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spoke.
    The dragon turned its head aside a little so that she was not destroyed when it did speak, or perhaps it laughed—a great “Hah!” of orange flame.
    Then it lowered its body into a crouch and spoke, but not to her.
    “Ahivaraihe, Ged,” it said, mildly enough, smokily,with a flicker of the burning tongue; and it lowered its head.
    Tenar saw for the first time, then, the man astride its back. In the notch between two of the high sword-thorns that rose in a row down its spine he sat, just behind the neck and above the shoulders where the wings had root. His hands were clenched on the rust-dark mail of the dragons neck and his head leaned against the base of the sword-thorn, as if he were asleep.
    “Ahi eheraihe, Ged!” said the dragon, a little louder, its long mouth seeming always to smile, showing the teeth as long as Tenar’s forearm, yellowish, with white, sharp tips.
    The man did not stir.
    The dragon turned its long head and looked again at Tenar.
    “Sobriost?” it said, in a whisper of steel sliding over steel.
    That word of the Language of the Making she knew. Ogion had taught her all she would learn of that tongue. Go up, the dragon said: mount! And she saw the steps to mount. The taloned foot, the crooked elbow, the shoulder-joint, the first musculature of the wing: four steps.
    She too said, “Hah!” but not in a laugh, only trying to get her breath, which kept sticking in her throat; and she lowered her head a moment to stop her dizzy faintness. Then she went forward, past the talons and the long lipless mouth and the longyellow eye, and mounted the shoulder of the dragon. She took the man’s arm. He did not move, but surely he was not dead, for the dragon had brought him here and spoken to him. “Come on,” she said, and then seeing his face as she loosened the clenched grip of his left hand, “Come on, Ged. Come on....”
    He raised his head a little. His eyes were open, but unseeing. She had to climb around him, scratching her legs on the hot, mailed hide of the dragon, and unclench his right hand from a horny knob at the base of the sword-thorn. She got him to take hold of her arms, and so could carry-drag him down those four strange stairs to earth.
    He roused enough to try to hold on to her, but there was no strength in him. He sprawled off the dragon onto the rock like a sack unloaded, and lay there.
    The dragon turned its immense head and in a completely animal gesture nosed and sniffed at the mans body.
    It lifted its head, and its wings too half lifted with a vast, metallic sound. It shifted its feet away from Ged, closer to the edge of the cliff. Turning back the head on the thorned neck, it stared once more directly at Tenar, and its voice like the dry roar of a kiln-fire spoke: “ Thesse Kalessin.”
    The sea wind whistled in the dragons half-open wings.
    “Thesse Tenar,” the woman said in a clear, shaking voice.
    The dragon looked away, westward, over the sea. It twitched its long body with a clink and clash of iron scales, then abruptly opened its wings, crouched, and leapt straight out from the cliff onto the wind. The dragging tail scored the sandstone as it passed. The red wings beat down, lifted, and beat down, and already Kalessin was far from land, flying straight, flying west.
    Tenar watched it till it was no larger than a wild goose or a gull. The air was cold. When the dragon had been there it had been hot, furnace-hot, with the dragon’s inward fire. Tenar shivered. She sat down on the rock beside Ged and began to cry. She hid her face in her arms and wept aloud. “What can I do?” she cried. “What can I do now?”
    Presently she wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve, put back her hair with both hands, and turned to the man who lay beside her. He lay so still, so easy on the bare rock, as if he might lie there forever.
    Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.
    She could not carry him. She would have to get