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hill there’s grass, dead grass, but farther down there’s only dust and rocks. Nothing grows. Dark cities. The multitudes of the dead stand in the streets, or walk on the roads to no end. They don’t speak. They don’t touch. They never touch.” His voice was low and dry. “There Morred would pass Elfarran and never turn his head, and she wouldn’t look at him . . . There’s no rejoining there, Hara. No bond. The mother doesn’t hold her child, there.”
    “But my wife came to me,” Alder said, “she called my name, she kissed my mouth!”
    “Yes. And since your love wasn’t greater than any other mortal love, and since you and she aren’t mighty wizards whose power might change the laws of life and death, therefore, therefore something else is in this. Something is happening, is changing. Though it happens through you and to you, you are its instrument and not its cause.”
    Sparrowhawk stood up and strode to the beginning of the path along the cliff and back to Alder; he was charged, almost quivering with tense energy, like a hawk about to stoop down on its prey.
    “Did your wife not say to you, when you called her by her true name,
That is not my name any more
—?”
    “Yes,” Alder whispered.
    “But how is that? We who have true names keep them when we die, it’s our use-name that is forgotten . . . This is a mystery to the learned, I can tell you, but as well as we understand it, a true name is a word in the True Speech. That’s why only one with the gift can know a child’s name and give it. And the name binds the being—alive or dead. All the art of the Summoner lies in that . . . Yet when the master summoned your wife to come by her true name, she didn’t come to him. You called by her use-name, Lily, and she came to you. Did she come to you as to the one who knew her truly?”
    He gazed at Alder keenly and yet as if he saw more than the man who sat with him. After a while he went on, “When my master Aihal died, my wife was here with him; and as he was dying he said to her,
It is changed, all changed.
He was looking across that wall. From which side I do not know.
    “And since that time, indeed there have been changes—a king on Morred’s throne, and no Archmage of Roke. But more than that, much more. I saw a child summon the dragon Kalessin, the Eldest: and Kalessin came to her, calling her daughter, as I do. What does that mean? What does it mean that dragons have been seen above the islands of the west? The king sent to us, sent a ship to Gont Port, asking my daughter Tehanu to come and take counsel with him concerning dragons. People fear that the old covenant is broken, that the dragons will come to burn fields and cities as they did before Erreth-Akbe fought with Orm Embar. And now, at the boundary of life and death, a soul refuses the bond of her name . . . I do not understand it. All I know is that it is changing. It is all changing.”
    There was no fear in his voice, only fierce exultation.
    Alder could not share that. He had lost too much and was too worn out by his struggle against forces he could not control or comprehend. But his heart rose to that gallantry.
    “May it change for the good, my lord,” he said.
    “Be it so,” the old man said. “But change it must.”
    ***
    A S THE HEAT WENT OUT of the day, Sparrowhawk said he had to walk to the village. He carried the basket of plums with a basket of eggs nested in it.
    Alder walked with him and they talked. When Alder understood that Sparrowhawk bartered fruit and eggs and the other produce of the little farm for barley and wheat flour, that the wood he burned was gathered patiently up in the forest, that his goats’ not giving milk meant he must eke out last year’s cheese, Alder was amazed: how could it be that the Archmage of Earthsea lived from hand to mouth? Did his own people not honor him?
    When he went with him to the village, he saw women shut their doors when they saw the old man coming. The marketer