Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

In mid-autumn the sorcerer Beech came up the valley, called by a rich farmer to treat his gout. He stayed on awhile in the Middle Valley villages as he usually did, and passed one afternoon at Oak Farm, checking up on Therru and talking with Tenar. He wanted to know anything she would tell him of Ogion’s last days. He was the pupil of a pupil of Ogion’s and a devout admirer of the mage of Gont. Tenar found it was not so hard to talk about Ogion as about other people of Re Albi, and told him all she could. When she had done he asked a little cautiously, “And the arch­mage-did he come?”

“Yes,” Tenar said.

Beech, a smooth-skinned, mild-looking man in his for­ties, tending a little to fat, with dark half-circles under his eyes that belied the blandness of his face, glanced at her, and asked nothing.

“He came after Ogion’s death. And left,” she said. And presently, “He’s not archmage now. You knew that?”

Beech nodded.

“Is there any word of their choosing a new archmage?” The sorcerer shook his head. “There was a ship in from the Enlades not long ago, but no word from her crew of anything but the coronation. They were full of that! And it sounds as if all auspices and events were fortunate. If the goodwill of mages is valuable, then this young king of ours is a rich man. . . . And an active one, it seems. There’s an order come overland from Gont Port just before I left Valmouth, for the nobles and merchants and the mayor and his council to meet together and see to it that the bailiffs of the district be worthy and accountable men, for they’re the king’s officers now, and are to do his will and enact his law. Well, you can imagine how Lord Heno greeted that!” Heno was a notable patron of pirates, who had long kept most of the bailiffs and sea-sheriffs of South Gont in his pocket. “But there were men willing to face up to Heno, with the king standing behind them. They dismissed the old lot then and there, and named fifteen new bailiffs, decent men, paid out of the mayor’s funds. Heno stormed off swearing destruction. It’s a new day! Not all at once, of course, but it’s coming. I wish Master Ogion had lived to see it.”

“He did,” Tenar said. “As he was dying, he smiled, and he said, ‘All changed . . . . ”

Beech took this in his sober way, nodding slowly. “All changed,” he repeated .

After a while he said, “The little one’s doing very well.”

“Well enough. . . . Sometimes I think not well enough.”

“Mistress Goha,” said the sorcerer, “if I or any sorcerer or witch or I daresay wizard had kept her, and used all the power of healing of the Art Magic for her all these months since she was injured, she wouldn’t be better off. Maybe not as well as she is. You have done all that can be done, mistress. You have done a wonder.”

She was touched by his earnest praise, and yet it made her sad; and she told him why. “It isn’t enough,” she said. “I can’t heal her. She is . . . What is she to do? What will become of her?” She ran off the thread she had been spin­ning onto the spindle-shank, and said, “I am afraid.”

“For her,” Beech said, half querying.

“Afraid because her fear draws to it, to her, the cause of her fear. Afraid because- “

But she could not find the words for it.

“If she lives in fear, she will do harm,” she said at last. “I’m afraid of that.”

The sorcerer pondered. “I’ve thought,” “ he said at last in his diffident way, that maybe, if she has the gift, as I think she does, she might be trained a bit in the Art. And, as a witch, her . . . appearance wouldn’t be so much against her-possibly.” He cleared his throat. “There are witches who do very creditable work,” he said.

Tenar ran a little of the thread she had spun between her fingers, testing it for evenness and strength. “Ogion told me to teach her. ‘Teach her all,’ he said, and then, ‘Not Roke.’ I don’t know what he meant.”

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