◇ Earthsea 5 The Other Wind

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標題: Earthsea 5 The Other Wind              silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May  7 08:09:14 2004

THE OTHER WIND
Ursula K. LeGuin

The Earthsea 05

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EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML
December 13, 2002

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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5


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CHAPTER ONE
^ ?
MENDING THE GREEN PITCHER



Sails long and white as swan's wings carried the ship Farflyer through summer 
air down the bay from the Armed Cliffs toward Gont Port. She glided into the 
still water landward of the jetty, so sure and graceful a creature of the 
wind that a couple of 
townsmen fishing off the old quay cheered her in, waving to the crewmen and 
the one passenger standing in the prow.

He was a thin man with a thin pack and an old black cloak, probably a 
sorcerer or small tradesman, nobody important. The two fishermen watched the 
bustle on the dock and the ship's deck as she made ready to unload her cargo, 
and only glanced at the 
passenger with a bit of curiosity when as he left the ship one of the sailors 
made a gesture behind his back, thumb and first and last finger of the left 
hand all pointed at him: May you never come back!

He hesitated on the pier, shouldered his pack, and set off into the streets 
of Gont Port. They were busy streets, and he got at once into the Fish 
Market, abrawl with hawkers and hagglers, paving stones glittering with fish 
scales and brine. If he had 
a way, he soon lost it among the carts and stalls and crowds and the cold 
stares of dead fish.

A tall old woman turned from the stall where she had been insulting the 
freshness of the herring and the veracity of the fishwife. Seeing her glaring 
at him, the stranger said unwisely, "Would you have the kindness to tell me 
the way I should go for Re 
Albi?"

"Why, go drown yourself in pig slop for a start," said the tall woman and 
strode off, leaving the stranger wilted and dismayed. But the fishwife, 
seeing a chance to seize the high moral ground, blared out, "Re Albi is it? 
Re Albi you want, man? Speak 
up then! The Old Mage's house, that would be what you'd want at Re Albi. Yes 
it would. So you go out by the corner there, and up Elvers Lane there, see, 
till you reach the tower…"

Once he was out of the market, broad streets led him uphill and past the 
massive watchtower to a town gate. Two stone dragons large as life guarded 
it, teeth the length of his forearm, stone eyes glaring blindly out over the 
town and the bay. A 
lounging guard told him just turn left at the top of the road and he'd be in 
Re Albi. "And keep on through the village for the Old Mage's house," the 
guard said.

So he went trudging up the road, which was pretty steep, looking up as he 
went to the steeper slopes and far peak of Gont Mountain that overhung its 
island like a cloud.

It was a long road and a hot day. He soon had his black cloak off and went on 
bareheaded in his shirtsleeves, but he had not thought to find water or buy 
food in the town, or had been too shy to, maybe, for he was not a man 
familiar with cities or at 
ease with strangers.

After several long miles he caught up to a cart which he had seen far up the 
dusty way for a long time as a dark blot in a white blot of dust. It creaked 
and streaked along at the pace of a pair of small oxen that looked as old, 
wrinkled, and unhopeful 
as tortoises. He greeted the carter, who resembled the oxen. The carter said 
nothing, but blinked.


"Might there be a spring of water up the road?" the stranger asked.

The carter slowly shook his head. After a long time he said, "No." A while 
later he said, "There ain't."

They all plodded along. Discouraged, the stranger found it hard to go any 
faster than the oxen, about a mile an hour, maybe.

He became aware that the carter was wordlessly reaching something out to him: 
a big clay jug wrapped round with wicker. He took it, and finding it very 
heavy, drank his fill of the water, leaving it scarcely lighter when he 
passed it back with his 
thanks.

"Climb on," said the carter after a while.

"Thanks. I'll walk. How far might it be to Re Albi?"

The wheels creaked. The oxen heaved deep sighs, first one, then the other. 
Their dusty hides smelled sweet in the hot sunlight.

"Ten mile," the carter said. He thought, and said, "Or twelve." After a while 
he said, "No less."

"I'd better walk on, then," said the stranger.

Refreshed by the water, he was able to get ahead of the oxen, and they and 
the cart and the carter were a good way behind him when he heard the carter 
speak again. "Going to the Old Mages house," he said. If it was a question, 
it seemed to need no 
answer. The traveler walked on.

When he started up the road it had still lain in the vast shadow of the 
mountain, but when he turned left to the little village he took to be Re 
Albi, the sun was blazing in the western sky and under it the sea lay white 
as steel.

There were scattered small houses, a small dusty square, a fountain with one 
thin stream of water falling. He made for that, drank from his hands again 
and again, put his head under the stream, rubbed cool water through his hair 
and let it run down his 
arms, and sat for a while on the stone rim of the fountain, observed in 
attentive silence by two dirty little boys and a dirty little girl.

"He ain't the farrier," one of the boys said.

The traveler combed his wet hair back with his ringers.

"He'll be going to the Old Mage's house," said the girl, "stupid."

"Yerraghh!" said the boy, drawing his face into a horrible lopsided grimace 
by pulling at it with one hand while he clawed the air with the other.

"You watch it, Stony," said the other boy.

"Take you there," said the girl to the traveler.

"Thanks," he said, and stood up wearily.

"Got no staff, see," said one boy, and the other said, "Never said he did." 
Both watched with sullen eyes as the stranger followed the girl out of the 
village to a path that led north through rocky pastures that dropped down 
steep to the left.

The sun glared on the sea. His eyes dazzled, and the high horizon and the 
blowing wind made him dizzy. The child was a little hopping shadow ahead of 
him. He stopped.

"Come on," she said, but she too stopped. He came up to her on the path. 
"There," she said. He saw a wooden house near the cliff's edge, still some 
way ahead.

"I ain't afraid," the girl said. "I fetch their eggs lots of times for 
Stony's dad to carry to market. Once she gave me peaches. The old lady. Stony 
says I stole 'em but I never. Go on. She ain't there. Neither of em is."

She stood still, pointing to the house.

"Nobody's there?"

"The old man is. Old Hawk, he is."

The traveler went on. The child stood watching him till he went round the 
corner of the house.

Two goats stared down at the stranger from a steep fenced field. A scatter of 
hens and half-grown chicks pecked and conversed softly in long grass under 
peach and plum trees. A man was standing on a short ladder against the trunk 
of one of the trees; 
his head was in the leaves, and the traveler could see only his bare brown 
legs.

"Hello," the traveler said, and after a while said it again a bit louder.

The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a 
handful of plums, and when he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of 
bees drawn by the juice. He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey 
hair tied back from a 
handsome, timeworn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white 
seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. His gaze was clear, 
direct, intense. "They're ripe," he said, "though they'll be even better 
tomorrow." He held out his 
handful of little yellow plums.

"Lord Sparrowhawk," the stranger said huskily. "Arch-mage."

The old man gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. "Come into the shade," he said.

The stranger followed him, and did what he was told: he sat down on a wooden 
bench in the shade of the gnarled tree nearest the house; he accepted the 
plums, now rinsed and served in a wicker basket; he ate one, then another, 
then a third. Questioned, 
he admitted that he had eaten nothing that day. He sat while the master of 
the house went into it, coming out presently with bread and cheese and half 
an onion. The guest ate the bread and cheese and onion and drank the cup of 
cold water his host 
brought him. The host ate plums to keep him company.

"You look tired. How far have you come?"

"From Roke."

The old man's expression was hard to read. He said only, "I wouldn't have 
guessed that."

"I'm from Taon, lord. I went from Taon to Roke. And there the Lord Patterner 
told me I should come here. To you."

"Why?"

It was a formidable gaze.

"Because you walked across the dark land living…" The stranger's husky voice 
died away.

The old man picked up the words: "And came to the far shores of the day. Yes. 
But that was spoken in prophecy of the coming of our King, Lebannen."

"You were with him, lord."

"I was. And he gained his kingdom there. But I left mine there. So don't call 
me by any title. Hawk, or Sparrowhawk, as you please. And how shall I call 
you?"

The man murmured his use-name: "Alder."

Food and drink and shade and sitting down had clearly eased him, but he still 
looked exhausted. He had a weary sadness in him; his face was full of it.

The old man had spoken to him with a hard edge in his voice, but that was 
gone when he said, "Let's put off talking for a bit. You've sailed near a 
thousand miles and walked fifteen uphill. And I've got to water the beans and 
the lettuce id all, since 
my wife and daughter left the garden in my charge. So rest a while. We can 
talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There's seldom 
as much hurry as I used to think there was."

When he came back by half an hour later his guest was flat on his back asleep 
in the cool grass under the peach trees.

The man who had been Archmage of Earthsea stopped with a bucket in one hand 
and a hoe in the other and looked down at the sleeping stranger.

"Alder," he said under his breath. "What's the trouble you bring with you, 
Alder?"

It seemed to him that if he wanted to know the man's true name he would know 
it only by thinking, by putting his mind to it, as he might have done when he 
was a mage.

But he did not know it, and thinking would not give it to him, and he was not 
a mage.

He knew nothing about this Alder and must wait to be told. "Never trouble 
trouble," he told himself, and went on to water the beans.

As soon as the sun's light was cut offby a low rock wall that ran along the 
top of the cliff near the house, the cool of the shadow roused the sleeper. 
He sat up with a shiver, then stood up, a bit stiff and bewildered, with 
grass seed in his hair. 
Seeing his host filling buckets at the well and lugging them to the garden, 
he went to help him.

"Three or four more ought to do it," said the ex-Archmage, doling out water 
to the roots of a row of young cabbages. The smell of wet dirt was pleasant 
in the dry, warm air. The westering light came golden and broken over the 
ground.

They sat on a long bench beside the house door to see the sun go down. 
Sparrowhawk had brought out a bottle and two squat, thick cups of greenish 
glass. "My wife's son's wine," he said. "From Oak Farm, in Middle Valley. A 
good year, seven years back." 
It was a flinty red wine that warmed Alder right through. The sun set in calm 
clarity. The wind was down. Birds in the orchard trees made a few closing 
remarks.

Alder had been amazed when he learned from the Master Patterner of Roke that 
the Archmage Sparrowhawk, that man of legend, who had brought the king home 
from the realm of death and then flown off on a dragon's back, was still 
alive. Alive, said the 
Patterner, and living on his home island, Gont. "I tell you what not many 
know," the Patterner had said, "for I think you need to know it. And I think 
you will keep his secret."

"But then he is still Archmage!" Alder had said, with a kind of joy: for it 
had been a puzzle and concern to all men of the art that the wise men of Roke 
Island, the school and center of magery in the Archipelago, had not in all 
the years of King 
Lebannen's rule named an Archmage to replace Sparrowhawk.

"No," the Patterner had said. "He is not a mage at all."

The Patterner had told him a little of how Sparrowhawk had lost his power, 
and why; and Alder had had time to ponder it all. But still, here, in the 
presence of this man who had spoken with dragons, and brought back the Ring 
of Erreth-Akbe, and crossed 
the kingdom of the dead, and ruled the Archipelago before the king, all those 
stories and songs were in his mind. Even as he saw him old, content with his 
garden, with no power in him or about him but that of a soul made by a long 
life of thought and 
action, he still saw a great mage. And so it troubled him considerably that 
Sparrow-hawk had a wife.

A wife, a daughter, a stepson… Mages had no family. A common sorcerer like 
Alder might marry or might not, but the men of true power were celibate. 
Alder could imagine this man riding a dragon, that was easy enough, but to 
think of him as a husband 
and father was another matter. He couldn't manage it. He tried. He asked, 
"Your─wife─She's with her son, then?"

Sparrowhawk came back from far away. His eyes had been on the western gulfs. 
"No," he said. "She's in Havnor. With the king."

After a while, coming all the way back, he added, "She went there with our 
daughter just after the Long Dance. Lebannen sent for them, to take counsel. 
Maybe on the same matter that brings you here to me. We'll see… But the 
truth is, I'm tired this 
evening, and not much disposed to weighing heavy matters. And you look tired 
too. So a bowl of soup, maybe, and another glass of wine, and sleep? And 
we'll talk in the morning."

"All with pleasure, lord," Alder said, "but for the sleep. That's what I 
fear."

It took the old man a while to register this, but then he said, "You fear to 
sleep?"

"Dreams."

"Ah." A keen glance from the dark eyes under eyebrows grown tangled and half 
grey. "You had a good nap there in the grass, I think."

"The sweetest sleep I've had since I left Roke Island. I'm grateful to you 
for that boon, lord. Maybe it will return tonight. But if not, I struggle 
with my dream, and cry out, and wake, and am a burden to anyone near me. I'll 
sleep outside, if you 
permit."

Sparrowhawk nodded. "It'll be a pleasant night," he said.

It was a pleasant night, cool, the sea wind mild from the south, the stars of 
summer whitening all the sky except where the broad, dark summit of the 
mountain loomed. Alder put down the pallet and sheepskin his host gave him, 
in the grass where he had 
slept before.

Sparrowhawk lay in the little western alcove of the house. He had slept there 
as a boy, when it was Ogion's house and he was Ogion's prentice in wizardry. 
Tehanu had slept there these last fifteen years, since she had been his 
daughter. With her and 
Tenar gone, when he lay in his and Tenar's bed in the dark back corner of the 
single room he felt his solitude, so he had taken to sleeping in the alcove. 
He liked the narrow cot built out from the thick house wall of timbers, right 
under the window. 
He slept well there. But this night he did not.

Before midnight, wakened by a cry, voices outside, he leapt up and went to 
the door. It was only Alder struggling with nightmare, amid sleepy protests 
from the henhouse. Alder shouted in the thick voice of dream and then woke, 
starting up in panic and 
distress. He begged his host's pardon and said he would sit up a while under 
the stars. Sparrowhawk went back to bed. He was not wakened again by Alder, 
but he had a bad dream of his own.

He was standing by a wall of stone near the top of a long hillside of dry 
grey grass that ran down from dimness into the dark. He knew he had been 
there before, had stood there before, but he did not know when, or what place 
it was. Someone was 
standing on the other side of the wall, the downhill side, not far away. He 
could not see the face, only that it was a tall man, cloaked. He knew that he 
knew him. The man spoke to him, using his true name. He said, "You will soon 
be here, Ged."

Cold to the bone, he sat up, staring to see the space of the house about him, 
to draw its reality around him like a blanket. He looked out the window at 
the stars. The cold came into his heart then. They were not the stars of 
summer, beloved, familiar, 
the Cart, the Falcon, the Dancers, the Heart of the Swan. They were other 
stars, the small, still stars of the dry land, that never rise or set. He had 
known their names, once, when he knew the names of things.

"Avert!" he said aloud and made the gesture to turn away misfortune that he 
had learned when he was ten years old. His gaze went to the open doorway of 
the house, the corner behind the door, where he thought to see darkness 
taking shape, clotting 
together and rising up.

But his gesture, though it had no power, woke him. The shadows behind the 
door were only shadows. The stars out the window were the stars of Earthsea, 
paling in the first reflection of the dawn.

He sat holding his sheepskin up round his shoulders, watching those stars 
fade as they dropped west, watching the growing brightness, the colors of 
light, the play and change of coming day. There was a grief in him, he did 
not know why, a pain and 
yearning as for something dear and lost, forever lost. He was used to that; 
he had held much dear, and lost much; but this sadness was so great it did 
not seem to be his own. He felt a sadness at the very heart of things, a 
grief even in the coming of 
the light. It clung to him from his dream, and stayed with him when he got up.

He lit a little fire in the big hearth and went to the peach trees and the 
henhouse to gather breakfast. Alder came in from the path that ran north 
along the cliff top; he had gone for a walk at first light, he said. He 
looked jaded, and Sparrowhawk 
was struck again by the sadness in his face, which echoed the deep aftermood 
of his own dream.

They had a cup of the warmed barley gruel the country people of Gont drink, a 
boiled egg, a peach; they ate by the hearth, for the morning air in the 
shadow of the mountain was too cold for sitting outdoors. Sparrowhawk looked 
after his livestock: fed 
the chickens, scattered grain for doves, let the goats into the pasture. When 
he came back they sat again on the bench in the dooryard. The sun was not 
over the mountain yet, but the air had grown dry and warm.

"Now tell me what brings you here, Alder. But since you came by Roke, tell me 
first if things are well in the Great House."

"I did not enter it, my lord."

"Ah." A neutral tone but a sharp glance.

"I was only in the Immanent Grove."

"Ah." A neutral tone, a neutral glance. "Is the Patterner well?"

"He told me, 'Carry my love and honor to my lord and say to him: I wish we 
walked in the Grove together as we used to do.'"

