The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“May it change for the good, my lord,” he said. “Be it so,” the old man said. “But change it must.”

“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.