Azver spoke into the silence that followed the question.

"Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do."

"I wish he were here now," said Onyx.

"He's done with doing," the Doorkeeper murmured smiling.

"But we're not. We sit here talking on the edge of the precipice—we all know it." Onyx looked round at their starlit faces. "What do the dead want of us?"

"What do the dragons want of us?" said Gamble. "These women who are dragons, dragons who are women—why are they here? Can we trust them?"

"Have we a choice?" said the Doorkeeper.

"I think not," said the Patterner. An edge of hardness, a sword's edge, had come into his voice. "We can only follow."

"Follow the dragons?" Gamble asked.

Azver shook his head. "Alder."

"But he's no guide, Patterner!" said Gamble. "A village mender?"

Onyx said, "Alder has wisdom, but in his hands, not in his head. He follows his heart. Certainly he doesn't seek to lead us."

"Yet he was chosen from among us all."

"Who chose him?" Seppel asked softly.

The Patterner answered him: "The dead."

They sat silent. The crickets' trill had ceased. Two tall figures came towards them through the grass lit grey by starlight. "May Brand and I sit with you a while?" Lebannen said. "There is no sleep tonight."

On the doorstep of the house on the Overfell, Ged sat watching the stars above the sea. He had gone in to sleep an hour or more ago, but as he closed his eyes he saw the hillside and heard the voices rising like a wave. He got up at once and went outside, where he could see the stars move.

He was tired. His eyes would close, and then he would be there by the wall of stones, his heart cold with dread that he would be there forever, not knowing the way back. At last, impatient and sick of fear, he got up again, fetched a lantern from the house and lit it, and set off on the path to Moss's house. Moss might or might not be frightened; she lived pretty near the wall, these days. But Heather would be in a panic, and Moss would not be able to soothe her. And since whatever had to be done, it wasn't he who could do it this time, he could at least go comfort the poor half-wit. He could tell her it was only dreams.

It was hard going in the dark, the lantern throwing great shadows of small things across the path. He walked slower than he would have liked to walk, and stumbled sometimes.

He saw a light in the widower's house, late as it was. A child wailed, over in the village. Mother, mother, why are the people crying? Who are the people crying, mother? There was no sleep there, either. There was not much sleep anywhere in Earthsea, tonight, Ged thought. He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.

Alder woke. he lay on earth and felt its depth beneath him. Above him the bright stars burned, the stars of summer, moving between leaf and leaf with the wind's blowing, moving from east to west with the world's turning. He watched them a while before he let them go. Tehanu was waiting for him on the hill.

"What must we do, Hara?" she asked him.

"We have to mend the world," he said. He smiled, because his heart had grown light at last. "We have to break the wall."

"Can they help us?" she asked, for the dead were gathered waiting down in the darkness as countless as grass or sand or stars, silent now, a great, dim beach of souls.

"No," he said, "but maybe others can." He walked down the hill to the wall. It was little more than waist-high here. He put his hands on one of the stones of the coping row and tried to move it. It was fixed fast, or was heavier than a stone should be; he could not lift it, could not make it move at all.

Tehanu came beside him. "Help me," he said. She put her hands on the stone, the human hand and the burnt claw, gripping it as well as she could, and gave a lifting tug as he did. The stone moved a little, then a little more. "Push it!" she said, and together they pushed it slowly out of place, grating hard on the rock beneath it, till it fell on the far side of the wall with a dull heavy thump.

The next stone was smaller; together they could lift it up out of its place. They let it drop into the dust on the near side.

A tremor ran through the ground under their feet then. Small chinking stones in the wall rattled. And with a long sigh, the multitudes of the dead came closer to the wall.

The patterner stood up suddenly and stood listening. Leaves stormed all about the glade, the trees of the Grove bowed and trembled as if under a great wind, but there was no wind.

"Now it changes," he said, and he walked away from them, into the darkness under the trees.

The Summoner, the Doorkeeper, and Seppel rose and followed him, quick and silent. Gamble and Onyx followed more slowly after them.

Lebannen stood up; he took a few steps after the others, hesitated, and hurried across the glade to the low house of stone and sod. "Irian," he said, stooping to the dark doorway. "Irian, will you take me with you?"

She came out of the house; she was smiling, and there was a kind of fiery brightness all about her. "Come then, come quick," she said, and took his hand. Her hand burned like a coal of fire as she lifted him into the other wind.

After a little time Seserakh came out of the house into the starlight, and after her came Tenar. They stood and looked about them. Nothing moved; the trees were still again.

"They are all gone," Seserakh whispered. "On the Dragons' Way."

She took a step forward, gazing into the dark.

"What are we to do, Tenar?"

"We are to keep the house," Tenar said.

"Oh!" Seserakh whispered, dropping to her knees. She had seen Lebannen lying near the doorway, stretched facedown in the grass. "He isn't dead—I think—Oh, my dear Lord King, don't go, don't die!"

"He's with them. Stay with him. Keep him warm. Keep the house, Seserakh," Tenar said. She went to where Alder lay, his unseeing eyes turned to the stars. She sat down by him, her hand on his. She waited.

Alder could scarcely move the great stone his hands were on, but the Summoner was beside him, stooping with his shoulder against it, and said, "Now!" Together they pushed it till it overbalanced and dropped down with that same heavy, final thump on the far side of the wall.

Others were there now with him and Tehanu, wrenching at the stones, casting them down beside the wall. Alder saw his own hands cast shadows for an instant from a red gleam. Orm Irian, as he had seen her first, a great dragon shape, had let out her fiery breath as she struggled to move a boulder from the lowest rank of stones, deepset in the earth. Her talons struck sparks and her thorned back arched, and the rock rolled ponderously free, breaching the wall entirely in that place.

There was a vast, soft cry among the shadows on the other side, like the sound of the sea on a hollow shore. Their darkness surged up against the wall. But Alder looked up and saw that it was no longer dark. Light moved in that sky where the stars had never moved, quick sparks of fire far in the dark west.

"Kalessin!"

That was Tehanu's voice. He looked at her. She was gazing upward, westward. She had no eye for earth.

She reached up her arms. Fire ran along her hands, her arms, into her hair, into her face and body, flamed up into great wings above her head, and lifted her into the air, a creature all fire, blazing, beautiful.

She cried out aloud, a clear, wordless cry. She flew high, headlong, fast, up into the sky where the light was growing and a white wind had erased the unmeaning stars.

From among the hosts of the dead a few here and there, like her, rose up flickering into dragons, and mounted on the wind.