Court of Seeming

The Court of Seeming is a roofless, stone-paved courtyard within the Great House on Roke Island, one of the open courts where the Masters of the School for Wizards conduct their teaching. It is the domain of the Master Hand, a gentle and light-hearted old man who instructs prentices in sleight, jugglery, and the lesser arts of Changing—the crafts of illusion that fool the beholder's senses but do not alter the true substance of a thing. Here, amid the sunlight and the stone, the young wizards of Roke learn to make a pebble appear a diamond, a flower, a fly, or a flame, and to weave the fleeting seemings that are the foundation of all magical display.

Ged's Prodigious Skill and His Ambition

Ged, who had arrived at Roke as a raw village boy knowing only the witch's charms of Ten Alders, took to the arts of illusion with astonishing ease. Within a month of his arrival, he was bettering lads who had been a year at the School before him. The Master Hand, delighted by the wit and beauty of the crafts he taught, showed Ged whatever spell he asked for, and Ged soon felt no awe of him. But Ged's ambition was not satisfied by mere seeming. Having it in mind to put his rival Jasper to shame, he one day approached the Master Hand in the Court of Seeming and asked a question that revealed his deeper hunger: he wanted to know how to make the illusion permanent—how to lock a changing-spell so that a pebble transformed into a diamond would remain diamond, not revert to rock when the spell-weaving ceased.

The Master Hand's Lesson on Equilibrium

The Master Hand looked at the glittering jewel on Ged's palm and spoke a single word in the True Speech—"Tolk"—and the jewel was once again a rough grey bit of rock. He then held the pebble out on his own hand and delivered a lesson that cut to the heart of wizardly ethics. "This is a rock; tolk in the True Speech," he said. "A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of the dry land on which men live. It is itself. It is part of the world." He demonstrated that by the Illusion-Change one could make it look like a diamond, a flower, a fly, an eye, or a flame—the rock flickered from shape to shape as he named them—but that was mere seeming. To truly change the rock into a jewel, one must change its true name, and to do that, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world itself. "It can be done," the Master said. "Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow."

Ged's Dissatisfaction and the Seeds of Pride

Ged left the Court of Seeming dissatisfied. The Master's warning about balance, danger, and the dark seemed to him merely the evasive talk of a mage pressed for his secrets. He could not accept that a true wizard, one who had mastered the high arts of Summoning and Change, would not be powerful enough to do as he pleased, to balance the world as seemed best to him, and to drive back darkness with his own light. This refusal to heed the lesson of the Court of Seeming—that power must be bounded by knowledge and need—was the seed of the pride and arrogance that would soon lead him to the disastrous summoning on Roke Knoll. The Court of Seeming, intended as a place of playful learning, thus became the setting for a foundational moral teaching that Ged, in his youthful certainty, chose to ignore.