Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

When Tenar was alone, folding up the scraps of red material, tears came stinging into her eyes. She felt rebuked. She had done right to make the dress, and 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. Love, her love for Therru and Therru’s for her, made a bridge across that gap, a bridge of spiderweb, but love did not fill or close it. Nothing did that. And the child knew it better than she.

“But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power—that comes before it, maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using? Like this. Ogion said of you once that before you’d had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage-born, he said. So I imagined that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the emptiness the more power can fill it. But if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given away—still that would be there.” “That emptiness,” he said. “Emptiness is one word for it. Maybe not the right word.” “Potentiality?” he said, and shook his head. “What is able to be . . . to become.” “I think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that—because that is what happens to you. You didn’t make it happen. You didn’t cause it. It wasn’t because of your ‘power.’ It happened to you. Because of your—emptiness.” After a while he said, “This isn’t far from what I was taught as a boy on Roke: that true magery lies in doing only what you must do. But this would go further. Not to do, but to be done to. . . .” “I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s more like what true doing rises from. Didn’t you come and save my life—didn’t you run a fork into Hake? That was ‘doing,’ all right, doing what you must do. . . .” He pondered again, and finally asked her, “Is this a wisdom taught you when you were Priestess of the Tombs?”