“As children trust their parents,” he said.
They were both silent.
“As things are,” he said, “even trust corrupts. The men on Roke trust themselves and one another. Their power is pure, nothing taints its purity, and so they take that purity for wisdom. They cannot imagine doing wrong.
She looked up at him. He had never spoken about Roke thus before, from wholly outside it, free of it.
“Maybe they need some women there to point that possibility out to them,” she said, and he laughed.
She restarted the wheel. “I still don’t see why, if there can be she-kings, there can’t be she-archmages.”
Therru was listening.
“Hot snow, dry water,” said Ged, a Gontish saying. “Kings are given power by other men. A mage’s power is his own–himself. ‘ ‘
“And it’s a male power. Because we don’t even know what a woman’s power is. All right. I see. But all the same, why can’t they find an archmage-a he-archmage?”
Ged studied the tattered inseam of the breeches. “Well,” he said, “if the Patterner wasn’t answering their question, he was answering one they didn’t ask. Maybe what they have to do is ask it.”
“Is it a riddle?” Therru asked.
“Yes,” said Tenar. “But we don’t know the riddle. We only know the answer to it. The answer is: A woman on Gont.”
“There’s lots of them,” Therru said after pondering a bit. Apparently satisfied by this, she went out for the next load of kindling.
Ged watched her go. “All changed,” he said. “All . . . Sometimes I think, Tenar – I wonder if Lebannen’s kingship is only a beginning. A doorway . . . And he the doorkeeper. Not to pass through.”
“He seems so young,” ‘ Tenar said, tenderly.
“Young as Morred was when he met the Black Ships. Young as I was when I . . . ” He stopped, looking out the window at the grey, frozen fields through the leafless trees.
“Or you, Tenar, in that dark place . . . What’s youth or age?
“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I’d been alive for a thousand years; sometimes I feel my life’s been like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. I have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once. And the Making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. Only in dying, life. . . . I thought about that when I was up with the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again. . . . I learned goat wisdom. So I thought, What is this grief of mine for? What man am I mourning? Ged the archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? What have I done that I should be ashamed?”
“Nothing,” Tenar said. “Nothing, ever!”
“Oh, yes,” said Ged. “All the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it. So Hawk the goatherd wept for Ged the archmage. And looked after the goats, also, as well as a boy his age could be expected to do. . . ”
After a while Tenar smiled. She said, a little shyly, “Moss said you were about fifteen.”
“That would be about right. Ogion named me in the autumn; and the next summer I was off to Roke. . . . Who was that boy? An emptiness . . . A freedom.”
“Who is Therru, Ged?”
He did not answer until she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, “So made-what freedom is there for her?”
“We are our freedom, then?”
“I think so.”
“You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I . . . I was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion, But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice; and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel, I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don’t know who the dancer is.”