“Those are bitter scars you bear, lad,” he said.
“I, have no strength against the thing,” Ged answered.
Ogion shook his head but said no more for a time. At length, “Strange,” he said: “You had strength enough to outspell a sorcerer in his own domain, there in Osskil. You had strength enough to withstand the lures and fend off the attack of the servants of an Old Power of Earth. And at Pendor you had strength enough to stand up to a dragon.”
“It was luck I had in Osskil, not strength,” Ged replied, and he shivered again as he thought of the dreamlike deathly cold of the Court of the Terrenon. “As for the dragon, I knew his name. The evil thing, the shadow that hunts me, has no name.”
“All things have a name,” said Ogion, so certainly that Ged dared not repeat what the Archmage Gensher had told him, that such evil forces as he had loosed were nameless. The Dragon of Pendor, indeed, had offered to tell him the shadow’s name, but he put little trust in the truth of that offer, nor did he believe Serret’s promise that the Stone would tell him what he needed to know.
“If the shadow has a name,” he said at last, “I do not think it will stop and tell it to me…”
“No,” said Ogion. “Nor have you stopped and told it your name. And yet it knew it. On the moors in Osskil it called you by your name, the name I gave you. It is strange, strange…”
He fell to brooding again. At last Ged said, “I came here for counsel, not for refuge, Master. I will not bring this shadow upon you, and it will soon be here if I stay. Once you drove it from this very room-“
“No; that was but the foreboding of it, the shadow of a shadow. I could not drive it forth, now. Only you could do that.”
“But I am powerless before it. Is there any place…” His voice died away before he had asked the question.
“There is no safe place,” Ogion said gently. “Do not transform yourself again, Ged. The shadow seeks to destroy your true being. It nearly did so, driving you into hawk’s being. No, where you should go, I do not know. Yet I have an idea of what you should do. It is a hard thing to say to you.”
Ged’s silence demanded truth, and Ogion said at last, “You must turn around.”
“Turn around?”
“If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter.”
Ged said nothing.
“At the spring of the River Ar I named you,” the mage said, “a stream that falls from the mountain to the sea. A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea. You returned to Gont, you returned to me, Ged. Now turn clear round, and seek the very source, and that which lies before the source. There lies your hope of strength.”
“There, Master?” Ged said with terror in his voice”Where?”
Ogion did not answer.
“If I turn,” Ged said after some time had gone by, “if as you say I hunt the hunter, I think the hunt will not be long. All its desire is to meet me face to face. And twice it has done so, and twice defeated me.”
“Third time is the charm,” said Ogion.
Ged paced the room up and down, from fireside to door, from door to fireside. “And if it defeats me wholly,” he said, arguing perhaps with Ogion perhaps with himself, “it will take my knowledge and my power, and use them. It threatens only me, now. But if it enters into me and possesses me, it will work great evil through me.”