The attitude of the villagers was much the same. A bit of whispering and sniggering, but little more. It seemed that being respectable was easier than Moss thought; or perhaps it was that used goods had little value.
She felt as soiled and diminished by their acceptance as she would have by their disapproval. Only Lark freed her from shame, by making no judgments at all, and using no words-man, woman, widow, foreigner-in place of what she saw, but simply looking, watching her and Hawk with interest, curiosity, envy, and generosity.
Because Lark did not see Hawk through the words herdsman, hired hand, widow’s man, but looked at him himself, she saw a good deal that puzzled her. His dignity and simplicity were not greater than that of other men she had known, but were a little different in quality; there was a size to him, she thought, not height or girth, certainly, but soul and mind. She said to Ivy, “That man hasn’t lived among goats all his life. He knows more about the world than he does about a farm.”
“I’d say he’s a sorcerer who’s been accursed or lost his power some way,” the witch said. “It happens.”
“Ah,” said Lark.
But the word “archmage” was too great and grand a word to bring from far-off pomps and palaces and fit to the dark-eyed, grey-haired man at Oak Farm, and she never did that. If she had, she could not have been as comfortable with him as she was. Even the idea of his having been a sorcerer made her a bit uneasy, the word getting in the way of the man, until she actually saw him again. He was up in one of the old apple trees in the orchard pruning out deadwood, and he called out a greeting to her as she came to the farm. His name fit him well, she thought, perched up there, and she waved at him, and smiled as she went on.
Tenar had not forgotten the question she had asked him on the hearthstones under the sheepskin coat. She asked it again, a few days or months later-time went along very sweet and easy for them in the stone house, on the winterbound farm. “You never told me,” ‘ she said, “how you came to hear them talking on the road.”
“I told you, I think. I’d gone aside, hidden, when I heard
“Why?”
“I was alone, and knew there were some gangs around.”
“Yes, of course- But then just as they passed, Hake was talking about Therru?”
“He said ‘Oak Farm,’ I think.”
“It’s all perfectly possible. It just seems so convenient.” Knowing she did not disbelieve him, he lay back and waited .
“It’s the kind of thing that happens to a wizard,” she said.
“And others.”
“Maybe.”
“My dear, you’re not trying to . . . reinstate me?”
“No. No, not at all. Would that be a sensible thing to do? If you were a wizard, would you be here?”
They were in the big oak-framed bed, well covered with sheepskins and feather-coverlets, for the room had no fireplace and the night was one of hard frost on fallen snow.
“But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power-that comes before it, maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using? Like this. Ogion said of you once that before you’d had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage-born, he said. So I imagined that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the emptiness the more power can fill it. But if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given away-still that would be there.”
“That emptiness,” he said.
“Emptiness is one word for it. Maybe not the right word.”
“Potentiality?” he said, and shook his head. “What is able to be . . . to become.”
“I think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that-because that is what happens to you. You didn’t make it happen. You didn’t cause it. It wasn’t because of your ‘power.’ It happened to you. Because of your emptiness.”