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In which case it would not help much if Therru became the properest farm-lassie in Gont. Not even prosperity would diminish the visible brand of what had been done to her. So Beech had thought of her being a witch, accepting, making use, of the brand. Was that what Ogion had meant, when he said “Not Roke” — when he said “They will fear her”? Was that all?
One day when a managed chance brought them together in the village street, Tenar said to Ivy, “There’s a question I want to ask you, Mistress Ivy. A matter of your profession. “
The witch eyed her. She had a scathing eye.
“My profession, is it?”
Tenar nodded, steady.
“Come on, then,” Ivy said with a shrug, leading off down Mill Lane to her little house.
It was not a den of infamy and chickens, like Moss’s house, but it was a witch-house, the beams hung thick with dried and drying herbs, the fire banked under grey ash with one tiny coal winking like a red eye, a lithe, fat, black cat with one white mustache sleeping up on a shelf, and everywhere a profusion of little boxes, pots, ewers, trays, and stoppered bottles, all aromatic, pungent or sweet or strange.
“What can I do for you, Mistress Goha?” Ivy asked, very dry, when they were inside.
“Tell me, if you will, if you think my ward, Therru, has any gift for your art-any power in her.”
“She? Of course!” said the witch.
Tenar was a bit floored by the prompt and contemptuous answer. “Well,”’ she said. “Beech seemed to think so.”
“A blind bat in a cave could see it,” said Ivy. “Is that all?”
“No. I want your advice. When I’ve asked my question, you can tell me the price of the answer. Fair?”
“Fair.”
“Should I prentice Therru for a witch, when she’s a bit older?”’
Ivy was silent for a minute, deciding on her fee, Tenar thought. Instead, she answered the question. “I would not take her,” “ she said.
“Why?”
“I’d be afraid to,’” the witch answered, with a sudden fierce stare at Tenar.
“Afraid? Of what?”
“Of her! What is she?’”
“A child. An ill-used child!”
“That’s not all she is.”
Dark anger came into Tenar and she said, “Must a prentice witch be a virgin, then?”
Ivy stared. She said after a moment, “I didn’t mean that.”
“What did you mean?’”
“I mean I don’t know what she is. I mean when she looks at me with that one eye seeing and one eye blind I don’t know what she sees. I see you go about with her like she was any child, and I think, What are they? What’s the strength of that woman, for she’s not a fool, to hold a fire by the hand, to spin thread with the whirlwind? They say, mistress, that you lived as a child yourself with the Old Ones, the Dark Ones, the Ones Underfoot, and that you were queen and servant of those powers. Maybe that’s why you’re not afraid of this one. What power she is, I don’t know, I don’t say. But it’s beyond my teaching, I know that-or Beech’s, or any witch or wizard I ever knew! I’ll give you my advice, mistress, free and feeless. It’s this: Beware. Beware her, the day she finds her strength! That’s all.”
“I thank you, Mistress Ivy,” Tenar said with all the formality of the Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and went out of the warm room into the thin, biting wind of the end of autumn.
She was still angry. Nobody would help her, she thought. She knew the job was beyond her, they didn’t have to tell her that-but none of them would help her. Ogion had died, and old Moss ranted, and Ivy warned, and Beech kept clear, and Ged-the one who might really have helped— Ged ran away. Ran off like a whipped dog, and never sent sign or word to her, never gave a thought to her or Therru, but only to his own precious shame. That was his child, his nurseling. That was all he cared about. He had never cared or thought about her, only about power-her power, his power, how he could use it, how he could make more power of it. Putting the broken Ring together, making the Rune, putting a king on the throne. And when his power was gone, still it was all he could think about: that it was gone, lost, leaving him only himself, his shame, his emptiness.
"You aren’t being fair," Goha said to Tenar.
"Fair!" said Tenar. "Did he play fair?"
"Yes," said Goha. "He did. Or tried to".
"Well, then, he can play fair with the goats he’s herding; it’s nothing to me," said Tenar, trudging homeward in the wind and the first, sparse, cold rain.
“Snow tonight, maybe,” said her tenant Tiff, meeting her on the road beside the meadows of the Kaheda.
“Snow so soon? I hope not.”
“Freeze, anyway, for sure.”
And it froze when the sun was down: rain puddles and watering troughs skimming over, then opaqued with ice; the reeds by the Kaheda stilled, bound in ice; the wind itself stilled as if frozen, unable to move.
Beside the fire-a sweeter fire than Ivy’s, for the wood was that of an old apple that had been taken down in the orchard last spring-Tenar and Therru sat to spin and talk after supper was cleared away.
“Tell the story about the cat ghosts,’” Therru said in her husky voice as she started the wheel to spin a mass of dark, silky goat’s-wool into fleecefell yarn.
“That’s a summer story."
Therru cocked her head.
“In winter the stories should be the great stories. In winter you learn the Creation of E`a, so that you can sing it at the Long Dance when summer comes. In winter you learn the Winter Carol and the Deed of the Young King, and at the Festival of Sunreturn, when the sun turns north to bring the spring, you can sing them.”
“I can’t sing,” the girl whispered.
Tenar was winding spun yarn off the distaff into a ball, her hands deft and rhythmic.
“Not only the voice sings,” she said. “The mind sings. The prettiest voice in the world’s no good if the mind doesn’t know the songs.” She untied the last bit of yarn, which had been the first spun. “You have strength, Therru, and strength that is ignorant is dangerous.”
“Like the ones who wouldn’t learn,” Therru said. “The wild ones.” Tenar did not know what she meant, and looked her question. “The ones that stayed in the west,” Therru said.
“Ah-the dragons-in the song of the Woman of Kemay. Yes. Exactly. So: which will we start with-how the islands were raised from the sea, or how King Morred drove back the Black Ships?" “
“The islands,” Therru whispered. Tenar had rather hoped she would choose the Deed of the Young King, for she saw Lebannen’s face as Morred’s; but the child’s choice was the right one. “Very well,” she said. She glanced up at Ogion’s great Lore-books on the mantel, encouraging herself that if she forgot, she could find the words there; and drew breath; and began.
By her bedtime Therru knew how Segoy had raised the first of the islands from the depths of Time. Instead of singing to her, Tenar sat on the bed after tucking her in, and they recited together, softly, the first stanza of the song of the Making.
Tenar carried the little oil lamp back to the kitchen, listening to the absolute silence. The frost had bound the world, locked it. No star showed. Blackness pressed at the single window of the kitchen. Cold lay on the stone floors.
She went back to the fire, for she was not sleepy yet. The great words of the song had stirred her spirit, and there was still anger and unrest in her from her talk with Ivy. She took the poker to rouse up a little flame from the backlog. As she struck the log, there was an echo of the sound in the back of the house.
She straightened up and stood listening.
Again: a soft, dull thump or thud-outside the house-at the dairy window?
The poker still in her hand, Tenar went down the dark hall to the door that gave on the cool-room. Beyond the cool-room was the dairy. The house was built against a low hill, and both those rooms ran back into the hill like cellars, though on a level with the rest of the house. The cool-room had only air-vents; the dairy had a door and a window, low and wide like the kitchen window, in its one outside wall. Standing at the cool-room door, she could hear that window being pried or jimmied, and men’s voices whispering.
Flint had been a methodical householder. Every door but one of his house had a bar-bolt on each side of it, a stout length of cast iron set in slides. All were kept clean and oiled; none were ever locked.
She slipped the bolt across the cool-room door. It slid into place without a sound, fitting snug into the heavy iron slot on the doorjamb.
She heard the outer door of the dairy opened. One of them had finally thought to try it, before they broke the window, and found it wasn’t locked. She heard the mutter of voices again. Then silence, long enough that she heard her heartbeat drumming in her ears so loud she feared she could not hear any sound over it. She felt her legs trembling and trembling, and felt the cold of the floor creep up under her skirt like a hand.
“It’s open,” a man’s voice whispered near her, and her heart leapt painfully. She put her hand on the bolt, thinking it was open-she had unlocked not locked it— She had almost slid it back when she heard the door between the cool-room and the dairy creak, opening. She knew that creak of the upper hinge. She knew the voice that had spoken, too, but in a different way of knowing. “It’s a storeroom,” Handy said, and then, as the door she stood against rattled against the bolt, “This one’s locked.” It rattled again. A thin blade of light, like a knife blade, flicked between the door and the jamb. It touched her breast, and she drew back as if it had cut her.
The door rattled again, but not much. It was solid, solidly hinged, and the bolt was firm.
They muttered together on the other side of the door. She knew they were planning to come around and try the front of the house. She found herself at the front door, bolting it, not knowing how she came there. Maybe this was a nightmare. She had had this dream, that they were trying to get into the house, that they drove thin knives through the cracks of the doors. The doors-was there any other door they could get in? The windows-the shutters of the bedroom windows— Her breath came so short she thought she could not get to Therru’s room, but she was there, she brought the heavy wooden shutters across the glass. The hinges were stiff, and they came together with a bang. Now they knew. Now they were coming. They would come to the window of the next room, her room. They would be there before she could close the shutters. And they were.
