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

know if Ged had known that name. Surely he had. Ogion would have told him, or had not needed to tell him.
    For a while he did not react, and when he spoke it was without expression. “Then he is dead.”
    “Ten days ago.”
    He lay looking before him as if pondering, trying to think something out.
    “When did I come here?”
    She had to lean close to understand him.
    “Four days ago, in the evening of the day.”
    “There was no one else in the mountains,” he said. Then his body winced and shuddered as if in pain or the intolerable memory of pain. He shut his eyes, frowning, and took a deep breath.
    As his strength returned little by little, that frown, the held breath and clenched hands, became familiar to Tenar. Strength returned to him but not ease, not health.
    He sat on the doorstep of the house in the sunlight of the summer afternoon. It was the longest journey he had yet taken from the bed. He sat on the threshold, looking out into the day, and Tenar, coming around the house from the bean patch, looked at him. He still had an ashy, shadowy look to him. It was not the grey hair only, but some quality of skin and bone, and there was nothing much to him but that. There was no light in his eyes. Yet this shadow, this ashen man, was the same whose face she had seen first in the radiance of his own power, the strong face with hawk nose and fine mouth, a handsome man. He had always been a proud, handsome man.
    She came on towards him.
    “The sunlight’s what you need,” she said to him, and he nodded, but his hands were clenchedas he sat in the flood of summer warmth.
    He was so silent with her that she thought maybe it was her presence that troubled him. Maybe he could not be at ease with her as he had used to be. He was Archmage now, after all—she kept forgetting that. And it was twenty-five years since they had walked in the mountains of Atuan and sailed together in Lookfar across the eastern sea.
    “Where is Lookfar?” she asked, suddenly, surprised by the thought of it, and then thought, But how stupid of me! All those years ago, and he’s Archmage, he wouldn’t have that little boat now.
    “In Selidor,” he answered, his face set in its steady and incomprehensible misery.
    As long ago as forever, as far away as Selidor.…
    “The farthest island,” she said; it was half a question.
    “The farthest west,” he said.
    They were sitting at table, having finished the evening meal. Therru had gone outside to play.
    “It was from Selidor that you came, then, on Kalessin?”
    When she spoke the dragon’s name again it spoke itself, shaping her mouth to its shape and sound, making her breath soft fire.
    At the name, he looked up at her, one intense glance, which made her realize that he did not usually meet her eyes at all. He nodded. Then, with a laborious honesty, he corrected his assent: “From Selidor to Roke. And then from Roke to Gont.”
    A thousand miles? Ten thousand miles? She had no idea. She had seen the great maps in the treasuries of Havnor, but no one had taught her numbers, distances. As far away as Selidor ... And could the flight of a dragon be counted in miles?
    “Ged,” she said, using his true name since they were alone, “I know you’ve been in great pain and peril. And if you don’t want, maybe you can’t, maybe you shouldn’t tell me—but if I knew, if I knew something of it, I’d be more help to you, maybe. I’d like to be. And they’ll be coming soon from Roke for you, sending a ship for the Archmage, what do I know, sending a dragon for you! And you’ll be gone again. And we’ll never have talked.” As she spoke she clenched her own hands at the falseness of her tone and words. To joke about the dragon—to whine like an accusing wife!
    He was looking down at the table, sullen, enduring, like a farmer after a hard day in the fields faced with some domestic squall.
    “Nobody will come from Roke, I think,” he said, and it cost him effort enough that it was a while