“So at last we looked to the one who knows the names: the Master Namer. And he was watching the Patterner, who hadn’t said a word, but sat there among his trees like a stump. It’s in the Grove we meet, you know, among those trees whose roots are deeper than the islands. It was late in the evening by then. Sometimes there’s a light among those trees, but not that night. It was dark, no starlight, a cloudy sky above the leaves. And the Patterner stood up and spoke then—but in his own language, not in the Old Speech, nor in Hardic, but in Kargish. Few of us knew it or even knew what tongue it
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