“So,” she said.
“I wanted to ask you to go away with me,” he said.
“When?”
“Then. When we quarreled. I said it all wrong. I thought….” A long pause. “I thought I could go on running away. With you. And play music. Make a living. Together. I meant to say that.”
“You didn’t say it.”
“I know. I said everything wrong. I did everything wrong. I betrayed everything. The magic. And the music. And you.”
“I’m all right,” she said.
“Are you?”
“I’m not really good on the fife, but I’m good enough. What you didn’t teach me, I can fill in with a spell, if I have to. And the band, they’re all right. Labby isn’t as bad as he looks. Nobody fools with me. We make a pretty good living. Winters, I go stay with Mother and help her out. So I’m all right. What about you, Di?”
“All wrong.”
She started to say something, and did not say it.
“I guess we were children,” he said. “Now….”
“What’s changed?”
“I made the wrong choice.”
“Once?” she said. “Or twice?”
“Twice.”
“Third time’s the charm.”
Neither spoke for a while. She could just make out the bulk of him in the leafy shadows. “You’re bigger than you were,” she said. “Can you still make a light, Di? I want to see you.”
He shook his head.
“That was the one thing you could do that I never could. And you never could teach me.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.”
“And the wizard in South Port didn’t teach you how to make it work?”
“He only taught me names.”
“Why can’t you do it now?”
“I gave it up, Darkrose. I had to either do it and nothing else, or not do it. You have to have a single heart.”
“I don’t see why,” she said. “My mother can cure a fever and ease a childbirth and find a lost ring, maybe that’s nothing compared to what the wizards and the dragonlords can do, but it’s not nothing, all the same. And she didn’t give up anything for it. Having me didn’t stop her. She had me so that she could learn how to do it! Just because I learned how to play music from you, did I have to give up saying spells? I can bring a fever down now too. Why should you have to stop doing one thing so you can do the other?”
“My father,” he began, and stopped, and gave a kind of laugh. “They don’t go together,” he said. “The money and the music.”
“The father and the witch-girl,” said Darkrose.
Again there was silence between them. The leaves of the willows stirred.
“Would you come back to me?” he said. “Would you go with me, live with me, marry me, Darkrose?”
“Not in your father’s house, Di.”
“Anywhere. Run away.”
“But you can’t have me without the music.”
“Or the music without you.”
“I would,” she said.
“Does Labby want a harper?”
She hesitated; she laughed. “If he wants a fife-player,” she said.
“I haven’t practiced ever since I left, Darkrose,” he said. “But the music was always in my head, and you….” She reached out her hands to him. They knelt facing, the willow-leaves moving across their hair. They kissed each other, timidly at first.
IN THE YEARS after Diamond left home, Golden made more money than he had ever done before. All his deals were profitable. It was as if good fortune stuck to him and he could not shake it off. He grew immensely wealthy.
He did not forgive his son. It would have made a happy ending, but he would not have it. To leave so, without a word, on his nameday night, to go off with the witch-girl, leaving all the honest work undone, to be a vagrant musician, a harper twanging and singing and grinning for pennies—there was nothing but shame and pain and anger in it for Golden. So he had his tragedy.
Tuly shared it with him for a long time, since she could see her son only by lying to her husband, which she found hard to do. She wept to think of Diamond hungry, sleeping hard. Cold nights of autumn were a misery to her. But as time went on and she heard him spoken of as Diamond the sweet singer of the West of Havnor, Diamond who had harped and sung to the great lords in the Tower of the Sword, her heart grew lighter. And once, when Golden was down ‘at South Port, she and Tangle took a donkey cart and drove over to Easthill, where they heard Diamond sing the Lay of the Lost Queen, while Rose sat with them, and Little Tuly sat on Tuly’s knee. And if not a happy ending, that was a true joy, which may be enough to ask for, after all.