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she was set apart, set above. Men had given her power, men had shared their power with her. Women looked at her from outside, sometimes rivalrous, often with a trace of ridicule.
He does you great honour, teaching you. But look and see, child, if all he’s taught you isn’t finally to follow your heart.’
Moss was following her heart, but it was a dark, wild, queer heart, like a crow, going its own ways on its own errands.
There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.
for the first time she thought and felt that this was he indeed, and that all the years since she had first seen him were their bond. She saw a light like a star in darkness, underground, long ago, and his face in the light.
As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. As a stranger in Gont, she had found that people liked to teach. She had learned to be taught and so to be accepted, her foreignness forgiven.
It was her habit of life, to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned,
Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said.
A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell.’ She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. ‘It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside.’
Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark.’ Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. ‘I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark?
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everywhere Ged had lived, it was without women; so he did the ‘women’s work’ and thought nothing about it. It would be a pity, she thought, if he did think about it, if he started fearing that his dignity hung by a dishcloth.
As a young woman she had been taught a powerful knowledge by a powerful man and had laid it aside, turned away from it, not touched it. As a woman she had chosen and had the powers of a woman, in their time, and the time was past; her wiving and mothering was done.
So she was a woman dragons would talk to.
she went on, pondering the indifference of a man towards the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking …
The girl sitting at the hearth, gazing at the fire, listening, saw the hawk; saw the man; saw the birds come to him, come at his word, at his naming them, come beating their wings to hold his arm with their fierce talons; saw herself the hawk, the wild bird.
But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so.
‘Teach her, teach her all, Tenar!’ When she knew that a wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
You need not fear him. You must not fear him. He wants you to fear him. He feeds on your fear. We will starve him, Therru. We’ll starve him till he eats himself. Till he chokes gnawing on the bones of his own hands …
Have you understood me?’ ‘No,’ Tenar said. ‘I have never understood men like you.’
But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it.
Her heart yearned to him. He thought he had learned pain, but he would learn it again and again, all his life, and forget none of it.
You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren’t the scars. You aren’t ugly. You aren’t evil. You are Therru, and beautiful.
she had spoken the truth to the child. But it was not enough, the right and the truth. There was a gap, a void, a gulf, on beyond the right and the truth.
‘If she lives in fear, she will do harm,’ she said at last. ‘I’m afraid of that.’
Like most people, Tiff believed that you are what happens to you. The rich and strong must have virtue; one to whom evil has been done must be bad, and may rightly be punished.
I’m old to be bringing up a child. And she … She obeys me, but only because she wants to.’ ‘It’s the only justification for obedience,’ Ged observed.
It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.’
‘If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,’