Sparrowhawk smiled a little sadly. After a while he said, "So. But he sent 
you to me with more to say than that, I think."

"I will try to be brief."

"Man, we have all day before us. And I like a story told from the beginning."

So Alder told him his story from the beginning.

He was a witch's son, born in the town of Elini on Taon, the Isle of the 
Harpers.

Taon is at the southern end of the Sea of Ea, not far from where Solea lay 
before the sea whelmed it. That was the ancient heart of Earthsea. All those 
islands had states and cities, kings and wizards, when Havnor was a land of 
feuding tribesmen and 
Gont a wilderness ruled by bears. People born on Ea or Ebea, Enlad or Taon, 
though they may be a ditchdigger's daughter or a witch's son, consider 
themselves to be descendants of the Elder Mages, sharing the lineage of the 
warriors who died in the dark 
years for Queen Elfarran. Therefore they often have a fine courtesy of 
manner, though sometimes an undue haughtiness, and a generous, uncalculating 
turn of mind and speech, a way of soaring above mere fact and prose, which 
those whose minds stay close 
to merchandise distrust. "Kites without strings," say the rich men of Havnor 
of such people. But they do not say it in the hearing of the king, Lebannen 
of the House of Enlad.

The best harps in Earthsea are made on Taon, and there are schools of music 
there, and many famous singers of the Lays and Deeds were born or learned 
their art there. Elini, however, is just a market town in the hills, with no 
music about it, Alder 
said; and his mother was a poor woman, though not, as he put it, hungry poor. 
She had a birthmark, a red stain from the right eyebrow and ear clear down 
over her shoulder. Many women and men with such a blemish or difference about 
them become witches 
or sorcerers perforce, "marked for it," people say. Blackberry learned spells 
and could do the most ordinary kind of witchery; she had no real gift for it, 
but she had a way about her that was almost as good as the gift itself. She 
made a living, and 
trained her son as well as she could, and saved enough to prentice him to the 
sorcerer who gave him his true name.

Of his father Alder said nothing. He knew nothing. Blackberry had never 
spoken of him. Though seldom celibate, witches seldom kept company more than 
a night or two with any man, and it was a rare thing for a witch to marry a 
man. Far more often two of 
them lived their lives together, and that was called witch marriage or 
she-troth. A witch's child, then, had a mother or two mothers, but no father. 
That went without saying, and Sparrowhawk asked nothing on that score; but he 
asked about Alder's 
training.

The sorcerer Gannet had taught Alder the few words he knew of the True 
Speech, and some spells of finding and illusion, at which Alder had shown, he 
said, no talent at all. But Gannet took enough interest in the boy to 
discover his true gift. Alder was 
a mender. He could rejoin. He could make whole. A broken tool, a knife blade 
or an axle snapped, a pottery bowl shattered: he could bring the fragments 
back together without joint or seam or weakness. So his master sent him about 
seeking various spells 
of mending, which he found mostly among witches of the island, and he worked 
with them and by himself to learn to mend.

"That is a kind of healing," Sparrowhawk said. "No small gift, nor easy 
craft."

"It was a joy to me," Alder said, with a shadow of a smile in his face. 
"Working out the spells, and finding sometimes how to use one of the True 
Words in the work… To put back together a barrel that's dried, the staves 
all fallen in from the 
hoops─that's a real pleasure, seeing it build up again, and swell out in the 
right curve, and stand there on its bottom ready for the wine…There was a 
harper from Meoni, a great harper, oh, he played like a storm on the high 
hills, like a tempest on 
the sea. He was hard on the harp strings, twanging and pulling them in the 
passion of his art, so they'd break at the very height and flight of the 
music. And so he hired me to be there near him when he played, and when he 
broke a string I'd mend it 
quick as the note itself, and he'd play on."

Sparrowhawk nodded with the warmth of a fellow professional talking shop. 
"Have you mended glass?" he asked.

"I have, but it's a long, nasty job," Alder said, "with all the tiny little 
bits and speckles glass goes to."

"But a big hole in the heel of a stocking can be worse," Sparrowhawk said, 
and they discussed mending for a while longer, before Alder returned to his 
story.

He had become a mender, then, a sorcerer with a modest practice and a local 
reputation for his gift. When he was about thirty, he went to the principal 
city of the island, Meoni, with the harper, who was playing for a wedding 
there. A woman sought him 
out in their lodging, a young woman, not trained as a witch; but she had a 
gift, she said, the same as his, and wanted him to teach her. And indeed she 
had a greater gift than his. Though she knew not a word of the Old Speech, 
she could put a smashed 
jug back together or mend a frayed-out rope just with the movements of her 
hands and a wordless song she sang under her breath, and she had healed 
broken limbs of animals and people, which Alder had never dared try to do.

So rather than his teaching her, they put their skills together and taught 
each other more than either had ever known. She came back to Elini and lived 
with Alder's mother Blackberry, who taught her various useful appearances and 
effects and ways of 
impressing customers, if not much actual witch knowledge. Lily was her name; 
and Lily and Alder worked together there and in all the hill towns nearby, as 
their reputation grew.

"And I came to love her," Alder said. His voice had changed when he began to 
speak of her, losing its hesitancy, growing urgent and musical.

"Her hair was dark, but with a shining of red gold in it," he said.

There was no way he could hide his love from her, and she knew it and 
returned it. Whether she was a witch now or not, she said she did not care; 
she said the two of them were born to be together, in their work and in their 
life; she loved him and 
would be married to him.

So they were married, and lived in very great happiness for a year, and half 
a second year.

"Nothing was wrong at all until the time came for the child to be born," 
Alder said. "But it was late, and then very late. The midwives tried to bring 
on the birth with herbs and spells, but it was as if the child would not let 
her bear it. It would 
not be separated from her. It would not be born. And it was not born. It took 
her with it."

After a while he said, "We had great joy."

"I see that."

"And my sorrow was in that degree."


The old man nodded.

"I could bear it," Alder said. "You know how it is. There was not much reason 
to be living that I could see, but I could bear it."

"Yes."

"But in the winter. Two months after her death. There was a dream came to me. 
She was in the dream."

‘Tell it.

"I stood on a hillside. Along the top of the hill and running down the slope 
was a wall, low, like a boundary wall between sheep pastures. She was 
standing across the wall from me, below it. It was darker there."

Sparrowhawk nodded once. His face had gone rock hard.

"She was calling to me. I heard her voice saying my name, and I went to her. 
I knew she was dead, I knew it in the dream, but I was glad to go. I couldn't 
see her clear, and I went to her to see her, to be with her. And she reached 
out across the wall. 
It was no higher than my heart. I had thought she might have the child with 
her, but she did not. She was reaching her hands out to me, and so I reached 
out to her, and we took each others hands."

"You touched?"

"I wanted to go to her, but I could not cross the wall. My legs would not 
move. I tried to draw her to me, and she wanted to come, it seemed as if she 
could, but the wall was there between us. We couldn't get over it. So she 
leaned across to me and 
kissed my mouth and said my name. And she said, 'Set me free!'

"I thought if I called her by her true name maybe I could free her, bring her 
across that wall, and I said, 'Come with me, Mevre!' But she said, 'That's 
not my name, Hara, that's not my name any more.' And she let go my hands, 
though I tried to hold 
her. She cried, 'Set me free, Hara!' But she was going down into the dark. It 
was all dark down that hillside below the wall. I called her name and her 
use-name and all the dear names I had had for her, but she went on away. So 
then I woke."

Sparrowhawk gazed long and keenly at his visitor. "You gave me your name, 
Hara," he said.

Alder looked a little stunned, and took a couple of long breaths, but he 
looked up with desolate courage. "Who could I better trust it with?" he said.

Sparrowhawk thanked him gravely. "I will try to deserve your trust," he said. 
"Tell me, do you know what that place is─that wall?"

"I did not know it then. Now I know you have crossed it."

"Yes. I've been on that hill. And crossed the wall, by the power and art I 
used to have. And I've gone down to the cities of the dead, and spoken to men 
I had known living, and sometimes they answered me. But Hara, you are the 
first man I ever knew or 
heard of, among all the great mages in the lore of Roke or Paln or the 
Enlades, who ever touched, ho ever kissed his love across that wall."

Alder sat with his head bowed and his hands clenched.

"Will you tell me: what was her touch like? Were her hands warm? Was she cold 
air and shadow, or like a living woman? Forgive my questions."

"I wish I could answer them, my lord. On Roke the summoner asked the same. 
But I can't answer truly. My longing for her was so great, I wished so much─
it could be I wished her to be as she was in life. But I don't know. In dream 
not all things are 
clear."

"In dream, no. But I never heard of any man coming to the wall in dream. It 
is a place a wizard may seek to come to, if he must, if he's learned the way 
and has the power. But without the knowledge and the power, only the dying can
─"

And then he broke off, remembering his dream of the night before.

"I took it for a dream," Alder said. "It troubled me, but I cherished it. It 
was like a harrow on my heart's ground to think of it, and yet I held to that 
pain, held it close to me. I wanted it. I hoped to dream again."

"Did you?"

"Yes. I dreamed again."


He looked unseeing into the blue gulf of air and ocean west of where they 
sat. Low and faint across the tranquil sea lay the sunlit hills of Kameber. 
Behind them the sun was breaking bright over the mountains northern shoulder.

"It was nine days after the first dream. I was in that same place, but high 
up on the hill. I saw the wall below me across the slope. And I ran down the 
hill, calling out her name, sure of seeing her. There was someone there. But 
when I came close, I 
saw it wasn't Lily. It was a man, and he was stooping at the wall, as if he 
was repairing it. I said to him, 'Where is she, where is Lily?' He didn't 
answer or look up. I saw what he was doing. He wasn't working to mend the 
wall but to unbuild it, 
prying with his fingers at a great stone. The stone never moved, and he said, 
'Help me, Hara!' Then I saw that it was my teacher, Gannet, who named me. He 
has been dead these five years. He kept prying and straining at the stone 
with his fingers, and 
said my name again─'Help me, set me free.' And he stood up and reached out 
to me across the wall, as she had done, and caught my hand. But his hand 
burned, with fire or with cold, I don't know, but the touch of it burned me 
so that I pulled away, and 
the pain and fear of it woke me from the dream."

He held his hand out as he spoke, showing a darkness on the back and palm 
like an old bruise.

"I've learned not to let them touch me," he said in a low voice.

Ged looked at Alder's mouth. There was a darkening across his lips too.

"Hara, you've been in mortal danger," he said, also softly.

"There is more."

Forcing his voice against silence, Alder went on with his story.

The next night when he slept again he found himself on that dim hill and saw 
the wall that dropped down from the hilltop across the slope. He went down 
towards it, hoping to find his wife there. "I didn't care if she couldn't 
cross it, if I couldn't, 
so long as I could see her and talk to her," he said. But if she was there he 
never saw her among all the others: for as he came closer to the wall he saw 
a crowd of shadowy people on the other side, some clear and some dim, some he 
seemed to know and 
others he did not know, and all of them reached out their hands to him as he 
approached and called him by his name: "Hara! let us come with you! Hara, set 
us free!"

"It's a terrible thing to hear one's true name called by strangers," Alder 
said, "and it's a terrible thing to be called by the dead."

He tried to turn and climb back up the hill, away from the wall; but his legs 
had the awful weakness of dream and would not carry him. He fell to his knees 
to keep himself from being drawn down to the wall, and called out for help, 
though there was no 
one to help him; and so he woke in terror.

Since then, every night that he slept deeply, he found himself standing on 
the hill in the dry grey grass above the wall, and the dead would crowd thick 
and shadowy below it, pleading and crying to him, calling his name.

"I wake," he said, "and I'm in my own room. I'm not there, on that hillside. 
But I know they are. And I have to sleep. I try to wake often, and to sleep 
in daylight when I can, but I have to sleep at last. And then I am there, and 
they are there. And I 
can't go up the hill. If I move it's always downhill, towards the wall. 
Sometimes I can turn my back to them, but then I think I hear Lily among 
them, crying to me. And I turn to look for her. And they reach out to me."

He looked down at his hands gripping each other.

"What am I to do?" he said.

Sparrowhawk said nothing.

After a long time Alder said, "The harper I told you of was a good friend to 
me. After a while he saw there was something amiss, and when I told him that 
I couldn't sleep for fear of my dreams of the dead, he urged me arid helped 
me to take ship's 
passage to Ea, to speak to a grey wizard there." He meant a man trained in 
the School on Roke. "As soon as that wizard heard what my dreams were he said 
I must go to Roke."

"What is his name?"

"Beryl. He serves the Prince of Ea, who is Lord of the Isle of Taon."

The old man nodded.

"He had no help to give me, he said, but his word was as good as gold to the 
ship's master. So I went on the water again. That was a long journey, 
coasting clear round Havnor and down the Inmost Sea. I thought maybe being on 
the water, far from Taon, 
always farther, I might leave the dream behind me. The wizard on Ea called 
that place in my dream the dry land, and I thought maybe I'd be going away 
from it, going on the sea. But every night I was there on the hillside. And 
more than once in the 
night, as time went on. Twice, or three times, or every time my eyes close, 
I'm on the hill, and the wall below me, and the voices calling me. So I'm 
like a man crazy with the pain of a wound who can find peace only in sleep, 
but the sleep is my 
torment, with the pain and anguish of the wretched dead all crowding at the 
wall, and my fear of them."

The sailors soon began to shun him, he said, at night because he cried out 
and woke them with his miserable wakenings, and in daylight because they 
thought there was a curse on him or a gebbeth in him.

"And no relief for you on Roke?"

"In the Grove," Alder said, and his face changed entirely when he said the 
word.

Sparrowhawk's face had the same look for a moment.

"The Master Patterner took me there, under those trees, and I could sleep. 
Even at night I could sleep. In daylight, if the sun's on me─it was like 
that in the afternoon, yesterday, here─if the warmth of the sun's on me and 
the red of the sun shines 
through my eyelids, I don't fear to dream. But in the Grove there was no fear 
at all, and I could love the night again."

"Tell me how it was when you came to Roke."

Though hampered by weariness, anguish, and awe, Alder had the silver tongue 
of his island; and what he left out for fear of going on too long or telling 
the Archmage what he already knew, his listener could well imagine, 
remembering when he himself 
first came to the Isle of the Wise as a boy of fifteen.

When Alder left the ship at the docks at Thwil Town, one of the sailors had 
drawn the rune of the Closed Door on the top of the gangplank to prevent his 
ever coming back aboard. Alder noticed it, but he thought the sailor had good 
cause. He felt 
himself ill-omened; he felt he bore darkness in him. That made him shyer than 
he would have been in any case in a strange town. And Thwil was a very 
strange town.

"The streets lead you awry," Sparrowhawk said.

"They do that, my lord!─I'm sorry, my tongue will obey my heart, and not you
─"

"Never mind. I was used to it once. I can be Lord Goatherd again, if it eases 
your speech. Go on."

Misdirected by those he asked, or misunderstanding the directions, Alder 
wandered about the hilly little labyrinth of Thwil Town with the School 
always in sight and never able to get to it, until, having reached despair, 
he came to a plain door in a 
bare wall on a dull square. After staring at it a while he recognised the 
wall was the one he had been trying to get to. He knocked, and a man with a 
quiet face and quiet eyes opened the door.

Alder was ready to say that he had been sent by the wizard Beryl of Ea with a 
message for the Master Summoner, but he didn't have a chance to speak. The 
Doorkeeper gazed at him a moment and said mildly, "You cannot bring them into 
this house, friend."

Alder did not ask who it was he could not bring with him. He knew. He had 
slept scarcely at all the past nights, snatching fragments of sleep and 
waking in terror, dozing off in the daylight, seeing the dry grass sloping 
down through the sunlit deck of 
the ship, the wall of stones across the waves of the sea. And waking, the 
dream was in him, with him, around him, veiled, and he could hear, always, 
faintly, through all the noises of wind and sea, the voices that cried his 
name. He did not know if he 
was awake now or asleep. He was crazy with pain and fear and weariness.

"Keep them out," he said, "and let me in, for pity's sake let me in!"

"Wait here," the man said, as gently as before. "There's a bench," pointing. 
And he closed the door.

Alder went and sat down on the stone bench. He remembered that, and he 
remembered some boys of fifteen or so looking curiously at him as they went 
by and entered that door, but what happened for some while after he could 
recall only in fragments.

