The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Not many of us know who or what we are,” said the Doorkeeper. “A glimpse is all we get.”

“There’s no less or greater in an absolute thing,” Sparrowhawk said. “All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”

Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small common ones.

He had not been sucked down and suffocated, but brought up short in front of a rock, a high place in clear air, a truth.

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.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.