Vetch asked no question about their course, knowing that Ged did not choose it but went as he must go. As Soders Island grew small and pale behind them, and the waves hissed and smacked under the prow, and the great grey plain of water circled them all round clear to the edge of the sky, Ged asked, “What lands lie ahead this course?”
“Due south of Soders there are no lands at all. Southeast you go a long way and find little: Pelimer, Kornay, Gosk, and Astowell which is also called Lastland. Beyond it, the Open Sea.”
“What to the southwest?”
“Rolameny, which is one of our East Reach isles, and some small islets round about it; then nothing till you enter the South Reach: Rood, and Toom, and the Isle of the Ear where men do not go.”
“We may,” Ged said wryly.
“I’d rather not,” said Vetch- “that is a disagreeable part of the world, they say, full of bones and portents. Sailors say that there are stars to be seen from the waters by the Isle of the Ear and Far Sorr that cannot be seen anywhere else, and that have never been named.”
“Aye, there was a sailor on the ship that brought me first to Roke who spoke of that. And he told tales of the RaftFolk in the far South Reach, who never come to land but once a year, to cut the great logs for their rafts, and the rest of the year, all the days and months, they drift on the currents of ocean, out of sight of any land. I’d like to see those raft-villages “
“I would not,” said Vetch grinning. “Give me land, and land-folk; the sea in its bed and I in mine…”
“I wish I could have seen all the cities of the Archipelago,” Ged said as he held the sail-rope, watching the wide grey wastes before them. “Havnor at the world’s heart, and Ea where the myths were born, and Shelleth of the Fountains on Way; all the cities and the great lands. And the small lands, the strange lands of the Outer Reaches, them too. To sail right down the Dragons’ Run, away in the west. Or to sail north into the ice-floes, clear to Hogen Land. Some say that is a land greater than all the Archipelago, and others say it is mere reefs and rocks with ice between. No one knows. I should like to see the whales in the northern seas…. But I cannot. I must go where I am bound to go, and turn my back on the bright shores. I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.” So, as the mageborn will, Ged made his fear and regret into a song, a brief lament, halfsung, that was not for himself alone; and his friend replying spoke the hero’s words from the Deed of Erreth-Akbe, “O may I see the earth’s bright hearth once more, the white towers of Havnor…”
So they sailed on their narrow course over the wide forsaken waters. The most they saw that day was a school of silver pannies swimming south, but never a dolphin leapt nor did the flight of gull or murre or tern break the grey air. As the east darkened and the west grew red, Vetch brought out food and divided it between them and said, “Here’s the last of the ale. I drink to the one who thought to put the keg aboard for thirsty men in cold weather: my sister Yarrow.”
At that Ged left off his bleak thoughts and his gazing ahead over the sea, and he saluted Yarrow more earnestly, perhaps, than Vetch. The thought of her brought to his mind the sense of her wise and childish sweetness. She was not like any person he had known. (What young girl had he ever known at all? but he never thought of that.) “She is like a little fish, a minnow, that swims in a clear creek,” he said, “-defenseless, yet you cannot catch her.”