Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

light. She could not make out his expression; but presently he raised his glass to her with a shadowy smile, and drank.
    “This wine,” he said. “Some great merchant or pirate must have brought it to Ogion. I never drank its equal. Even in Havnor.” He turned the squat glass in his hands, looking down at it. “I’ll call myself something,” he said, “and go across themountain, to Armouth and the East Forest country, where I came from. They’ll be making hay. There’s always work at haying and harvest.”
    She did not know how to answer. Fragile and ill-looking, he would be given such work only out of charity or brutality; and if he got it he would not be able to do it.
    “The roads aren’t like they used to be,” she said. “These last years, there’s thieves and gangs everywhere. Foreign riffraff, as my friend Townsend says. But it’s not safe any more to go alone.”
    Looking at him in the dusky light to see how he took this, she wondered sharply for a moment what it must be like never to have feared a human being—what it would be like to have to learn to be afraid.
    “Ogion still went—” he began, and then set his mouth; he had recalled that Ogion had been a mage.
    “Down in the south part of the island,” Tenar said, “there’s a lot of herding. Sheep, goats, cattle. They drive them up into the hills before the Long Dance, and pasture them there until the rains. They’re always needing herders.” She drank a mouthful of the wine. It was like the dragon’s name in her mouth. “But why can’t you just stay here?”
    “Not in Ogion’s house. The first place they’ll come.”
    “Well, what if they do come? What will they want of you?”
    “To be what I was.”
    The desolation of his voice chilled her.
    She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself. She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.
    Or maybe Aunty Moss was right, and when the meat was out the shell was empty.
    Witch-thoughts, she thought. And to turn his mind and her own, and because the soft, fiery wine made her wits and tongue quick, she said, “Do you know, I’ve thought—about Ogion teaching me, and I wouldn’t go on, but went and found myself my farmer and married him—I thought, when I did that, I thought on my wedding day, Ged will be angry when he hears of this!” She laughed as she spoke.
    “I was,” he said.
    She waited.
    He said, “I was disappointed.”
    “Angry,” she said.
    “Angry,” he said.
    He poured her glass full.
    “I had the power to know power, then,” he said. “And you—you shone, in that terrible place, the Labyrinth, that darkness....”
    “Well, then, tell me: what should I have done with my power, and the knowledge Ogion tried to teach me?”
    “Use it.”
    “How?”
    “As the Art Magic is used.”
    “By whom?”
    “Wizards,” he said, a little painfully.
    “Magic means the skills, the arts of wizards, of mages?”
    “What else would it mean?”
    “Is that all it could ever mean?”
    He pondered, glancing up at her once or twice.
    “When Ogion taught me,” she said, “here—at the hearth there—the words of the Old Speech, they were as easy and as hard in my mouth as in his. That was like learning the language I spoke before I was born. But the rest—the lore, the runes of power, the spells, the rules, the raising of the forces—that was all dead to me. Somebody else’s language. I used to think, I could be dressed up as a warrior, with a lance and a sword and a plume and all, but it wouldn’t fit, would it? What would I do with the sword? Would it make