She saw the faces, blurs moving in the darkness outside, as she tried to free the left-hand shutter from its hasp. It was stuck. She could not make it move. A hand touched the glass, flattening white against it.
“There she is."
“Let us in. We won’t hurt you.”
“We just want to talk to you."
“He just wants to see his little girl.”
She got the shutter free and dragged it across the window. But if they broke the glass they would be able to push the shutters open from the outside. The fastening was only a hook that would pull out of the wood if forced.
“Let us in and we won’t hurt you,” one of the voices said. She heard their feet on the frozen ground, crackling in the fallen leaves. Was Therru awake? The crash of the shutters closing might have wakened her, but she had made no sound. Tenar stood in the doorway between her room and Therru’s, It was pitch-dark, silent. She was afraid to touch the child and waken her. She must stay in the room with her. She must fight for her. She had had the poker in her hand, where had she put it? She had put it down to close the shutters. She could not find it. She groped for it in the blackness of the room that seemed to have no walls.
The front door, which led into the kitchen, rattled, shaken in its frame.
If she could find the poker she would stay in here, she would fight them.
“Here!” one of them called, and she knew what he had found. He was looking up at the kitchen window, broad, unshuttered, easy to reach.
She went, very slowly it seemed, groping, to the door of the room. It was Therru’s room now. It had been her children’s room. The nursery. That was why there was no lock on the inner side of the door. So the children could not lock themselves in and be frightened if the bolt stuck.
Around back of the hill, through the orchard, Clearbrook and Shandy would be asleep in their cottage. If she called, maybe Shandy would hear. If she opened the bedroom window and called-or if she waked Therru and they climbed out the window and ran through the orchard-but the men were there, right there, waiting.
It was more than she could bear. The frozen terror that had bound her broke, and in rage she ran into the kitchen that was all red light in her eyes, grabbed up the long, sharp butcher knife from the block, flung back the door-bolt, and stood in the doorway. “Come on, then!" “ she said.
As she spoke there was a howl and a sucking gasp, and a man yelled, “Look out!” Another shouted, “Here! Here!”
Then there was silence.
Light from the open doorway shot across the black ice of puddles, glittered on the black branches of the oaks and on fallen silver leaves, and as her eyes cleared she saw that something was crawling towards her on the path, a dark mass or heap crawling towards her, making a high, sobbing wail. Behind the light a black shape ran and darted, and long blades shone.
“Tenar!”
“Stop there,” she said, raising the knife.
“Tenar! It’s me-Hawk, Sparrowhawk!”
“Stay there,” she said.
The darting black shape stood still next to the black mass lying on the path. The light from the doorway shone dim on a body, a face, a long-tined pitchfork held upright, like a wizard’s staff, she thought. “Is that you?” she said.
He was kneeling now by the black thing on the path.
“I killed him, I think,” he said. He looked over his shoulder, stood up. There was no sign or sound of the other men.
“Where are they?”
“Ran. Give me a hand, Tenar."
She held the knife in one hand. With the other she took hold of the arm of the man that lay huddled up on the path. Ged took him under the shoulder and they dragged him up the step and into the house. He lay on the stone floor of the kitchen, and blood ran out of his chest and belly like water from a pitcher. His upper lip was drawn back from his teeth, and only the whites of his eyes showed.
“Lock the door,” Ged said, and she locked the door.
“Linens in the press,” she said, and he got a sheet and tore it for bandages, which she bound round and round the man’s belly and breast, into which three of the four tines of the pitchfork had driven full force, making three ragged springs of blood that dripped and squirted as Ged supported the man’s torso so that she could wrap the bandages.
“What are you doing here? Did you come with them?”
“Yes. But they didn’t know it. That’s about all you can do, Tenar. “ He let the man’s body sag down, and sat back, breathing hard, wiping his face with the back of his bloody hand. “I think I killed him,” he said again.
“Maybe you did.” Tenar watched the bright red spots spread slowly on the heavy linen that wrapped the man’s thin, hairy chest and belly. She stood up, and swayed, very dizzy. “Get by the fire,” she said. “You must be perishing.”
She did not know how she had known him in the dark outside. By his voice, maybe. He wore a bulky shepherd’s winter coat of cut fleece with the leather side out, and a
shepherd’s knit watch cap pulled down; his face was lined and weathered, his hair long and iron-grey. He smelled like woodsmoke, and frost, and sheep. He was shivering, his whole body shaking. “Get by the fire,” she said again. “Put wood on it.”
He did so. Tenar filled the kettle and swung it out on its iron arm over the blaze.
There was blood on her skirt, and she used an end of linen soaked in cold water to clean it. She gave the cloth to Ged to clean the blood off his hands. “What do you mean, she said, “you came with them but they didn’t know it?”
“I was coming down. From the mountain. On the road from the springs of the Kaheda. “ He spoke in a flat voice as if out of breath, and his shivering made his speech slur. “Heard men behind me, and I went aside. Into the woods. Didn’t feel like talking. I don’t know. Something about them. I was afraid of them.”
She nodded impatiently and sat down across the hearth from him, leaning forward to listen, her hands clenched tight in her lap. Her damp skirt was cold against her legs.
“I heard one of them say ‘Oak Farm’ as they went by. After that I followed them. One of them kept talking. About the child.”
“What did he say?”
He was silent. He said finally, “That he was going to get her back. Punish her, he said. And get back at you. For stealing her, he said. He said-” He stopped.
“That he’d punish me, too."
“They all talked. About, about that.”
“That one isn’t Handy.” She nodded toward the man on the floor. “Is it the. . . " . . . “
“He said she was his.” Ged looked at the man too, and back at the fire. “He’s dying. We should get help.”
“He won’t die,” Tenar said. “I’ll send for Ivy in the morning. The others are still out there-how many of them?”
“Two.”
“If he dies he dies, if he lives he lives. Neither of us is going out.” She got to her feet, in a spasm of fear. “Did you bring in the pitchfork, Ged!" “
He pointed to it, the four long tines shining as it leaned against the wall beside the door.
She sat down in the hearthseat again, but now she was shaking, trembling from head to foot, as he had done. He reached across the hearth to touch her arm. “It’s all right,” he said.
“What if they’re still out there?”
“They ran.”
“They could come back.”
“Two against two? And we’ve got the pitchfork.”
She lowered her voice to a bare whisper to say, in terror, “The pruning hook and the scythes are in the barn lean-to.”
He shook his head. “They ran. They saw-him-and you in the door.”
“What did you do?”
“He came at me. So I came at him.”
“I mean, before. On the road.”
“They got cold, walking. It started to rain, and they got cold, and started talking about coming here. Before that it was only this one, talking about the child and you, about teaching-teaching lessons-” His voice dried up. “I’m thirsty,” he said.
“So am I. The kettle’s not boiling yet. Go on.
He took breath and tried to tell his story coherently. “The other two didn’t listen to him much. Heard it all before, maybe. They were in a hurry to get on. To get to Valmouth. As if they were running from somebody. Getting away. But it got cold, and he went on about Oak Farm, and the one with the cap said, ‘Well, why not just go there and spend the night with-" “ .
“With the widow, yes.”
Ged put his face in his hands. She waited.
He looked into the fire, and went on steadily. “Then I lost them for a while. The road came out level into the valley, and I couldn’t follow along the way I’d been doing, in the woods, just behind them. I had to go aside, through the fields, keeping out of their sight. I don’t know the country here, only the road. I was afraid if I cut across the fields I’d get lost, miss the house. And it was getting dark. I thought I’d missed the house, overshot it. I came back to the road, and almost ran into them-at the turn there. They’d seen the old man go by. They decided to wait till it was dark and they were sure nobody else was coming. They waited in the barn. I stayed outside. Just through the wall from them.”
“You must be frozen,” Tenar said dully.
“It was cold.” He held his hands to the fire as if the thought of it had chilled him again. “I found the pitchfork by the lean-to door. They went around to the back of the house when they came out. I could have come to the front door then to warn you, it’s what I should have done, but all I could think of was to take them by surprise-I thought it was my only advantage, chance. . . . I thought the house would be locked and they’d have to break in. But then I heard them going in, at the back, there. I went in-into the dairy-after them. I only just got out, when they came to the locked door.” He gave a kind of laugh. “They went right by me in the dark. I could have tripped them. . . . One of them had a flint and steel, he’d burn a little tinder when they wanted to see a lock. They came around front. I heard you putting up the shutters; I knew you’d heard them. They talked about smashing the window they’d seen you at. Then the one with the cap saw the window-that window-” He nodded toward the kitchen window, with its deep, broad inner sill. “He said, ‘Get me a rock, I’ll smash that right open,’ and they came to where he was, and they were about to hoist him up to the sill. So I let out a yell, and he dropped down, and one of them-this one-came running right at me.
