Carefully Moiraine floated Merean’s body over that rail and down a little, close to the stone of the mountain. Flows of Fire, and flame, enveloped the Black sister, flame so hot there was no smoke, only a shimmering in the air, and the occasional crack of a splitting rock.
“What are you—?” Lan began, then changed it to, “Why?”
Moiraine let herself feel the rising heat, currents of air fit for a furnace. “There is no proof she was Black Ajah, only that she was Aes Sedai.” The White Tower needed its armor of secrecy again, more than it had when Malkier died, but she could not tell him that. Not yet. “I cannot lie about what happened here, but I can be silent. Will you be silent, or will you do the Shadow’s work?”
“You are a very hard woman,” he said finally. That was the only answer he gave, but it was enough.
“I am as hard as I must be,” she told him. Diryk’s scream. Iselle’s face. There was still Ryne’s body to dispose of, and the blood. As hard as she must be.
* * *
Next dawn found the Aesdaishar in mourning, white banners flying from every prominence, the servants with long white cloths tied to their arms. Rumors in the city already talked of portents foretelling the deaths, comets in the night, fires in the sky. People had a way of folding what they saw into what they knew and what they wanted to believe. The disappearance of a simple soldier, and even of an Aes Sedai, escaped notice alongside grief.
Returning from destroying Merean’s belongings—after searching in vain for any clue to other Black sisters—Moiraine stepped aside for Edeyn Arrel, who glided down the corridor in a white gown, her hair cut raggedly short. Whispers said she intended to retire from the world. Moiraine thought she already had. The woman’s staring eyes looked haggard and old. In a way, they looked much as her daughter’s did, in Moiraine’s mind.
When Moiraine entered her apartments, Siuan leaped up from a chair. It seemed weeks since Moiraine had seen her. “You look like you reached into the bait well and found a fangfish,” she growled. “Well, it’s no surprise. I always hated mourning when I knew the people. Anyway, we can go whenever you’re ready. Rahien was born in a farmhouse almost two miles from Dragonmount. Merean hasn’t been near him, as of this morning. I don’t suppose she’ll harm him on suspicion even if she is Black.”
Not the one. Somehow, Moiraine had almost expected that. “Merean will not harm anyone, Siuan. Put that mind of yours to a puzzle for me.” Settling in a chair, she began with the end, and hurried through despite Siuan’s gasps and demands for more detail. It was almost like living it again. Getting to what had led her to that confrontation was a relief. “She wanted Diryk dead most of all, Siuan; she killed him first. And she tried to kill Lan. The only thing those two had in common was luck. Diryk survived a fall that should have killed him, and everyone says Lan is the luckiest man alive or the Blight would have killed him years ago. It makes a pattern, but the pattern looks crazy to me. Maybe your blacksmith is even part of it. And Josef Najima, back in Canluum, for all I know. He was lucky, too. Puzzle it out for me if you can. I think it is important, but I cannot see how.”
Siuan strode back and forth across the room, kicking her skirt and rubbing her chin, muttering about “men with luck” and “the blacksmith rose suddenly” and other things Moiraine could not make out. Suddenly she stopped dead and said, “She never went near Rahien, Moiraine. The Black Ajah knows the Dragon was Reborn, but they don’t bloody know when! Maybe Tamra managed to keep it back, or maybe they were too rough and she died before they could pry it out of her. That has to be it!” Her eagerness turned to horror. “Light! They’re killing any man or boy who might be able to channel! Oh, burn me, thousands could die, Moiraine. Tens of thousands.”
It did make a terrible sense. Men who could channel seldom knew what they were doing, at least in the beginning. At first, they often just seemed to be lucky. Events favored them, and frequently, like the blacksmith, they rose to prominence with unexpected suddenness. Siuan was right. The Black Ajah had begun a slaughter.
“But they do not know to look for a boychild,” Moiraine said. As hard as she had to be. “An infant will show no signs.” Not until he was sixteen at the earliest. No man on record had begun channeling before that, and some not for ten years or more later. “We have more time than we thought. Not enough to be careless, though. Any sister can be Black. I think Cadsuane is. They know others are looking. If one of Tamra’s searchers locates the boy and they find her with him, or if they decide to question one of them instead of killing her as soon as it is convenient…” Siuan was staring at her. “We still have the task,” Moiraine told her.
