“Never fear,” Diamond said, turned on his heel, and strode out. A string of dried sage caught on his head and trailed after him.
HE SPENT THE NIGHT in their old place in the sallows. Maybe he hoped she would come, but she did not come, and he soon slept in sheer weariness. He woke in the first, cold light. He sat up and thought. He looked at life in that cold light. It was a different matter from what he had believed it. He went down to the stream in which he had been named. He drank, washed his hands and face, made himself look as decent as he could, and went up through the town to the fine house at the high end, his father’s house.
After the first outcries and embraces, the servants and his mother sat him right down to breakfast. So it was with warm food in his belly and a certain chill courage in his heart that he faced his father, who had been out before breakfast seeing off a string of timber-carts to the Great Port.
“Well, son!” They touched cheeks. “So Master Hemlock gave you a vacation?”
“No, sir. I left.”
Golden stared, then filled his plate and sat down. “Left,” he said.
“Yes, sir. I decided that I don’t want to be a wizard.”
“Hmf,” said Golden, chewing. “Left of your own accord? Entirely? With the Master’s permission?”
“Of my own accord entirely, without his permission.”
Golden chewed very slowly, his eyes on the table. Diamond had seen his father look like this when a forester reported an infestation in the chestnut groves, and when he found a mule-dealer had cheated him.
“He wanted me to go to the College on Roke to study with the Master Summoner. He was going to send me there. I decided not to go.”
After a while Golden asked, still looking at the table, “Why?”
“It isn’t the life I want.”
Another pause. Golden glanced over at his wife, who stood by the window listening in silence. Then he looked at his son. Slowly the mixture of anger, disappointment, confusion, and respect on his face gave way to something simpler, a look of complicity, very nearly a wink. “I see,” he said. “And what did you decide you want?”
A pause. “This,” Diamond said. His voice was level. He looked neither at his father nor his mother.
“Hah!” said Golden. “Well! I will say I’m glad of it, son.” He ate a small porkpie in one mouthful. “Being a wizard, going to Roke, all that, it never seemed real, not exactly. And with you off there, I didn’t know what all this was for, to tell you the truth. All my business. If you’re here, it adds up, you see. It adds up. Well! But listen here, did you just run off from the wizard? Did he know you were going?”
“No. I’ll write him,” Diamond said, in his new, level voice.
“He won’t be angry? They say wizards have short tempers. Full of pride.”
“He’s angry,” Diamond said, “but he won’t do anything.”
So it proved. Indeed, to Golden’s amazement, Master Hemlock sent back a scrupulous two-fifths of the prenticing-fee. With the packet, which was delivered by one of Golden’s carters who had taken a load of spars down to South Port, was a note for Diamond. It said, “True art requires a single heart.” The direction on the outside was the Hardic rune for willow. The note was signed with Hemlock’s rune, which had two meanings: the hemlock tree, and suffering.
Diamond sat in his own sunny room upstairs, on his comfortable bed, hearing his mother singing as she went about the house. He held the wizard’s letter and reread the message and the two runes many times. The cold and sluggish mind that had been born in him that morning down in the sallows accepted the lesson. No magic. Never again. He had never given his heart to it. It had been a game to him, a game to play with Darkrose. Even the names of the True Speech that he had learned in the wizard’s house, though he knew the beauty and the power that lay in them, he could let go, let slip, forget. That was not his language.