And therefore he would not, like Handy, do the easy thing to do.
“I’ll bear a message willingly,” she said. “It’s no burden. Whether he’d hear it is up to him.”
The Master Windkey grinned. “It always was,”’ he said. “Whatever he did was up to him.”
“You’ve known him a long time?”
“Even longer than you, my lady. Taught him,’” said the mage. “What I could. . . . He came to the School on Roke, you know, as a boy, with a letter from Ogion telling us that he had great power. But the first time I had him out in a boat, to learn how to speak to the wind, you know, he raised up a waterspout. I saw then what we were in for. I thought, Either he’ll be drowned before he’s sixteen, or he’ll be archmage before he’s forty. . . . Or I like to think I thought it.”
“Is he still archmage?”’ Tenar asked. The question seemed baldly ignorant, and when it was greeted by a silence, she feared it had been worse than ignorant.
The mage said finally, “There is now no Archmage of Roke. “ His tone was exceedingly cautious and precise.
She dared not ask what he meant.
“I think,” said the king, “that the Healer of the Rune of Peace may be part of any council of this realm; don’t you think so, sir?”
After another pause and evidently with a little struggle, the mage said, “Certainly.”’
The king waited, but he said no more.
Lebannen looked out at the bright water and spoke as if he began a tale: “When he and I came to Roke from the farthest west, borne by the dragon He paused, and the dragon’s name spoke itself in Tenar’s mind, Kalessin, like a struck gong.
“The dragon left me there, but bore him away. The keeper of the door of the House of Roke said then, ‘He has done with doing. He goes home.’ And before that-on the beach of Selid or-he bade me leave his staff, saying he was no mage now. So the Masters of Roke took counsel to choose a new archmage.
“They took me among them, that I might learn what it might be well for a king to know about the Council of the Wise. And also I was one of them to replace one of their number: Thorion, the Summoner, whose art was turned against him by that great evil which my lord Sparrowhawk found and ended. When we were there, in the dry land, between the wall and the mountains, I saw Thorion. My lord spoke to him, telling him the way back to life across the wall. But he did not take it. He did not come back.””
The young man’s strong, fine hands held hard to the ship’s rail. He still gazed at the sea as he spoke. He was silent for a minute and then took up his story.
“So I made out the number, nine, who meet to choose the new archmage.
“They are . . . they are wise men,” he said, with a glance at Tenar. “Not only learned in their art, but knowledgeable men. They use their differences, as I had seen before, to make their decision strong. But this time . . .
“The fact is,” said the master windkey, seeing Lebannen unwilling to seem to criticize the Masters of Roke, “we were all difference and no decision. We could come to no agreement. Because the archmage wasn’t dead-was alive, you see, and yet no mage-and yet still a dragonlord, it seemed. . . . And because our Changer was still shaken from the turning of his own art on him, and believed that the Summoner would return from death, and begged us to wait for him. . . . And because the Master Patterner would not speak at all. He is a Karg, my lady, like yourself; did you know that? He came to us from Karego-At. “ “ His keen eyes watched her: which way does the wind blow? “So because of all that, we found ourselves at a loss. When the Doorkeeper asked for the names of those from whom we would choose, not a name was spoken. Everybody looked at everybody else