“I know,” Siuan said slowly. “I just never thought. Well, when there’s work to do, you haul nets or gut fish.” That lacked her usual force, though. “We can be on our way to Arafel before noon.”
“You go back to the Tower,” Moiraine said. Together, they could search no faster than one could alone, and if they had to be apart, what better place for Siuan than working for Cetalia Delarme, seeing the reports of all the Blue Ajah eyes-and-ears? The Blue was a small Ajah, but every sister said it had a larger network than any other. While Moiraine hunted for the boy, Siuan could learn what was happening in every land, and knowing what she was looking for, she could spot any sign of the Black Ajah or the Dragon Reborn. Siuan truly could see sense when it was pointed out to her, though it took some effort this time, and when she agreed, she did it with a poor grace.
“Cetalia will use me to caulk drafts for running off without leave,” she grumbled. “Burn me! Hung out on a drying rack in the Tower! Moiraine, the politics are enough to make you sweat buckets in midwinter! I hate it!” But she was already pawing through the trunks to see what she could take with her for the ride back to Tar Valon. “I suppose you warned that fellow Lan. Seems to me, he deserves it, much good it’ll do him. I heard he rode out an hour ago, heading for the Blight, and if that doesn’t kill him—Where are you going?”
“I have unfinished business with the man,” Moiraine said over her shoulder. She had made a decision about him the first day she knew him, and she intended to keep it.
In the stable where Arrow was kept, silver marks tossed like pennies got the mare saddled and bridled almost while the coins were still in air, and she scrambled onto the animal’s back without a care that her skirts pushed up to bare her legs above the knee. Digging her heels in, she galloped out of the Aesdaishar and north through the city, making people leap aside and once setting Arrow to leap cleanly over an empty wagon with a driver too slow to move out of her way. She left a tumult of shouts and shaken fists behind.
On the road north from the city, she slowed enough to ask wagon drivers heading the other way whether they had seen a Malkieri on a bay stallion, and was more than a little relieved the first time she got a yes. The man could have gone in fifty directions after crossing the moat bridge. And with an hour’s lead.… She would catch him if she had to follow him into the Blight!
“A Malkieri?” The skinny merchant in a dark blue cloak looked startled. “Well, my guards told me there’s one up there.” Twisting on his wagon seat, he pointed to a grassy hill a hundred paces off the road. Two horses stood in plain sight at the crest, one a packhorse, and the thin smoke of a fire curled into the breeze.
Lan barely looked up when she dismounted. Kneeling beside the remains of a small fire, he was stirring the ashes with a long twig. Strangely, the smell of burned hair hung in the air. “I had hoped you were done with me,” he said.
“Not quite yet,” she told him. “Burning your future? It will sorrow a great many, I think, when you die in the Blight.”
“Burning my past,” he said, rising. “Burning memories. A nation. The Golden Crane will fly no more.” He started to kick dirt over the ashes, then hesitated and bent to scoop up damp soil and pour it out of his hands almost formally. “No one will sorrow for me when I die, because those who would are dead already. Besides, all men die.”
“Only fools
choose to die before they must. I want you to be my Warder, Lan Mandragoran.”
He stared at her unblinking, then shook his head. “I should have know it would be that. I have a war to fight, Aes Sedai, and no desire to help you weave White Tower webs. Find another.”
“I fight the same war as you, against the Shadow. Merean was Black Ajah.” She told him all of it, from Gitara’s Foretelling in the presence of the Amyrlin Seat and two Accepted to what she and Siuan had reasoned out. For another man, she would have left most unsaid, but there were few secrets between Warder and Aes Sedai. For another man, she might have softened it, but she did not believe hidden enemies frightened him, not even when they were Aes Sedai. “You said you burned your past. Let the past have its ashes. This is the same war, Lan. The most important battle yet in that war. And this one, you can win.”
