The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

But Tehanu did. The dragon’s wings were hers to fly on.

“So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do.

“We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We’re yoked, and they’re free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom . . .

it proved. The kitten, evidently happy to be away from the household of dogs and tomcats and roosters and the unpredictable Heather, tried hard to show

that it was a reliable and diligent cat, patrolling the house for mice, riding on Alder’s shoulder under his hair when permitted, and settling right down to sleep purring under his chin as soon as he lay down.

“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”

“Well,” Alder said, sitting down on the bed. He was not in the habit of talking to the kitten. Their relationship was one of silent, trustful touch. But he had to talk to somebody. “I met the king today,” he said.

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

But as they walked up the street among the lights and the rejoicing voices, Tenar was still thinking, “It has changed. She has changed. She’ll never come home.”

He melted her heart, he dazzled her, but she was not blinded. “He’s still afraid of the princess,” she thought.

Soon I am going beyond the west to fly on the other wind. I will lead you there, or wait for you, if you will come.’

These two are the messengers, the bringers of choice. There will be no more such born to us or to them. For the balance changes.’

‘Choose. Come with me to fly on the far side of the world, on the other wind. Or

‘The last to make the choice will be Tehanu. After her there will be no choosing. There will be no way west. Only the forest will be, as it is always, at the center.’”

But I go there and come back, so long as the winds will bear me.

They hate you, but they will not kill you unless you try to kill them.

And they fear nothing in the world, except your wizardries of death.”

“We fear your spells of immortality,” she said bluntly.

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.

the Archmage who had spent all his power, and having been great among the great, now lived his life out poor and disregarded.

The Old Powers were the Old Powers. You used them at your risk.

It was his own, for never having valued his gift at its true worth.

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?

But the Powers of the Earth keep their own account.” “And theirs is a justice that is hard for men to understand.”

that’s true, and yet the bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”

But they were here. Under her feet. In the roots of these trees, in the roots of the hill.

You wanted not only your cares, but our freedom. You wanted the wind! And by the spells and wizardries of those oath-breakers, you stole half our realm from us, walled it away from life and light, so that you could live there forever. Thieves, traitors!”

Tehanu looked at Irian. Irian hesitated, and then said in a much subdued voice, “Greed puts out the sun. These are Kalessin’s words.”

But as the wall was built and the spell laid, the wind ceased to blow, within the wall. The sea withdrew. The springs ceased to run. The mountains of sunrise became the mountains of the night. Those that died came to a dark land, a dry land.”

“Not into life, master,” Seppel said. “Still, like the Rune Makers, they sought the bodiless, immortal self.”

Alder stood up. He said, “It is not life they yearn for. It is death. To be one with the earth again. To rejoin it.”

What did the Summoner do?” “Summoned him—brought him back by force.” “Into life.” “Into life.”

“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.”

“Look,” Tehanu murmured. A shooting star crossed the sky, a quick, slow-fading trail of light.

think maybe the division that was begun, and then betrayed, will be completed at last,” he said. “The dragons will go free, and leave us here to the choice we made.” “The knowledge of good and evil,” said Onyx.

“Come then, come quick,” she said, and took his hand. Her hand burned like a coal of fire as she lifted him into the other wind.

Fire ran along her hands, her arms, into her hair, into her face and body, flamed up into great wings above her head, and lifted her into the air, a creature all fire, blazing, beautiful.

She cried out aloud, a clear, wordless cry. She flew high, headlong, fast, up into the sky where the light was growing and a white wind had erased the unmeaning stars.

He tossed the stone aside then and stepped forward. “Lily,” he said. She saw him and smiled and held out her hand to him. He took her hand, and they crossed together into the sunlight.

My lady, I saw Tehanu. She flies golden on the other wind.”

“Whole?” He nodded.

“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.

She smiled. “Seserakh calls him the Warrior. She says only a warrior would fall in love with a dragon.”

“She went out of the house. When I came out she was gone.” A long silence. “Azver saw her. In the sunrise. On the other wind.”

“They’re all gone. There are no dragons left in Havnor or the western islands. Onyx said: as that shadow place and all the shadows in it rejoined the world of light, so they regained their true realm.” “We broke the world to make it whole,” Ged said.

The Patterner believes Irian will come to the Grove if...

“Tell me,” she said, “tell me what you did while I was gone.” “Kept the house.” “Did you walk in the forest?” “Not yet,” he said.

The six books of Earthsea were published over thirty-one years,

And I gave the next two books a central character who is a genuine, authentic young adult: Ged is still only nineteen at the end of A Wizard, and Tenar and Arren are probably not even that old at the end of their books.

I was writing my main characters through my own life and their lives, and they were long, rich lives. I am grateful to my readers for living those lives with them.