“It’s best I go, Tenar,” he said. “Till I learn to be what I am now.
“Go where?’ ‘
“Up on the mountain.”
“Wandering-like Ogion?’ ‘ She looked at him. She remembered walking with him on the roads of Atuan, deriding him: “Do wizards often beg?” And he had answered, “Yes, but they try to give something in exchange. “ ‘
She asked cautiously, “Could you get on for a while as a weatherworker, or a finder?” She filled his glass full.
He shook his head. He drank wine, and looked away. “No,” he said. “None of that. Nothing of that.”
She did not believe him. She wanted to rebel, to deny, to say to him, How can it be, how can you say that-as if you’d forgotten all you know, all you learned from Ogion, and at Roke, and in your traveling! You can’t have forgotten the words, the names, the acts of your art. You learned, you earned your power!-She kept herself from saying that, but she murmured, “I don’t understand. How can it all . . . ‘ ‘
“A cup of water,” he said, tipping his glass a little as if to pour it out. And after a while, ‘ ‘What I don’t understand is why he brought me back. The kindness of the young is cruelty…. So I’m here, I have to get on with it, till I can go back.”
She did not know clearly what he meant, but she heard a note of blame or complaint that, in him, shocked and angered her. She spoke stiffly: “It was Kalessin that brought you here.”
It was dark in the house with the door closed and only the small western window letting in the late-afternoon light. She could not make out his expression; but presently he raised his glass to her with a shadowy smile, and drank.
“This wine,” he said. “Some great merchant or pirate must have brought it to Ogion. I never drank its equal.
Even in Havnor.” He turned the squat glass in his hands, looking down at it. “I’ll call myself something,’ ‘ he said, “and go across the mountain, to Armouth and the East Forest country, where I came from. They’ll be making hay. There’s always work at haying and harvest. “
She did not know how to answer.” Fragile and jll~looking, he would be given such work only out of charity or brutality; and if he got it he would not be able to do it.”
“The roads aren’t like they used to be,” she said.” “These last years, there’s thieves and gangs everywhere. Foreign riffraff, as my friend Townsend says. But it’s not safe any more to go alone.”
Looking at him in the dusky light to see how he took this, she wondered sharply for a moment what it must be like never to have feared a human being-what it would be like to have to learn to be afraid .
“Ogion still went-’” he began, and then set his mouth; he had recalled that Ogion had been a mage.
“Down in the south part of the island,’ ‘ Tenar said, “there’s a lot of herding. Sheep, goats, cattle. They drive them up into the hills before the Long Dance, and pasture them there until the rains. They’re always needing herders. “ She drank a mouthful of the wine. It was like the dragon’s name in her mouth.” “But why can”t you just stay here?’ –
“Not in Ogion’s house.” The first place they’ll come. “Well, what if they do come? What will they want of you?”
“To be what I was.
The desolation of his voice chilled her.
She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself.” She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless.” But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.