“Ah, ah," “ gasped the man lying on the floor, as if telling Ged’s tale for him. Ged got up and bent over him.
“He’s dying, I think.”
“No, he’s not,” Tenar said. She could not stop shaking entirely, but it was only an inward tremor now. The kettle was singing. She made a pot of tea, and laid her hands on the thick pottery sides of the teapot while it steeped. She poured out two cups, then a third, into which she put a little cold water. “It’s too hot to drink,” she told Ged, “hold it a minute first. I’ll see if this’ll go into him.” She sat down on the floor by the man’s head, lifted it on one arm, put the cup of cooled tea to his mouth, pushed the rim between the bared teeth. The warm stuff ran into his mouth; he swallowed. “He won’t die,” she said. “The floor’s like ice. Help me move him nearer the fire.”
Ged started to take the rug from a bench that ran along the wall between the chimney and the hall. “Don’t use that, it’s a good piece of weaving,” Tenar said, and she went to the closet and brought out a worn-out felt cloak, which she spread out as a bed for the man. They hauled the inert body onto it, lapped it over him. The soaked red spots on the bandages had grown no larger.
Tenar stood up, and stood motionless.
“Therru,” she said.
Ged looked round, but the child was not there. Tenar went hurriedly out of the room.
The children’s room, the child’s room, was perfectly dark and quiet. She felt her way to the bed, and laid her hand on the warm curve of the blanket over Therru’s shoulder.
“Therru?”
The child’s breathing was peaceful. She had not waked. Tenar could feel the heat of her body, like a radiance in the cold room.
As she went out, Tenar ran her hand across the chest of drawers and touched cold metal: the poker she had laid down when she closed the shutters. She brought it back to the kitchen, stepped over the man’s body, and hung the poker on its hook on the chimney. She stood looking down at the fire.
“I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “What should I have done? Run out-right away-shouted, and run to Clear-brook and Shandy. They wouldn’t have had time to hurt Therru.”
“They would have been in the house with her, and you outside it, with the old man and woman. Or they could have picked her up and gone clear away with her. You did what you could. What you did was right. Timed right. The light from the house, and you coming out with the knife, and me there-they could see the pitchfork then-and him down. So they ran.”
“Those that could,” said Tenar. She turned and stirred the man’s leg a little with the toe of her shoe, as if he were an object she was a little curious about, a little repelled by, like a dead viper. “You did the right thing,” she said.
“I don’t think he even saw it. He ran right onto it, It was like-” He did not say what it was like. He said, “Drink your tea,” and poured himself more from the pot keeping warm on the hearthbricks. “It’s good. Sit down,” he said, and she did so.
“When I was a boy,” he said after a time, “the Kargs raided my village. They had lances-long, with feathers tied to the shaft-”
She nodded. “Warriors of the God-Brothers,” she said. “I made a . . . a fog-spell. To confuse them. But they came on, some of them. I saw one of them run right onto a pitchfork-like him, Only it went clear through him. Below the waist.”
“You hit a rib,” Tenar said.
He nodded.
“It was the only mistake you made,” she said. Her teeth were chattering now. She drank her tea. “Ged,” she said, “what if they come back?”
“They won’t.”
“They could set fire to the house.”
“This house?” He looked around at the stone walls.
“The haybarn-”
“They won’t be back,” he said, doggedly.
“No.”
They held their cups with care, warming their hands on them.
“She slept through it.”
“It’s well she did.”
“But she’ll see him-here-in the morning-”
They stared at each other.
“If I’d killed him-if he’d die!” Ged said with rage. “I could drag him out and bury him-”
“Do it.”
He merely shook his head angrily.
“What does it matter, why, why can’t we do it!” Tenar demanded .
“I don’t know.”
“As soon as it gets light-”
“I’ll get him out of the house. Wheelbarrow. The old man can help me.”
“He can’t lift anything any more. I’ll help you.”
“However I can do it, I’ll cart him off to the village. There’s a healer of some kind there?”
“A witch, Ivy.”
She felt all at once abysmally, infinitely weary. She could scarcely hold the cup in her hand .
“There’s more tea,” she said, thick-tongued.
He poured himself another cupful.
The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light beyond the world. Flames of yellow, orange, orange-red, red tongues of flame, flame-tongues, the words she could not speak.
“Tenar.”
“We call the star Tehanu,” she said.
“Tenar, my dear. Come on. Come with me.”
They were not at the fire. They were in the dark-in the dark hall. The dark passage. They had been there before, leading each other, following each other, in the darkness underneath the earth.
“This is the way,” she said.
Winter
She was waking, not wanting to waken. Faint grey shone at the window in thin slits through the shutters. Why was the window shuttered? She got up hurriedly and went down the hail to the kitchen. No one sat by the fire, no one lay on the floor, There was no sign of anyone, anything. Except the teapot and three cups on the counter.
Therru got up about sunrise, and they breakfasted as usual; clearing up, the girl asked, “What happened?” She lifted a corner of wet linen from the soaking-tub in the pantry. The water in the tub was veined and clouded with brownish red.
“Oh, my period came on early,” Tenar said, startled at the lie as she spoke it.
Therru stood a moment motionless, her nostrils flared and her head still, like an animal getting a scent. Then she dropped the sheeting back into the water, and went out to feed the chickens.
Tenar felt ill; her bones ached. The weather was still cold, and she stayed indoors as much as she could.. She tried to keep Therru in, but when the sun came out with a keen, bright wind, Therru wanted to be out in it.
“Stay with Shandy in the orchard,” Tenar said.
Therru said nothing as she slipped out.
The burned and deformed side of her face was made rigid by the destruction of muscles and the thickness of the scar-surface, but as the scars got older and as Tenar learned by long usage not to look away from it as deformity but to see it as face, it had expressions of its own. When Therru was frightened, the burned and darkened side “closed in,” as Tenar thought, drawing together, hardening. When she was excited or intent, even the blind eye socket seemed to gaze, and the scars reddened and were hot to touch. Now, as she went out, there was a queer look to her, as if her face were not human at all, an animal, some strange horny-skinned wild creature with one bright eye, silent, escaping.
And Tenar knew that as she had lied to her for the first time, Therru for the first time was going to disobey her. The first but not the last time.
She sat down at the fireside with a weary sigh, and did nothing at all for a while.
A rap at the door: Clearbrook and Ged-no, Hawk she must call him-Hawk standing on the doorstep. Old Clear-brook was full of talk and importance, Ged dark and quiet and bulky in his grimy sheepskin coat. “Come in,” she said. “Have some tea. What’s the news?”
“Tried to get away, down to Valmouth, but the men from Kahedanan, the bailies, come down and ‘twas in Cherry’s outhouse they found ‘em,” Clearbrook announced, waving his fist.
“He escaped?” Horror caught at her.
“The other two,” Ged said. “Not him.”
“See, they found the body up in the old shambles on Round Hill, all beat to pieces like, up in the old shambles there, by Kahedanan, so ten, twelve of ‘em ‘pointed their-selves bailies then and there and come after them. And there was a search all through the villages last night, and this morning before ‘twas hardly light they found ‘em hiding out in Cherry’s outhouse. Half-froze they was.”
“He’s dead, then?” she asked, bewildered.
Ged had shucked off the heavy coat and was now sitting on the cane-bottom chair by the door to undo his leather gaiters. “He’s alive,” he said in his quiet voice. “Ivy has him. I took him in this morning on the muck-cart. There were people out on the road before daylight, hunting for all three of them. They’d killed a woman, up in the hills.”
“What woman?” Tenar whispered.
Her eyes were on Ged’s. He nodded slightly. Clearbrook wanted the story to be his, and took it up loudly: “I talked with some o’ them from up there and they told me they’d all four of ‘em been traipsing and camping and vagranting about near Kahedanan, and the woman would come into the village to beg, all beat about and burns and bruises all over her. They’d send her in, the men would, see, like that to beg, and then she’d go back to ‘em, and she told people if she went back with nothing they’d beat her more, so they said why go back? But if she didn’t they’d come after her, she said, see, and she’d always go with ‘em. But then they finally went too far and beat her to death, and they took and left her body in the old shambles there where there’s still some o’ the stink left, you know, maybe thinking that was hiding what they done. And they came away then, down here, just last night. And why didn’t you shout and call last night, Goha? Hawk says they was right here, sneaking about the house, when he come on em. I surely would have heard, or Shandy would, her ears might be sharper than mine. Did you tell her yet?”
Tenar shook her head.
“I’ll just go tell her,” said the old man, delighted to be first with the news, and he clumped off across the yard. He turned back halfway. “Never would have picked you as useful with a pitchfork!” he shouted to Ged, and slapped his thigh, laughing, and went on.
