Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

After a while he said, “This isn’t far from what I was taught as a boy on Roke: that true magery lies in doing only what you must do. But this would go further. Not to do, but to be done to. . . .

“I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s more like what true doing rises from. Didn’t you come and save my life-didn’t you run a fork into Hake? That was ‘doing,’ all right, doing what you must do. . . .”

He pondered again, and finally asked her, “Is this a wis­dom taught you when you were Priestess of the Tombs?”

“No.” She stretched a little, gazing into the darkness. “Arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that’s untrue. But my soul can’t live in that narrow place-this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption-beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.”

“The doorway between them,” he said softly.

That night Tenar dreamed. She dreamed that she saw the doorway of the Creation of E`a, It was a little window of gnarled, clouded, heavy glass, set low in the west wall of an old house above the sea. The window was locked, It had been bolted shut. She wanted to open it, but there was a word or a key, something she had forgotten, a word, a key, a name, without which she could not open it. She sought for it in rooms of stone that grew smaller and darker till she found that Ged was holding her, trying to wake her and comfort her, saying, “It’s all right, dear love, it will be all right!” ‘ ‘

“I can’t get free!” she cried, clinging to him.

He soothed her, stroking her hair; they lay back together, and he whispered, “Look.”

The old moon had risen. Its white brilliance on the fallen snow was reflected into the room, for cold as it was Tenar would not have the shutters closed. All the air above them was luminous. They lay in shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of light.

It was a winter of heavy snows on Gont, and a long winter. The harvest had been a good one. There was food for the animals and people, and not much to do but eat it and stay warm.

Therru knew the Creation of E`a all through. She spoke the Winter Carol and the Deed of the Young King on the day of Sunreturn. She knew how to handle a piecrust, how to spin on the wheel, and how to make soap. She knew the name and use of every plant that showed above the snow, and a good deal of other lore, herbal and verbal, that Ged had stowed away in his head from his short apprenticeship with Ogion and his long years at the School on Roke. But he had not taken down the Runes or the Lore-books from the mantelpiece, nor had he taught the child any word of the Language of the Making.

He and Tenar spoke of this. She told him how she had taught Therru the one word, tolk, and then had stopped, for it had not seemed right, though she did not know why.

“I thought perhaps it was because I’d never truly spoken that language, never used it in magery. I thought perhaps she should learn it from a true speaker of it.” ‘ ‘

“No man is that.”

“No woman is half that.”

“I meant that only the dragons speak it as their native tongue.”

“Do they learn it?”

Struck by the question, he was slow to answer, evidently calling to mind all he had been told and knew of the drag­ons. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “What do we know about them? Would they teach as we do, mother to child, elder to younger? Or are they like the animals, teaching some things, but born knowing most of what they know? Even that we don’t know. But my guess would be that the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one. One being.”

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