Simon & Schuster

. How could I? Why should I?”

After a pause she said, “I see your magic is not good only for large things.”

“Hospitality,” he said, “kindness to a stranger, that’s a very large thing. Thanks are enough,

Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, I’ll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you.”

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light.

“There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.

I grew into it. It grew into me. We blurred at the edges, became an amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

I am a person coming undone.

Otherwise I’ll fall apart. I’m going to fall apart. I am falling apart

The sky is on fire and the night has ended.

In sickness and in health?’ she asks. ‘Till death us do part?’

I shake my head. ‘Way beyond that,’ I say. ‘For ever.’

She takes my hands and leans in for a kiss. It hurts. Suddenly everything hurts