Ged slipped off the heavy gaiters, took off his muddy shoes and set them on the doorstep, and came over to the fire in his stocking feet. Trousers and jerkin and shirt of homespun wool: a Gontish goatherd, with a canny face, a hawk nose, and clear, dark eyes.
“There’ll be people out soon," he said. “To tell you all about it, and hear what happened here again. They’ve got the two that ran off shut up now in a wine cellar with no wine in it, and fifteen or twenty men guarding them, and twenty or thirty boys trying to get a peek He yawned, shook his shoulders and arms to loosen them, and with a glance at Tenar asked permission to sit down at the fire.
She gestured to the hearthseat. “You must be worn out, she whispered.
“I slept a little, here, last night. Couldn’t stay awake.” He yawned again. He looked up at her, gauging, seeing how she was.
“It was Therru’s mother,” she said. Her voice would not go above a whisper.
He nodded. He sat leaning forward a bit, his arms on his knees, as Flint had used to sit, gazing into the fire. They were very alike and entirely unlike, as unlike as a buried stone and a soaring bird. Her heart ached, and her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a troubled lightness.
“The witch has got our man,” he said. “Tied down in case he feels lively, With the holes in him stuffed full of spiderwebs and blood-stanching spells. She says he’ll live to hang.”
“To hang.”
“It’s up to the King’s Courts of Law, now that they’re meeting again. Hanged or set to slave-labor.”
She shook her head, frowning.
“You wouldn’t just let him go, Tenar," ‘ he said gently, watching her.
“No.”
“They must be punished,” he said, still watching her.
“Punished." That’s what he said. Punish the child. She’s bad. She must be punished. Punish me, for taking her. For being-’ ‘ She struggled to speak. “I don’t want punishment! — It should not have happened. — I wish you’d killed him!”
“I did my best,” Ged said.
After a good while she laughed, rather shakily. “You certainly did.”
“Think how easy it would have been,” he said, looking into the coals again, “when I was a wizard. I could have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. I could have marched them right down to Valmouth like a flock of sheep. Or last night, here, think of the fireworks I could have set off! They’d never have known what hit them.”
“They still don’t,” she said.
He glanced at her. There was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph.
“No,” he said. “They don’t.”
“Useful with a pitchfork,” she murmured.
He yawned enormously.
“Why don’t you go in and get some sleep? The second room down the hall. Unless you want to entertain company. I see Lark and Daisy coming, and some of the children.” She had got up, hearing voices, to look out the window.
“I’ll do that,” he said, and slipped away.
Lark and her husband, Daisy the blacksmith’s wife, and other friends from the village came by all day long to tell and be told all, as Ged had said. She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night’s terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.
That was also what Therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life.
She said to Lark when the others had gone, “What makes me rage at myself is how stupid I was.”
“I did tell you you ought to keep the house locked.”
“No-Maybe-That’s just it. ‘ ‘
“I know,’ ‘ said Lark.
“But I meant, when they were here-I could have run out and fetched Shandy and Clearbrook-maybe I could have taken Therru, Or I could have gone to the lean-to and got the pitchfork myself. Or the apple-pruner. It’s seven feet long with a blade like a razor; I keep it the way Flint kept it. Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I do something? Why did I just lock myself in-when it wasn’t any good trying to? If he— If Hawk hadn’t been here— All I did was trap myself and Therru. I did finally go to the door with the butcher knife, and I shouted at them. I was half crazy. But that wouldn’t have scared them off.”
“I don’t know,” Lark said. “It was crazy, but maybe . . . I don’t know. What could you do but lock the doors? But it’s like we’re all our lives locking the doors. It’s the house we live in.”
They looked around at the stone walls, the stone floors, the stone chimney, the sunny window of the kitchen of Oak Farm, Farmer Flint’s house.
“That girl, that woman they murdered,” Lark said, looking shrewdly at Tenar. “She was the same one." Tenar nodded.
“One of them told me she was pregnant. Four, five months along.”
They were both silent.
“Trapped,” Tenar said.
Lark sat back, her hands on the skirt on her heavy thighs, her back straight, her handsome face set. “Fear,” she said. “What are we so afraid of? Why do we let ‘em tell us we’re afraid? What is it they’re afraid of? ‘ ‘ She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, “What are they afraid of us for?”
Tenar spun and did not answer.
Therru came running in, and Lark greeted her: “There’s my honey! Come give me a hug, my honey girl!”
Therru hugged her hastily. “Who are the men they caught?” she demanded in her hoarse, toneless voice, looking from Lark to Tenar.
Tenar stopped her wheel. She spoke slowly.
“One was Handy. One was a man called Shag. The one that was hurt is called Hake.” She kept her eyes on Therru’s face; she saw the fire, the scar reddening. “The woman they killed was called Senny, I think.”
“Senini,’ ‘ the child whispered.
Tenar nodded.
“Did they kil lher dead?”
She nodded again.
“Tadpole says they were here.”
She nodded again.
The child looked around the room, as the women had done; but her look was utterly unacceptant, seeing no walls.
“Will you kill them?”
“They may be hanged.”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
Therru nodded, half indifferently. She went out again, rejoining Lark’s children by the wellhouse.
The two women said nothing. They spun and mended, silent, by the fire, in Flint’s house.
After a long time Lark said, “What’s become of the fellow, the shepherd, that followed ‘em here? Hawk, you said he’s called?”
“He’s asleep in there,’ ‘ said Tenar, nodding to the back of the house.
“Ah,” said Lark.
The wheel purred. “I knew him before last night.”
“Ah. Up at Re Albi, did you?”
Tenar nodded. The wheel purred.
“To follow those three, and take ‘em on in the dark with a pitchfork, that took a bit of courage, now. Not a young man, is he?”
“No.” After a while she went on, “He’d been ill, and needed work. So I sent him over the mountain to tell Clear-brook to take him on here. But Clearbrook thinks he can still do it all himself, so he sent him up above the Springs for the summer herding. He was coming back from that.”
“Think you’ll keep him on here, then?" ‘“If he likes,” said Tenar.
Another group came out to Oak Farm from the village, wanting to hear Goha’s story and tell her their part in the great capture of the murderers, and look at the pitchfork and compare its four long tines to the three bloody spots on the bandages of the man called Hake, and talk it all over again. Tenar was glad to see the evening come, and call Therru in, and shut the door.
She raised her hand to latch it. She lowered her hand and forced herself to turn from it, leaving it unlocked.
“Sparrowhawk’s in your room,” Therru informed her, coming back to the kitchen with eggs from the cool-room.
“I meant to tell you he was here-I’m sorry.
“I know him,” Therru said, washing her face and hands in the pantry. And when Ged came in, heavy-eyed and unkempt, she went straight to him and put up her arms.
“Therru,” he said, and took her up and held her. She clung to him briefly, then broke free.
“I know the beginning part of the Creation," she told him. “Will you sing it to me?” Again glancing at Tenar for permission, he sat down in his place at the hearth.
“I can only say it.”
He nodded and waited, his face rather stern. The child said:
The making from the unmaking,
The ending from the beginning,
Who shall know surely?
What we know is the doorway between them
that we enter departing.
Among all beings ever returning,
the eldest, the Doorkeeper, Segoy.. . .
The child’s voice was like a metal brush drawn across metal, like dry leaves, like the hiss of fire burning. She spoke to the end of the first stanza:
Then from the foam bright E`a broke.
Ged nodded brief, firm approval. “Good,” he said.
“Last night, ” Tenar said. “Last night she learned it. It seems a year ago."
“I can learn more,” said Therru.
“You will," Ged told her.
“Now finish cleaning the squash, please,” said Tenar, and the child obeyed.
“What shall I do?" ‘ Ged asked. Tenar paused, looking at him.
“I need that kettle filled and heated.”
He nodded, and took the kettle to the pump. They made and ate their supper and cleared it away. “Say the Making again as far as you know it,” Ged said to Therru, at the hearth, “and we’ll go on from there.”
She said the second stanza once with him, once with Tenar, once by herself.
“Bed,” said Tenar.
“You didn’t tell Sparrowhawk about the king.”
“You tell him," ‘ Tenar said, amused at this pretext for delay.
Therru turned to Ged. Her face, scarred and whole, seeing and blind, was intent, fiery. “The king came in a ship. He had a sword. He gave me the bone dolphin. His ship was flying, but I was sick, because Handy touched me. But the king touched me there and the mark went away. She showed her round, thin arm. Tenar stared. She had forgotten the mark.
“Some day I want to fly to where he lives,” Therru told Ged. He nodded. “I will do that,’ ‘ she said. “Do you know him?”
“Yes. I know him. I went on a long journey with him.”
“Where?”
“To where the sun doesn’t rise and the stars don’t set. And back from that place.”
“Did you fly?”
He shook his head. “I can only walk,” he said.
