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December 31, 2016 - July 8, 2017
There was a grief in him, he did not know why, a pain and yearning as for something dear and lost, forever lost. He was used to that; he had held much dear, and lost much; but this sadness was so great it did not seem to be his own. He felt a sadness at the very heart of things, a grief even in the coming of the light. It clung to him from his dream, and stayed with him when he got up.
The goats, however, were long gone. “Neither of ’em’s in milk,” Sparrowhawk grumbled as they returned to the house. “They’ve got nothing to do but find new ways through the fence. I keep them for exasperation . . . The first spell I ever learned was to call goats from wandering. My aunt taught me. It’s no more use to me now than if I sang them a love song.
“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.