For a long while he was silent, standing there. She thought she had said the right thing, and given him some comfort. But he spoke at last.
“Like the child?”
It was like a knife so sharp she did not feel it come into her body.
“I don’t know,” he said in the same soft, dry voice, “why you took her, knowing that she cannot be healed. Knowing what her life must be. I suppose it’s a part of this time we have lived-a dark time, an age of ruin, an ending time. You took her, I suppose, as I went to meet my enemy, because it was all you could do. And so we must live on into the new age with the spoils of our victory over evil. You with your burned child, and I with nothing at all.”
Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
Tenar turned to look at the mage’s staff in the dark place to the right of the door, but there was no light in it. It was all dark, inside and out. Through the open doorway a couple of stars were visible, high and faint. She looked at them. She wanted to know what stars they were. She got up and went groping past the table to the door. The haze had risen and not many stars were visible. One of those she had seen from indoors was the white summer star that they called, in Atuan, in her own language, Tehanu. She did not know the other one. She did not know what they called Tehanu here, in Hardic, or what its true name was, what the dragons called it. She knew only what her mother would have called it, Tehanu, Tehanu. Tenar, Tenar . . .
“Ged,” she said from the doorway, not turning, “who brought you up, when you were a child?”
He came to stand near her, also looking out at the misty horizon of the sea, the stars, the dark bulk of the mountain above them.
“Nobody much,” he said. “My mother died when I was a baby. There were some older brothers. I don’t remember them. There was my father the smith. And my mother’s sister. She was the witch of Ten Alders.”
“Aunty Moss,” Tenar said.
“Younger. She had some power.
“What was her name?”
He was silent.
“I cannot remember,” he said slowly.
After a while he said, “She taught me the names. Falcon, pilgrim falcon, eagle, osprey, goshawk, sparrowhawk
“What do you call that star? The white one, up high.”
“The Heart of the Swan,” he said, looking up at it. “In Ten Alders they called it the Arrow.”
But he did not say its name in the Language of the Making, nor the true names the witch had taught him of hawk, falcon, sparrowhawk.
“What I said-in there-was wrong,” he said softly. “I shouldn’t speak at all. Forgive me.
“If you won’t speak, what can I do but leave you?” She turned to him. “Why do you think only of yourself? always of yourself? Go outside awhile,” she told him, wrathful. “I want to go to bed.”
Bewildered, muttering some apology, he went out; and she, going to the alcove, slipped out of her clothes and into the bed, and hid her face in the sweet warmth of Therru’s silky nape.
“Knowing what her life must be . . . “
Her anger with him, her stupid denial of the truth of what he told her, rose from disappointment. Though Lark had said ten times over that nothing could be done, yet she had hoped that Tenar could heal the burns; and for all her saying that even Ogion could not have done it, Tenar had hoped that Ged could heal Therru-could lay his hand on the scar and it would be whole and well, the blind eye bright, the clawed hand soft, the ruined life intact.
“Knowing what her life must be . . . “
The averted faces, the signs against evil, the horror and curiosity, the sickly pity and the prying threat, for harm draws harm to it . . . And never a man’s arms. Never anyone to hold her. Never anyone but Tenar. Oh, he was right, the child should have died, should be dead. They should have let her go into that dry land, she and Lark and Ivy, meddling old women, softhearted and cruel. He was right, he was always right. But then, the men who had used her for their needs and games, the woman who had suffered her to be used-they had been quite right to beat her unconscious and push her into the fire to burn to death. Only they had not been thorough. They had lost their nerve, they had left some life in her. That had been wrong. And everything she, Tenar, had done was wrong. She had been given to the dark powers as a child: she had been eaten by them, she had been suffered to be eaten. Did she think that by crossing the sea, by learning other languages, by being a man s wife, a mother of children, that by merely living her life, she could ever be anything but what she was-their servant, their food, theirs to use for their needs and games? Destroyed, she had drawn the destroyed to her, part of her own ruin, the body of her own evil.