Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Let him be now,” said Tenar, leading them all to the front pant of the house.

“Who is he?” Heather asked.

“What was he doing on the Overfell?” Moss asked.

“You know him, Moss. He was Ogion’s-Aihal’s pren­tice, once.

The witch shook her head. “That was the lad from Ten Alders, dearie,” she said. “The one that’s Anchmage in Roke, now.”

Tenan nodded.

“No, dearie,” said Moss. “This looks like him. But isn’t him. This man’s no mage. Not even a sorcerer.”

Heathen looked from one to the other, entertained. She did not understand most things people said, but she liked to hear them say them.

“But I know him, Moss. It’s Sparrowhawk.” Saying the name, Ged’s use-name, released a tenderness in her, so that for the first time she thought and felt that this was he in­deed, and that all the years since she had first seen him were their bond. She saw a light like a star in darkness, under­ground, long ago, and his face in the light. “I know him, Moss.” She smiled, and then smiled more broadly. “He’s the first man I ever saw,” she said.

Moss mumbled and shifted. She did not like to contradict “Mistress Goha,” but she was perfectly unconvinced. “There’s tricks, disguises, transformations, changes,” she said. “Better be careful, dearie. How did he get where you found him, away out there? Did any see him come through the village?”

“None of you-saw-?”

They stared at her. She tried to say “the dragon” and could not. Her lips and tongue would not form the word. But a word formed itself with them, making itself with her mouth and breath. “Kalessin,” she said.

Therru was staring at her. A wave of warmth, heat, seemed to flow from the child, as if she were in fever. She said nothing, but moved her lips as if repeating the name, and that fever heat burned around her.

“Tricks!” Moss said. “Now that our mage is gone there’ll be all kinds of tnicksters coming round.”

“I came from Atuan to Havnon, from Havnor to Gont, with Sparnowhawk, in an open boat,” Tenar said drily.

“You saw him when he brought me here, Moss. He wasn’t archmage then. But he was the same, the same man. Are there other scars like those?”

Confronted, the olden woman became still, collecting herself. She glanced at Therru. “No,” she said. “But-”

“Do you think I wouldn’t know him?”

Moss twisted her mouth, frowned, rubbed one thumb with the other, looking at hen hands. “There’s evil things in the world, mistress,” she said. “A thing that takes a man’s form and body, but his soul’s gone-eaten- “The gebbeth?”

Moss cringed at the word spoken openly. She nodded.

“They do say, once the mage Sparrowhawk came here, long ago, before you came with him. And a thing of dankness came with him-following him. Maybe it still does. Maybe-”

“The dragon who brought him here,” Tenar said, “called him by his true name. And I know that name. Wrath at the witch’s obstinate suspicion rang in hen voice.

Moss stood mute. Her silence was better argument than her words.

“Maybe the shadow on him is his death,” Tenan said. “Maybe he’s dying. I don’t know. If Ogion-”

At the thought of Ogion she was in tears again, thinking how Ged had come too late. She swallowed the tears and went to the woodbox for kindling for the fire. She gave Therru the kettle to fill, touching hen face as she spoke to her. The seamed and slabby scars were hot to touch, but the child was not feverish. Tenar knelt to make the fire. Some­body in this fine household-a witch, a widow, a cripple, and a half-wit-had to do what must be done, and not frighten the child with weeping. But the dragon was gone, and was there nothing to come any more but death?

Bettering

He lay like the dead but was not dead. Where had he been? What had he come through? That night, in firelight, Tenar took the stained, worn, sweat-stiffened clothes off him. She washed him and let him lie naked between the linen sheet and the blanket of soft, heavy goat’s-wool. Though a short, slight-built man, he had been compact, vigorous; now he was thin as if worn down to the bone, worn away, fragile. Even the scars that ridged his shoulder and the left side of his face from temple to jaw seemed lessened, silvery. And his hair was grey.

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