The Doorkeeper came back with a young man with the staff and cloak of a Roke 
wizard. Then Alder was in a room, which he understood was in a lodging house. 
There the Master Summoner came and tried to talk with him. But Alder by then 
was not able to 
talk. Between sleep and waking, between the sunlit room and the dim grey 
hill, between the Summoner's voice speaking to him and the voices calling him 
across the wall, he could not think and he could not move, in the living 
world. But in the dim world 
where the voices called, he thought it would be easy to walk on down those 
few steps to the wall and let the reaching hands take him and hold him. If he 
was one of them they would let him be, he thought.

Then, as he remembered, the sunlit room was altogether gone, and he was on 
the grey hill. But with him stood the Summoner of Roke: a big, broad, 
dark-skinned man, with a great staff of yew wood that shimmered in the dim 
place.

The voices had ceased calling. The people, the crowding figures at the wall, 
were gone. He could hear a distant rustle and a kind of sobbing as they went 
down into the darkness, went away.

The Summoner stepped to the wall and put his hands on it.

The stones had been loosened here and there. A few had fallen and lay on the 
dry grass. Alder felt that he should pick them up and replace them, mend the 
wall, but he did not.

The Summoner turned to him and asked, "Who brought you here?"

"My wife, Mevre."

"Summon her here."

Alder stood dumb. At last he opened his mouth, but it was not his wife's true 
name that he spoke but her use-name, the name he had called her in life. He 
said it aloud, "Lily…" The sound of it was not like a white flower, but like 
a pebble dropping on 
dust.

No sound. Stars shone small and steady in the black sky. Alder had never 
looked up at the sky in this place before. He did not recognise the stars.

"Mevre!" said the Summoner, and in his deep voice spoke some words in the Old 
Speech.

Alder felt the breath go out of him and could barely stand. But nothing 
stirred on the long slope that led down to formless dark.

Then there was some movement, something lighter, coming up the hill, coming 
slowly nearer. Alder shook with fear and yearning, and whispered, "Oh my dear 
love."

But the figure as it came closer was too small to be Lily. He saw it was a 
child of twelve or so, girl or boy he could not tell. It paid no heed to him 
or the Summoner and never looked across the wall, but settled down just under 
it. When Alder came 
closer and looked down he saw the child was prying and pulling at the stones, 
trying to loosen one, then another.

The Summoner was whispering in the Old Speech. The child glanced up once 
indifferently and went on tugging at the stones with its thin fingers that 
seemed to have no strength in them.

This was so horrible to Alder that his head spun; he tried to turn away, and 
beyond that he could remember nothing till he woke in the sunny room, lying 
in bed, weak and sick and cold.

People looked after him: the aloof, smiling woman who kept the lodging house, 
and a brown-skinned, stocky old man who came with the Doorkeeper. Alder took 
him for a physician-sorcerer. Only after he had seen him with his staff of 
olive wood did he 
understand that he was the Herbal, the master of healing of the School on 
Roke.

His presence brought solace, and he was able to give Alder sleep. He brewed 
up a tea and had Alder drink it, and lighted some herb that burned slowly 
with a smell like the dark earth under pine woods, and sitting nearby began a 
long, soft chant. "But I 
must not sleep," Alder protested, feeling sleep coming into him like a great 
dark tide. The healer laid his warm hand on Alder's hand. Then peace came 
into Alder, and he slipped into sleep without fear. So long as the healer's 
hand was on his, or on 
his shoulder, it kept him from the dark hillside and the wall of stones.

He woke to eat a little, and soon the Master Herbal was there again with the 
tepid, insipid tea and the earth-smelling smoke and the dull untuneful chant 
and the touch of his hand; and Alder could have rest.

The healer had all his duties at the School, so could be there only some 
hours of the night. Alder got enough rest in three nights that he could eat 
and walk about the town a little in the day and think and talk coherently. On 
the fourth morning the 
three masters, the Herbal, the Doorkeeper, and the Summoner, came to his room.

Alder bowed to the Summoner with dread, almost distrust, in his heart. The 
Herbal was also a great mage, but his art was not altogether different from 
Alder's own craft, so they had a kind of understanding; and there was the 
great kindness of his hand. 
The Summoner, though, dealt not with bodily things but with the spirit, with 
the minds and wills of men, with ghosts, with meanings. His art was arcane, 
dangerous, full of risk and threat. And he had stood beside Alder there, not 
in the body, on the 
boundary, at the wall. With him the darkness and the fear returned.

None of the three mages said anything at first. If they had one thing in 
common, it was a great capacity for silence.

So Alder spoke, trying to say what was in his heart, for nothing less would 
do.

"If I did some wrong that brought me to that place, or brought my wife to me 
there, or the other souls, if I can mend or undo what I did, I will. But I 
don't know what it is I did."

"Or what you are," the Summoner said.

Alder was mute.

"Not many of us know who or what we are," said the Doorkeeper. "A glimpse is 
all we get."

"Tell us how you first went to the wall of stones," the Summoner said.

And Alder told them.

The mages listened in silence and said nothing for a while after he was done. 
Then the Summoner asked, "Have you thought what it means to cross that wall?"

"I know I could not come back."

"Only mages can cross the wall living, and only at utmost need. The Herbal 
may go with a sufferer all the way to that wall, but if the sick man crosses 
it, he does not follow."

The Summoner was so tall and broad-bodied and dark that, looking at him, 
Alder thought of a bear.

"My art of Summoning empowers us to call the dead back across the wall for a 
brief time, a moment, if there is need to do so. I myself question if any 
need could justify so great a breach in the law and balance of the world. I 
have never made that 
spell. Nor have I crossed the wall. The Archmage did, and the King with him, 
to heal the wound in the world the wizard called Cob made."

"And when the Archmage did not return, Thorion, who was our Summoner then, 
went down into the dry land to seek him," the Herbal said. "He came back, but 
changed."

"There is no need to speak of that," the big man said.

"Maybe there is," said the Herbal. "Maybe Alder needs to know it. Thorion 
trusted his strength too far, I think. He stayed there too long. He thought 
he could summon himself back into life, but what came back was only his 
skill, his power, his 
ambition─the will to live that gives no life. Yet we trusted him, because we 
had loved him. So he devoured us. Until Irian destroyed him."

Far from Roke, on the Isle of Gont, Alder's listener interrupted him─"What 
name was that?" Sparrowhawk asked.

"Irian, he said."

"Do you know that name?"

"No, my lord."

"Nor I." After a pause Sparrowhawk went on softly, as if unwillingly. "But I 
saw Thorion, there. In the dry land, where he had risked going to seek me. It 
grieved me to see him there. I said to him he might go back across the wall." 
His face went dark 
and grim. "That was ill spoken. All is spoken ill between the living and the 
dead. But I had loved him too."

They sat in silence. Sparrowhawk got up abruptly to stretch his arms and rub 
his thighs. They both moved about a bit. Alder got a drink of water from the 
well. Sparrowhawk fetched out a garden spade and the new handle to fit to it, 
and set to work 
smoothing the oaken shaft and tapering the end that would go in the socket.

He said, "Go on, Alder," and Alder went on with his story.

The two masters had been silent for a while after the Herbal spoke about 
Thorion. Alder got up the courage to ask them about a matter that had been 
much on his mind: how those who died came to the wall, and how the mages came 
there.

The Summoner answered promptly: "It is a spirit journey."

The old healer was more hesitant. "It's not in the body that we cross the 
wall, since the body of one who dies stays here. And if a mage goes there in 
vision, his sleeping body is still here, alive. And so we call that voyager… 
we call what makes that 
journey from the body, the soul, the spirit."

"But my wife took my hand," Alder said. He could not say again to them that 
she had kissed his mouth. "I felt her touch."

"So it seemed to you," the Summoner said.

"If they touched bodily, if a link was made," the Herbal said to the 
Summoner, "might that not be why the other dead can come to him, call to him, 
even touch him?"

"That is why he must resist them," said the Summoner, with a glance at Alder. 
His eyes were small, fiery.

Alder felt it as an accusation, and not a fair one. He said, "I try to resist 
them, my lord. I have tried. But there are so many of them─and she's with 
them─and they're suffering, crying out to me."

"They cannot suffer," the Summoner said. "Death ends all suffering."

"Maybe the shadow of pain is pain," said the Herbal. "There are mountains in 
that land, and they are called Paln."

The Doorkeeper had scarcely spoken until now. He said in his quiet, easy 
voice, "Alder is a mender, not a breaker. I don't think he can break that 
link."

"If he made it he can break it," the Summoner said.

"Did he make it?"

"I have no such art, my lord," Alder said, so frightened by what they were 
saying that he spoke angrily.

"Then I must go down among them," said the Summoner.

"No, my friend," said the Doorkeeper, and the old Herbal said, "You last of 
us all."

"But this is my art."

"And ours."

"Who then?"

The Doorkeeper said, "It seems Alder is our guide. Having come to us for 
help, maybe he can help us. Let us all go with him in his vision─to the 
wall, though not across it."

So that night, when late and fearfully Alder let sleep overcome him, and 
found himself on the grey hill, the others were with him: the Herbal, a warm 
presence in the chill; the Doorkeeper, elusive and silvery as starlight; and 
the massive Summoner, the 
bear, a dark strength.

This time they were standing not where the hill ran down into the dark, but 
on the near slope, looking up to the top. The wall in this place ran along 
the crest of the hill and was low, little more than knee height. Above it the 
sky with its few small 
stars was perfectly black.

Nothing moved.

It would be hard to walk uphill to the wall, Alder thought. Always before it 
had been below him.

But if he could go to it maybe Lily would be there, as she had been the first 
time. Maybe he could take her hand, and the mages would bring her back with 
him. Or he could step over the wall where it was so low and come to her.

He began to walk up the hill. It was easy, it was no trouble, he was almost 
there. "Hara!" The Summoner's deep voice called him back like a noose round 
his neck, a jerked leash. He stumbled, staggered forward one step more, 
almost at the wall, dropped 
to his knees and reached out to the stones. He was crying, "Save me!" but to 
whom? To the mages, or to the shadows beyond the wall?

Then hands were on his shoulders, living hands, strong and warm, and he was 
in his room, with the healers hands indeed on his shoulders, and the 
werelight burning white around them. And there were four men in the room with 
him, not three.

The old Herbal sat down on the bed with him and soothed him a while, for he 
was shaking, shuddering, sobbing. "I can't do it," he kept saying, but still 
he did not know if he was talking to the mages or to the dead.

When the fear and pain began to lessen, he felt tired beyond bearing, and 
looked almost without interest at the man who had come into the room. His 
eyes were the color of ice, his hair and skin were white. A far Northerner, 
from Enwas or Bereswek, 
Alder thought him.

This man said to the mages, "What are you doing, my friends?"

"Taking risks, Azver," said the old Herbal.

"Trouble at the border, Patterner," said the Summoner.

Alder could feel the respect they had for this man, their relief that he was 
there, as they told him briefly what the trouble was.

"If he'll come with me, will you let him go?" the Patterner asked when they 
were done, and turning to Alder, "You need not fear your dreams in the 
Immanent Grove. And so we need not fear your dreams."

They all assented. The Patterner nodded and vanished. He was not there.

He had not been there; he had been a sending, a presentment. It was the first 
time Alder had seen the great powers of these masters made manifest, and it 
would have unnerved him if he had not been past amazement and fear.

He followed the Doorkeeper out into the night, through the streets, past the 
walls of the School, across fields under a high round hill, and along a 
stream singing its water music softly in the darkness of its banks. Ahead of 
them was a high wood, the 
trees crowned with grey starlight.

The Master Patterner came along the path to meet them, looking just as he had 
in the room. He and the Doorkeeper spoke for a minute, and then Alder 
followed the Patterner into the Grove.

"The trees are dark," Alder said to Sparrowhawk, "but it isn't dark under 
them. There is a light─a lightness there."

His listener nodded, smiling a little.

"As soon as I came there, I knew I could sleep. I felt as if I'd been asleep 
all along, in an evil dream, and now, here, I was truly awake: so I could 
truly sleep. There was a place he took me to, in among the roots of a huge 
tree, all soft with the 
fallen leaves of the tree, and he told me I could lie there. And I did, and I 
slept. I cannot tell you the sweetness of it."

The midday sun had grown strong; they went indoors, and the host set out 
bread and cheese and a bit of dried meat. Alder looked round him as they ate. 
The house had only the one long room with its little western alcove, but it 
was large and darkly 
airy, strongly built, with wide boards and beams, a gleaming floor, a deep 
stone fireplace. "This is a noble house," Alder said.

"An old one. They call it the Old Mage's house. Not for me, nor for my master 
Aihal who lived here, but for his master Heleth, who with him stilled the 
great earthquake. It's a good house."

Alder slept a while again under the trees with the sun shining on him through 
the moving leaves. His host rested too, but not long; when Alder woke, there 
was a good-sized basket of the small golden plums under the tree, and 
Sparrowhawk was up in the 
goat pasture mending a fence. Alder went to help him, but the job was done. 
The goats, however, were long gone.

"Neither of 'em's in milk," Sparrowhawk grumbled as they returned to the 
house. "They've got nothing to do but find new ways through the fence. I keep 
them for exasperation… The first spell I ever learned was to call goats from 
wandering. My aunt 
taught me. It's no more use to me now than if I sang them a love song. I'd 
better go see if they've got into the widower's vegetables. You don't have 
the kind of sorcery to charm a goat to come, do you?"

The two brown nannies were indeed invading a cabbage patch on the outskirts 
of the village. Alder repeated the spell Sparrowhawk told him:

Noth hierth malk man, hiolk ban merth ban!

The goats gazed at him with alert disdain and moved away a little. Shouting 
and a stick got them out of the cabbages onto the path, and there Sparrowhawk 
produced some plums from his pocket. Promising, offering, and cajoling, he 
slowly led the truants 
back into their pasture.

"They're odd creatures," he said, latching the gate. "You never know where 
you are with a goat."

Alder thought that he never knew where he was with his host, but did not say 
it.

When they were sitting in the shade again, Sparrowhawk said, "The Patterner 
isn't a Northerner, he's a Karg. Like my wife. He was a warrior of Karego-At. 
The only man I know of who ever came from those lands to Roke. The Kargs have 
no wizards. They 
distrust all sorcery. But they've kept more knowledge of the Old Powers of 
the Earth than we have. This man, Azver, when he was young, he heard some 
tale of the Immanent Grove, and it came to him that the center of all the 
earth's powers must be there. 
So he left his gods and his native tongue behind him and made his way to 
Roke. He stood on our doorstep and said, 'Teach me to live in that forest!' 
And we taught him, till he began to teach us… So he became our Master 
Patterner. He's not a gentle 
man, but he is to be trusted."

"I never could fear him," Alder said. "It was easy to be with him. He'd take 
me far into the wood with him."

They were both silent, both thinking of the glades and aisles of that wood, 
the sunlight and starlight in its leaves.

"It is the heart of the world," Alder said.

Sparrowhawk looked up eastward at the slopes of Gont Mountain, dark with 
trees. "I'll go walking there," he said, "in the forest, come autumn."

After a while he said, "Tell me what counsel the Patterner had for you, and 
why he sent you here to me."

"He said, my lord, that you knew more of the… the dry land than any living 
man, and so maybe you would understand what it means that the souls there 
come to me as they do, begging me for freedom."

"Did he say how he thinks it came about?"

"Yes. He said that maybe my wife and I didn't know how to be parted, only how 
to be joined. That it was not my doing, but was maybe ours together, because 
we drew each to the other, like drops of quicksilver. But the Master 
Sum-moner didn't agree. He 
said that only a great power of magery could so transgress the order of the 
world. Because my old master Gannet also touched me across the wall, the 
Summoner said maybe it was a mage power in him which had been hidden or 
disguised in life, but now was 
revealed."

Sparrowhawk brooded a while. "When I lived on Roke," he said, "I might have 
seen it as the Summoner does. There I knew no power stronger than what we 
call magery. Not even the Old Powers of the Earth, I thought… If the 
Summoner you met is the man I 
think, he came as a boy to Roke. My old friend Vetch of Iffish sent him to 
study with us. And he never left. That's a difference between him and Azver 
the Patterner. Azver lived till he was grown as a warrior's son, a warrior 
himself, among men and 
women, in the thick of life. Matters that the walls of the School keep out, 
he knows in his flesh and blood. He knows that men and women love, make love, 
marry… Having lived these fifteen years outside the walls, I incline to 
think Azver might be on 
the better track. The bond between you and your wife is stronger than the 
division between life and death."

Alder hesitated. "I've thought it might be so. But it seems… shameless to 
think it. We loved each other, more than I can say we loved each other, but 
was our love greater than any other before us? Was it greater than Morred's 
and Elfarran's?"

