Confrontation in the Hands

After the shipwreck on the nameless isle and the rebuilding of his boat Lookfar, Ged sailed southward from Springwater Isle, following the shadow's cold trail. He knew now that he was the hunter, not the hunted: the shadow had tricked him onto the rocks but had not dared to face him while he was turned against it. Yet the certainty of pursuit brought no relief. The dread that had driven him across the seas now guided him, and he followed his fear as a hunter follows the tracks of a bear that may at any moment turn from the thickets.

The Trap of the Silent Inlet

Ged steered Lookfar into a narrow sound between two great capes, a sea-lane that ran deep into the island, no wider than the length of two galleys. The cliffs dropped straight into dark water, and the sea, confined, fretted at the steep shores. It was windless and very silent. The opening between the headlands behind him seemed a remote, bright gateway as he approached the mountain-root from which the cliffs sprang. The lane of water grew narrower, and the cliffs loomed higher overhead. Fallen boulders and rotten trunks and the roots of gnarled trees left only a tight way to steer. Nothing moved before him or above him. All was deathly still. He could go no further. He turned the boat around, working her carefully round with spell and makeshift oar, until she faced outward again. He was about to raise a wind to take him back when the words of the spell froze on his lips. He looked back over his shoulder. The shadow stood behind him in the boat.

The Grasp That Found Nothing

Had Ged lost one instant, he had been lost; but he was ready, and lunged to seize and hold the thing that wavered and trembled within arm's reach. No wizardry would serve him now, but only his own flesh, his life itself, against the unliving. He spoke no word, but attacked, and the boat plunged and pitched from his sudden turn and lunge. A pain ran up his arms into his breast, taking away his breath, and an icy cold filled him, and he was blinded. Yet in his hands that seized the shadow there was nothing—darkness, air. He stumbled forward, catching the mast to stay his fall, and light came shooting back into his eyes. He saw the shadow shudder away from him and shrink together, then stretch hugely up over him, over the sail, for an instant. Then like black smoke on the wind it recoiled and fled, formless, down the water towards the bright gate between the cliffs.

The Unbreakable Bond

Ged sank to his knees. The little spell-patched boat pitched again, rocked itself to stillness, drifting on the uneasy waves. He crouched in it, numb, unthinking, struggling to draw breath, until at last cold water welling under his hands warned him that he must see to his boat, for the spells binding it were growing weak. He stood up, holding on to the staff that made the mast, and rewove the binding-spell as best he could. He was chilled and weary; his hands and arms ached sorely, and there was no power in him. All terror was gone. All joy was gone. It was a chase no longer. He was neither hunted nor hunter, now. For the third time they had met and touched: he had of his own will turned to the shadow, seeking to hold it with living hands. He had not held it, but he had forged between them a bond, a link that had no breaking-point. There was no need to hunt the thing down, to track it, nor would its flight avail it. Neither could escape. When they had come to the time and place for their last meeting, they would meet. But until that time, and elsewhere than that place, there would never be any rest or peace for Ged, day or night, on earth or sea. He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

Aftermath and the Way Forward

He sailed out from between the dark cliffs, and on the sea was broad, bright morning, with a fair wind blowing from the north. He drank what water he had left in the sealskin pouch, and steered around the westernmost headland until he came into a wide strait between it and a second island lying to the west. Then he knew the place, calling to mind sea-charts of the East Reach. These were the Hands, a pair of lonely isles that reach their mountain-fingers northward toward the Kargad Lands. He sailed on between the two, and as the afternoon darkened with storm-clouds coming up from the north he came to shore, on the southern coast of the west isle. There was a little village there, above the beach where a stream came tumbling down to the sea. The villagers were rough shy people, awed by a wizard's staff, wary of a strange face, but hospitable to one who came alone, over sea, before a storm. They gave him meat and drink in plenty, and the comfort of firelight and the comfort of human voices speaking his own Hardic tongue, and last and best they gave him hot water to wash the cold and saltness of the sea from him, and a bed where he could sleep. There he spent three days, recovering himself and making ready a boat built not of spells and sea-wrack but of sound wood, that he might sail easily and sleep when he needed. He paid the old man who owned her by healing his eyes of cataracts, and the old man, rejoicing, said to him, "We called the boat Sanderling, but do you call her Lookfar, and paint eyes aside her prow, and my thanks will look out of that blind wood for you and keep you from rock and reef. For I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me."