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That is not my name any more—?”
It is all changing.”
Tehanu’s mare, though small, was the finest of the lot, and had a strong conviction that she should lead the others. If Tehanu didn’t hold her back she would keep sidling and overtaking till she was ahead of the line.
“Sister, brother,”
“It called her Daughter of the Eldest,”
“That place where nothing is but dust and shadows, is that your conquest?”
“Kalessin’s daughter, my sister,” it said. “You do not fly.” “I cannot change, sister,” Tehanu said.
Of these one is now living in the Inner Isles. And there is one of them living there now who is a dragon.
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.’”
wizardries of death.”
“Roke keeps its secrets,”
her being sent here at this time cannot be an accident.”
“Maybe it was a bad bargain from the beginning,” Seppel said, and when Onyx looked a question at him he said, “Verw nadan.”
“What’s the little good of my gift, against the great evil my ignorance could do?
If he was only air and fire, no weight of earth to him, no patient water . . .
ordinary language which, if it allowed lies and errors, also permitted uncertainty and retraction.
“That would be the blind man who led the seers to the cliff’s edge, indeed!” Alder said with a laugh. “Ah, but we’re at the cliff’s edge already, with our eyes shut,” said the wizard of Paln.
“There,” he said, “our wizardry and the Old Powers of the Earth meet, and are one.”
Priests have no friends.”
“It is the Namer’s name.”
“In a great land of rivers and mountains and beautiful cities, where there is no suffering or pain, and where the self endures, unchanged, unchanging, forever . . .
you stole half our realm from us, walled it away from life and light, so that you could live there forever.
“These are not the men who stole from us. They are those who pay the price.”
“It is not life they yearn for. It is death. To be one with the earth again. To rejoin it.”
“Because I had the power to do it.”
“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.”
“The dragons will go free, and leave us here to the choice we made.” “The knowledge of good and evil,” said Onyx.
he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”
that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.
“Did you walk in the forest?” “Not yet,” he said.