"Maybe not less."

"How can that be?"

Sparrowhawk looked at him as if saluting something, and answered him with a 
care that made Alder feel honored. "Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's 
a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it 
ends in its beauty, 
it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that 
escapes the years. That was the love of the Young King and Elfarran. That was 
your love, Hara. It wasn't greater than Morred's, but was his greater than 
yours?"

Alder said nothing, pondering.

"There's no less or greater in an absolute thing," Sparrowhawk said. "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?"

He spoke softly but with fire and energy, then he leaned back, and after a 
minute said, with a half smile, "Every oaf of a farm boy sings that, every 
young girl that dreams of love knows it. But it's not a thing the Masters of 
Roke are familiar with. 
The Patterner maybe knew it early. I learned it late. Very late. Not quite 
too late." He looked at Alder, the fire still in his eyes, challenging. "You 
had that," he said.

"I did." Alder drew a deep breath. Presently he said, "Maybe they're there 
together, in the dark land. Morred and Elfarran."

"No," Sparrowhawk said with bleak certainty.

"But if the bond is true, what can break it?"

"There are no lovers there."

"Then what are they, what do they do, there in that land? You've been there, 
you crossed the wall. You walked and spoke with them. Tell me!"

"I will." But Sparrowhawk said nothing for a while. "I don't like to think 
about it," he said. He rubbed his head and scowled. "You saw…You've seen 
those stars. Little, mean stars, that never move. No moon. No sunrise… There 
are roads, if you go down 
the hill. Roads and cities. On the hill there's grass, dead grass, but 
farther down there's only dust and rocks. Nothing grows. Dark cities. The 
multitudes of the dead stand in the streets, or walk on the roads to no end. 
They don't speak. They don't 
touch. They never touch." His voice was low and dry. "There Morred would pass 
Elfarran and never turn his head, and she wouldn't look at him… There's no 
rejoining there, Hara. No bond. The mother doesn't hold her child, there."

"But my wife came to me," Alder said, "she called my name, she kissed my 
mouth!"

"Yes. And since your love wasn't greater than any other mortal love, and 
since you and she aren't mighty wizards whose power might change the laws of 
life and death, therefore, therefore something else is in this. Something is 
happening, is changing. 
Though it happens through you and to you, you are its instrument and not its 
cause."

Sparrowhawk stood up and strode to the beginning of the path along the cliff 
and back to Alder; he was charged, almost quivering with tense energy, like a 
hawk about to stoop down on its prey.

"Did your wife not say to you, when you called her by her true name, That is 
not my name any more─?"

"Yes," Alder whispered.

"But how is that? We who have true names keep them when we die, it's our 
use-name that is forgotten… This is a mystery to the learned, I can tell 
you, but as well as we understand it, a true name is a word in the True 
Speech. That's why only one with 
the gift can know a child's name and give it. And the name binds the being─
alive or dead. All the art of the Summoner lies in that… Yet when the master 
summoned your wife to come by her true name, she didn't come to him. You 
called by her use-name, 
Lily, and she came to you. Did she come to you as to the one who knew her 
truly?"

He gazed at Alder keenly and yet as if he saw more than the man who sat with 
him. After a while he went on, "When my master Aihal died, my wife was here 
with him; and as he was dying he said to her, all is changed, all changed. He 
was looking across 
that wall. From which side I do not know.

"And since that time, indeed there have been changes─a king on Morred's 
throne, and no Archmage of Roke. But more than that, much more. I saw a child 
summon the dragon Kalessin, the Eldest: and Kalessin came to her, calling her 
daughter, as I do. What 
does that mean? What does it mean that dragons have been seen above the 
islands of the west? The king sent to us, sent a ship to Gont Port, asking my 
daughter Tehanu to come and take counsel with him concerning dragons. People 
fear that the old 
covenant is broken, that the dragons will come to burn fields and cities as 
they did before Erreth-Akbe fought with Orm Embar. And now, at the boundary 
of life and death, a soul refuses the bond of her name… I do not understand 
it. All I know is that 
it is changing. It is all changing."

There was no fear in his voice, only fierce exultation.

Alder could not share that. He had lost too much and was too worn out by his 
struggle against forces he could not control or comprehend. But his heart 
rose to that gallantry.

"May it change for the good, my lord," he said.

"Be it so," the old man said. "But change it must."

As the heat went out of the day, Sparrowhawk said he had to walk to the 
village. He carried the basket of plums with a basket of eggs nested in it.

Alder walked with him and they talked. When Alder understood that Sparrowhawk 
bartered fruit and eggs and the other produce of the little farm for barley 
and wheat flour, that the wood he burned was gathered patiently up in the 
forest, that his goats' 
not giving milk meant he must eke out last year's cheese, Alder was amazed: 
how could it be that the Archmage of Earthsea lived from hand to mouth? Did 
his own people not honor him?

When he went with him to the village, he saw women shut their doors when they 
saw the old man coming. The marketer who took his eggs and fruit tallied the 
count on his wooden tablet without a word, his face sullen and his eyes 
lowered. Sparrowhawk 
spoke to him pleasantly, "A good day to you then, Iddi," but got no answer.

"My lord," Alder asked as they walked home, "do they know who you are?"

"No," said the ex-Archmage, with a dry sidelong look. "And yes."

"But─" Alder did not know how to speak his indignation.

"They know I have no power of sorcery, but there's something uncanny about 
me. They know I live with a foreigner, a Kargish woman. They know the girl we 
call our daughter is something like a witch, but worse, because her face and 
hand were burnt away 
by fire, and because she herself burnt up the Lord of Re Albi, or pushed him 
off the cliff, or killed him with the evil eye─their stories vary. They 
honor the house we live in, though, because it was Aihal's and Heleth's 
house, and dead wizards are 
good wizards… You're a townsman, Alder, of an isle of Morred's kingdom. A 
village on Gont is another matter."

"But why do you stay here, lord? Surely the king would do you proper honor─"

"I want no honor," the old man said, with a violence that silenced Alder 
entirely.

They walked on. As they came to the house built at the cliff's edge he spoke 
again. "This is my eyrie," he said.

They had a glass of the red wine with supper, and another sitting out to 
watch the sun set. They did not talk much. Fear of the night, of the dream, 
was coming into Alder.

"I'm no healer," his host said, "but perhaps I can do what the Master Herbal 
did to let you sleep."

Alder looked his question.

"I've been thinking about it, and it seems to me maybe it was no spell at all 
that kept you away from that hillside, but just the touch of a living hand. 
If you like, we can try it."

Alder protested, but Sparrowhawk said, "I'm awake hah0 most nights anyway." 
So the guest lay that night in the low bed in the back corner of the big 
room, and the host sat up beside him, watching the fire and dozing.

He watched Alder, too, and saw him fall asleep at last; and not long after 
that saw him start and shudder in his sleep. He put out his hand and laid it 
on Alder's shoulder as he lay half turned away. The sleeping man stirred a 
little, sighed, relaxed, 
and slept on.

It pleased Sparrowhawk that he could do this much. As good as a wizard, he 
told himself with mild sarcasm.

He was not sleepy, the tension was still in him. He thought about all Alder 
had told him, and what they had talked about in the afternoon. He saw Alder 
stand in the path by the cabbage patch saying the spell to call the goats, 
and the goats' haughty 
indifference to the powerless words. He remembered how he had used to speak 
the name of the Sparrowhawk, the marsh hawk, the grey eagle, calling them 
down from the sky to him in a rush of wings to grasp his arm with iron talons 
and glare at him, eye to 
wrathful, golden eye… None of that any more. He could boast, calling this 
house his eyrie, but he had no wings.

But Tehanu did. The dragon's wings were hers to fly on.

The fire had burned out. He pulled his sheepskin over him more closely, 
leaning his head back against the wall, still keeping his hand on Alder's 
inert, warm shoulder. He liked the man and was sorry for him.

He must remember to ask him to mend the green pitcher, tomorrow.

The grass next to the wall was short, dry, dead. No wind blew to make it move 
or rustle.

He roused up with a start, hah0 rising from the chair, and after a moment of 
bewilderment put his hand back on Alder's shoulder, grasping it a little, and 
whispered, "Hara! Come away, Hara." Alder shuddered, then relaxed. He sighed 
again, turned more 
onto his face and lay still.

Sparrowhawk sat with his hand on the sleeper's arm. How had he himself come 
there, to the wall of stones? He no longer had the power to go there. He had 
no way to find the way. As in the night before, Alder's dream or vision, 
Alder's voyaging soul had 
drawn him with it to the edge of the dark land.

He was wide awake now. He sat gazing at the greyish square of the west 
window, full of stars.

The grass under the wall… It did not grow farther down where the hill 
leveled out into the dim, dry land. He had said to Alder that down there was 
only dust, only rock. He saw that black dust, black rock. Dead stream beds 
where no water ever ran. No 
living thing. No bird, no field mouse cowering, no glitter and buzz of little 
insects, the creatures of the sun. Only the dead, with their empty eyes and 
silent faces.

But did birds not die?

A mouse, a gnat, a goat─a white-and-brown, clever-hoofed, yellow-eyed, 
shameless goat, Sippy who had been Tehanu's pet, and who had died last winter 
at a great age─where was Sippy? Not in the dry land, the dark land. She was 
dead, but she was not 
there. She was where she belonged, in the dirt. In the dirt, in the light, in 
the wind, the leap of water from the rock, the yellow eye of the sun.

Then why, then why…

He watched Alder mend the pitcher. Fat-bellied and jade green, it had been a 
favorite of Tenar's; she had carried it all the way from Oak Farm, years ago. 
It had slipped from his hands the other day as he took it from the shelf. He 
had picked up the 
two big pieces of it and the little fragments with some notion of gluing them 
back together so it could sit out for looks, if never for use again. Every 
time he saw the pieces, which he had put into a basket, his clumsiness had 
outraged him.

Now, fascinated, he watched Alder's hands. Slender, strong, deft, unhurried, 
they cradled the shape of the pitcher, stroking and fitting and settling the 
pieces of pottery, urging and caressing, the thumbs coaxing and guiding the 
smaller fragments into 
place, reuniting them, reassuring them. While he worked he murmured a 
two-word, tuneless chant. They were words of the Old Speech. Ged knew and did 
not know their meaning. Alder's face was serene, all stress and sorrow gone: 
a face so wholly absorbed 
in time and task that timeless calm shone through it.

His hands separated from the pitcher, opening out from it like the sheath of 
a flower opening. It stood on the oak table, whole.

He looked at it with quiet pleasure.

When Ged thanked him, he said, "It was no trouble at all. The breaks were 
very clean. It's a well-made piece, and good clay. It's the shoddy work that 
costs to mend."

"I had a thought how you might find sleep," Ged said.

Alder had waked at first light and had got up, so that his host could go to 
his bed and sleep sound till broad day; but clearly the arrangement would not 
do for long.

"Come along with me," the old man said, and they set off inland on a path 
that skirted the goats' pasture and wound between knolls, little, half-tended 
fields, and inlets of the forest. Gont was a wild-looking place to Alder, 
ragged and random, the 
shaggy mountain always frowning and looming above.

"It seemed to me," Sparrowhawk said as they walked, "if I could do as well as 
the Master Herbal did, keeping you from the hill of the wall only by putting 
my hand on you, that there might be others who could help you. If you have no 
objection to 
animals."

"Animals?"

"You see," Sparrowhawk began, but got no further, interrupted by a strange 
creature bounding down the path towards them. It was bundled in skirts and 
shawls, feathers stuck out in all directions from its head, and it wore high 
leather boots. "O 
Mastawk, O Mastawk!" it shouted.

"Hello, then, Heather. Gently now," said Sparrowhawk. The woman stopped, 
rocking her body, her head-feathers waving, a large grin on her face. "She 
knowed you was a-coming!" she bawled. "She made that hawk's beak with her 
fingers like this, see, she 
did, and she told me go, go, with her hand! She knowed you was a-coming!"

"And so I am."

"To see us?"

"To see you. Heather, this is Master Alder."

"Master Alder," she whispered, quieting suddenly as she included Alder in her 
consciousness. She shrank, drew into herself, looked down at her feet.

She had no leather boots on. Her bare legs were coated from the knee down 
with smooth, brown, drying mud. Her skirts were bunched, caught up into the 
waistband.

"You've been frogging, have you, Heather?"

She nodded vacantly.

"I'll go tell Aunty," she said, beginning in a whisper and ending with a 
bellow, and bolted back the way she had come.

"She's a good soul," Sparrowhawk said. "She used to help my wife. She lives 
with our witch now and helps her. I don't think you'll object to entering a 
witch's house?"

"Never in the world, my lord."

"Many do. Nobles and common folk, wizards and sorcerers."

"Lily my wife was a witch."

Sparrowhawk bowed his head and walked in silence for a while. "How did she 
learn of her gift, Alder?"

"It was born in her. As a child she'd make a torn branch grow on the tree 
again, and other children brought her their broken toys to mend. But when her 
father saw her do that he would strike her hands. Her family were 
considerable persons in their 
town. Respectable persons," Alder said in his even, gentle voice. "They 
didn't want her consorting with witches. Since it would keep her from 
marriage with a respectable man. So she kept all her study to herself. And 
the witches of her town would have 
nothing to do with her, even when she sought to learn from them, for they 
were afraid of her father, you see. Then a rich man came to court her, for 
she was beautiful, as I told you, my lord. More beautiful than I could say. 
And her father told her she 
was to be married. She ran away that night. She lived by herself, wandering, 
for some years. A witch here and there took her in, but she kept herself by 
her skill."

"It's not a big island, Taon."

"Her father wouldn't seek her. He said no tinker witch was his daughter."

Again Sparrowhawk bowed his head. "So she heard of you, and came to you."

"But she taught me more than I could teach her," Alder said earnestly. "It 
was a great gift she had."

"I believe it."

They had come to a little house or big hut, set down in a dell, with witch 
hazel and broom in tangles about it, and a goat on the roof, and a flock of 
white-speckled black hens squawking away, and a lazy little sheepdog bitch 
standing up and thinking 
about barking and thinking better of it and waving her tail.

Sparrowhawk went to the low doorway, stooping to look in. "There you are, 
Aunty!" he said. "I've brought you a visitor. Alder, a man of sorcery from 
the-Isle of Taon. His craft is mending, and he's a master, I can tell you, 
for I just watched him put 
back together Tenar's green pitcher, you know the one, that I like a clumsy 
old fool dropped and broke to pieces the other day."

He entered the hut, and Alder followed him. An old woman sat in a cushioned 
chair near the doorway where she could look out into the sunlight. Feathers 
stuck out of her wispy white hair. A speckled hen was settled in her lap. She 
smiled at Sparrowhawk 
with enchanting sweetness and nodded politely to the visitor. The hen woke, 
cackled, and departed.

"This is Moss," said Sparrowhawk, "a witch of many skills, the greatest of 
which is kindness."

So, Alder imagined, might the Archmage of Roke have introduced a great wizard 
to a great lady. He bowed. The old woman ducked her head and laughed a little.

She made a circling motion with her left hand, looking a query at Sparrowhawk.

"Tenar? Tehanu?" he said. "Still in Havnor with the king, so far as I know. 
They'll be having a fine time there, seeing all the sights of the great city 
and the palaces."

"I made us crowns," Heather shouted, bouncing out of the odorous, dark jumble 
farther inside the house. "Like kings and queens. See?" She preened the 
chicken feathers that stuck out of her thick hair at all angles. Aunty Moss, 
becoming aware of her own 
peculiar headdress, batted ineffectively at the feathers with her left hand 
and grimaced.

"Crowns are heavy," Sparrowhawk said. He gently plucked the feathers from the 
thin hair.

"Who's the queen, Mastawk?" Heather cried. "Who's the queen? Bannen's the 
king, who's the queen?"

"King Lebannen has no queen, Heather."

"Why not? He ought to. Why not?"

"Maybe he's looking for her."

"He'll marry Tehanu!" the woman shrieked, joyful. "He will!"

Alder saw Sparrowhawk's face change, close, become rock.

He said only, "I doubt it." He held the feathers he had taken from Moss's 
hair and stroked them softly. "I've come to you for a favor, as always, Aunty 
Moss," he said.

She reached her good hand out and took his hand with such tenderness that 
Alder was moved to the heart.

"I want to borrow one of your puppies."

Moss began to look sad. Heather, gawking beside her, puzzled it over for a 
minute and then shouted, "The puppies! Aunty Moss, the puppies! But they're 
all gone!"

