His voice was strained and stifled.
“She was a woman of power,” he went on. “No mere witch or potion-maker, but a woman of art and skill, using her craft for the making of the beautiful, a proud woman and honorable. That was her life. And it is all wasted.” He turned abruptly away, walked off into the orchard aisles, and there stood beside a tree-trunk, his back turned.
Arren waited for him in the hot, leaf-speckled sunlight. He knew that Sparrowhawk was ashamed to burden Arren with his emotion; and indeed there was nothing the boy could do or say. But his heart went out utterly to his companion, not now with that first romantic ardor and adoration, but painfully, as if a link were drawn forth from the very inmost of it and forged into an unbreaking bond. For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last.
Presently Sparrowhawk returned to him through the green shade of the orchard. Neither said anything, and they went on side by side. It was hot already; last night’s rain had dried, and dust rose under their feet on the road. Earlier the day had seemed dreary and insipid to Arren, as if infected by his dreams; now he took pleasure in the bite of the sunlight and the relief of shade, and enjoyed walking without brooding about their destination.
This was just as well, for they accomplished nothing. The afternoon was spent in talking with the men who mined the dye-ores, and bargaining for some bits of what was said to be emmelstone. As they trudged back to Sosara with the late sun pounding on their heads and necks, Sparrowhawk remarked, “It’s blue malachite; but I doubt they’ll know the difference in Sosara either.”
“They’re strange here,” Arren said. “It’s that way with everything; they don’t know the difference. Like what one of them said to the headman last night, ‘You wouldn’t know the true azure from blue mud…’ They complain about bad times, but they don’t know when the bad times began; they say the work’s shoddy, but they don’t improve it; they don’t even know the difference between an artisan and a spell-worker, between handicraft and the art magic. It’s as if they had no lines and distinctions and colors clear in their heads. Everything’s the same to them; everything’s grey.”
Aye,” said the mage, thoughtfully. He stalked along for a while, his head hunched between his shoulders, hawklike; though a short man, he walked with a long stride. “What is it they’re missing?”
Arren said without hesitation, “Joy in life.”
“Aye,” said Sparrowhawk again, accepting Arren’s statement and pondering it for some time. “I’m glad,” he said at last, “that you can think for me, lad… I feel tired and stupid. I’ve been sick at heart since this morning, since we talked to her who was Akaren. I do not like waste and destruction. I do not want an enemy. If I must have an enemy, I do not want to seek him, and find him, and meet him… If one must hunt, the prize should be a treasure, not a detestable thing.”
“An enemy, my lord?” said Arren.
Sparrowhawk nodded.
“When she talked about the Great Man, the King of Shadows-?”
Sparrowhawk nodded again. “I think so,” he said. “I think we must come not only to a place, but to a person. This is evil, evil, what passes on this island: this loss of craft and pride, this joylessness, this waste. This is the work of an evil will. But a will not even bent here, not even noticing Akaren or Lorbanery. The track we hunt is a track of wreckage, as if we followed a runaway cart down a mountainside and watched it set off an avalanche.”
“Could she -Akaren- tell you more about this enemy- who he is and where he is, or what he is?”
“Not now, lad,” the mage said in a soft but rather bleak voice. “No doubt she could have. In her madness there was still wizardry. Indeed her madness was her wizardry. But I could not hold her to answer me. She was in too much pain.”