For a long time he stood staring north, toward the Blight. She did not know what she would do if he refused. She had told him more than she would have anyone but her Warder.
Suddenly he turned, sword flashing out, and for an instant she thought he meant to attack her. Instead he sank to his knees, the sword lying bare across his hands. “By my mother’s name, I will draw as you say ‘draw’ and sheathe as you say ‘sheathe.’ By my mother’s name, I will come as you say ‘come’ and go as you say ‘go.’” He kissed the blade and looked up at her expectantly. On his knees, he made any king on a throne look meek. She would have to teach him some humility for his own sake. And for a pond’s sake.
“There is a little more,” she said, laying hands on his head.
The weave of Spirit was one of the most intricate known to Aes Sedai. It wove around him, settled into him, vanished. Suddenly she was aware of him, in the way that Aes Sedai were of their Warders. His emotions were a small knot in the back of her head, all steely hard determination, sharp as his blade’s edge. She knew the muted pain of old injuries, tamped down and ignored. She would be able to draw on his strength at need, to find him however far away he was. They were bonded.
He rose smoothly, sheathing his sword, studying her. “Men who weren’t there call it the Battle of the Shining Walls,” he said abruptly. “Men who were, call it the Blood Snow. No more. They know it was a battle. On the morning of the first day, I led nearly five hundred men. Kandori, Saldaeans, Domani. By evening on the third day, half were dead or wounded. Had I made different choices, some of those dead would be alive. And others would be dead in their places. In war, you say a prayer for your dead and ride on, because there is always another fight over the next horizon. Say a prayer for the dead, Moiraine Sedai, and ride on.”
Startled, she came close to gaping. She had forgotten that the bond’s flow worked both ways. He knew her emotions, too, and apparently could reason out hers far better than she could his. After a moment, she nodded, though she did not know how many prayers it would take to clear her mind.
Handing her Arrow’s reins, he said, “Where do we ride first?”
“Back to Chachin,” she admitted. “And then Arafel, and…” So few names remained that were easy to find. “The world, if need be. We win this battle, or the world dies.”
Side by side they rode down the hill and turned south. Behind them the sky rumbled and turned black, another late storm rolling down from the Blight.
EARTHSEA
Ursula K. Le Guin
A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA (1968)
THE TOMBS OF ATUAN (1971)
THE FARTHEST SHORE (1972)
TEHANU THE LAST BOOK OF EARTHSEA (1990)
The island world of Earthsea is inhabited by human beings and by dragons. The dragons are aloof and dangerous creatures, whose native tongue is the Language of the Making. Some events and stories (in Tehanu) suggest that there was a time when dragons and human beings were all one kind, but they have long been divided and unfriendly. Among the human beings, magic is a gift with which some people are born, but which must also be learned as an art or science. Essential to the practice of magic is learning at least some words of the Language of the Making, in which things are given their true names. By learning the true name, the witch or wizard gains power over the thing or the person. Power, of course, may be used for good or for ill.
A Wizard of Earthsea opens on Gont Island. Ged, a young peasant boy with a great gift of magic, goes to the School for Wizards on Roke Island. There, attempting to prove his superiority to another boy, he brings a shadow-being from the realm of the dead into the world of the living. This shadow hunts him through the islands, driving him always toward danger and evil. At last, guided by his old teacher Ogion, he turns on it, and pursues it on a desperate course that leads him out of the world across the barrier of death. There Ged and his shadow, confronting each other, find that they are one; and thus Ged’s being is healed and made whole.
The Tombs of Atuan is set on one of the four islands of the Kargish people, whose language and customs are different from those of the Archipelagans. A child named Tenar is taken from her parents, renamed Arha, “the Eaten One,” and trained as the High Priestess of the Tombs, an ancient desert sanctuary in Atuan, where only women and eunuchs may come. When she is near the end of her training, she comes upon a stranger, a man, in the underground Labyrinth, the heart of the sacred place. This is Ged, now a powerful wizard, seeking the missing half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, on which is engraved the broken Rune of Peace. The young priestess’s duty is to kill him. Talking with her prisoner, she begins to see that she herself is a prisoner in the Tombs, bound by a meaningless and cruel ritual. Ged gives her back her true name, Tenar. As he has freed her, she frees him: she leads him out of the Labyrinth, and the two escape with the reunited Ring of Peace. Tenar is honored in Havnor, the City of the Kings of Earthsea, but Ged will take her to live and study with his old master Ogion, on Gont.
