The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

He carried the basket of plums with a basket of eggs nested in it.

For days the kitten hunted a young rat nearly as big as it was. Seeing it proudly and laboriously hauling the carcass across the deck, one of the sailors called it Tug. Alder accepted the name for it.

“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 said, and Alder, hearing the true accent of his home islands in the words, was a little cheered.

Tug emerged in a leisurely manner indicating his familiarity with palaces.

“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

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.