The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

I have, believe me, learned never to call any book “the last.” But I want to tell the kind people who write me asking for another Earthsea story that so far as I know, the story I had to tell ends here. With Tenar and Ged, on Gont. It has come round to and past where it began so long ago. In that dark night on Roke and the great sunrise in the other world, it came where it was going all along—and yet it goes on past that, being not a closed circle but a spiral, like the orbit of our Earth. Lives end, lives go on, a story ends, others go on. I know the reign of King Lebannen and Queen Seserakh will be long remembered both in the Archipelago and the Kargad Lands. I think Roke will change, and maybe magic itself will change. I’m not sure if the dragons will ever return out of the west beyond the west, yet I know Tehanu will. I know where Ged goes next. But the storyteller doesn’t tell all she knows. When the story is over she falls silent. Then, after a while, perhaps she says, “But listen now! I have another tale to tell! Once upon a time, on the western shore of the world, lived people who could work strange spells . . .”