Encounter in the Hands

The third meeting between Ged and the shadow he had loosed took place not on a stormy moor or a mist-wreathed shoal, but in a narrow, silent sea-lane called the Hands, a pair of lonely isles in the East Reach. This encounter marked a decisive turning point: Ged ceased to be the hunted and became the hunter, yet the confrontation itself yielded neither victory nor defeat, but a profound and irreversible change in the nature of their connection.

The Setting and the Trap

Ged had sailed south from the nameless sandbar where he had been shipwrecked, following the shadow's cold trail. The land that loomed before him was a queer-looking mass that from afar seemed a single mountain wall but was split into several long, steep ridges, between which the sea ran in narrow sounds. As he drew nearer, the dark, forest-crowned cliffs towered high over his small boat, and spray from the waves breaking against the rocky headlands blew against his sail. The magewind bore him between two great capes into a sound no wider than the length of two galleys, a sea-lane that ran deep into the island. The sea, confined, was restless and fretted at the steep shores; there were no beaches, for the cliffs dropped straight down into the water, darkened by the cold reflection of their heights. It was windless and very silent. Ged knew the torment of dread, and the certainty that he must go ahead and do what he had set out to do: hunt down the evil, follow his terror to its source. He peered ahead into the dark cleft, and left and right up the great, cavern-pocked, boulder-tumbled slopes where trees crouched with their roots half in air. Nothing moved. He was coming to the end of the inlet, a high blank wrinkled mass of rock against which the last sea-waves lapped feebly. Fallen boulders and rotten trunks and the roots of gnarled trees left only a tight way to steer. It was a dark trap under the roots of the silent mountain, and he was in it.

The Third Touch

Ged turned the boat around, working her carefully round with spell and with makeshift oar till she faced outward again. He was about to raise up a wind to take him back when the words of the spell froze on his lips, and his heart went cold within him. He looked back over his shoulder. The shadow stood behind him in the boat. Had he lost one instant, he had been lost; but he was ready, and lunged to seize and hold the thing which wavered and trembled there 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. He could not tell if this weariness were a sorcery laid on him by the shadow as it fled, or came of the bitter coldness of its touch, or was from mere hunger and want of sleep and expense of strength; but he struggled against it, forcing himself to raise up a light magewind into the sail and follow down the dark seaway where the shadow had fled. 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 Changed Quest

Ged 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. The encounter in the Hands had fundamentally altered the nature of his quest. The shadow had fled, but the bond between them was now absolute. Ged was no longer running from a nameless terror, nor was he chasing a mere enemy. He was moving toward an inevitable meeting with a part of himself, a confrontation that would determine not just his survival, but his very identity. The hunt had become a journey toward wholeness, a path that would lead him, after his rest and the building of a new boat, to the Open Sea and the final, naming confrontation.