Tenar ran back to Ogion’s house, calling again and again. And this time she looked down the steep fields below the house, hoping to see the little figure crouched playing among the boulders. But all she saw was the sea, wrinkled and dark, at the end of those falling fields, and she grew dizzy and sick-hearted .
She went to Ogion’s grave and a short way past it up the forest path, calling. As she came back through the meadow, the kestrel was hunting in the same spot where Ged had watched it hunt. This time it stooped, and struck, and rose with some little creature in its talons. It flew fast to the forest. She’s feeding her young, Tenar thought. All kinds of thoughts went through her mind very vivid and precise, as she passed the laundry laid out on the grass, dry now, she must take it up before evening. She must search around the house, the springhouse, the milking shed, more carefully. This was her fault. She had caused it to happen by thinking of making Therru into a weaver, shutting her away in the dark to work, to be respectable. When Ogion had said
“Teach her, teach her all, Tenar!” When she knew that a wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended. When she knew that the child had been given her and she had failed in her charge, failed her trust, lost her, lost the one great gift.
She went into the house, having searched every corner of the other buildings, and looked again in the alcove and round the other bed. She poured herself water, for her mouth was dry as sand.
Behind the door the three sticks of wood, Ogion’s staff and the walking sticks, moved in the shadows, and one of them said, “Here.”
The child was crouched in that dark corner, drawn into her own body so that she seemed no bigger than a little dog, head bent down to the shoulder, arms and legs pulled tight in, the one eye shut.
“Little bird, little sparrow, little flame, what is wrong? What happened? What have they done to you now?”
Tenar held the small body, closed and stiff as stone, rocking it in her arms. “How could you frighten me so? How could you hide from me? Oh, I was so angry!”
She wept, and her tears fell on the child’s face.
“Oh Therru, Therru, Therru, don’t hide away from me!” A shudder went through the knotted limbs, and slowly they loosened. Therru moved, and all at once clung to Tenar, pushing her face into the hollow between Tenar’s breast and shoulder, clinging tighter, till she was clutching desperately. She did not weep. She never wept; her tears had been burned out of her, maybe; she had none. But she made a long, moaning, sobbing sound.
Tenar held her, rocking her, rocking her. Very, very slowly the desperate grip relaxed . The head lay pillowed on Tenar’s breast.
“Tell me,” the woman murmured, and the child answered in her faint, hoarse whisper, “He came here.”
Tenar’s first thought was of Ged, and her mind, still moving with the quickness of fear, caught that, saw who “he” was to her, and gave it a wry grin in passing, but passed on, hunting. “Who came here?”
No answer but a kind of internal shuddering.
“A man,” Tenar said quietly, “a man in a leather cap.”
Therru nodded once.
“We saw him on the road, coming here.”
No response.
“The four men-the ones I was angry at, do you remember? He was one of them.”
But she recalled how Therru had held her head down, hiding the burned side, not looking up, as she had always done among strangers.
“Do you know him, Therru?”
“Yes.”
“From-from when you lived in the camp by the river?”
One nod.
Tenar’s arms tightened around her.
“He came here?” she said, and all the fear she had felt turned as she spoke into anger, a rage that burned in her the length of her body like a rod of fire. She gave a kind of laugh- ”Hah!”-and remembered in that moment Kalessin, how Kalessin had laughed.
But it was not so simple for a human and a woman. The fire must be contained, And the child must be comforted.
“Did he see you?”
“I hid.”
Presently Tenar said, stroking Therru’s hair, “He will never touch you, Therru. Understand me and believe me: he will never touch you again. He’ll never see you again unless I’m with you, and then he must deal with me. Do you understand, my dear, my precious, my beautiful? You need not fear him. You must not fear him. He wants you to fear him. He feeds on your fear. We will starve him, Therru. We’ll starve him till he eats himself. Till he chokes gnawing on the bones of his own hands. . . . Ah, ah, ah, don’t listen to me now, I’m only angry, only angry. . . . Am I red? Am I red like a Gontishwoman, now? Like a dragon, am I red?” She tried to joke; and Therru, lifting her head, looked up into her face from her own crumpled, tremulous, fire-eaten face and said, “Yes. You are a red dragon.”
The idea of the man’s coming to the house, being in the house, coming around to look at his handiwork, maybe thinking of improving on it, that idea whenever it recurred to Tenar came less as a thought than as a queasy fit, a need to vomit, But the nausea burned itself out against the anger.
They got up and washed, and Tenar decided that what she felt most of all just now was hunger. “I am hollow,” she said to Therru, and set them out a substantial meal of bread and cheese, cold beans in oil and herbs, a sliced onion, and dry sausage. Therru ate a good deal, and Tenar ate a great deal.
As they cleared up, she said, “For the present, Therru, I won’t leave you at all, and you won’t leave me. Right? And we should both go now to Aunty Moss’s house. She was making a spell to find you, and she needn’t bother to go on with it, but she might not know that.”
Therm stopped moving. She glanced once at the open doorway, and shrank away from it.
“We need to bring in the laundry, too. On our way back. And when we’re back, I’ll show you the cloth I got today. For a dress. For a new dress, for you. A red dress.”
The child stood, drawing in to herself.
“If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him. Come with me.
The difficulty, the barrier of that doorway to the outside was tremendous to Therru. She shrank from it, she hid her face, she trembled, stumbled, it was cruel to force her to cross it, cruel to drive her out of hiding, but Tenar was without pity. “Come!” she said, and the child came.
They walked hand~in~hand acrosS the fields to Moss’s house. Once or twice Therru managed to look up.
Moss was not surprised to see them, but she had a queer, wary look about her. She told Therru to run inside her house to see the ringneck hen’s new chicks and choose which two might be hers; and Therru disappeared at once into that refuge.
“She was in the house all along,” Tenar said. “Hiding.” “Well she might,” said Moss.
“Why?” Tenar asked harshly. She was not in the hid~
ing vein. “
“There’s-there’s beings about, the witch said, not por~ tentously but uneasily.
“There’s scoundrels about!” said Tenar, and Moss looked at her and drew back a little.
“Eh, now, she said. “Eh, dearie. You have a fire around you, a shining of fire all about your head. I cast the spell to find the child, but it didn’t go right. It went its own way somehow, and I don’t know yet if it’s ended. I’m bewildered. I saw great beings. I sought the little girl but I saw them, flying in the mountains, flying in the clouds, And now you have that about you, like your hair was afire. What’s amiss, what’s wrong?”
“A man in a leather cap,” Tenar said. “A youngish man. Well enough looking. The shoulder seam of his vest’s torn. Have you seen him round?”
Moss nodded. “They took him on for the haying at the mansion house.”
“I told you that she”-Tenar glanced at the house-”was with a woman and two men? He’s one of them.”