“There’ll be people out soon,” he said. “To tell you all about it, and hear what happened here again. They’ve got the two that ran off shut up now in a wine cellar with no wine in it, and fifteen or twenty men guarding them, and twenty or thirty boys trying to get a peek He yawned, shook his shoulders and arms to loosen them, and with a glance at Tenar asked permission to sit down at the fire.
She gestured to the hearthseat. “You must be worn out, she whispered.
“I slept a little, here, last night. Couldn’t stay awake.” He yawned again. He looked up at her, gauging, seeing how she was.
“It was Therru’s mother,” she said. Her voice would not go above a whisper.
He nodded. He sat leaning forward a bit, his arms on his knees, as Flint had used to sit, gazing into the fire. They were very alike and entirely unlike, as unlike as a buried stone and a soaring bird. Her heart ached, and her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a troubled lightness.
“The witch has got our man,” he said. “Tied down in case he feels lively, With the holes in him stuffed full of spiderwebs and blood-stanching spells. She says he’ll live to hang.”
“To hang.”
“It’s up to the King’s Courts of Law, now that they’re meeting again. Hanged or set to slave-labor.”
She shook her head, frowning.
“You wouldn’t just let him go, Tenar,” ‘ he said gently, watching her.
“No.”
“They must be punished,” he said, still watching her.
“Punished.” That’s what he said. Punish the child. She’s bad. She must be punished. Punish me, for taking her. For being-’ ‘ She struggled to speak. “I don’t want punishment! – It should not have happened. – I wish you’d killed him!”
“I did my best,” Ged said.
After a good while she laughed, rather shakily. “You certainly did.”
“Think how easy it would have been,” he said, looking into the coals again, “when I was a wizard. I could have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. I could have marched them right down to Valmouth like a flock of sheep. Or last night, here, think of the fireworks I could have set off! They’d never have known what hit them.”
“They still don’t,” she said.
He glanced at her. There was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph.
“No,” he said. “They don’t.”
“Useful with a pitchfork,” she murmured.
He yawned enormously.
“Why don’t you go in and get some sleep? The second room down the hall. Unless you want to entertain company. I see Lark and Daisy coming, and some of the children.” She had got up, hearing voices, to look out the window.
“I’ll do that,” he said, and slipped away.
Lark and her husband, Daisy the blacksmith’s wife, and other friends from the village came by all day long to tell and be told all, as Ged had said. She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night’s terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.
That was also what Therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life.
She said to Lark when the others had gone, “What makes me rage at myself is how stupid I was.”
“I did tell you you ought to keep the house locked.”
“No-Maybe-That’s just it. ‘ ‘
“I know,’ ‘ said Lark.
“But I meant, when they were here-I could have run out and fetched Shandy and Clearbrook-maybe I could have taken Therru, Or I could have gone to the lean-to and got the pitchfork myself. Or the apple-pruner. It’s seven feet long with a blade like a razor; I keep it the way Flint kept it. Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I do something? Why did I just lock myself in-when it wasn’t any good trying to? If he- If Hawk hadn’t been here- All I did was trap myself and Therru. I did finally go to the door with the butcher knife, and I shouted at them. I was half crazy. But that wouldn’t have scared them off.”