She stopped herself, and drank wine, making herself taste its flavor.
“And so from him I ran to you. To the haven.” She looked about at the low, carved beams of the cabin, the polished table, the silver tray, the thin, quiet face of the young man. His hair was dark and soft, his skin a clear bronze-red; he was dressed well and plainly, with no chain or ring or outward mark of authority. But he looked the way a king should look, she thought.
“I’m sorry I let the man go,” he said. “But he can be found again. Who was it laid the spell on you?”
“A wizard.” She would not say the name. She did not want to think about all that. She wanted them all behind her. No retribution, no pursuit. Leave them to their hatreds, put them behind her, forget.
Lebannen did not press, but he asked, “Will you be safe from these men on your farm?”
“I think so. If I hadn’t been so tired, so confused by the-by the-so confused in my mind, so that I couldn’t think, I wouldn’t have been afraid of Handy. What could he have done? With all the people about, in the street? I shouldn’t have run from him. But all I could feel was her fear. She’s so little, all she can do is fear him. She’ll have to learn not to fear him. I have to teach her that …“ She was wandering. Thoughts came into her head in Kargish. Had she been talking in Kargish? He would think she was mad, an old mad woman babbling. She glanced up at him furtively. His dark eyes were not on her; he gazed at the flame of the glass lamp that hung low over the table, a little, still, clear flame. His face was too sad for a young man’s face.
“You came to find him,” she said. “The archmage. Sparrowhawk.”
“Ged,” he said, looking at her with a faint smile. “You, and he, and I go by our true names.
“You and I, yes. But he, only to you and me.”
He nodded.
“He’s in danger from envious men, men of ill will, and he has no-no defense, now. You know that?”
She could not bring herself to be plainer, but Lebannen said, “He told me that his power as a mage was gone. Spent in the act that saved me, and all of us. But it was hard to believe. I wanted not to believe him.”’
“I too, But it is so. And so he-” Again she hesitated. “He wants to be alone until his hurts are healed,” she said at last, cautiously.
Lebannen said, “He and I were in the dark land, the dry land, together. We died together. Together we crossed the mountains there. You can come back across the mountains. There is a way. He knew it. But the name of the mountains is Pain. The stones . . . The stones cut, and the cuts are long to heal.”
He looked down at his hands. She thought of Ged’s hands, scored and gashed, clenched on their wounds. Holding the cuts close, closed.
Her own hand closed on the small stone in her pocket, the word she had picked up on the steep road.
“Why does he hide from me?’” the young man cried in grief. Then, quietly, “I hoped indeed to see him. But if he doesn’t wish it, that’s the end of it, of course.” She recognized the courtliness, the civility, the dignity of the messengers from Havnor, and appreciated it; she knew its worth. But she loved him for his grief.
“Surely he’ll come to you. Only give him time. He was so badly hurt-everything taken from him- But when he spoke of you, when he said your name, oh, then I saw him for a moment as he was-as he will be again- All pride!’”
“Pride?”’ Lebannen repeated, as if startled.
“Yes. Of course, pride. Who should be proud, if not he?”
“I always thought of him as- He was so patient,” Lebannen said, and then laughed at the inadequacy of his description.
“Now he has no patience,” she said, “and is hard on himself beyond all reason. There’s nothing we can do for him, I think, except let him go his own way and find himself at the end of his tether, as they say on Gont All at once she was at the end of her own tether, so weary she felt ill. “I think I must rest now,”” she said.