“Teach her, teach her all, Tenar!” When she knew that a wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended. When she knew that the child had been given her and she had failed in her charge, failed her trust, lost her, lost the one great gift.
She went into the house, having searched every corner of the other buildings, and looked again in the alcove and round the other bed. She poured herself water, for her mouth was dry as sand.
Behind the door the three sticks of wood, Ogion’s staff and the walking sticks, moved in the shadows, and one of them said, “Here.”
The child was crouched in that dark corner, drawn into her own body so that she seemed no bigger than a little dog, head bent down to the shoulder, arms and legs pulled tight in, the one eye shut.
“Little bird, little sparrow, little flame, what is wrong? What happened? What have they done to you now?”
Tenar held the small body, closed and stiff as stone, rocking it in her arms. “How could you frighten me so? How could you hide from me? Oh, I was so angry!”
She wept, and her tears fell on the child’s face.
“Oh Therru, Therru, Therru, don’t hide away from me!” A shudder went through the knotted limbs, and slowly they loosened. Therru moved, and all at once clung to Tenar, pushing her face into the hollow between Tenar’s breast and shoulder, clinging tighter, till she was clutching desperately. She did not weep. She never wept; her tears had been burned out of her, maybe; she had none. But she made a long, moaning, sobbing sound.
Tenar held her, rocking her, rocking her. Very, very slowly the desperate grip relaxed . The head lay pillowed on Tenar’s breast.
“Tell me,” the woman murmured, and the child answered in her faint, hoarse whisper, “He came here.”
Tenar’s first thought was of Ged, and her mind, still moving with the quickness of fear, caught that, saw who “he” was to her, and gave it a wry grin in passing, but passed on, hunting. “Who came here?”
No answer but a kind of internal shuddering.
“A man,” Tenar said quietly, “a man in a leather cap.”
Therru nodded once.
“We saw him on the road, coming here.”
No response.
“The four men-the ones I was angry at, do you remember? He was one of them.”
But she recalled how Therru had held her head down, hiding the burned side, not looking up, as she had always done among strangers.
“Do you know him, Therru?”
“Yes.”
“From-from when you lived in the camp by the river?”
One nod.
Tenar’s arms tightened around her.
“He came here?” she said, and all the fear she had felt turned as she spoke into anger, a rage that burned in her the length of her body like a rod of fire. She gave a kind of laugh- ”Hah!”-and remembered in that moment Kalessin, how Kalessin had laughed.
But it was not so simple for a human and a woman. The fire must be contained, And the child must be comforted.
“Did he see you?”
“I hid.”
Presently Tenar said, stroking Therru’s hair, “He will never touch you, Therru. Understand me and believe me: he will never touch you again. He’ll never see you again unless I’m with you, and then he must deal with me. Do you understand, my dear, my precious, my beautiful? You need not fear him. You must not fear him. He wants you to fear him. He feeds on your fear. We will starve him, Therru. We’ll starve him till he eats himself. Till he chokes gnawing on the bones of his own hands. . . . Ah, ah, ah, don’t listen to me now, I’m only angry, only angry. . . . Am I red? Am I red like a Gontishwoman, now? Like a dragon, am I red?” She tried to joke; and Therru, lifting her head, looked up into her face from her own crumpled, tremulous, fire-eaten face and said, “Yes. You are a red dragon.”
The idea of the man’s coming to the house, being in the house, coming around to look at his handiwork, maybe thinking of improving on it, that idea whenever it recurred to Tenar came less as a thought than as a queasy fit, a need to vomit, But the nausea burned itself out against the anger.