Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page A

contradict “Mistress Goha,” but she was perfectly unconvinced. “There’s tricks, disguises, transformations, changes,” she said. “Better be careful, dearie. How did he get where you found him, away out there? Did any see him come through the village?”
    “None of you—saw—?”
    They stared at her. She tried to say “the dragon” and could not. Her lips and tongue would not form the word. But a word formed itself withthem, making itself with her mouth and breath. “Kalessin,” she said.
    Therru was staring at her. A wave of warmth, heat, seemed to flow from the child, as if she were in fever. She said nothing, but moved her lips as if repeating the name, and that fever heat burned around her.
    “Tricks!” Moss said. “Now that our mage is gone there’ll be all kinds of tricksters coming round.”
    “I came from Atuan to Havnor, from Havnor to Gont, with Sparrowhawk, in an open boat,” Tenar said drily. “You saw him when he brought me here, Moss. He wasn’t archmage then. But he was the same, the same man. Are there other scars like those?”
    Confronted, the older woman became still, collecting herself. She glanced at Therru. “No,” she said. “But—”
    “Do you think I wouldn’t know him?”
    Moss twisted her mouth, frowned, rubbed one thumb with the other, looking at her hands. “There’s evil things in the world, mistress,” she said. “A thing that takes a man’s form and body, but his soul’s gone—eaten—”
    “The gebbeth?”
    Moss cringed at the word spoken openly. She nodded. “They do say, once the mage Sparrowhawk came here, long ago, before you came with him. And a thing of darkness came with him—following him. Maybe it still does. Maybe—”
    “The dragon who brought him here,” Tenar said, “called him by his true name. And I know that name.” Wrath at the witch’s obstinate suspicion rang in her voice..
    Moss stood mute. Her silence was better argument than her words.
    “Maybe the shadow on him is his death,” Tenar said. “Maybe he’s dying. I don’t know. If Ogion—”
    At the thought of Ogion she was in tears again, thinking how Ged had come too late. She swallowed the tears and went to the woodbox for kindling for the fire. She gave Therru the kettle to fill, touching her face as she spoke to her. The seamed and slabby scars were hot to touch, but the child was not feverish. Tenar knelt to make the fire. Somebody in this fine household—a witch, a widow, a cripple, and a halfwit—had to do what must be done, and not frighten the child with weeping. But the dragon was gone, and was there nothing to come any more but death?

HE LAY LIKE THE DEAD BUT WAS NOT DEAD. Where had he been? What had he come through? That night, in firelight, Tenar took the stained, worn, sweat-stiffened clothes off him. She washed him and let him lie naked between the linen sheet and the blanket of soft, heavy goat’s-wool. Though a short, slight-built man, he had been compact, vigorous; now he was thin as if worn down to the bone, worn away, fragile. Even the scars that ridged his shoulder and the left side of his face from temple to jaw seemed lessened, silvery. And his hair was grey.
    I’m sick of mourning, Tenar thought. Sick of mourning, sick of grief. I will not grieve for him! Didn’t he come to me riding the dragon?
    Once I meant to kill him, she thought. Now I’llmake him live, if I can. She looked at him then with a challenge in her eye, and no pity.
    “Which of us saved the other from the Labyrinth, Ged?”
    Unhearing, unmoving, he slept. She was very tired. She bathed in the water she had heated to wash him with, and crept into bed beside the little, warm, silky silence that was Therru asleep. She slept, and her sleep opened out into a vast windy space hazy with rose and gold. She flew. Her voice called, “Kalessin!” A voice answered, calling from the gulfs of light.
    When she woke, the birds were chirping in the fields and on the roof. Sitting up she saw