“All changed!” the old man had whispered, dying, joyful. Laying his hand on hers, giving her the gift, his name, giving it away.
“Aihal!” she whispered. For answer a couple of goats bleated, out behind the milking shed, waiting for Heather to come. “Be-eh,” one said, and the other, deeper, metallic, “Bla-ah! Bla-ah!” Trust a goat, Flint used to say, to spoil anything. Flint, a shepherd, had disliked goats. But Sparrowhawk had been a goatherd, here across the mountain, as a boy.
She went inside. She found Therru standing gazing at the sleeping man. She put her arm around the child, and though Therm usually shrank from or was passive to touch or caress, this time she accepted it and perhaps even leaned a little to Tenar.
Ged lay in the same exhausted, overwhelmed sleep. His face was turned to expose the four white scars that marked it.
“Was he burned?” Therru whispered.
Tenar did not answer at once. She did not know what those scars were. She had asked him long ago, in the Painted Room of the Labyrinth of Atuan, jeering: “A dragon?” And he had answered seriously, “Not a dragon. One of the kinship of the Nameless Ones; but I learned his name…. And that was all she knew. But she knew what “burned” meant to the child.
“Yes,” she said.
Therru continued to gaze at him. She had cocked her head to bring her one seeing eye to bear, which made her look like a little bird, a sparrow or a finch.
“Come along, finchling, birdlet, sleep’s what he needs, you need a peach. Is there a peach ripe this morning?”
Therru trotted out to see, and Tenar followed her.
Eating her peach, the child studied the place where she had planted the peach pit yesterday. She was evidently disappointed that no tree had grown there, but she said nothing.
“Water it,” said Tenar.
Aunty Moss arrived in the midmorning. One of her skills as a witch-handywoman was basket making, using the rushes of Overfell Marsh, and Tenar had asked her to teach her the art. As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. As a stranger in Gont, she had found that people liked to teach. She had learned to be taught and so to be accepted, her foreignness forgiven.
Ogion had taught her his knowledge, and then Flint had taught her his. It was her habit of life, to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.
The rushes had been soaking, and this morning they were to split them, an exacting but not a complicated business, leaving plenty of attention to spare.
“Aunty,” said Tenar as they sat on the doorstep with the bowl of soaking rushes between them and a mat before them to lay the split ones on, “how do you tell if a man’s a wizard or not?”
Moss’s reply was circuitous, beginning with the usual gnomics and obscurities. “Deep knows deep,” she said, deeply, and “What’s born will speak,” and she told a story about the ant that picked up a tiny end of hair from the floor of a palace and ran off to the ants’ nest with it, and in the night the nest glowed underground like a star, for the hair was from the head of the great mage Brost, But only the wise could see the glowing anthill. To common eyes it was all dark.
“One needs training, then,” said Tenar.
Maybe, maybe not, was the gist of Moss’s dark reply. “Some are born with that gift,” she said. “Even when they don’t know it, it will be there. Like the hair of the mage in the hole in the ground, it will shine.”
“Yes,” said Tenar. “I’ve seen that.” She split and resplit a reed cleanly and laid the splints on the mat. “How do you know, then, when a man is not a wizard?”
“It’s not there,” Moss said, “it’s not there, dearie. The power. See now. If I’ve got eyes in my head I can see that you have eyes, can’t I? And if you’re blind I’ll see that. And if you’ve only got one eye, like the little one, or if you’ve got three, I’ll see ‘em, won’t I? But if I don’t have an eye to see with, I won’t know if you do till you tell me. But I do. I see, I know. The third eye!” She touched her forehead and gave a loud, dry chuckle, like a hen triumphant over an egg. She was pleased with having found the words to say what she wanted to say. A good deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.