Tehanu: Chapters 9–10

Three of the mowers were women, and of the two men one was a boy, as Tenar could make out from some distance, and the other was stooped and grizzled.

None of them knew where the man from Middle Valley was or why he wasn’t mowing with them. “That kind don't stay,'' the grizzled man said. “Shiftless. You know him, miss’s?”

They were tenants of the Lord of Re Albi, suspicious of the villagers, leery of anything to do with Ogion.

'A thief and worse,’ you say, but slander’s cheap, and a woman’s tongue worse than any thief.

You come up here to make bad blood among the field hands, casting calumny and lies, the dragonseed every witch sows behind her.

When I saw that foul imp that clings to you, do you think I did not know how it was begotten, and for what purposes?

You defied me once, across the body of the old wizard, and I forbore to punish you then, for his sake and in the presence of others.

They looked from Aspen to Tenar with bland and courtly expressions, as if regretting the necessity of preventing a wizard from laying a curse on a middle-aged widow, but really, really, it would not do.

She went on down the road to Re Albi at last, shaken by the shock and change of things, the wizard’s flaying hatred, her own angry contempt, her terror at the sudden knowledge of his will and power to do her harm, the sudden end of that terror in the refuge offered by the envoys of the King—the men who had come in the white-sailed ship from the haven itself, the Tower of the Sword and the Throne, the center of right and order.

They seemed to be conversing with him amicably, as if nothing had happened.

They all hated Aspen and so were quite ready to talk about him, but their tales must be heard as half spite and fear.

Moss herself attested that until Aspen came three years ago, the younger lord, the grandson, had been fit and well, though a shy, sullen man, “scared-like,” she said.

Since then, less and less had been seen of the grandson, and it was said now that he lay day and night in bed, “like a sick baby, all shriveled up,” said one of the women who had been into the house on some errand. But the old lord, “a hundred years old, or near, or more,” Moss insisted—she had no fear of numbers and no respect for them—the old lord was flourishing...

She was learning to spin; she could hold the distaff in the burned hand and twist the drop-spindle with the other.

She was restless, concerned with one petty anxiety after another—did I fasten the pasture gate, does my hand ache from carding or is it arthritis beginning, and so on.

In her pack she put her spare dress and shifts, Therru’s two old dresses and the half-made new one and the spare cloth; the spindle whorls she had carved for herself and Therru; and a little food and a clay bottle of water for the way.

They could not stay here in the desecrated house, the house where hatred had come in.

She wanted to ask him where she would find the road south across the headlands, the coast road to Valmouth; but she dared not waken his interest again, lest he decide she was after all a vagrant or a witch or whatever he and the stone dragons were supposed to keep out of Gont Port.

So they went on between the dragons—Therru looked up, a little, to see them—and tramped along on cobblestones, more and more amazed, bewildered, and abashed.

The ship, sails furled, lay against the stone pier, beyond an oared galley.

The ship, sails furled, lay against the stone pier, beyond an oared galley.

“A glass of wine. Some food, some rest,” he said, “and a bed for your child.” The ship's master, listening discreetly, gave orders.

“From Enlad, not the Andrades,” he said meekly.

The vivid tastes of the food and wine were like the ropes that moored the ship, they moored her to the world, to her mind again.

No retribution, no pursuit. Leave them to their hatreds, put them behind her, forget.

She glanced up at him furtively.

She was blank, inert, mute.

The expression of Lebannen’s face as he looked at her was unreadable. A mask perhaps, a civil mask for revulsion, shock.

Lebannen stood at the high prow with the ship’s master and an elderly, lean, narrow-eyed man in the grey cloak of a mage of Roke Island.

She felt as she had felt in Havnor as a girl: a barbarian, uncouth among their smoothnesses.

Still very weary from the long distress and strain of the day before, she was content to sit in the seat the bald sailor contrived for her out of a straw mattress and a piece of sailcloth, and watch the waves and the gulls, and see the outline of Gont Mountain, blue and dreamy in the noon light, changing as they skirted its steep shores only a mile or two out from land.

But Tenar had to go thank the humble giver.

I give you no message for our friend. It seems to me that to do so is to lay a burden on you, and also to encroach upon his freedom; and I don’t want to do either.

If he was so wary of her, it behooved her to be wary of him; but to Lebannen, and in Lebannen’s presence, only candor would do.

If he was so wary of her, it behooved her to be wary of him; but to Lebannen, and in Lebannen’s presence, only candor would do.

And I have heard men and women of power speak of the waning, or the changing, of their power.

Kalessin came to Roke, which is said to be defended utterly from dragons; and not through any spell of my lord’s, for he had no magery then.

The mage made an earnest effort to amend his offense.

And in a minute those down on deck saw the little huddle of slate roofs, the spires of blue smoke, a few glass windows catching the westering sun, and the docks and piers of Valmouth on its bay of satiny blue water.

“Shall I take her in or will you talk her in, my lord?” asked the calm ship’s master, and the Windkey replied, “Sail her in, master. I don't want to have to deal with all that flotsam!”—waving his hand at the dozens of fishing craft that littered the bay.