TALES FROM EARTHSEA by Ursula K. LeGuin

Medra knew only a hint of this story from Ember. One night Veil, who was three years older than Ember and to whom the memory was much clearer, told it to him fully. Ember sat with them, listening in silence.

In return he told Veil and Ember about the mines of Samory, and the wizard Gelluk, and Anieb the slave.

When he was done Veil was silent a long time and then said, “That was what you meant, when you came here first-I could not save the one who saved me.”

“And you asked me, What can you tell me that could make me trust you?”

“You have told me,” Veil said.

Medra took her hand and put his forehead against it. Telling his story he had kept back tears. He could not do so now.

“She gave me freedom,” he said. “And I still feel that all I do is done through her and for her. No, not for her. We can do nothing for the dead. But for…”

“For us,” said Ember. “For us who live, in hiding, neither killed nor killing. The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.”

“Must we hide forever?”

“Spoken like a man,” said Veil with her gentle, wounded smile.

“Yes,” said Ember. “We must hide, and forever if need be. Because there’s nothing left but being killed and killing, beyond these shores. You say it, and I believe it.”

“But you can’t hide true power,” Medra said. “Not for long. It dies in hiding, unshared.”

“Magic won’t die on Roke,” said Veil. “On Roke all spells are strong. So said Ath himself. And you have walked under the trees… Our job must be to keep that strength. Hide it, yes. Hoard it, as a young dragon hoards up its fire. And share it. But only here. Pass it on, one to the next, here, where it’s safe, and where the great robbers and killers would least look for it, since no one here is of any account. And one day the dragon will come into its strength. If it takes a thousand years…”

“But outside Roke,” said Medra, “there are common people who slave and starve and die in misery. Must they do so for a thousand years with no hope?”

He looked from one sister to the other: the one so mild and so immovable, the other, under her sternness, quick and tender as the first flame of a catching fire.

“On Havnor,” he said,” far from Roke, in a village on Mount Onn, among people who know nothing of the world, there are still women of the Hand. That net hasn’t broken after so many years. How was it woven?”

“Craftily,” said Ember.

“And cast wide!” He looked from one to the other again. “I wasn’t well taught, in the City of Havnor,” he said. “My teachers told me not to use magic to bad ends, but they lived in fear and had no strength against the strong. They gave me all they had to give, but it was little. It was by mere luck I didn’t go wrong. And by Anieb’s gift of strength to me. But for her I’d be Gelluk’s servant now. Yet she herself was untaught, and so enslaved. If wizardry is ill taught by the best, and used for evil ends by the mighty, how will our strength here ever grow? What will the young dragon feed on?”

“This is the center,” said Veil. “We must keep to the center. And wait.”

“We must give what we have to give,” said Medra. “If all but us are slaves, what’s our freedom worth?”

“The true art prevails over the false. The pattern will hold,” Ember said, frowning. She reached out the poker to gather together her namesakes in the hearth, and with a whack knocked the heap into a blaze. “That I know. But our lives are short, and the patterns very long. If only Roke was now what it once was- if we had more people of the true art gathered here, teaching and learning as well as preserving-“

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