The child pondered, and then as if satisfied said, “Good night,” and went off to her room. Tenar followed her; but Therru did not want to be sung to sleep. “I can say the Making in the dark,” she said. “Both stanzas.”
One day when a managed chance brought them together in the village street, Tenar said to Ivy, “There’s a question I want to ask you, Mistress Ivy. A matter of your profession. “
The witch eyed her. She had a scathing eye.
“My profession, is it?”
Tenar nodded, steady.
“Come on, then,” Ivy said with a shrug, leading off down Mill Lane to her little house.
It was not a den of infamy and chickens, like Moss’s house, but it was a witch-house, the beams hung thick with dried and drying herbs, the fire banked under grey ash with one tiny coal winking like a red eye, a lithe, fat, black cat with one white mustache sleeping up on a shelf, and everywhere a profusion of little boxes, pots, ewers, trays, and stoppered bottles, all aromatic, pungent or sweet or strange.
“What can I do for you, Mistress Goha?” Ivy asked, very dry, when they were inside.
“Tell me, if you will, if you think my ward, Therru, has any gift for your art-any power in her.”
“She? Of course!” said the witch.
Tenar was a bit floored by the prompt and contemptuous answer. “Well,”’ she said. “Beech seemed to think so.”
“A blind bat in a cave could see it,” said Ivy. “Is that all?”
“No. I want your advice. When I’ve asked my question, you can tell me the price of the answer. Fair?”
“Fair.”
“Should I prentice Therru for a witch, when she’s a bit older?”’
Ivy was silent for a minute, deciding on her fee, Tenar thought. Instead, she answered the question. “I would not take her,” “ she said.
“Why?”
“I’d be afraid to,’” the witch answered, with a sudden fierce stare at Tenar.
“Afraid? Of what?”
“Of her! What is she?’”
“A child. An ill-used child!”
“That’s not all she is.”
Dark anger came into Tenar and she said, “Must a prentice witch be a virgin, then?”
Ivy stared. She said after a moment, “I didn’t mean that.”
“What did you mean?’”
“I mean I don’t know what she is. I mean when she looks at me with that one eye seeing and one eye blind I don’t know what she sees. I see you go about with her like she was any child, and I think, What are they? What’s the strength of that woman, for she’s not a fool, to hold a fire by the hand, to spin thread with the whirlwind? They say, mistress, that you lived as a child yourself with the Old Ones, the Dark Ones, the Ones Underfoot, and that you were queen and servant of those powers. Maybe that’s why you’re not afraid of this one. What power she is, I don’t know, I don’t say. But it’s beyond my teaching, I know that-or Beech’s, or any witch or wizard I ever knew! I’ll give you my advice, mistress, free and feeless. It’s this: Beware. Beware her, the day she finds her strength! That’s all.”
“I thank you, Mistress Ivy,” Tenar said with all the formality of the Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and went out of the warm room into the thin, biting wind of the end of autumn.
She was still angry. Nobody would help her, she thought. She knew the job was beyond her, they didn’t have to tell her that-but none of them would help her. Ogion had died, and old Moss ranted, and Ivy warned, and Beech kept clear, and Ged-the one who might really have helped— Ged ran away. Ran off like a whipped dog, and never sent sign or word to her, never gave a thought to her or Therru, but only to his own precious shame. That was his child, his nurseling. That was all he cared about. He had never cared or thought about her, only about power-her power, his power, how he could use it, how he could make more power of it. Putting the broken Ring together, making the Rune, putting a king on the throne. And when his power was gone, still it was all he could think about: that it was gone, lost, leaving him only himself, his shame, his emptiness.
"You aren’t being fair," Goha said to Tenar.
"Fair!" said Tenar. "Did he play fair?"
"Yes," said Goha. "He did. Or tried to".
"Well, then, he can play fair with the goats he’s herding; it’s nothing to me," said Tenar, trudging homeward in the wind and the first, sparse, cold rain.
“Snow tonight, maybe,” said her tenant Tiff, meeting her on the road beside the meadows of the Kaheda.
“Snow so soon? I hope not.”
“Freeze, anyway, for sure.”
And it froze when the sun was down: rain puddles and watering troughs skimming over, then opaqued with ice; the reeds by the Kaheda stilled, bound in ice; the wind itself stilled as if frozen, unable to move.
Beside the fire-a sweeter fire than Ivy’s, for the wood was that of an old apple that had been taken down in the orchard last spring-Tenar and Therru sat to spin and talk after supper was cleared away.
“Tell the story about the cat ghosts,’” Therru said in her husky voice as she started the wheel to spin a mass of dark, silky goat’s-wool into fleecefell yarn.
“That’s a summer story."
Therru cocked her head.
“In winter the stories should be the great stories. In winter you learn the Creation of E`a, so that you can sing it at the Long Dance when summer comes. In winter you learn the Winter Carol and the Deed of the Young King, and at the Festival of Sunreturn, when the sun turns north to bring the spring, you can sing them.”
“I can’t sing,” the girl whispered.
Tenar was winding spun yarn off the distaff into a ball, her hands deft and rhythmic.
“Not only the voice sings,” she said. “The mind sings. The prettiest voice in the world’s no good if the mind doesn’t know the songs.” She untied the last bit of yarn, which had been the first spun. “You have strength, Therru, and strength that is ignorant is dangerous.”
“Like the ones who wouldn’t learn,” Therru said. “The wild ones.” Tenar did not know what she meant, and looked her question. “The ones that stayed in the west,” Therru said.
“Ah-the dragons-in the song of the Woman of Kemay. Yes. Exactly. So: which will we start with-how the islands were raised from the sea, or how King Morred drove back the Black Ships?" “
“The islands,” Therru whispered. Tenar had rather hoped she would choose the Deed of the Young King, for she saw Lebannen’s face as Morred’s; but the child’s choice was the right one. “Very well,” she said. She glanced up at Ogion’s great Lore-books on the mantel, encouraging herself that if she forgot, she could find the words there; and drew breath; and began.
By her bedtime Therru knew how Segoy had raised the first of the islands from the depths of Time. Instead of singing to her, Tenar sat on the bed after tucking her in, and they recited together, softly, the first stanza of the song of the Making.
Tenar carried the little oil lamp back to the kitchen, listening to the absolute silence. The frost had bound the world, locked it. No star showed. Blackness pressed at the single window of the kitchen. Cold lay on the stone floors.
She went back to the fire, for she was not sleepy yet. The great words of the song had stirred her spirit, and there was still anger and unrest in her from her talk with Ivy. She took the poker to rouse up a little flame from the backlog. As she struck the log, there was an echo of the sound in the back of the house.
She straightened up and stood listening.
Again: a soft, dull thump or thud-outside the house-at the dairy window?
The poker still in her hand, Tenar went down the dark hall to the door that gave on the cool-room. Beyond the cool-room was the dairy. The house was built against a low hill, and both those rooms ran back into the hill like cellars, though on a level with the rest of the house. The cool-room had only air-vents; the dairy had a door and a window, low and wide like the kitchen window, in its one outside wall. Standing at the cool-room door, she could hear that window being pried or jimmied, and men’s voices whispering.
Flint had been a methodical householder. Every door but one of his house had a bar-bolt on each side of it, a stout length of cast iron set in slides. All were kept clean and oiled; none were ever locked.
She slipped the bolt across the cool-room door. It slid into place without a sound, fitting snug into the heavy iron slot on the doorjamb.
She heard the outer door of the dairy opened. One of them had finally thought to try it, before they broke the window, and found it wasn’t locked. She heard the mutter of voices again. Then silence, long enough that she heard her heartbeat drumming in her ears so loud she feared she could not hear any sound over it. She felt her legs trembling and trembling, and felt the cold of the floor creep up under her skirt like a hand.
“It’s open,” a man’s voice whispered near her, and her heart leapt painfully. She put her hand on the bolt, thinking it was open-she had unlocked not locked it— She had almost slid it back when she heard the door between the cool-room and the dairy creak, opening. She knew that creak of the upper hinge. She knew the voice that had spoken, too, but in a different way of knowing. “It’s a storeroom,” Handy said, and then, as the door she stood against rattled against the bolt, “This one’s locked.” It rattled again. A thin blade of light, like a knife blade, flicked between the door and the jamb. It touched her breast, and she drew back as if it had cut her.
The door rattled again, but not much. It was solid, solidly hinged, and the bolt was firm.
They muttered together on the other side of the door. She knew they were planning to come around and try the front of the house. She found herself at the front door, bolting it, not knowing how she came there. Maybe this was a nightmare. She had had this dream, that they were trying to get into the house, that they drove thin knives through the cracks of the doors. The doors-was there any other door they could get in? The windows-the shutters of the bedroom windows— Her breath came so short she thought she could not get to Therru’s room, but she was there, she brought the heavy wooden shutters across the glass. The hinges were stiff, and they came together with a bang. Now they knew. Now they were coming. They would come to the window of the next room, her room. They would be there before she could close the shutters. And they were.
