She did not know what they made of Sparrowhawk, of his presence and nonpresence, in the village. Ogion, aloof and silent and in some ways feared, had been their own mage and their fellow-villager. Sparrowhawk they might be proud of as a name, the archmage who had lived awhile in Re Albi and done wonderful things, fooling a dragon in the Ninety Isles, bringing the Ring of Erreth-Akbe back from somewhere or other; but they did not know him. Nor did he know them. He had not gone into the village since he came, only to the forest, the wilderness. She had not thought about it before, but he avoided the village as surely as Therru did.

They must have talked about him. It was a village, and people talked. But gossip about the doings of wizards and mages would not go far. The matter was too uncanny, the lives of men of power were too strange, too different from their own. “Let be,” she had heard villagers in the Middle Valley say when somebody got to speculating too freely about a visiting weatherworker or their own wizard, Beech-’ ‘Let be. He goes his way, not ours.

As for herself, that she should have stayed on to nurse and serve such a man of power would not seem a questionable matter to them; again it was a case of “Let be.” She had not been very much in the village herself; they were neither friendly nor unfriendly to her. She had lived there once in Weaver Fan’s cottage, she was the old mage’s ward, he had sent Townsend down round the mountain for her; all that was very well. But then she had come with the child, terrible to look at, who’d walk about in daylight with it by choice? And what kind of woman would be a wizard’s pupil, a wizard’s nurse? Witchery there, sure enough, and foreign too. But all the same, she was wife to a rich farmer way down there in the Middle Valley; though he was dead and she a widow. Well, who could understand the ways of the witchfolk? Let be, better let be....

She met the Archmage of Earthsea as he came past the garden fence. She said, “They say there’s a ship in from the City of Havnor. “

He stopped. He made a movement, quickly controlled, but it had been the beginning of a turn to run, to break and run like a mouse from a hawk.

“Ged!” she said. “What is it?”

“I can’t, “ he said. “I can’t face them.”

“Who?”

“Men from him. From the king.”

His face had gone greyish, as when he was first here, and he looked around for a place to hide.

His terror was so urgent and undefended that she thought only how to spare him. “You needn’t see them. If anybody comes I’ll send them away. Come back to the house now. You haven’t eaten all day.”

“There was a man there,” he said.

“Townsend, pricing goats. I sent him away. Come on!” He came with her, and when they were in the house she shut the door.

“They couldn’t harm you, surely, Ged. Why would they want to?”

He sat down at the table and shook his head dully. “No, no.

“Do they know you’re here?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is it you’re afraid of?” she asked, not impatiently, but with some rational authority.

He put his hands across his face, rubbing his temples and forehead, looking down. “I was--” he said. “I’m not- It was all he could say.

She stopped him, saying, “All right, it’s all right.” She dared not touch him lest she worsen his humiliation by any semblance of pity. She was angry at him, and for him. “It’s none of their business,’ ‘ she said, “where you are, or who you are, or what you choose to do or not to do! If they come prying they can leave curious.” That was Lark’s saying. She had a pang of longing for the company of an ordinary, sensible woman. “Anyhow, the ship may have nothing at all to do with you. They may be chasing pirates home. It ll be a good thing, too, when the king gets around to doing that.. . . I found some wine in the back of the cupboard, a couple of bottles, I wonder how long Ogion had it squirreled away there. I think we’d both do well with a glass of wine. And some bread and cheese. The little one’s had her dinner and gone off with Heather to catch frogs. There may be frogs’ legs for supper. But bread and cheese for now. And wine. I wonder where it’s from, who brought it to Ogion, how old it is?” So she talked along, woman’s babble, saving him from having to make any answer or misread any silence, until he had got over the crisis of shame, and eaten a little, and drunk a glass of the old, soft, red wine.

“It’s best I go, Tenar,” he said. “Till I learn to be what I am now.

“Go where?’ ‘

“Up on the mountain.”

“Wandering-like Ogion?’ ‘ She looked at him. She remembered walking with him on the roads of Atuan, deriding him: “Do wizards often beg?” And he had answered, “Yes, but they try to give something in exchange. “ ‘

She asked cautiously, “Could you get on for a while as a weatherworker, or a finder?” She filled his glass full.

He shook his head. He drank wine, and looked away. “No,” he said. “None of that. Nothing of that.”

She did not believe him. She wanted to rebel, to deny, to say to him, How can it be, how can you say that-as if you’d forgotten all you know, all you learned from Ogion, and at Roke, and in your traveling! You can’t have forgotten the words, the names, the acts of your art. You learned, you earned your power!-She kept herself from saying that, but she murmured, “I don’t understand. How can it all . . . ‘ ‘

“A cup of water,” he said, tipping his glass a little as if to pour it out. And after a while, ‘ ‘What I don’t understand is why he brought me back. The kindness of the young is cruelty.... So I’m here, I have to get on with it, till I can go back.”

She did not know clearly what he meant, but she heard a note of blame or complaint that, in him, shocked and angered her. She spoke stiffly: “It was Kalessin that brought you here.”

It was dark in the house with the door closed and only the small western window letting in the late-afternoon light. She could not make out his expression; but presently he raised his glass to her with a shadowy smile, and drank.

“This wine,” he said. “Some great merchant or pirate must have brought it to Ogion. I never drank its equal.

Even in Havnor.” He turned the squat glass in his hands, looking down at it. “I’ll call myself something,’ ‘ he said, “and go across the mountain, to Armouth and the East Forest country, where I came from. They’ll be making hay. There’s always work at haying and harvest. “

She did not know how to answer.” Fragile and jll~looking, he would be given such work only out of charity or brutality; and if he got it he would not be able to do it.”

“The roads aren’t like they used to be,” she said.” “These last years, there’s thieves and gangs everywhere. Foreign riffraff, as my friend Townsend says. But it’s not safe any more to go alone.”

Looking at him in the dusky light to see how he took this, she wondered sharply for a moment what it must be like never to have feared a human being-what it would be like to have to learn to be afraid .

“Ogion still went-’” he began, and then set his mouth; he had recalled that Ogion had been a mage.

“Down in the south part of the island,’ ‘ Tenar said, “there’s a lot of herding. Sheep, goats, cattle. They drive them up into the hills before the Long Dance, and pasture them there until the rains. They’re always needing herders. “ She drank a mouthful of the wine. It was like the dragon’s name in her mouth.” “But why can”t you just stay here?’ -

“Not in Ogion’s house.” The first place they’ll come. “Well, what if they do come? What will they want of you?”

“To be what I was.

The desolation of his voice chilled her.

She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself.” She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless.” But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.