The old woman nodded, looking forlorn, caressing Sparrowhawk's brown hand.

"Somebody wanted them?"

"The biggest one got out and maybe it ran up in the forest and some creature 
killed it for it never came back and then old Ramballs, he came and said he 
needs sheepdogs and he'd take both and train them and Aunty gave them to him 
because they chased 
the new chicks Snowflakes hatched and ate out house and home, they did, 
besides."

"Well, Rambles may have a bit of a job training them," Sparrowhawk said with 
a half smile. "I'm glad he's got them but sorry they're gone, since I wanted 
to borrow one for a night or two. They slept on your bed, didn't they, Moss?"

She nodded, still sad. Then, brightening a little, she looked up with her 
head to one side and mewed.

Sparrowhawk blinked, but Heather understood, "Oh! The kittens!" she shouted. 
"Little Grey had four, and Old Black he killed one before we could stop him, 
but there's still two or three somewhere round here, they sleep with Aunty 
and Biddy most every 
night now the little dogs are gone. Kitty! kitty! kitty! where are you, 
kitty, kitty?" And after a good deal of commotion and scrambling and piercing 
mews in the dark interior, she reappeared with a grey kitten clutched 
squirming and squealing in her 
hand. "Here's one!" she shouted, and threw it at Sparrowhawk. He caught it 
awkwardly. It instantly bit him.

"There, there now," he told it. "Calm down." A tiny, rumbling growl emerged 
from it, and it tried to bite him again. Moss gestured, and he set the little 
creature down in her lap. She stroked it with her slow heavy hand. It 
flattened out at once, 
stretched, looked up at her, and purred.

"May I borrow it for a while?"

The old witch raised her hand from the kitten in a royal gesture that said 
clearly: It is yours and welcome.

"Master Alder here is having troublesome dreams, you see, and I thought maybe 
having an animal with him nights might help to ease the trouble."

Moss nodded gravely and, looking up at Alder, slipped her hand under the 
kitten and lifted it towards him. Alder took it rather gingerly into his 
hands. It did not growl or bite. It scrambled up his arm and clung to his 
neck under his hair, which he 
wore loosely gathered at the nape.

As they walked back to the Old Mage's house, the kitten tucked inside Alder's 
shirt, Sparrowhawk explained. "Once, when I was new to the art, I was asked 
to heal a child with the redfever. I knew the boy was dying, but I couldn't 
bring myself to let 
him go. I tried to follow him. To bring him back. Across the wall of stones… 
And so, here in the body, I fell down by the bedside and lay like the dead 
myself.

There was a witch there who guessed what the matter was, and she had me taken 
to my house and laid abed there. And in my house was an animal that had 
befriended me when I was a boy on Roke, a wild creature that came to me of 
its own will and stayed 
with me. An otak. Do you know them? I think there are none in the North."

Alder hesitated. He said, "I know of them only from the Deed that tells of how
… how the mage came to the Court of the Terrenon in Osskil. And the otak 
tried to warn him of a gebbeth that walked with him. And he won free of the 
gebbeth, but the little 
animal was caught and slain."

Sparrowhawk walked on without speaking for twenty paces or so. "Yes," he 
said. "So. Well, my otak also saved my life when I was caught by my own folly 
on the wrong side of the wall, my body lying here and my soul astray there. 
The otak came to me and 
washed me, the way they wash themselves and their young, the way cats do, 
with a dry tongue, patiently, touching me and bringing me back with its 
touch, bringing me back into my body. And the gift the animal gave me was not 
only life but a knowledge as 
great as I ever learned on Roke… But you see, I forget all my learning.

"A knowledge, I say, but it's rather a mystery. What's the difference between 
us and the animals? Speech? All the animals have some way of speaking, saying 
come and beware and much else; but they can't tell stories, and they can't 
tell lies. While we 
can…

"But the dragons speak: they speak the True Speech, the language of the 
Making, in which there are no lies, in which to tell the story is to make it 
be! Yet we call the dragons animals..

"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…

"Last night, I was thinking of how witches often have a companion, a 
familiar. My aunt had an old dog that never barked. She called him Gobefore. 
And the Archmage Nemmerle, when I first came to Roke Island, had a raven that 
went with him everywhere. 
And I thought of a young woman I knew once who wore a little dragon-lizard, a 
harekki, for her bracelet. And so at last I thought of my otak. Then I 
thought, if what Alder needs to keep him on this side of the wall is the 
warmth of a touch, why not an 
animal? Since they see life, not death. Maybe a dog or cat is as good as a 
Master of Roke…"

So it proved. The kitten, evidently happy to be away from the household of 
dogs and tomcats and roosters and the unpredictable Heather, tried hard to 
show that it was a reliable and diligent cat, patrolling the house for mice, 
riding on Alder's 
shoulder under his hair when permitted, and settling right down to sleep 
purring under his chin as soon as he lay down. Alder slept all night without 
any dream he remembered, and woke to find the kitten sitting on his chest, 
washing its ears with an 
air of quiet virtue.

When Sparrowhawk tried to determine its sex, however, it growled and 
struggled. "All right," he said, getting his hand out of danger quickly. 
"Have it your way. It's either a male or a female, Alder, I'm certain of 
that."

"I won't name it, in any case," Alder said. "They go out like candle flames, 
little cats. If you've named one you grieve more for it."

That day at Alder's suggestion they went fence mending, walking the 
goat-pasture fence, Sparrowhawk on the inside and Alder on the outside. 
Whenever one of them found a place where the palings showed the beginning of 
rot or the tie laths had been 
weakened, Alder would run his hands along the wood, thumbing and tugging and 
smoothing and strengthening, a half- articulate chant almost inaudible in his 
throat and chest, his face relaxed and intent.

Once Sparrowhawk, watching him, murmured, "And I used to take it all for 
granted!"

Alder, lost in his work, did not ask him what he meant.

"There," he said, "that'll hold." And they moved on, followed closely by the 
two inquisitive goats, who butted and pushed at the repaired sections offence 
as if to test them.

"I've been thinking," Sparrowhawk said, "that you might do well to go to 
Havnor."

Alder looked at him in alarm. "Ah," he said. "I thought maybe, if I have a 
way now to keep away from… that place… I could go home to Taon." He was 
losing faith in what he said as he said it.

"You might, but I don't think it would be wise."

Alder said reluctantly, "It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a 
man against the armies of the dead."

"It is."

"But I─what should I do in Havnor?" And, with sudden hope, "Would you go 
with me?"

Sparrowhawk shook his head once. "I stay here."

"The Lord Patterner…"

"Sent you to me. And I send you to those who should hear your tale and find 
out what it means… I tell you, Alder, I think in his heart the Patterner 
believes I am what I was. He believes I'm merely hiding here in the forests 
of Gont and will come 
forth when the need is greatest." The old man looked down at his sweaty, 
patched clothes and dusty shoes, and laughed. "In all my glory," he said.

"Beh," said the brown goat behind him.

"But all the same, Alder, he was right to send you here, since she'd have 
been here, if she hadn't gone to Havnor."

"The Lady Tenar?"

"Hama Gondun. So the Patterner himself called her," Sparrowhawk said, looking 
across the fence at Alder, his eyes unfathomable. "A woman on Gont. The Woman 
of Gont. Tehanu."


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

CHAPTER TWO
? ^ ?
PALACES



When Alder came down to the docks, Farflyer was still there, taking on a 
cargo of timbers; but he knew he had worn out his welcome on that ship. He 
went to a small shabby coaster tied up next to her, the Pretty Rose.

Sparrowhawk had given him a letter of passage signed by the king and sealed 
with the Rune of Peace. "He sent it for me to use if I changed my mind," the 
old man had said with a snort. "It'll serve you." The ship's master, after 
getting his purser to 
read it for him, became quite deferential and apologised for the cramped 
quarters and the length of the voyage. Pretty Rose was going to Havnor, sure 
enough, but she was a coaster, trading small goods from port to port, and it 
might take her a month to 
work clear round the southeast coast of the Great Island to the King's City.

That was all right with him, Alder said. For if he dreaded the voyage, he 
feared its ending more.

New moon to half moon, the sea voyage was a time of peace for him. The grey 
kitten was a hardy traveler, busy mousing the ship all day but faithfully 
curling up under his chin or within hand's reach at night; and to his 
unceasing wonder, that little 
scrap of warm life kept him from the wall of stones and the voices calling 
him across it. Not wholly. Not so that he ever entirely forgot them. They 
were there, just through the veil of sleep in darkness, just through the 
brightness of the day. 
Sleeping out on deck those warm nights, he opened his eyes often to see that 
the stars moved, swinging to the rocking of the moored ship, following their 
courses through heaven to the west. He was still a haunted man. But for a 
half month of summer 
along the coasts of Kameber and Barnisk and the Great Island he could turn 
his back on his ghosts.

For days the kitten hunted a young rat nearly as big as it was. Seeing it 
proudly and laboriously hauling the carcass across the deck, one of the 
sailors called it Tug. Alder accepted the name for it.

They sailed down the Ebavnor Straits and in through the portals of Havnor 
Bay. Across the sunlit water little by little the white towers of the city at 
the center of the world resolved out of the haze of distance. Alder stood at 
the prow as they came 
in and looking up saw on the pinnacle of the highest tower a flash of silver 
light, the Sword of Erreth-Akbe.

Now he wished he could stay aboard and sail on and not go ashore into the 
great city among great people with a letter for the king. He knew he was no 
fit messenger. Why had such a burden been laid on him? How could it be that a 
village sorcerer who 
knew nothing of high matters and deep arts was called on to make these 
journeys from land to land, from mage to monarch, from the living to the dead?

He had said something like that to Sparrowhawk. "It's all beyond me," he had 
said. The old man looked at him a while and then, calling him by his true 
name, said, "The world's vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no 
stranger than our minds are. 
Think of that sometimes."

Behind the city the sky darkened with a thunderstorm inland. The towers 
burned white against purple-black, and gulls soared like drifting sparks of 
fire above them.

Pretty Rose was moored, the gangplank run out. This time the sailors wished 
him well as he shouldered his pack. He picked up the covered poultry basket 
in which Tug crouched patiently, and went ashore.

The streets were many and crowded, but the way to the palace was plain, and 
he had no idea what to do except go there and say that he carried a letter 
for the king from the Archmage Sparrowhawk.

And that he did, many times.

From guard to guard, from official to official, from the broad outer steps of 
the palace to high anterooms, staircases with gilded banisters, inner offices 
with tapestried walls, across floors of tile and marble and oak, under 
ceilings coffered, 
beamed, vaulted, painted, he went repeating his talisman: "I come from 
Sparrowhawk who was the Archmage with a letter for the king." He would not 
give his letter up. A retinue, a crowd of suspicious, semi-civil, 
patronising, temporising, obstructive 
guards and ushers and officials kept gathering and thickening around him and 
followed and impeded his slow way into the palace.

Suddenly they were all gone. A door had opened. It closed behind him.

He stood alone in a quiet room. A wide window looked out over the roofs 
northwestward. The thundercloud had cleared and the broad grey summit of 
Mount Onn hovered above far hills.

Another door opened. A man came in, dressed in black, about Alder's age, 
quick moving, with a fine, strong face as smooth as bronze. He came straight 
to Alder: "Master Alder, I am Lebannen."

He put out his right hand to touch Alders hand, palm against palm, as the 
custom was in Ea and the Enlades. Alder responded automatically to the 
familiar gesture. Then he thought he ought to kneel, or bow at least, but the 
moment to do so seemed to 
have passed. He stood dumb.

"You came from my Lord Sparrowhawk? How is he? Is he well?"

"Yes, lord. He sends you─" Alder hurriedly groped inside his jacket for the 
letter, which he had intended to offer to the king kneeling, when they 
finally showed him to the throne room where the king would be sitting on his 
throne─"this letter, my 
lord."

The eyes watching him were alert, urbane, as implacably keen as 
Sparrowhawk's, but withholding even more of the mind within. As the king took 
the letter Alder offered him, his courtesy was perfect. "The bearer of any 
word from him has my heart's thanks 
and welcome. Will you forgive me?"

Alder finally managed a bow. The king walked over to the window to read the 
letter.

He read it twice at least, then refolded it. His face was as impassive as 
before. He went to the door and spoke to someone outside it, then turned back 
to Alder. "Please," he said, "sit down with me. They'll bring us something to 
eat. You've been all 
afternoon in the palace, I know. If the gate captain had had the wits to send 
me word, I could have spared you hours of climbing the walls and swimming the 
moats they set around me… Did you stay with my Lord Sparrowhawk? In his 
house on the cliff's 
edge?"

"Yes."

"I envy you. I've never been there. I haven't seen him since we parted on 
Roke, half my lifetime ago. He wouldn't let me come to him on Gont. He 
wouldn't come to my crowning." Lebannen smiled as if nothing he said was of 
any moment. "He gave me my 
kingdom," he said.


Sitting down, he nodded to Alder to take the chair facing him across a little 
table. Alder looked at the tabletop, inlaid with curling patterns of ivory 
and silver, leaves and blossoms of the rowan tree twined about slender swords.

"Did you have a good voyage?" the king asked, and made other small talk while 
they were served plates of cold meat and smoked trout and lettuces and 
cheese. He set Alder a welcome example by eating with a good appetite; and he 
poured them wine, the 
palest topaz, in goblets of crystal. He raised his glass. "To my lord and 
dear friend," he said.

Alder murmured, "To him," and drank.

The king spoke about Taon, which he had visited a few years before─Alder 
remembered the excitement of the island when the king was in Meoni. And he 
spoke of some musicians from Taon who were in the city now, harpers and 
singers come to make music for 
the court; it might be Alder knew some of them; and indeed the names he said 
were familiar. He was very skilled at putting his guest at ease, and food and 
wine were a considerable help too.

When they were done eating, the king poured them another half glass of wine 
and said, "The letter concerns you, mostly. Did you know that?" His tone had 
not changed much from the small talk, and Alder was fuddled for a moment.

"No," he said.

"Do you have an idea what it deals with?"

"What I dream, maybe," Alder said, speaking low, looking down.

The king studied him for a moment. There was nothing offensive in his gaze, 
but he was more open in that scrutiny than most men would have been. Then he 
took up the letter and held it out to Alder.

"My lord, I read very little."

Lebannen was not surprised─some sorcerers could read, some could not─but he 
clearly and sharply regretted putting his guest at a disadvantage. The 
gold-bronze skin of his face went dusky red. He said, "I'm sorry, Alder. May 
I read you what he says?"


"Please, my lord," Alder said. The king's embarrassment made him, for a 
moment, feel the king's equal, and he spoke for the first time naturally and 
with warmth.

Lebannen scanned the salutation and some lines of the letter and then read 
aloud:

"Alder of Taon who bears this to you is one called in dream and not by his 
own will to that land you and I crossed once together. He will tell you of 
suffering where suffering is past and change where no thing changes. We 
closed the door Cob opened. 
Now the wall itself maybe is to fall. He has been to Roke. Only Azver heard 
him. My Lord the King will hear and will act as wisdom instructs and need 
requires. Alder bears my lifelong honor and obedience to my Lord the King. 
Also my lifelong honor and 
regard to my lady Tenar. Also to my beloved daughter Tehanu a spoken message 
from me.' And he signs it with the rune of the Talon." Lebannen looked up 
from the letter into Alder's eyes and held his gaze. "Tell me what it is you 
dream," he said.

So once more Alder told his story.

He told it briefly and not very well. Though he had been in awe of 
Sparrowhawk, the ex-Archmage looked and dressed and lived like an old 
villager or farmer, a man of Alder's own kind and standing, and that 
simplicity had defeated all superficial 
timidity. But however kind and courteous the king might be, he looked like 
the king, he behaved like the king, he was the king, and to Alder the 
distance was insuperable. He hurried through as best he could and stopped 
with relief.

Lebannen asked a few questions. Lily and then Gannet had each touched Alder 
once: never since? And Gannet's touch had burned?

Alder held out his hand. The marks were almost invisible under a month's tan.

"I think the people at the wall would touch me if I came close to them," he 
said.

"But you keep away from them?"

"I have done so."

"And they are not people you knew in life?"

"Sometimes I think I know one or another."

"But never your wife?"

"There are so many of them, my lord. Sometimes I think she's there. But I 
can't see her."

To talk about it brought it near, too near. He felt the fear welling up in 
him again. He thought the walls of the room might melt away and the evening 
sky and the floating mountain-crown vanish like a curtain brushed aside, to 
leave him standing where 
he was always standing, on a dark hill by a wall of stones.

"Alder."