She saw the faces, blurs moving in the darkness outside, as she tried to free the left-hand shutter from its hasp. It was stuck. She could not make it move. A hand touched the glass, flattening white against it.
“There she is."
“Let us in. We won’t hurt you.”
“We just want to talk to you."
“He just wants to see his little girl.”
She got the shutter free and dragged it across the window. But if they broke the glass they would be able to push the shutters open from the outside. The fastening was only a hook that would pull out of the wood if forced.
“Let us in and we won’t hurt you,” one of the voices said. She heard their feet on the frozen ground, crackling in the fallen leaves. Was Therru awake? The crash of the shutters closing might have wakened her, but she had made no sound. Tenar stood in the doorway between her room and Therru’s, It was pitch-dark, silent. She was afraid to touch the child and waken her. She must stay in the room with her. She must fight for her. She had had the poker in her hand, where had she put it? She had put it down to close the shutters. She could not find it. She groped for it in the blackness of the room that seemed to have no walls.
The front door, which led into the kitchen, rattled, shaken in its frame.
If she could find the poker she would stay in here, she would fight them.
“Here!” one of them called, and she knew what he had found. He was looking up at the kitchen window, broad, unshuttered, easy to reach.
She went, very slowly it seemed, groping, to the door of the room. It was Therru’s room now. It had been her children’s room. The nursery. That was why there was no lock on the inner side of the door. So the children could not lock themselves in and be frightened if the bolt stuck.
Around back of the hill, through the orchard, Clearbrook and Shandy would be asleep in their cottage. If she called, maybe Shandy would hear. If she opened the bedroom window and called-or if she waked Therru and they climbed out the window and ran through the orchard-but the men were there, right there, waiting.
It was more than she could bear. The frozen terror that had bound her broke, and in rage she ran into the kitchen that was all red light in her eyes, grabbed up the long, sharp butcher knife from the block, flung back the door-bolt, and stood in the doorway. “Come on, then!" “ she said.
As she spoke there was a howl and a sucking gasp, and a man yelled, “Look out!” Another shouted, “Here! Here!”
Then there was silence.
Light from the open doorway shot across the black ice of puddles, glittered on the black branches of the oaks and on fallen silver leaves, and as her eyes cleared she saw that something was crawling towards her on the path, a dark mass or heap crawling towards her, making a high, sobbing wail. Behind the light a black shape ran and darted, and long blades shone.
“Tenar!”
“Stop there,” she said, raising the knife.
“Tenar! It’s me-Hawk, Sparrowhawk!”
“Stay there,” she said.
The darting black shape stood still next to the black mass lying on the path. The light from the doorway shone dim on a body, a face, a long-tined pitchfork held upright, like a wizard’s staff, she thought. “Is that you?” she said.
He was kneeling now by the black thing on the path.
“I killed him, I think,” he said. He looked over his shoulder, stood up. There was no sign or sound of the other men.
“Where are they?”
“Ran. Give me a hand, Tenar."
She held the knife in one hand. With the other she took hold of the arm of the man that lay huddled up on the path. Ged took him under the shoulder and they dragged him up the step and into the house. He lay on the stone floor of the kitchen, and blood ran out of his chest and belly like water from a pitcher. His upper lip was drawn back from his teeth, and only the whites of his eyes showed.
“Lock the door,” Ged said, and she locked the door.
“Linens in the press,” she said, and he got a sheet and tore it for bandages, which she bound round and round the man’s belly and breast, into which three of the four tines of the pitchfork had driven full force, making three ragged springs of blood that dripped and squirted as Ged supported the man’s torso so that she could wrap the bandages.
“What are you doing here? Did you come with them?”
“Yes. But they didn’t know it. That’s about all you can do, Tenar. “ He let the man’s body sag down, and sat back, breathing hard, wiping his face with the back of his bloody hand. “I think I killed him,” he said again.
“Maybe you did.” Tenar watched the bright red spots spread slowly on the heavy linen that wrapped the man’s thin, hairy chest and belly. She stood up, and swayed, very dizzy. “Get by the fire,” she said. “You must be perishing.”
She did not know how she had known him in the dark outside. By his voice, maybe. He wore a bulky shepherd’s winter coat of cut fleece with the leather side out, and a
shepherd’s knit watch cap pulled down; his face was lined and weathered, his hair long and iron-grey. He smelled like woodsmoke, and frost, and sheep. He was shivering, his whole body shaking. “Get by the fire,” she said again. “Put wood on it.”
He did so. Tenar filled the kettle and swung it out on its iron arm over the blaze.
There was blood on her skirt, and she used an end of linen soaked in cold water to clean it. She gave the cloth to Ged to clean the blood off his hands. “What do you mean, she said, “you came with them but they didn’t know it?”
“I was coming down. From the mountain. On the road from the springs of the Kaheda. “ He spoke in a flat voice as if out of breath, and his shivering made his speech slur. “Heard men behind me, and I went aside. Into the woods. Didn’t feel like talking. I don’t know. Something about them. I was afraid of them.”
She nodded impatiently and sat down across the hearth from him, leaning forward to listen, her hands clenched tight in her lap. Her damp skirt was cold against her legs.
“I heard one of them say ‘Oak Farm’ as they went by. After that I followed them. One of them kept talking. About the child.”
“What did he say?”
He was silent. He said finally, “That he was going to get her back. Punish her, he said. And get back at you. For stealing her, he said. He said-” He stopped.
“That he’d punish me, too."
“They all talked. About, about that.”
“That one isn’t Handy.” She nodded toward the man on the floor. “Is it the. . . " . . . “
“He said she was his.” Ged looked at the man too, and back at the fire. “He’s dying. We should get help.”
“He won’t die,” Tenar said. “I’ll send for Ivy in the morning. The others are still out there-how many of them?”
“Two.”
“If he dies he dies, if he lives he lives. Neither of us is going out.” She got to her feet, in a spasm of fear. “Did you bring in the pitchfork, Ged!" “
He pointed to it, the four long tines shining as it leaned against the wall beside the door.
She sat down in the hearthseat again, but now she was shaking, trembling from head to foot, as he had done. He reached across the hearth to touch her arm. “It’s all right,” he said.
“What if they’re still out there?”
“They ran.”
“They could come back.”
“Two against two? And we’ve got the pitchfork.”
She lowered her voice to a bare whisper to say, in terror, “The pruning hook and the scythes are in the barn lean-to.”
He shook his head. “They ran. They saw-him-and you in the door.”
“What did you do?”
“He came at me. So I came at him.”
“I mean, before. On the road.”
“They got cold, walking. It started to rain, and they got cold, and started talking about coming here. Before that it was only this one, talking about the child and you, about teaching-teaching lessons-” His voice dried up. “I’m thirsty,” he said.
“So am I. The kettle’s not boiling yet. Go on.
He took breath and tried to tell his story coherently. “The other two didn’t listen to him much. Heard it all before, maybe. They were in a hurry to get on. To get to Valmouth. As if they were running from somebody. Getting away. But it got cold, and he went on about Oak Farm, and the one with the cap said, ‘Well, why not just go there and spend the night with-" “ .
“With the widow, yes.”
Ged put his face in his hands. She waited.
He looked into the fire, and went on steadily. “Then I lost them for a while. The road came out level into the valley, and I couldn’t follow along the way I’d been doing, in the woods, just behind them. I had to go aside, through the fields, keeping out of their sight. I don’t know the country here, only the road. I was afraid if I cut across the fields I’d get lost, miss the house. And it was getting dark. I thought I’d missed the house, overshot it. I came back to the road, and almost ran into them-at the turn there. They’d seen the old man go by. They decided to wait till it was dark and they were sure nobody else was coming. They waited in the barn. I stayed outside. Just through the wall from them.”
“You must be frozen,” Tenar said dully.
“It was cold.” He held his hands to the fire as if the thought of it had chilled him again. “I found the pitchfork by the lean-to door. They went around to the back of the house when they came out. I could have come to the front door then to warn you, it’s what I should have done, but all I could think of was to take them by surprise-I thought it was my only advantage, chance. . . . I thought the house would be locked and they’d have to break in. But then I heard them going in, at the back, there. I went in-into the dairy-after them. I only just got out, when they came to the locked door.” He gave a kind of laugh. “They went right by me in the dark. I could have tripped them. . . . One of them had a flint and steel, he’d burn a little tinder when they wanted to see a lock. They came around front. I heard you putting up the shutters; I knew you’d heard them. They talked about smashing the window they’d seen you at. Then the one with the cap saw the window-that window-” He nodded toward the kitchen window, with its deep, broad inner sill. “He said, ‘Get me a rock, I’ll smash that right open,’ and they came to where he was, and they were about to hoist him up to the sill. So I let out a yell, and he dropped down, and one of them-this one-came running right at me.
