The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

insulting the freshness of the herring and the veracity of the fishwife.

“All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”

“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. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they’re not evil. They’re beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. “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 . . .

The ruthless love that makes no allowances, no conditions.

So Tenar must play nursemaid, tutor, and companion now to both of them, two scared girls who didn’t know how to take hold of their power, while she wanted no power on earth except the freedom to go home where she belonged and help Ged with the garden.

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.

It was like knowing the way to go, he thought, like knowing the direction of home. Not a thing one could identify or even say much about, but a connection on which everything else depended. Without it he was desolate. He was useless.

“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.”

“Well, you had the sense to build your Great House here,” the Patterner said, smiling. “But we built it wrong,” Onyx said. “All we build, we build wrong.” “So we must knock it down,” said Seppel. “No,” said Gamble. “We’re not dragons. We do live in houses. We have to have some walls, at least.” “So long as the wind can blow through the windows,” said Azver. “And who will come in the doors?” asked the Doorkeeper in his mild voice. There was a pause. A cricket trilled industriously somewhere across the glade, fell silent, trilled again.

he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”

It was hard going in the dark, the lantern throwing great shadows of small things across the path.

“If she comes, she’ll come from there,” he said. “And if she doesn’t come, she is there.”