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“Never trouble trouble,”
There was no way he could hide his love from her, and she knew it and returned it. Whether she was a witch now or not, she said she did not care; she said the two of them were born to be together, in their work and in their life; she loved him and would be married to him.
“Not many of us know who or what we are,” said the Doorkeeper. “A glimpse is all we get.” “Tell
“Well,” he said slowly, “sometimes there’s a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it’s what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years.
“But why do you stay here, lord? Surely the king would do you proper honor—” “I want no honor,” the old man said, with a violence that silenced Alder entirely.
“It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the dead.”
“A woman on Gont. The Woman of Gont. Tehanu.”
“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
And I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,”
a king who does not obey his people is a tyrant.
She wished they could grow white roses like these, at home. Their scent was so sweet in the night air.
“It called her Daughter of the Eldest,” the wizard whispered, as Tehanu stood motionless, watching the dragon go.
Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small common ones.
But before he took Tug back inside, Alder looked up again at the sword, now only a faint glimmer, and the star riding bright above it.
“It has changed. She has changed. She’ll never come home.”
“What is a kingdom without the barns that feed it and the farmers to grow the grain?”
“My name was Irian, of the Domain of Old Iria on Way. I am Orm Irian now. Kalessin, the Eldest, calls me daughter. I am sister to Orm Embar, whom the king knew, and grandchild of Orm, who killed the king’s companion Erreth-Akbe and was killed by him. I am here because my sister Tehanu called to me.
“Maybe it’s not only our desire to live forever that has kept the wound open,” Seppel said, “but the desire of the dead to die.”
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.
Tenar had dutifully tutored her in Hardic, had been delighted with her quickness to learn, and realised only now that the true delight had been just to speak Kargish with her, hearing and saying words that held in them all her lost childhood.
“I don’t know what I am, mother,”
He thought often of Sparrowhawk, wishing he could talk with him: the Archmage who had spent all his power, and having been great among the great, now lived his life out poor and disregarded. Yet the king longed to show him honor; so Sparrowhawk’s poverty was by choice. Perhaps, Alder thought, riches or high estate would have been only shameful to a man who had lost his true wealth, his way.
Infinite are the arguments of mages,
“Across the wall of stones, no bond endures.”
“Death is the bond breaker.”
“Ah, but we’re at the cliff’s edge already, with our eyes shut,”
They were talking earnestly. What on earth did a dragon woman from Way have to talk about with a harem woman from Hur-at-Hur? What language had they in common?
“What a ragbag you are bringing them, to be sure!” she said. “A sorcerer with nightmares, a wizard from Paln, two dragons, and two Kargs. The only respectable passengers on this ship are you and Onyx.”
So, here in the center where earth’s powers met, the human powers had also met together: a king, a princess, the masters of wizardry. And the dragons.
And a priestess-thief turned farmwife, and a village sorcerer with a broken heart . . .
“Sister,” Tehanu said. “These are not the men who stole from us. They are those who pay the price.”
“I don’t know which I should fear more,” Tenar said, “death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.”
“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.”
“Before long, I think, Mother . . .” “I know.” “I don’t want to leave you.” “You have to leave me.” “I know.”
FIVE WIZARDS SAT IN STARLIGHT.
he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”
He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.
“How can I tell you everything?” she said. “Tell it backward,” he said.
“We broke the world to make it whole,”
Ged said nothing, till, after a while: “Look there, Tenar.” She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western sea. “If she comes, she’ll come from there,” he said. “And if she doesn’t come, she is there.” She nodded. “I know.” Her eyes were full of tears.
Once upon a time, on the western shore of the world, lived people who could work strange spells . . .”