“Ah, ah," “ gasped the man lying on the floor, as if telling Ged’s tale for him. Ged got up and bent over him.
“He’s dying, I think.”
“No, he’s not,” Tenar said. She could not stop shaking entirely, but it was only an inward tremor now. The kettle was singing. She made a pot of tea, and laid her hands on the thick pottery sides of the teapot while it steeped. She poured out two cups, then a third, into which she put a little cold water. “It’s too hot to drink,” she told Ged, “hold it a minute first. I’ll see if this’ll go into him.” She sat down on the floor by the man’s head, lifted it on one arm, put the cup of cooled tea to his mouth, pushed the rim between the bared teeth. The warm stuff ran into his mouth; he swallowed. “He won’t die,” she said. “The floor’s like ice. Help me move him nearer the fire.”
Ged started to take the rug from a bench that ran along the wall between the chimney and the hall. “Don’t use that, it’s a good piece of weaving,” Tenar said, and she went to the closet and brought out a worn-out felt cloak, which she spread out as a bed for the man. They hauled the inert body onto it, lapped it over him. The soaked red spots on the bandages had grown no larger.
Tenar stood up, and stood motionless.
“Therru,” she said.
Ged looked round, but the child was not there. Tenar went hurriedly out of the room.
The children’s room, the child’s room, was perfectly dark and quiet. She felt her way to the bed, and laid her hand on the warm curve of the blanket over Therru’s shoulder.
“Therru?”
The child’s breathing was peaceful. She had not waked. Tenar could feel the heat of her body, like a radiance in the cold room.
As she went out, Tenar ran her hand across the chest of drawers and touched cold metal: the poker she had laid down when she closed the shutters. She brought it back to the kitchen, stepped over the man’s body, and hung the poker on its hook on the chimney. She stood looking down at the fire.
“I couldn’t do anything,” she said. “What should I have done? Run out-right away-shouted, and run to Clear-brook and Shandy. They wouldn’t have had time to hurt Therru.”
“They would have been in the house with her, and you outside it, with the old man and woman. Or they could have picked her up and gone clear away with her. You did what you could. What you did was right. Timed right. The light from the house, and you coming out with the knife, and me there-they could see the pitchfork then-and him down. So they ran.”
“Those that could,” said Tenar. She turned and stirred the man’s leg a little with the toe of her shoe, as if he were an object she was a little curious about, a little repelled by, like a dead viper. “You did the right thing,” she said.
“I don’t think he even saw it. He ran right onto it, It was like-” He did not say what it was like. He said, “Drink your tea,” and poured himself more from the pot keeping warm on the hearthbricks. “It’s good. Sit down,” he said, and she did so.
“When I was a boy,” he said after a time, “the Kargs raided my village. They had lances-long, with feathers tied to the shaft-”
She nodded. “Warriors of the God-Brothers,” she said. “I made a . . . a fog-spell. To confuse them. But they came on, some of them. I saw one of them run right onto a pitchfork-like him, Only it went clear through him. Below the waist.”
“You hit a rib,” Tenar said.
He nodded.
“It was the only mistake you made,” she said. Her teeth were chattering now. She drank her tea. “Ged,” she said, “what if they come back?”
“They won’t.”
“They could set fire to the house.”
“This house?” He looked around at the stone walls.
“The haybarn-”
“They won’t be back,” he said, doggedly.
“No.”
They held their cups with care, warming their hands on them.
“She slept through it.”
“It’s well she did.”
“But she’ll see him-here-in the morning-”
They stared at each other.
“If I’d killed him-if he’d die!” Ged said with rage. “I could drag him out and bury him-”
“Do it.”
He merely shook his head angrily.
“What does it matter, why, why can’t we do it!” Tenar demanded .
“I don’t know.”
“As soon as it gets light-”
“I’ll get him out of the house. Wheelbarrow. The old man can help me.”
“He can’t lift anything any more. I’ll help you.”
“However I can do it, I’ll cart him off to the village. There’s a healer of some kind there?”
“A witch, Ivy.”
She felt all at once abysmally, infinitely weary. She could scarcely hold the cup in her hand .
“There’s more tea,” she said, thick-tongued.
He poured himself another cupful.
The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light beyond the world. Flames of yellow, orange, orange-red, red tongues of flame, flame-tongues, the words she could not speak.
“Tenar.”
“We call the star Tehanu,” she said.
“Tenar, my dear. Come on. Come with me.”
They were not at the fire. They were in the dark-in the dark hall. The dark passage. They had been there before, leading each other, following each other, in the darkness underneath the earth.
“This is the way,” she said.
Winter
She was waking, not wanting to waken. Faint grey shone at the window in thin slits through the shutters. Why was the window shuttered? She got up hurriedly and went down the hail to the kitchen. No one sat by the fire, no one lay on the floor, There was no sign of anyone, anything. Except the teapot and three cups on the counter.
Therru got up about sunrise, and they breakfasted as usual; clearing up, the girl asked, “What happened?” She lifted a corner of wet linen from the soaking-tub in the pantry. The water in the tub was veined and clouded with brownish red.
“Oh, my period came on early,” Tenar said, startled at the lie as she spoke it.
Therru stood a moment motionless, her nostrils flared and her head still, like an animal getting a scent. Then she dropped the sheeting back into the water, and went out to feed the chickens.
Tenar felt ill; her bones ached. The weather was still cold, and she stayed indoors as much as she could.. She tried to keep Therru in, but when the sun came out with a keen, bright wind, Therru wanted to be out in it.
“Stay with Shandy in the orchard,” Tenar said.
Therru said nothing as she slipped out.
The burned and deformed side of her face was made rigid by the destruction of muscles and the thickness of the scar-surface, but as the scars got older and as Tenar learned by long usage not to look away from it as deformity but to see it as face, it had expressions of its own. When Therru was frightened, the burned and darkened side “closed in,” as Tenar thought, drawing together, hardening. When she was excited or intent, even the blind eye socket seemed to gaze, and the scars reddened and were hot to touch. Now, as she went out, there was a queer look to her, as if her face were not human at all, an animal, some strange horny-skinned wild creature with one bright eye, silent, escaping.
And Tenar knew that as she had lied to her for the first time, Therru for the first time was going to disobey her. The first but not the last time.
She sat down at the fireside with a weary sigh, and did nothing at all for a while.
A rap at the door: Clearbrook and Ged-no, Hawk she must call him-Hawk standing on the doorstep. Old Clear-brook was full of talk and importance, Ged dark and quiet and bulky in his grimy sheepskin coat. “Come in,” she said. “Have some tea. What’s the news?”
“Tried to get away, down to Valmouth, but the men from Kahedanan, the bailies, come down and ‘twas in Cherry’s outhouse they found ‘em,” Clearbrook announced, waving his fist.
“He escaped?” Horror caught at her.
“The other two,” Ged said. “Not him.”
“See, they found the body up in the old shambles on Round Hill, all beat to pieces like, up in the old shambles there, by Kahedanan, so ten, twelve of ‘em ‘pointed their-selves bailies then and there and come after them. And there was a search all through the villages last night, and this morning before ‘twas hardly light they found ‘em hiding out in Cherry’s outhouse. Half-froze they was.”
“He’s dead, then?” she asked, bewildered.
Ged had shucked off the heavy coat and was now sitting on the cane-bottom chair by the door to undo his leather gaiters. “He’s alive,” he said in his quiet voice. “Ivy has him. I took him in this morning on the muck-cart. There were people out on the road before daylight, hunting for all three of them. They’d killed a woman, up in the hills.”
“What woman?” Tenar whispered.
Her eyes were on Ged’s. He nodded slightly. Clearbrook wanted the story to be his, and took it up loudly: “I talked with some o’ them from up there and they told me they’d all four of ‘em been traipsing and camping and vagranting about near Kahedanan, and the woman would come into the village to beg, all beat about and burns and bruises all over her. They’d send her in, the men would, see, like that to beg, and then she’d go back to ‘em, and she told people if she went back with nothing they’d beat her more, so they said why go back? But if she didn’t they’d come after her, she said, see, and she’d always go with ‘em. But then they finally went too far and beat her to death, and they took and left her body in the old shambles there where there’s still some o’ the stink left, you know, maybe thinking that was hiding what they done. And they came away then, down here, just last night. And why didn’t you shout and call last night, Goha? Hawk says they was right here, sneaking about the house, when he come on em. I surely would have heard, or Shandy would, her ears might be sharper than mine. Did you tell her yet?”
Tenar shook her head.
“I’ll just go tell her,” said the old man, delighted to be first with the news, and he clumped off across the yard. He turned back halfway. “Never would have picked you as useful with a pitchfork!” he shouted to Ged, and slapped his thigh, laughing, and went on.
Ged slipped off the heavy gaiters, took off his muddy shoes and set them on the doorstep, and came over to the fire in his stocking feet. Trousers and jerkin and shirt of homespun wool: a Gontish goatherd, with a canny face, a hawk nose, and clear, dark eyes.