He looked up, shaken, his head swimming. The room seemed bright, the king's 
face hard and vivid.

"You'll stay here in the palace?"

It was an invitation, but Alder could only nod, accepting it as an order.

"Good. I'll arrange for you to give the message you bear to Mistress Tehanu 
tomorrow. And I know the White Lady will wish to talk with you."

He bowed. Lebannen turned away.

"My lord─"


Lebannen turned.

"May I have my cat with me?"

Not a flicker of a smile, no mockery. "Of course."

"My lord, I am sorry to my heart, to bring news that troubles you!"

"Any word from the man who sent you is a grace to me and to its bearer. And 
I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer," 
Lebannen said, and Alder, hearing the true accent of his home islands in the 
words, was a little cheered.

The king went out, and at once a man looked in the door Alder had entered by. 
"I will take you to your chamber, if you wall follow me, sir," he said. He 
was dignified, elderly, and well dressed, and Alder followed him without any 
idea whether he was a 
nobleman or a servant, and therefore not daring to ask him about Tug. In the 
room before the room where he had met the king, the officials and guards and 
ushers had absolutely insisted that he leave his poultry basket with them. It 
had been eyed with 
suspicion and inspected with disapproval by ten or fifteen officials already. 
He had explained ten or fifteen times that he had the cat with him because he 
had nowhere in the city to leave it. The anteroom where he had been compelled 
to set it down was 
far behind him, he had not seen it there as they went through, he would never 
find it now, it was half a palace away, corridors, hallways, passages, doors…

His guide bowed and left him in a small, beautiful room, tapestried, 
carpeted, a chair with an embroidered seat, a window that looked out to the 
harbor, a table on which stood a bowl of summer fruit and a pitcher of water. 
And the poultry basket.

He opened it. Tug emerged in a leisurely manner indicating his familiarity 
with palaces. He stretched, sniffed Alder's fingers in greeting, and went 
about the room examining things. He discovered a curtained alcove with a bed 
in it and jumped up on the 
bed. A discreet knock at the door. A young man entered carrying a large, 
flat, heavy wooden box with no lid. He bowed to Alder, murmuring, "Sand, 
sir." He placed the box in the far corner of the alcove. He bowed again and 
left.

"Well," Alder said, sitting down on the bed. He was not in the habit of 
talking to the kitten. Their relationship was one of silent, trustful touch. 
But he had to talk to somebody. "I met the king today," he said.

The king had all too many people to talk to before he could sit down on his 
bed. Chief among them were the emissaries of the High King of the Kargs. They 
were about to take their leave, having accomplished their mission to Havnor, 
to their own 
satisfaction if not at all to Lebannen's.

He had looked forward to the visit of these ambassadors as the culmination of 
years of patient overture, invitation, and negotiation. For the first ten 
years of his reign he had been able to accomplish nothing at all with the 
Kargs. The God-King in 
Awabath rejected his offers of treaties and trade and sent his envoys back 
unheard, declaring that gods do not parley with vile mortals, least of all 
with accursed sorcerers. But the God-Kings proclamations of universal divine 
empire were not followed 
by the threatened fleets of a myriad ships bearing plumed warriors to overrun 
the godless West. Even the pirate raids that had plagued the eastern isles of 
the Archipelago for so long gradually ceased. The pirates had become 
contrabanders, seeking to 
trade whatever unlicensed goods they could smuggle out of Karego-At for 
Archipelagan iron and steel and bronze, for the Kargad Lands were poor in 
mines and metal.

It was from these illicit traders that news first came of the rise of the 
High King.

On Hur-at-Hur, the big, poor, easternmost island of the Kargad Lands, a 
warlord, Thol, claiming descent from Thoreg of Hupun and from the God Wuluah, 
had made himself High King of that land. Next he had conquered At-nini, and 
then, with a fleet and an 
invading army drawn from both Hur-at-Hur and Atnini, he had claimed dominion 
over the rich central island, Karego-At. While his warriors were fighting 
their way towards Awabath, the capital city, the people of the city rose up 
against the tyranny of 
the God-King. They slaughtered the high priests, drove the bureaucrats out of 
the temples, threw the gates wide, and welcomed King Thol to the throne of 
Thoreg with banners and dancing in the streets.

The God-King fled with a remnant of his guards and hi-erophants to the Place 
of the Tombs on Atuan. There in the desert, in his temple by the 
earthquake-shattered ruins of the shrine of the Nameless Ones, one of his 
priest-eunuchs cut the God-King's 
throat.

Thol proclaimed himself High King of the Four Kargad Lands. As soon as he got 
word of that, Lebannen sent ambassadors to greet his brother king and assure 
him of the friendly disposition of the Archipelago.

Five years of difficult and tiresome diplomacy had ensued. Thol was a violent 
man on a threatened throne. In the wreckage of the theocracy, all control in 
his realm was chancy, all authority questionable. Lesser kings constantly 
declared themselves and 
had to be bought or beaten into obedience to the High King. Sectarians issued 
from shrines and caverns crying "Woe to the mighty!" and foretelling 
earthquake, tidal wave, plague upon the deicides. Ruling a troubled, divided 
empire, Thol could scarcely 
place any trust in the powerful and wealthy Archipelagans.

It meant nothing to him that their king talked about friendship, flourishing 
the Ring of Peace. Did not the Kargs have a claim to that ring? It had been 
made in ancient days in the West, but long ago, King Thoreg of Hupun had 
accepted it as a gift from 
the hero Erreth-Akbe, a sign of amity between the Kargad and Hardic lands. It 
had disappeared, and there had been war, not amity. But then the Hawk-Mage 
had found the ring and stolen it back, along with the Priestess of the Tombs 
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or made any gesture. 
They stood stiff with their hands at their sides.

The princess made her deep, straight-backed courtesy.

Tenar made the conventional gesture, and the Summoner returned it.

"The Woman of Gont, the daughter of the Archmage, Tehanu," Lebannen said. 
Tehanu dipped her head and made the conventional gesture. But the Master 
Summoner stared at her, gasped, and stepped back as if he had been struck.

"Mistress Tehanu," said Gamble quickly, coming forward between her and the 
Summoner, "we welcome you to Roke─for your father's sake, and your mother's, 
and your own. I hope your voyage was a pleasant one?"

She looked at him in confusion, and ducked, hiding her face, rather than 
bowed; but she managed to whisper some kind of answer.

Lebannen, his face a bronze mask of calm composure, said, "Yes, it was a good 
voyage, Gamble, though the end of it is still in doubt. Shall we walk up 
through the town, now, Tenar─Tehanu─Princess─Orm Irian?" He looked at each 
as he spoke, saying the 
last name with particular clarity.

He set off with Tenar, and the others followed. As Seserakh came down the 
gangplank, she resolutely swept back the red veils from her face.

Gamble walked with Onyx, Alder with Seppel. Tosla stayed with the ship. The 
last to leave the quay was Brand the Summoner, walking alone and heavily.

Tenar had asked ged about the Grove more than once, liking to hear him 
describe it. "It seems like any grove of trees, when you see it first. Not 
very large. The fields come right up to it on the north and east, and there 
are hills to the south and 
usually to the west… It looks like nothing much. But it draws your eye. And 
sometimes, from up on Roke Knoll, you can see that it's a forest, going on 
and on. You try to make out where it ends, but you can't. It goes off into 
the west… And when you 
walk in it, it seems ordinary again, though the trees are mostly a kind that 
grows only there. Tall, with brown trunks, something like an oak, something 
like a chestnut."

"What are they called?"

Ged laughed. "Arhada, in the Old Speech. Trees… The trees of the Grove, in 
Hardic… Their leaves don't all turn in autumn, but some at every season, so 
the foliage is always green with a gold light in it. Even on a dark day those 
trees seem to hold 
some sunlight. And in the night, it's never quite dark under them. There's a 
kind of glimmer in the leaves, like moonlight or starlight. Willows grow 
there, and oak, and fir, other kinds; but as you go deeper in, it's more and 
more only the trees of 
the Grove. And the roots of those go down deeper than the island. Some are 
huge trees, some slender, but you don't see many fallen, nor many saplings. 
They live a long, long time." His voice had grown soft, dreamy. "You can walk 
and walk in their 
shadow, in their light, and never come to the end of them."

"But is Roke so large an island?"

He looked at her peacefully, smiling. "The forests here on Gont Mountain are 
that forest," he said. "All forests are."

And now she saw the Grove. Following Lebannen, they had come up through the 
devious streets of Thwil Town, gathering a flock of townsfolk and children 
come out to see and greet their king. These cheerful followers dropped away 
little by little as the 
travelers left the town on a lane between hedges and farms, which petered out 
into a footpath past the high, round hill, Roke Knoll.

Ged had told her of the Knoll, too. There, he said, all magic is strong; 
there all things take their true nature. "There," he said, "our wizardry and 
the Old Powers of the Earth meet, and are one."

The wind blew in the high, half-dry grass on the hill. A donkey colt galloped 
off stiff-legged across a stubble field, flicking and flirting its tail. 
Cattle walked in slow procession along a fence that crossed a little stream. 
And there were trees 
ahead, dark trees, shadowy.

They followed Lebannen through a stile and over a footbridge to a sunlit 
meadow at the edge of the wood. A small, decrepit house stood near the 
stream. Irian broke from their group, ran across the grass to the house, and 
patted the door frame as one 
would pat and greet a beloved horse or dog after long absence. "Dear house!" 
she said. And turning to the others, smiling, "I lived here," she said, "when 
I was Dragonfly."

She looked round, searching the eaves of the wood, and then ran forward 
again. "Azver!" she called.

A man had come out of the shadow of the trees into the sunlight. His hair 
shone in it like silver gilt. He stood still as Irian ran to him. He lifted 
his hands to her, and she caught them in hers. "I won't burn you, I won't 
burn you this time," she was 
saying, laughing and crying, though without tears. "I'm keeping my fires out!"

They drew each other close and stood face to face, and he said to her, 
"Daughter of Kalessin, welcome home."

"My sister is with me, Azver," she said.

He turned his face─a light-skinned, hard, Kargish face, Tenar saw─and 
looked straight at Tehanu. He came to her. He dropped on both his knees 
before her. "Hama Gondun!" he said, and again, "Daughter of Kalessin."

Tehanu stood motionless for a moment. Slowly she put out her hand to him─her 
right hand, the burnt hand, the claw. He took it, bowed his head, and kissed 
it.

"My honor is that I was your prophet, Woman of Gont," he said, with a kind of 
exulting tenderness.

Then, rising, he turned at last to Lebannen, made his bow, and said, "My 
king, be welcome."

"It's a joy to me to see you again, Patterner! But I bring a crowd into your 
solitude."

"My solitude is crowded already," said the Patterner. "A few live souls might 
keep the balance."

His eyes, pale grey-blue-green, glanced round among them. He suddenly smiled, 
a smile of great warmth, surprising on his hard face. "But here are women of 
my own people," he said in Kargish, and came to Tenar and Seserakh, who stood 
side by side.

"I am Tenar of Atuan─of Gont," she said. "With me is the High Princess of 
the Kargad Lands."

He made a proper bow. Seserakh made her stiff courtesy, but her words poured 
out, tumultuous, in Kargish─"Oh, Lord Priest, I'm glad you're here! If it 
weren't for my friend Tenar I would have gone mad, thinking nobody was left 
in the world that could 
talk like a human being except the idiot women they sent with me from Awabath
─but I am learning to speak as they do─and I am learning courage, Tenar is 
my friend and teacher─But last night I broke taboo! I broke taboo! Oh, Lord 
Priest, please tell 
me what I must do to atone! I walked on the Dragons' Way!"

"But you were aboard the ship, princess," said Tenar ("I dreamed," Seserakh 
said, impatient), "and the Lord Patterner is not a priest but an─a sorcerer─
"

"Princess," said Azver the Patterner, "I think we're all walking on the 
Dragons' Way. And all taboos may well be shaken or broken. Not only in dream. 
We'll speak of this later, under the trees. Have no fear. But let me greet my 
friends, if you will?"

Seserakh nodded regally, and he turned away to greet Alder and Onyx.

The princess watched him. "He is a warrior," she said to Tenar in Kargish, 
with satisfaction. "Not a priest. Priests have no friends."

They all moved on slowly and came under the shadow of the trees.

Tenar looked up into the arcades and groves of branches, the layers and 
galleries of leaves. She saw oaks and a big hemmen tree, but most were the 
trees of the Grove. Their oval leaves moved easily in the air, like the 
leaves of aspen and poplar; some 
had yellowed, and there was a dapple of gold and brown on the ground at their 
roots, but the foliage in the morning light was the green of summer, full of 
shadows and deep light.

The Patterner led them along a path among the trees. As they went, Tenar 
thought again about Ged, remembering his voice as he told her about this 
place. She felt nearer him than she had been since she and Tehanu left him in 
the dooryard of their house 
in the early summer and walked down to Gont Port to take the king's ship to 
Havnor. She knew Ged had lived here with the Patterner of long ago, and had 
walked here with Azver. She knew the Grove was to him the central and sacred 
place, the heart of 
peace. She felt that she might look up and see him at the end of one of the 
long, sun-dappled glades. And that notion eased her heart.

For her dream of the night before had troubled her, and when Seserakh burst 
out with her dream of breaking taboo, Tenar had been deeply startled. She too 
had broken taboo in her dream, transgressed. She had climbed the last three 
stairs of the Empty 
Throne, the forbidden steps. The Place of the Tombs on Atuan was long ago and 
far away, and maybe the earthquake had left no throne or steps there at all 
in the temple where her name had been taken from her: but the Old Powers of 
the Earth were there, 
and they were here. They were not changed or moved. They were the earthquake, 
and the earth. Their justice was not man's justice. As she had walked by the 
round hill, Roke Knoll, she knew she walked where all the powers met.

She had defied them, long ago, breaking free of the Tombs, stealing the 
treasure, fleeing here to the West. But they were here. Under her feet. In 
the roots of these trees, in the roots of the hill.

So, here in the center where earth's powers met, the human powers had also 
met together: a king, a princess, the masters of wizardry. And the dragons.

And a priestess-thief turned farmwife, and a village sorcerer with a broken 
heart…

She looked round at Alder. He was walking beside Tehanu. They were talking 
quietly. Tehanu talked more readily with him than with anyone, even Irian, 
and looked at ease when she was with him. It cheered Tenar to see them, and 
she walked on under the 
great trees, letting her awareness slip into a half trance of green light and 
moving leaves. She was sorry when, after only a short way, the Patterner 
halted. She felt she could walk forever in the Grove.

They gathered in a grassy glade, open to the sky in the center where the 
branches did not reach to meet. A tributary of the Thwilburn ran across one 
side of it, willow and Alder growing along its course. Not far from the 
stream was a low, lumpy house 
built of stone and sod, with a taller lean-to against its wall made of 
withies and mats of woven reed. "My winter palace, my summer palace," Azver 
said.

Both Onyx and Lebannen stared at these small structures in surprise, and 
Irian said, ''I never knew you had a house at all!"

"I didn't," said the Patterner. "But bones get old."

With a little fetching and carrying from the ship, the house was soon 
furnished with bedding for the women, and the lean-to for the men. Boys ran 
back and forth to the eaves of the Grove with plentiful provisions from the 
kitchens of the Great House. 
And late in the afternoon, the Masters of Roke came at the invitation of the 
Patterner to meet with the king's party.

"Is this where they gather to choose the new Archmage?" Tenar asked Onyx, for 
Ged had told her of that secret glade.

Onyx shook his head. "I think not," he said. "The king would know, for he was 
there when they last met. But maybe only the Patterner could tell you. 
Because things change in this wood, you know. 'It is not always where it is.' 
Nor are the ways through 
it ever quite the same, I think."

"It should be frightening," she said, "but I can't seem to be afraid."

Onyx smiled. "So it is, here," he said.

She watched the masters come into the glade, led by the big, bearlike 
Summoner and Gamble the young weather-master. Onyx told her who the others 
were: the Changer, the Chanter, the Herbal, the Hand: all grey-haired, the 
Changer frail with age, using 
his wizard's staff as a walking stick. The Doorkeeper, smooth-faced and 
almond-eyed, seemed neither young nor old. The Namer, who came last, looked 
forty or so. His face was calm and closed. He presented himself to the king, 
naming himself 
Kurremkarmerruk.

At that Irian burst out, indignant, "But you are not!"

He looked at her and said evenly, "It is the Namer's name.

"Then my Kurremkarmerruk is dead?"

He nodded.

