at the Roke wizard’s look of surprise and question, said mildly, “Spellwords act.” Alder’s teacher Gannet, too, had called the words of the Old Speech
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Perhaps that had been part of the great choice men made in ancient times: to give up the innate knowledge of the Old Speech, which they once shared with the dragons. Had they done so, Alder wondered, in order to have a language of their own, a language suited to mankind, in which they could lie, cheat, swindle, and invent wonders that never had been and would never be?
Alder said presently, “I know that we try to keep the Equilibrium. But the Powers of the Earth keep their own account.” “And theirs is a justice that is hard for men to understand.”
Lebannen nodded, but said nothing. That was often the pleasure of Tosla’s company: he said what Lebannen felt it was better that he himself not say.
Ged had told her of the Knoll, too. There, he said, all magic is strong; there all things take their true nature. “There,” he said, “our wizardry and the Old Powers of the Earth meet, and are one.”
He ended, “It seemed to us that night by night all these things draw together, always more certainly, to some event, some end. It seemed to us that here, on this ground, with your knowledge and power aiding us, we might foresee and meet that event, not letting it overwhelm our understanding. The wisest of our mages have foretold: a great change is upon us. We must join together to learn what that change is, its causes, its course, and how we may hope to turn it from conflict and ruin to harmony and peace, in whose sign I rule.”
“Sister,” Tehanu said. “These are not the men who stole from us. They are those who pay the price.”
Tenar felt the beating, the calling, in her head and in her blood. She knew now, they all knew, what Alder had known. But she held to what she trusted, even if trust had become mere hope. She said, “They are only the dead, Seserakh. We built a false wall. It must be unbuilt. But there is a true one.”
“I don’t know which I should fear more,” Tenar said, “death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.”
he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”
Can we trust them?” “Have we a choice?” said the Doorkeeper. “I think not,” said the Patterner. An edge of hardness, a sword’s edge, had come into his voice. “We can only follow.”
There was not much sleep anywhere in Earthsea, tonight, Ged thought. He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.
He knelt there silent a while. Then he said to Tenar in her language, “My lady, I saw Tehanu. She flies golden on the other wind.” Tenar glanced up at him. His face was white and worn, but there was a shadow of glory in his eyes. She struggled and then said, speaking roughly and almost inaudibly, “Whole?” He nodded. She stroked Alder’s hand, the mender’s hand, fine, skillful. Tears came into her eyes. “Let me be with him a while,” she said, and she began to cry. She put her hands to her face and cried hard, bitterly, silently.
