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Alder said to Sparrowhawk, “but it isn’t dark under them. There is a light—a lightness there.”
    His listener nodded, smiling a little.
    “As soon as I came there, I knew I could sleep. I felt as if I’d been asleep all along, in an evil dream, and now, here, I was truly awake: so I could truly sleep. There was a place he took me to, in among the roots of a huge tree, all soft with the fallen leaves of the tree, and he told me I could lie there. And I did, and I slept. I cannot tell you the sweetness of it.”
    ***
    T HE MIDDAY SUN HAD GROWN strong; they went indoors, and the host set out bread and cheese and a bit of dried meat. Alder looked round him as they ate. The house had only the one long room with its little western alcove, but it was large and darkly airy, strongly built, with wide boards and beams, a gleaming floor, a deep stone fireplace. “This is a noble house,” Alder said.
    “An old one. They call it the Old Mage’s house. Not for me, nor for my master Aihal who lived here, but for his master Heleth, who with him stilled the great earthquake. It’s a good house.”
    Alder slept a while again under the trees with the sun shining on him through the moving leaves. His host rested too, but not long; when Alder woke, there was a good-sized basket of the small golden plums under the tree, and Sparrowhawk was up in the goat pasture mending a fence. Alder went to help him, but the job was done. The goats, however, were long gone.
    “Neither of ’em’s in milk,” Sparrowhawk grumbled as they returned to the house. “They’ve got nothing to do but find new ways through the fence. I keep them for exasperation . . . The first spell I ever learned was to call goats from wandering. My aunt taught me. It’s no more use to me now than if I sang them a love song. I’d better go see if they’ve got into the widower’s vegetables. You don’t have the kind of sorcery to charm a goat to come, do you?”
    The two brown nannies were indeed invading a cabbage patch on the outskirts of the village. Alder repeated the spell Sparrowhawk told him:
     
Noth hierth malk man,

hiolk han merth han!
     
    The goats gazed at him with alert disdain and moved away a little. Shouting and a stick got them out of the cabbages onto the path, and there Sparrowhawk produced some plums from his pocket. Promising, offering, and cajoling, he slowly led the truants back into their pasture.
    “They’re odd creatures,” he said, latching the gate. “You never know where you are with a goat.”
    Alder thought that he never knew where he was with his host, but did not say it.
    When they were sitting in the shade again, Sparrowhawk said, “The Patterner isn’t a Northerner, he’s a Karg. Like my wife. He was a warrior of Karego-At. The only man I know of who ever came from those lands to Roke. The Kargs have no wizards. They distrust all sorcery. But they’ve kept more knowledge of the Old Powers of the Earth than we have. This man, Azver, when he was young, he heard some tale of the Immanent Grove, and it came to him that the center of all the earth’s powers must be there. So he left his gods and his native tongue behind him and made his way to Roke. He stood on our doorstep and said, ‘Teach me to live in that forest!’ And we taught him, till he began to teach us . . . So he became our Master Patterner. He’s not a gentle man, but he is to be trusted.”
    “I never could fear him,” Alder said. “It was easy to be with him. He’d take me far into the wood with him.”
    They were both silent, both thinking of the glades and aisles of that wood, the sunlight and starlight in its leaves.
    “It is the heart of the world,” Alder said.
    Sparrowhawk looked up eastward at the slopes of Gont Mountain, dark with trees. “I’ll go walking there,” he said, “in the forest, come autumn.”
    After a while he said, “Tell me what counsel the Patterner had for you, and why he sent you here to me.”
    “He said, my lord,