Tehanu: Chapters 11–14

So Apple walked with her and Therru up along the placid, silvery Kaheda.

“A nice puppy that will come and kiss the burglars,’ said Apple, stepping along buxom and grey-eyed, laughing at her mother.

She felt rebuked. She had done right to make the dress, and she had spoken the truth to the child. But it was not enough, the right and the truth.

She treated her overtures of friendship with the contempt that, Tenar admitted, they perhaps deserved.

She had, she thought, slighted her too often and too long, and owed her reparation.

He was the pupil of a pupil of Ogion’s and a devout admirer of the mage of Gont.

Beech, a smooth-skinned, mild-looking man in his forties, tending a little to fat, with dark half-circles under his eyes that belied the blandness of his face, glanced at her, and asked nothing.

“I’ve thought,” he said at last in his diffident way, “that maybe, if she has the gift, as I think she does, she might be trained a bit in the Art. And, as a witch, her...appearance wouldn’t be so much against her—possibly.”

Before the month was out, the villages of Middle Valley had met at the Round Barn of Sodeva to appoint their own bailiffs and officers of the peace and to levy a tax upon themselves to pay the bailiffs’ wages with.

Some ugly rumors went about, such as that Lord Heno had formed a Council of Scoundrels and was enlisting all the blackguards in the countryside to go about in gangs breaking the heads of the King’s bailies; but most people said, “Just let ’em try!” and went home telling each other that now an honest man could sleep safe abed at night, and what went wrong the King was setting right, though the taxes were beyond all reason and they’d all be poor men forever trying to pay them.

A proper farm-lassie, old Tiff called her, fawning a bit.

Tenar had also seen him make the sign to avert evil, surreptitiously, when Therru passed him.

She had a scathing eye.

It was not a den of infamy and chickens, like Moss’s house, but it was a witch-house, the beams hung thick with dried and drying herbs, the fire banked under grey ash with one tiny coal winking like a red eye, a lithe, fat, black cat with one white mustache sleeping up on a shelf, and everywhere a profusion of little boxes, pots, ewers, trays, and stoppered bottles, all aromatic, pungent or sweet or strange.

It was not a den of infamy and chickens, like Moss’s house, but it was a witch-house, the beams hung thick with dried and drying herbs, the fire banked under grey ash with one tiny coal winking like a red eye, a lithe, fat, black cat with one white mustache sleeping up on a shelf, and everywhere a profusion of little boxes, pots, ewers, trays, and stoppered bottles, all aromatic, pungent or sweet or strange.

Well, then, he can play fair with the goats he’s herding; it’s nothing to me, said Tenar, trudging homeward in the wind and the first, sparse, cold rain.

And it froze when the sun was down: rain puddles and watering troughs skimming over, then opaqued with ice; the reeds by the Kaheda stilled, bound in ice; the wind itself stilled as if frozen, unable to move.

Tenar was winding spun yarn off the distaff into a ball, her hands deft and rhythmic.

Standing at the cool-room door, she could hear that window being pried or jimmied, and men’s voices whispering.

He took breath and tried to tell his story coherently.

“They won’t be back,” he said doggedly.

She felt all at once abysmally, infinitely weary.

I talked with some o’ them from up there and they told me they’d all four of ’em been traipsing and camping and vagranting about near Kahedanan, and the woman would come into the village to beg, all beat about and burns and bruises all over her.

He looked up at her, gauging, seeing how she was.

Her heart ached, and her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a troubled lightness.

“You tell him,” Tenar said, amused at this pretext for delay.

They could not do anything about it, nor did it entail any threat to them.

A widow’s tenure of her husband’s property was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant.

A widow’s tenure of her husband’s property was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant.

The two couples who did not own the land but held a life interest in the work and profit of the farming, as was common on Gont, could not be dislodged by any man the widow took up with, even if she married him; but she feared they might resent her lack of fidelity to Flint, whom they had after all known longer than she had.

His dignity and simplicity were not greater than that of other men she had known, but were a little different in quality; there was a size to him, she thought, not height or girth, certainly, but soul and mind.

But the word “archmage” was too great and grand a word to bring from far-off pomps and palaces and fit to the dark-eyed, grey-haired man at Oak Farm, and she never did that.

“My dear, you’re not trying to...reinstate me?”

“Infinite are the arguments of mages,” said Tenar rather drily.
Ged bit the thread off and rolled the unused length around two fingers.
“I learned to quibble a bit, on Roke,” he admitted.

In the villages there was talk, secondhand from Valmouth, of the king’s ships harrying the harriers, driving well-established pirates to ruin, confiscating their ships and fortunes.

There came other ships bearing other men sent by the King, not all of them popular among the townsfolk and villagers of rude Gont: royal sheriffs, sent to report on the system of bailiffs and officers of the peace and to hear complaints and grievances from the common people; tax reporters and tax collectors; noble visitors to the little lords of Gont, inquiring politely as to their fealty to the Crown in Havnor; and wizardly men, who went here and there, seeming to do little and say less.

He had sat down in the hearthseat, looking uncertain and morose.

He watched Ged, who had already packed his few belongings with the neatness and dispatch of one who had traveled much, and was now putting up the dishes to leave the kitchen in good order.

Ged strode along at his easy traveler’s gait, and Therru trudged right beside him, the same Therru who had worn out on this long climb less than a year ago, and had to be carried.

I might keep you alive here awhile, to see that power—my power. To see the old man I keep from death—and I might use your life for that if I need it—and to see your meddling king make a fool of himself, with his mincing lords and stupid wizards, looking for a woman!