When the ship was out past the last reefs and had begun to swing eastward, the three men came to her. Lebannen said, “My lady, this is the Master Windkey of Roke Island.”
The mage bowed, looking at her with praise in his keen eyes, and curiosity also; a man who liked to know which way the wind blew, she thought.
“Now I needn”t hope the fair weather will hold, but can count on it,’” she said to him.
“I’m only cargo on a day like this,’” said the mage. “Besides, with a sailor like Master Serrathen handling the ship, who needs a weatherworker?”
We are so polite, she thought, all Ladies and Lords and Masters, all bows and compliments. She glanced at the young king. He was looking at her, smiling but reserved.
She felt as she had felt in Havnor as a girl: a barbarian, uncouth among their smoothnesses. But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it.
It would take them only the day, they told her, to sail to Valmouth. They would make port there by late afternoon, with this fair wind in the sails.
Still very weary from the long distress and strain of the day before, she was content to sit in the seat the bald sailor contrived for her out of a straw mattress and a piece of sailcloth, and watch the waves and the gulls, and see the outline of Gont Mountain, blue and dreamy in the noon light, changing as they skirted its steep shores only a mile or two out from land. She brought Therru up to be in the sunshine, and the child lay beside her, watching and dozing.
A sailor, a very dark man, toothless, came on bare feet with soles like hooves and hideously gnarled toes, and put something down on the canvas near Therru. “For the little girl,”’ he said hoarsely, and went off at once, though not far off. He looked around hopefully now and then from his work to see if she liked his gift and then pretended he had not looked around. Therru would not touch the little cloth-wrapped packet. Tenar had to open it. It was an exquisite carving of a dolphin, in bone or ivory, the length of her thumb.
“It can live in your grass bag,” Tenar said, “with the others, the bone people.”
At that Therru came to life enough to fetch out her grass bag and put the dolphin in it. But Tenar had to go thank the humble giver. Therru would not look at him or speak. After a while she asked to go back to the cabin, and Tenar left her there with the bone person, the bone animal, and the dolphin for company.
It’s so easy, she thought with rage, it’s so easy for Handy to take the sunlight from her, take the ship and the king and her childhood from her, and it’s so hard to give them back! A year I’ve spent trying to give them back to her, and with one touch he takes them and throws them away. And what good does it do him-what’s his prize, his power? Is power that-an emptiness?
She joined the king and the mage at the ship’s railing. The sun was well to the west now, and the ship drove through a glory of light that made her think of her dream of flying with the dragons.
“Lady Tenar,” the king said, “I give you no message for our friend. It seems to me that to do so is to lay a burden on you, and also to encroach upon his freedom; and I don’t want to do either. I am to be crowned within the month. If it were he that held the crown, my reign would begin as my heart desires. But whether he’s there or not, he brought me to my kingdom. He made me king. I will not forget it.”
“I know you will not forget it,” she said gently. He was so intense, so serious, armored in the formality of his rank and yet vulnerable in his honesty, the purity of his will. Her heart yearned to him. He thought he had learned pain, but he would learn it again and again, all his life, and forget