“Ah!” she said, letting out her breath. “That’s lovely.” Presently she asked, “Could I do that?”
“Well-“
“It is a secret,” she said at once, dignified again.
“The rabbit’s name is a secret. At least, one should not use it lightly, for no reason. But what is not a secret, but rather a gift, or a mystery, do you see, is the power of calling.”
“Oh,” she said, “that you have. I know!” There was a passion in her voice, not hidden by pretended mockery. He looked at her and did not answer.
He was indeed still worn out by his struggle against the Nameless Ones; he had spent his strength in the quaking tunnels. Though he had won, he had little spirit left for exultation. He soon curled up again, as near the fire as he could get, and slept.
Tenar sat feeding the fire and watching the blaze of the winter constellations from horizon to horizon until her head grew giddy with splendor and silence, and she dozed off.
They both woke. The fire was dead. The stars she had watched were now far over the mountains and new ones had risen in the east. It was the cold that woke them, the dry cold of the desert night, the wind like a knife of ice. A veil of cloud was coming over the sky from the southwest.
The gathered firewood was almost gone. “Let’s walk,” Ged said, “it’s not long till dawn.” His teeth chattered so that she could hardly understand him. They set out, climbing the long slow slope westward. The bushes and rocks showed black in starlight, and it was as easy to walk as in the day. After a cold first while, the walking warmed them; they stopped crouching and shivering, and began to go easier. So by sunrise they were on the first rise of the western mountains, which had walled in Tenar’s life till then.
They stopped in a grove of trees whose golden, quivering leaves still clung to the boughs. He told her they were aspens; she knew no trees but juniper, and the sickly poplars by the riversprings, and the forty apple trees of the orchard of the Place. A small bird among the aspens said “dee, dee,” in a small voice. Under the trees ran a stream, narrow but powerful, shouting, muscular over its rocks and falls, too hasty to freeze. Tenar was almost afraid of it. She was used to the desert where things are silent and move slowly: sluggish rivers, shadows of clouds, vultures circling.
They divided a piece of bread and a last crumbling bit of cheese for breakfast, rested a little, and went on.
By evening they were up high. It was overcast and windy, freezing weather. They camped in the valley of another stream, where there was plenty of wood, and this time built up a sturdy fire of logs by which they could keep fairly warm.
Tenar was happy. She had found a squirrel’s cache of nuts, exposed by the falling of a hollow tree: a couple of pounds of fine walnuts and a smooth-shelled kind that Ged, not knowing the Kargish name, called ubir. She cracked them one by one between a flat stone and a hammerstone, and handed every second nutmeat to the man.
“I wish we could stay here,” she said, looking down at the windy, twilit valley between the hills. “I like this place.”
“This is a good place,” he agreed.
“People would never come here.”
“Not often… I was born in the mountains,” he said, “on the Mountain of Gont. We shall pass it, sailing to Havnor, if we take the northern way. It’s beautiful to see it in winter, rising all white out of the sea, like a greater wave. My village was by just such a stream as this one. Where were you born, Tenar?”
“In the north of Atuan, in Entat, I think. I can’t remember it.”
“They took you so young?”
“I was five. I remember a fire on a hearth, and… nothing else.”
He rubbed his jaw, which though it had acquired a sparse beard, was at least clean; despite the cold, both of them had washed in the mountain streams. He rubbed his jaw and looked thoughtful and severe. She watched him, and never could she have said what was in her heart as she watched him, in the firelight, in the mountain dusk.