“There’ll be people out soon," he said. “To tell you all about it, and hear what happened here again. They’ve got the two that ran off shut up now in a wine cellar with no wine in it, and fifteen or twenty men guarding them, and twenty or thirty boys trying to get a peek He yawned, shook his shoulders and arms to loosen them, and with a glance at Tenar asked permission to sit down at the fire.
She gestured to the hearthseat. “You must be worn out, she whispered.
“I slept a little, here, last night. Couldn’t stay awake.” He yawned again. He looked up at her, gauging, seeing how she was.
“It was Therru’s mother,” she said. Her voice would not go above a whisper.
He nodded. He sat leaning forward a bit, his arms on his knees, as Flint had used to sit, gazing into the fire. They were very alike and entirely unlike, as unlike as a buried stone and a soaring bird. Her heart ached, and her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a troubled lightness.
“The witch has got our man,” he said. “Tied down in case he feels lively, With the holes in him stuffed full of spiderwebs and blood-stanching spells. She says he’ll live to hang.”
“To hang.”
“It’s up to the King’s Courts of Law, now that they’re meeting again. Hanged or set to slave-labor.”
She shook her head, frowning.
“You wouldn’t just let him go, Tenar," ‘ he said gently, watching her.
“No.”
“They must be punished,” he said, still watching her.
“Punished." That’s what he said. Punish the child. She’s bad. She must be punished. Punish me, for taking her. For being-’ ‘ She struggled to speak. “I don’t want punishment! — It should not have happened. — I wish you’d killed him!”
“I did my best,” Ged said.
After a good while she laughed, rather shakily. “You certainly did.”
“Think how easy it would have been,” he said, looking into the coals again, “when I was a wizard. I could have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. I could have marched them right down to Valmouth like a flock of sheep. Or last night, here, think of the fireworks I could have set off! They’d never have known what hit them.”
“They still don’t,” she said.
He glanced at her. There was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph.
“No,” he said. “They don’t.”
“Useful with a pitchfork,” she murmured.
He yawned enormously.
“Why don’t you go in and get some sleep? The second room down the hall. Unless you want to entertain company. I see Lark and Daisy coming, and some of the children.” She had got up, hearing voices, to look out the window.
“I’ll do that,” he said, and slipped away.
Lark and her husband, Daisy the blacksmith’s wife, and other friends from the village came by all day long to tell and be told all, as Ged had said. She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night’s terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.
That was also what Therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life.
She said to Lark when the others had gone, “What makes me rage at myself is how stupid I was.”
“I did tell you you ought to keep the house locked.”
“No-Maybe-That’s just it. ‘ ‘
“I know,’ ‘ said Lark.
“But I meant, when they were here-I could have run out and fetched Shandy and Clearbrook-maybe I could have taken Therru, Or I could have gone to the lean-to and got the pitchfork myself. Or the apple-pruner. It’s seven feet long with a blade like a razor; I keep it the way Flint kept it. Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I do something? Why did I just lock myself in-when it wasn’t any good trying to? If he— If Hawk hadn’t been here— All I did was trap myself and Therru. I did finally go to the door with the butcher knife, and I shouted at them. I was half crazy. But that wouldn’t have scared them off.”
“I don’t know,” Lark said. “It was crazy, but maybe . . . I don’t know. What could you do but lock the doors? But it’s like we’re all our lives locking the doors. It’s the house we live in.”
They looked around at the stone walls, the stone floors, the stone chimney, the sunny window of the kitchen of Oak Farm, Farmer Flint’s house.
“That girl, that woman they murdered,” Lark said, looking shrewdly at Tenar. “She was the same one." Tenar nodded.
“One of them told me she was pregnant. Four, five months along.”
They were both silent.
“Trapped,” Tenar said.
Lark sat back, her hands on the skirt on her heavy thighs, her back straight, her handsome face set. “Fear,” she said. “What are we so afraid of? Why do we let ‘em tell us we’re afraid? What is it they’re afraid of? ‘ ‘ She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, “What are they afraid of us for?”
Tenar spun and did not answer.
Therru came running in, and Lark greeted her: “There’s my honey! Come give me a hug, my honey girl!”
Therru hugged her hastily. “Who are the men they caught?” she demanded in her hoarse, toneless voice, looking from Lark to Tenar.
Tenar stopped her wheel. She spoke slowly.
“One was Handy. One was a man called Shag. The one that was hurt is called Hake.” She kept her eyes on Therru’s face; she saw the fire, the scar reddening. “The woman they killed was called Senny, I think.”
“Senini,’ ‘ the child whispered.
Tenar nodded.
“Did they kil lher dead?”
She nodded again.
“Tadpole says they were here.”
She nodded again.
The child looked around the room, as the women had done; but her look was utterly unacceptant, seeing no walls.
“Will you kill them?”
“They may be hanged.”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
Therru nodded, half indifferently. She went out again, rejoining Lark’s children by the wellhouse.
The two women said nothing. They spun and mended, silent, by the fire, in Flint’s house.
After a long time Lark said, “What’s become of the fellow, the shepherd, that followed ‘em here? Hawk, you said he’s called?”
“He’s asleep in there,’ ‘ said Tenar, nodding to the back of the house.
“Ah,” said Lark.
The wheel purred. “I knew him before last night.”
“Ah. Up at Re Albi, did you?”
Tenar nodded. The wheel purred.
“To follow those three, and take ‘em on in the dark with a pitchfork, that took a bit of courage, now. Not a young man, is he?”
“No.” After a while she went on, “He’d been ill, and needed work. So I sent him over the mountain to tell Clear-brook to take him on here. But Clearbrook thinks he can still do it all himself, so he sent him up above the Springs for the summer herding. He was coming back from that.”
“Think you’ll keep him on here, then?" ‘“If he likes,” said Tenar.
Another group came out to Oak Farm from the village, wanting to hear Goha’s story and tell her their part in the great capture of the murderers, and look at the pitchfork and compare its four long tines to the three bloody spots on the bandages of the man called Hake, and talk it all over again. Tenar was glad to see the evening come, and call Therru in, and shut the door.
She raised her hand to latch it. She lowered her hand and forced herself to turn from it, leaving it unlocked.
“Sparrowhawk’s in your room,” Therru informed her, coming back to the kitchen with eggs from the cool-room.
“I meant to tell you he was here-I’m sorry.
“I know him,” Therru said, washing her face and hands in the pantry. And when Ged came in, heavy-eyed and unkempt, she went straight to him and put up her arms.
“Therru,” he said, and took her up and held her. She clung to him briefly, then broke free.
“I know the beginning part of the Creation," she told him. “Will you sing it to me?” Again glancing at Tenar for permission, he sat down in his place at the hearth.
“I can only say it.”
He nodded and waited, his face rather stern. The child said:
The making from the unmaking,
The ending from the beginning,
Who shall know surely?
What we know is the doorway between them
that we enter departing.
Among all beings ever returning,
the eldest, the Doorkeeper, Segoy.. . .
The child’s voice was like a metal brush drawn across metal, like dry leaves, like the hiss of fire burning. She spoke to the end of the first stanza:
Then from the foam bright E`a broke.
Ged nodded brief, firm approval. “Good,” he said.
“Last night, ” Tenar said. “Last night she learned it. It seems a year ago."
“I can learn more,” said Therru.
“You will," Ged told her.
“Now finish cleaning the squash, please,” said Tenar, and the child obeyed.
“What shall I do?" ‘ Ged asked. Tenar paused, looking at him.
“I need that kettle filled and heated.”
He nodded, and took the kettle to the pump. They made and ate their supper and cleared it away. “Say the Making again as far as you know it,” Ged said to Therru, at the hearth, “and we’ll go on from there.”
She said the second stanza once with him, once with Tenar, once by herself.
“Bed,” said Tenar.
“You didn’t tell Sparrowhawk about the king.”
“You tell him," ‘ Tenar said, amused at this pretext for delay.
Therru turned to Ged. Her face, scarred and whole, seeing and blind, was intent, fiery. “The king came in a ship. He had a sword. He gave me the bone dolphin. His ship was flying, but I was sick, because Handy touched me. But the king touched me there and the mark went away. She showed her round, thin arm. Tenar stared. She had forgotten the mark.
“Some day I want to fly to where he lives,” Therru told Ged. He nodded. “I will do that,’ ‘ she said. “Do you know him?”
“Yes. I know him. I went on a long journey with him.”
“Where?”
“To where the sun doesn’t rise and the stars don’t set. And back from that place.”
“Did you fly?”
He shook his head. “I can only walk,” he said.
The child pondered, and then as if satisfied said, “Good night,” and went off to her room. Tenar followed her; but Therru did not want to be sung to sleep. “I can say the Making in the dark,” she said. “Both stanzas.”