"Oh," she cried, "that's hard news to bear! He was my friend, when I had few 
friends here!" She turned away and would not look at the Namer, angry and 
tearless in her grief. She had greeted the Master Herbal with affection, and 
the Doorkeeper, but she 
did not speak to the others.

Tenar saw that they watched Irian under their grey brows with uneasy looks.

From her they looked at Tehanu; and looked away again; and glanced back, 
sidelong. And Tenar began to wonder what they saw when they looked at Tehanu 
and Irian. For these were men who saw with wizard's eyes.

So she bade herself forgive the Summoner for his uncouth and unconcealed 
horror when he first saw Tehanu. Maybe it had not been horror. Maybe it had 
been awe.

When they were all made known to one another and were seated in a circle, 
with cushions and stump seats for those who needed them, the grass for 
carpet, and sky and leaves for ceiling, the Patterner said in his voice that 
still had some Kargish accent 
in it, "If it please him, my fellow masters, we will hear the king."

Lebannen stood up. As he spoke, Tenar watched him with irrepressible pride. 
He was so beautiful, so wise in his youth! She did not follow all his words 
at first, only the sense and passion of them.

He told the masters, briefly and clearly, all the matter that had brought him 
to Roke: the dragons and the dreams.

He ended, "It seemed to us that night by night all these things draw 
together, always more certainly, to some event, some end. It seemed to us 
that here, on this ground, with your knowledge and power aiding us, we might 
foresee and meet that event, not 
letting it overwhelm our understanding. The wisest of our mages have 
foretold: a great change is upon us. We must join together to learn what that 
change is, its causes, its course, and how we may hope to turn it from 
conflict and ruin to harmony and 
peace, in whose sign I rule."

Brand the Summoner stood to answer him. After some stately politenesses, with 
a special welcome to the High Princess, he said, "That the dreams of men, and 
more than their dreams, forewarn us of dire changes, all the masters and 
wizards of Roke agree. 
That there is a disturbance of the deepset boundaries between death and life─
transgressions of those boundaries, and the threat of worse─we confirm. But 
that these disturbances can be understood or controlled by any but the 
masters of the art magic, 
we doubt. And very deeply do we doubt that dragons, whose lives and death are 
wholly different from that of man, can ever be trusted to submit their wild 
wrath and jealousy to serve human good."

"Summoner," Lebannen said, before Irian could speak, "Orm Embar died for me 
on Selidor. Kalessin bore me to my throne.─Here in this circle are three 
peoples: the Kargish, the Hardic, and the People of the West."

"They were all one people, once," said the Namer in his level, toneless voice.

"But they are not now," said the Summoner, each word heavy and separate. "Do 
not misunderstand me because I speak hard truth, my Lord King! I honor the 
truce you have sworn with the dragons. When the danger we are in is past, 
Roke will aid Havnor in 
seeking lasting peace with them. But the dragons have nothing to do with this 
crisis that is upon us. Nor have the eastern peoples, who foreswore their 
immortal souls when they forgot the Language of the Making."

"Es eyemra," said a soft, hissing voice: Tehanu, standing.

The Summoner stared at her.

"Our language," she repeated in Hardic, staring back at him.

Irian laughed. "Es eyemra," she said.

"You are not immortal," Tenar said to the Summoner. She had had no intention 
of speaking. She did not stand up. The words broke from her like fire from 
struck rock. " We are! We die to rejoin the undying world. It was you who 
foreswore immortality."

Then they were all still. The Patterner had made a small movement of his 
hands, a gentle movement.

His face was preoccupied, untroubled, as he studied a design of a few twigs 
and leaves he had made on the grass where he sat, just in front of his 
crossed legs. He looked up, looked round at them all. "I think we will have 
to go there soon," he said.

After another silence, Lebannen asked, "Go where, my lord?"

"Into the dark," said the Patterner.

As Alder sat listening to them speak, slowly the voices grew faint, fading, 
and the warm late sunlight of late summer dimmed into darkness. Nothing was 
left but the trees: tall blind presences between the blind earth and the sky. 
The oldest living 
children of the earth. 0 Segoy, he said in his heart: made and maker, let me 
come to you.

The darkness went on and on, past the trees, past everything.

Against that emptiness he saw the hill, the high hill that had been on their 
right as they walked up out of the town. He saw the dust of the road, the 
stones of the path, that led past that hill.


He turned now aside from the path, leaving the others, and walked up the 
slope.

The grasses were tall. The spent flower cases of spark-weed nodded among 
them. He came on a narrow path and followed it up the steep hillside. Now I 
am myself, he said in his heart. Segoy, the world is beautiful. Let me come 
through it to you.

I can do again what I was meant to do, he thought as he walked. I can mend 
what was broken. I can rejoin.

He reached the top of the hill. Standing there in the sun and wind among the 
nodding grasses he saw on his right the fields, the roofs of the little town 
and the big house, the bright bay and the sea beyond it. If he turned he 
would see behind him in 
the west the trees of the endless forest, fading on and on into blue 
distances. Before him the hill slope was dim and grey, going down to the wall 
of stones and the darkness beyond the wall, and the crowding, calling shadows 
at the wall. I will come, 
he said to them. I will come!

Warmth fell across his shoulders and his hands. Wind stirred in the leaves 
above his head. Voices spoke, speaking, not calling, not crying out his name. 
The Patterner's eyes were watching him across the circle of grass. The 
Summoner too was watching 
him. He looked down, bewildered. He tried to listen. He gathered his mind and 
listened.

The king was speaking, using all his skill and strength to hold these fierce, 
willful men and women to one purpose. "Let me try to tell you, Masters of 
Roke, what I learned from the High Princess as we sailed here. Princess, may 
I speak for you?"

Unveiled, she gazed across the circle at him, and bowed grave permission.

"This is her tale, then: long ago, the human and the dragon peoples were one 
kind, speaking one language. But they sought different things, and so they 
agreed to part─to go different ways. That agreement was called the Vedurnan."

Onyx's head went up, and Seppel's bright dark eyes widened. "Verw nadan," he 
whispered.

"The human beings went east, the dragons west. The humans gave up their 
knowledge of the Language of the Making, and in exchange received all skill 
and craft of hand, and ownership of all that hands can make. The dragons let 
go all such things. But 
they kept the Old Speech."

"And their wings," said Irian.

"And their wings," Lebannen said. He had caught Azver's eye. "Patterner, 
perhaps you can continue the story better than I?"

"The villagers of Gont and Hur-at-Hur remember what the wise men of Roke and 
the priests of Karego forget," Azver said. "Yes, as a child I was told this 
tale, I think, or something like it. But the dragons had been forgotten in 
it. It told how the Dark 
Folk of the Archipelago broke their oath. We had all promised to forgo 
sorcery and the language of sorcery, speaking only our common tongue. We 
would name no names, and make no spells. We would trust to Segoy, to the 
powers of the Earth our mother, 
mother of the Warrior Gods. But the Dark Folk broke the covenant. They caught 
the Language of the Making in their craft, writing it in runes. They kept it, 
taught it, used it. They made spells with it, with the skill of their hands, 
with false tongues 
speaking the true words. So the Kargish people can never trust them. So says 
the tale."

Irian spoke: "Men fear death as dragons do not. Men want to own life, possess 
it, as if it were a jewel in a box. Those ancient mages craved everlasting 
life. They learned to use true names to keep men from dying. But those who 
cannot die can never be 
reborn."

"The name and the dragon are one," said Kurremkarmerruk the Namer. "We men 
lost our names at the verwnadan, but we learned how to regain them. Name is 
self. Why should death change that?"

He looked at the Summoner; but Brand sat heavy and grim, listening, not 
speaking.

"Say more of this, Namer, if you will," the king said.

"I say what I have half learned, half guessed, not from village tales but 
from the most ancient records in the Isolate Tower. A thousand years before 
the first kings of Enlad, there were men in Ea and Solea, the first and 
greatest of the mages, the 
Rune Makers. It was they who learned to write the Language of the Making. 
They made the runes, which the dragons never learned. They taught us to give 
each soul its true name: which is its truth, its self. And with their power 
they granted to those who 
bear their true name life beyond the body's death."

"Life immortal," Seppel's soft voice took the word. He spoke smiling a 
little. "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… That is the 
dream of the ancient Lore of Paln."

"Where," the Summoner said, "where is that land?"

"On the other wind," said Irian. "The west beyond the west." She looked round 
at them all, scornful, irate. "Do you think we dragons fly only on the winds 
of this world? Do you think our freedom, for which we gave up all 
possessions, is no greater than 
that of the mindless seagulls? That our realm is a few rocks at the edge of 
your rich islands? You own the earth, you own the sea. But we are the fire of 
sunlight, we fly the wind! You wanted land to own. You wanted things to make 
and keep. And you 
have that. That was the division, the verw nadan. But you were not content 
with your share. You wanted not only your cares, but our freedom. You wanted 
the wind! And by the spells and wizardries of those oath-breakers, you stole 
half our realm from us, 
walled it away from life and light, so that you could live there forever. 
Thieves, traitors!"

"Sister," Tehanu said. "These are not the men who stole from us. They are 
those who pay the price."

A silence followed her harsh, whispering voice. "What was the price?" said 
the Namer. Tehanu looked at Irian. Irian hesitated, and then said in a much 
subdued voice, "Greed puts out the sun. These are Kalessin's words."

Azver the Patterner spoke. As he spoke, he looked into the aisles of the 
trees across the clearing, as if following the slight movements of the 
leaves. "The ancients saw that the dragons' realm was not of the body only. 
That they could fly… outside of 
time, it may be… And envying that freedom, they followed the dragons' way 
into the west beyond the west. There they claimed part of that realm as their 
own. A timeless realm, where the self might be forever. But not in the body, 
as the dragons were. 
Only in spirit could men be there… So they made a wall which no living body 
could cross, neither man nor dragon. For they feared the anger of the 
dragons. And their arts of naming laid a great net of spells upon all the 
western lands, so that when the 
people of the islands die, they would come to the west beyond the west and 
live there in the spirit forever.

"But as the wall was built and the spell laid, the wind ceased to blow, 
within the wall. The sea withdrew. The springs ceased to run. The mountains 
of sunrise became the mountains of the night. Those that died came to a dark 
land, a dry land."

"I have walked in that land," Lebannen said, low and unwillingly. "I do not 
fear death, but I fear it."

There was a silence among them.

"Cob, and Thorion," the Summoner said in his rough, reluctant voice, "they 
tried to break down that wall. To bring the dead back into life."

"Not into life, master," Seppel said. "Still, like the Rune Makers, they 
sought the bodiless, immortal self."

"Yet their spells disturbed that place," the Summoner said, brooding. "So the 
dragons began to remember the ancient wrong… And so the souls of the dead 
come reaching now across the wall, yearning back to life."

Alder stood up. He said, "It is not life they yearn for. It is death. To be 
one with the earth again. To rejoin it."

They all looked at him, but he hardly knew it; his awareness was half with 
them, half in the dry land. The grass beneath his feet was green and sunlit, 
was dead and dim. The leaves of the trees trembled above him and the low 
stone wall lay only a 
little distance from him, down the dark hill. Of them all he saw only Tehanu; 
he could not see her clearly, but he knew her, standing between him and the 
wall. He spoke to her. "They built it, but they cannot unbuild it," he said. 
"Will you help me, 
Tehanu?"

"I will, Hara," she said.

A shadow rushed between them, a great dark bulky strength, hiding her, 
seizing him, holding him; he struggled, gasped for breath, could not draw 
breath, saw red fire in the darkness, and saw nothing more.

They met in the starlight at the edge of the glade, the king of the western 
lands and the Master of Roke, the two powers of Earthsea.

"Will he live?" the Summoner asked, and Lebannen answered, "The healer says 
he is in no danger now."

"I did wrong," said the Summoner. "I am sorry for it."

"Why did you summon him back?" the king asked, not reproving but wanting an 
answer.

After a long time the Summoner said, grimly, "Because I had the power to do 
it."

They paced along in silence down an open path among the great trees. It was 
very dark to either hand, but the starlight shone grey where they walked.

"I was wrong. But it is not right to want to die," the Summoner said. The 
burr of the East Reach was in his voice. He spoke low, almost pleadingly. 
"For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it's 
wrong not to hold and 
treasure that great gift!"

"Death also is given us," said the king.

Alder lay on a pallet on the grass. He should lie out under the stars, the 
Patterner had said, and the old Master Herbal had agreed to that. He lay 
asleep, and Tehanu sat still beside him.

Tenar sat in the doorway of the low stone house and watched her. The great 
stars of late summer shone above the clearing: highest of them the star 
called Tehanu, the Swan's Heart, the linchpin of the sky.

Seserakh came quietly out of the house and sat down on the threshold beside 
her. She had taken off the circlet that held her veil, leaving her mass of 
tawny hair unbound.

"Oh my friend," she murmured, "what will happen to us? The dead are coming 
here. Do you feel them? Like the tide rising. Across that wall. I think 
nobody can stop them. All the dead people, from the graves of all the islands 
of the west, all the 
centuries…"

Tenar felt the beating, the calling, in her head and in her blood. She knew 
now, they all knew, what Alder had known. But she held to what she trusted, 
even if trust had become mere hope. She said, "They are only the dead, 
Seserakh. We built a false 
wall. It must be unbuilt. But there is a true one."

Tehanu got up and came softly over to them. She sat on the doorstep below 
them.

"He's all right, he's sleeping," she whispered.

"Were you there with him?" Tenar asked.

Tehanu nodded. "We were at the wall."

"What did the Summoner do?"

"Summoned him─brought him back by force."

"Into life."

"Into life."

"I don't know which I should fear more," Tenar said, "death or life. I wish I 
could be done with fear."

Seserakh's face, the wave of her warm hair, bent down to Tenar's shoulder for 
a moment in a light caress. "You are brave, brave," she murmured. "But oh! I 
fear the sea! and I fear death!"

Tehanu sat quietly. In the faint soft light that hung among the trees, Tenar 
could see how her daughter's slender hand lay crossed over her burnt and 
twisted hand.

"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."

She looked up at the stars and sighed. "Not for a long time yet," she 
whispered. Then she looked round at Tenar.

Seserakh stroked Tenar's hair gently, rose, and went silently into the house.

"Before long, I think, mother…"

"I know."

"I don't want to leave you."

"You have to leave me."

"I know."

They sat on in the glimmering darkness of the Grove, silent.

"Look," Tehanu murmured. A shooting star crossed the sky, a quick, 
slow-fading trail of light.

Five wizards sat in starlight. "Look," one said, his hand following the trail 
of the shooting star.

"The soul of a dragon dying," said Azver the Patterner "So they say in 
Karego-At."

"Do dragons die?" asked Onyx, musing. "Not as we do I think."

"They don't live as we do. They move between the worlds. So says Orm Irian. 
From the world's wind to the other wind."

"As we sought to do," said Seppel. "And failed."

Gamble looked at him curiously. "Have you on Paln always known this tale, 
this lore we have learned today─of the parting of dragon and mankind, and 
the making of the dry land?"

"Not as we heard it today. I was taught that the verw nadan was the first 
great triumph of the art magic. And that the goal of wizardry was to triumph 
over time and live forever… Hence the evils the Pelnish Lore has done."

"At least you kept the Mother knowledge we despised," Onyx said. "As your 
people did, Azver."

"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.

"Dragons?" said Azver.

The Doorkeeper shook his head. "I think maybe the division that was begun, 
and then betrayed, will be completed at last," he said. "The dragons will go 
free, and leave us here to the choice we made."

"The knowledge of good and evil," said Onyx.

"The joy of making, shaping," said Seppel. "Our mastery."

"And our greed, our weakness, our fear," said Azver.

The cricket was answered by another, closer to the stream. The two trills 
pulsed, crossed, in and out of rhythm.

"What I fear," said Gamble, "so much that I fear to say it─is this: that 
when the dragons go, our mastery will go with them. Our art. Our magic."

The silence of the others showed that they feared what he did. But the 
Doorkeeper spoke at last, gently, but with some certainty. "No, I think not. 
They are the Making, yes. But we learned the Making. We made it ours. It 
can't be taken from us. To lose 
it we must forget it, throw it away."

"As my people did," said Azver.

"Yet your people remembered what the earth is, what life everlasting is," 
said Seppel. "While we forgot."

There was another long silence among them.

"I could reach my hand out to the wall," Gamble said in a very low voice, and 
Seppel said, "They are near, they are very near."

"How are we to know what we should do?" Onyx said.

Azver spoke into the silence that followed the question.

"Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me 
he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but 
to do."

"I wish he were here now," said Onyx.