In The Farthest Shore, Ged, now Archmage of Roke and the most powerful man in the Archipelago, goes with young Arren, Prince of Enlad, on a quest to find why magic seems to be losing its power. After strange adventures far in the south, they are led to the dragons’ islands; and on Selidor, the westernmost of them all, their quest takes them into the realm of death, the dry land of darkness. There they find the wizard Cob, who, desiring immortality for himself, has breached the wall between life and death. Ged takes Cob’s power from him and closes the wound in the world, but it takes all his own power to do so. Arren, who will inherit the throne of Earthsea, empty for five centuries, leads him back into life. The dragon Kalessin carries them both to Roke, where Ged salutes Arren as king; then Kalessin bears him home to Gont Island.
Tehanu, though written seventeen years after The Farthest Shore, takes up the story where it ended. Tenar of the Tombs did not stay with Ogion but married a farmer, Flint, had two children, and has lived these thirty years as a farm woman. Dying, Ogion sends for her. She stays on at the old mage’s house after his death. With her is her adopted daughter. This girl, Therru, who was raped and burned and left for dead by the men who traveled with her mother, is a silent child full of fear and uncomprehended power. The dragon brings Ged to Gont. Worn out and ill, having lost all his powers of magic, Ged is full of shame, and hides even from Arren, who comes seeking him. Aspen, a disciple of Cob, brews evil magic on Gont; Handy, one of the men who abused the child Therru, keeps hanging around. The young king takes Tenar back to her husband’s farm. There Handy and the others try to get at Tenar and the child; Ged comes in time to help her fight them off. That winter Ged stays with Tenar at the farm, and though he has lost his power as a mage, he finds at last his power as a sexual human being. In the spring, Aspen lures Ged and Tenar back to Ogion’s house, and since they cannot work magic they have no defense against him. He humiliates and is about to kill them. Now the disfigured, powerless child Therru finds her true name, Tehanu, and her own power. She summons the dragon Kalessin in the dragons’ speech, the Language of the Making. The dragon destroys Aspen, and greets Therru as a daughter. She will live with Ged and Tenar now, but will live with the d
ragons later: “I give you my child,” Kalessin says to Ged, “as you will give me yours.”
DRAGONFLY
Ursula K. Le Guin
1. Iria
Her father’s ancestors had owned a wide, rich domain on the wide, rich island of Way. Claiming no title or court privilege in the days of the kings, through all the dark years after Maharion fell they held their land and people with firm hands, putting their gains back into the land, upholding some sort of justice, and fighting off petty tyrants. As order and peace returned to the Archipelago under the sway of the wise men of Roke, for a while yet the family and their farms and villages prospered. That prosperity and the beauty of the meadows and upland pastures and oak-crowned hills made the domain a byword, so that people said, “as fat as a cow of Iria,” or, “as lucky as an Irian.” The masters and many tenants of the domain added its name to their own, calling themselves Irian. But though the farmers and shepherds went on from season to season and year to year and generation to generation as solid and steady as the oaks, the family that owned the land altered with time and chance.
A quarrel between brothers over their inheritance divided them. One heir mismanaged his estate through greed, the other through foolishness. One had a daughter who married a merchant and tried to run her estate from the city, the other had a son whose sons quarreled again, redividing the divided land. By the time the girl called Dragonfly was born, the domain of Iria, though still one of the loveliest regions of hill and field and meadow in all Earthsea, was a battleground of feuds and litigations. Farmlands went to weeds, farmsteads went unroofed, milking sheds stood unused, and shepherds followed their flocks over the mountain to better pastures. The old house that had been the center of the domain was half in ruins on its hill among the oaks.