"He's done with doing," the Doorkeeper murmured smiling.

"But we're not. We sit here talking on the edge of the precipice─we all know 
it." Onyx looked round at their starlit faces. "What do the dead want of us?"

"What do the dragons want of us?" said Gamble. "These women who are dragons, 
dragons who are women─why are they here? Can we trust them?"

"Have we a choice?" said the Doorkeeper.

"I think not," said the Patterner. An edge of hardness, a sword's edge, had 
come into his voice. "We can only follow."

"Follow the dragons?" Gamble asked.

Azver shook his head. "Alder."

"But he's no guide, Patterner!" said Gamble. "A village mender?"

Onyx said, "Alder has wisdom, but in his hands, not in his head. He follows 
his heart. Certainly he doesn't seek to lead us."

"Yet he was chosen from among us all."

"Who chose him?" Seppel asked softly.

The Patterner answered him: "The dead."

They sat silent. The crickets' trill had ceased. Two tall figures came 
towards them through the grass lit grey by starlight. "May Brand and I sit 
with you a while?" Lebannen said. "There is no sleep tonight."

On the doorstep of the house on the Overfell, Ged sat watching the stars 
above the sea. He had gone in to sleep an hour or more ago, but as he closed 
his eyes he saw the hillside and heard the voices rising like a wave. He got 
up at once and went 
outside, where he could see the stars move.

He was tired. His eyes would close, and then he would be there by the wall of 
stones, his heart cold with dread that he would be there forever, not knowing 
the way back. At last, impatient and sick of fear, he got up again, fetched a 
lantern from the 
house and lit it, and set off on the path to Moss's house. Moss might or 
might not be frightened; she lived pretty near the wall, these days. But 
Heather would be in a panic, and Moss would not be able to soothe her. And 
since whatever had to be done, 
it wasn't he who could do it this time, he could at least go comfort the poor 
half-wit. He could tell her it was only dreams.

It was hard going in the dark, the lantern throwing great shadows of small 
things across the path. He walked slower than he would have liked to walk, 
and stumbled sometimes.

He saw a light in the widower's house, late as it was. A child wailed, over 
in the village. Mother, mother, why are the people crying? Who are the people 
crying, mother? There was no sleep there, either. There was not much sleep 
anywhere in Earthsea, 
tonight, Ged thought. He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always 
liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.

Alder woke. he lay on earth and felt its depth beneath him. Above him the 
bright stars burned, the stars of summer, moving between leaf and leaf with 
the wind's blowing, moving from east to west with the world's turning. He 
watched them a while before 
he let them go. Tehanu was waiting for him on the hill.

"What must we do, Hara?" she asked him.

"We have to mend the world," he said. He smiled, because his heart had grown 
light at last. "We have to break the wall."

"Can they help us?" she asked, for the dead were gathered waiting down in the 
darkness as countless as grass or sand or stars, silent now, a great, dim 
beach of souls.

"No," he said, "but maybe others can." He walked down the hill to the wall. 
It was little more than waist-high here. He put his hands on one of the 
stones of the coping row and tried to move it. It was fixed fast, or was 
heavier than a stone should be; 
he could not lift it, could not make it move at all.

Tehanu came beside him. "Help me," he said. She put her hands on the stone, 
the human hand and the burnt claw, gripping it as well as she could, and gave 
a lifting tug as he did. The stone moved a little, then a little more. "Push 
it!" she said, and 
together they pushed it slowly out of place, grating hard on the rock beneath 
it, till it fell on the far side of the wall with a dull heavy thump.


The next stone was smaller; together they could lift it up out of its place. 
They let it drop into the dust on the near side.

A tremor ran through the ground under their feet then. Small chinking stones 
in the wall rattled. And with a long sigh, the multitudes of the dead came 
closer to the wall.

The patterner stood up suddenly and stood listening. Leaves stormed all about 
the glade, the trees of the Grove bowed and trembled as if under a great 
wind, but there was no wind.

"Now it changes," he said, and he walked away from them, into the darkness 
under the trees.

The Summoner, the Doorkeeper, and Seppel rose and followed him, quick and 
silent. Gamble and Onyx followed more slowly after them.

Lebannen stood up; he took a few steps after the others, hesitated, and 
hurried across the glade to the low house of stone and sod. "Irian," he said, 
stooping to the dark doorway. "Irian, will you take me with you?"

She came out of the house; she was smiling, and there was a kind of fiery 
brightness all about her. "Come then, come quick," she said, and took his 
hand. Her hand burned like a coal of fire as she lifted him into the other 
wind.

After a little time Seserakh came out of the house into the starlight, and 
after her came Tenar. They stood and looked about them. Nothing moved; the 
trees were still again.

"They are all gone," Seserakh whispered. "On the Dragons' Way."

She took a step forward, gazing into the dark.

"What are we to do, Tenar?"

"We are to keep the house," Tenar said.

"Oh!" Seserakh whispered, dropping to her knees. She had seen Lebannen lying 
near the doorway, stretched facedown in the grass. "He isn't dead─I think─
Oh, my dear Lord King, don't go, don't die!"

"He's with them. Stay with him. Keep him warm. Keep the house, Seserakh," 
Tenar said. She went to where Alder lay, his unseeing eyes turned to the 
stars. She sat down by him, her hand on his. She waited.

Alder could scarcely move the great stone his hands were on, but the Summoner 
was beside him, stooping with his shoulder against it, and said, "Now!" 
Together they pushed it till it overbalanced and dropped down with that same 
heavy, final thump on the 
far side of the wall.

Others were there now with him and Tehanu, wrenching at the stones, casting 
them down beside the wall. Alder saw his own hands cast shadows for an 
instant from a red gleam. Orm Irian, as he had seen her first, a great dragon 
shape, had let out her 
fiery breath as she struggled to move a boulder from the lowest rank of 
stones, deepset in the earth. Her talons struck sparks and her thorned back 
arched, and the rock rolled ponderously free, breaching the wall entirely in 
that place.

There was a vast, soft cry among the shadows on the other side, like the 
sound of the sea on a hollow shore. Their darkness surged up against the 
wall. But Alder looked up and saw that it was no longer dark. Light moved in 
that sky where the stars had 
never moved, quick sparks of fire far in the dark west.

"Kalessin!"

That was Tehanu's voice. He looked at her. She was gazing upward, westward. 
She had no eye for earth.

She reached up her arms. Fire ran along her hands, her arms, into her hair, 
into her face and body, flamed up into great wings above her head, and lifted 
her into the air, a creature all fire, blazing, beautiful.

She cried out aloud, a clear, wordless cry. She flew high, headlong, fast, up 
into the sky where the light was growing and a white wind had erased the 
unmeaning stars.

From among the hosts of the dead a few here and there, like her, rose up 
flickering into dragons, and mounted on the wind.

Most came forward afoot. They were not pressing, not crying out now, but 
walking with unhurried certainty towards the fallen places in the wall: great 
multitudes of men and women, who as they came to the broken wall did not 
hesitate but stepped across 
it and were gone: a wisp of dust, a breath that shone an instant in the 
ever-brightening light.

Alder watched them. He still held in his hands, forgotten, a chinking stone 
he had wrenched from the wall to loosen a larger rock. He watched the dead go 
free. At last he saw her among them. He tossed the stone aside then and 
stepped forward. "Lily," 
he said. She saw him and smiled and held out her hand to him. He took her 
hand, and they crossed together into the sunlight.

Lebannen stood by the ruined wall and watched the dawn brighten in the east. 
There was an east now, where there had been no direction, no way to go. There 
was east and west, and light and motion. The very ground moved, shook, 
shivering like a great 
animal, so that the wall of stones beyond where they had broken it shuddered 
and slid into rubble. Fire broke from the far, black peaks of the mountains 
called Paln, the fire that burns in the heart of the world, the fire that 
feeds dragons.

He looked into the sky over those mountains and saw, as he and Ged had seen 
them once above the western sea, the dragons flying on the wind of morning.

Three came wheeling towards him where he stood among the others near the 
crest of the hill, above the ruined wall. Two he knew, Orm Irian and 
Kalessin. The third had bright mail, gold, with wings of gold. That one flew 
highest and did not stoop down to 
them. Orm Irian played about her in the air and they flew together, one 
chasing the other higher and higher, till all at once the highest rays of the 
rising sun struck Tehanu and she burned like her name, a great bright star.

Kalessin circled again, flew low, and alighted hugely amid the ruins of the 
wall.

"Agni Lebannen," said the dragon to the king.

"Eldest," the king said to the dragon.

"Aissadan verw nadannan," said the vast, hissing voice, like a sea of cymbals.

Beside Lebannen, Brand the Summoner of Roke stood planted solidly. He 
repeated the dragon's words in the Speech of the Making, and then said them 
in Hardic: "What was divided is divided."

The Patterner stood near them, his hair bright in the brightening light. He 
said, "What was built is broken. What was broken is made whole."

Then he looked up yearning into the sky, at the gold dragon and the 
red-bronze one; but they had flown almost out of sight, wheeling now in vast 
gyres over the long, falling land, where empty shadow cities faded to nothing 
in the light of day.

"Eldest," he said, and the long head swung slowly back to him.

"Will she follow the way back through the forest, sometimes?" Azver asked in 
the speech of dragons.

Kalessin's long, fathomless, yellow eye regarded him. The enormous mouth 
seemed, like the mouths of lizards, closed upon a smile. It did not speak.

Then ponderously dragging its length along the wall so that stones still 
standing slid and fell grating beneath its iron belly, Kalessin writhed away 
from them, and with a rush and rattle of upraised wings pushed off from the 
hillside and flew low over 
the land towards the mountains, whose peaks now were bright with smoke and 
white steam, fire and sunlight.

"Come, friends," said Seppel in his soft voice. "It's not yet our time to go 
free."

Sunlight was in the sky above the crowns of the highest trees, but the glade 
still held the chill grey of dawn. Tenar sat with her hand on Alder's hand, 
her face bowed down. She looked at the cold dew beading a grass blade, how it 
hung in tiny, 
delicate drops along the blade, each drop reflecting all the world.

Someone spoke her name. She did not look up.

"He's gone," she said.

The Patterner knelt by her. He touched Alder's face with a gentle hand.

He knelt there silent a while. Then he said to Tenar in her language, "My 
lady, I saw Tehanu. She flies golden on the other wind."

Tenar glanced up at him. His face was white and worn, but there was a shadow 
of glory in his eyes.

She struggled and then said, speaking roughly and almost inaudibly, "Whole?"

He nodded.

She stroked Alder's hand, the mender's hand, fine, skillful. Tears came into 
her eyes.

"Let me be with him a while," she said, and she began to cry. She put her 
hands to her face and cried hard, bitterly, silently.

Azver went to the little group by the door of the house. Onyx and Gamble were 
near the Summoner, who stood, heavy and anxious, near the princess. She 
crouched beside Lebannen, her arms across him, protecting him, daring any 
wizard to touch him. Her 
eyes flashed. She held Lebannen's short steel dagger naked in her hand.

"I came back with him," Brand said to Azver. "I tried to stay with him. I 
wasn't sure of the way. She won't let me near him."

"Ganai," Azver said, her title in Kargish, princess.

Her eyes flashed up to him. "Oh may Atwah-Wuluah be thanked and the Mother 
praised for ever!" she cried. "Lord Azver! Make these accursed-sorcerers go 
away. Kill them! They have killed my king." She held out the dagger to him by 
its slender steel blade.

"No, princess. He went with the dragon Irian. But this sorcerer brought him 
back to us. Let me see him," and he knelt and turned Lebannen's face a little 
to see it better, and laid his hands on his chest. "He's cold," he said. "It 
was a hard way back. 
Take him in your arms, princess. Keep him warm."

"I have tried to," she said, biting her lip. She flung down the dagger and 
bent to the unconscious man. "O poor king!" she said softly in Hardic, "dear 
king, poor king!"

Azver got up and said to the Summoner, "I think he will be all right, Brand. 
She is much more use than we are, now."

The Summoner put out his big hand and took hold of Azver's arm. "Steady now," 
he said.

"The Doorkeeper," Azver said, going whiter than before and looking around the 
glade.

"He came back with the Pelnishman," Brand said. "Sit down, Azver."

Azver obeyed him, sitting down on the log seat the old Changer had sat on in 
their circle the afternoon before. A thousand years ago it seemed. The old 
men had gone back to the School in the evening… And then the long night had 
begun, the night that 
brought the wall of stones so close that to sleep was to be there, and to be 
there was terror, so no one had slept. No one, maybe, in all Roke, in all the 
isles… Only Alder, who went to guide them… Azver found he was dozing and 
shivering.

Gamble tried to make him go inside the winter house, but Azver insisted that 
he should be near the princess to interpret for her. And near Tenar, he 
thought without saying it, to protect her. To let her grieve. But Alder was 
done with grieving. He had 
passed his grief to her. To them all. His joy…

The Herbal came from the School and fussed about Azver, put a winter cloak 
over his shoulders. He sat on in a weary, feverish half doze, not heeding the 
others, dimly irritated by the presence of so many people in his sweet silent 
glade, watching the 
sunlight creep down among the leaves. His vigil was rewarded when the 
princess came to him, knelt before him looking with solicitous respect into 
his face, and said, "Lord Azver, the king would speak with you."

She helped him stand up, as if he were an old man. He did not mind. "Thank 
you, gainha? he said.

"I am not queen," she said with a laugh.

"You will be," said the Patterner.

It was the strong tide of the full moon, and Dolphin had to wait for the 
slack to run between the Armed Cliffs. Tenar did not disembark in Gont Port 
till midmorning, and then there was the long walk uphill. It was near sunset 
when she came through Re 
Albi and took the cliff path to the house.

Ged was watering the cabbages, well grown by now.

He straightened up and looked at her coming to him, that hawk look, frowning. 
"Ah," he said.

"Oh my dear," she said. She hurried, the last few steps, as he came to her.

She was tired. She was very glad to sit with him with a glass of Spark's good 
red wine and watch the evening of early autumn flare into gold over all the 
western sea.

"How can I tell you everything?" she said.

"Tell it backward," he said.

"All right. I will. They wanted me to stay, but I said I wanted to go home. 
But there was a council meeting, the King's Council, you know, for the 
betrothal. There'll be a grand wedding and all, of course, but I don't think 
I have to go. Because that 
was truly when they married. With Elfar-ran's Ring. Our ring."

He looked at her and smiled, the broad, sweet smile that she thought, perhaps 
wrongly, perhaps rightly, nobody but her had ever seen on his face.

"Yes?" he said.

"Lebannen came and stood here, see, on my left, and then Seserakh came and 
stood here on my right. In front of Morred's throne. And I held up the Ring. 
The way I did when we brought it to Havnor, remember? in Lookfar, in the 
sunlight? Lebannen took it 
in his hands and kissed it and gave it back to me. And I put it on her arm, 
it just went over her hand─she's not a little woman, Seserakh─Oh, you 
should see her, Ged! What a beauty she is, what a lion! He's met his match.─
And everybody shouted. And 
there were festivals and so on. And so I could get away."

"Go on."

"Backward?"

"Backward."

"Well. Before that was Roke."

"Roke's never simple."

"No."

They drank their red wine in silence.

"Tell me of the Patterner."

She smiled. "Seserakh calls him the Warrior. She says only a warrior would 
fall in love with a dragon."

"Who followed him to the dry land─that night?"

"He followed Alder."

"Ah," Ged said, with surprise and a certain satisfaction.

"So did others of the masters. And Lebannen, and Irian…"

"And Tehanu."

A silence.

"She went out of the house. When I came out she was gone." A long silence. 
"Azver saw her. In the sunrise. On the other wind."

A silence.

"They're all gone. There are no dragons left in Havnor or the western 
islands. Onyx said: as that shadow place and all the shadows in it rejoined 
the world of light, so they regained their true realm."

"We broke the world to make it whole," Ged said.

After a long time Tenar said in a soft, thin voice, "The Patterner believes 
Irian will come to the Grove if he calls to her."

Ged said nothing, till, after a while: "Look there, Tenar."

She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western 
sea.

"If she comes, she'll come from there," he said. "And if she doesn't come, 
she is there."

She nodded. "I know." Her eyes were full of tears. "Lebannen sang me a song, 
on the ship, when we were going back to Havnor." She could not sing; she 
whispered the words. "O my joy, be free…"

He looked away, up at the forests, at the mountain, the darkening heights.

"Tell me," she said, "tell me what you did while I was gone."

"Kept the house."

"Did you walk in the forest?"

"Not yet," he said.


The End