Sea-House of Serd

The Sea-House of Serd stands on the island of Serd, the nearest of the Ninety Isles to Roke, as a place of hospitality for travelers and merchants. It offers good fare provided by the township and a long raftered hall where guests may sleep, a communal refuge typical of the thriving islands of the Inmost Sea. Yet for Ged, arriving there after the Roke-wind had turned him back from his intended return to the Isle of the Wise, this haven becomes a stage for his deepest vulnerability.

Ged's Night of Dread

Ged goes up from the wharves of Serd with a heaviness and dread in his heart. The shortening winter days bring dusk early, and with dusk his uneasiness always grows; he must steel himself not to keep looking back over his shoulder at what might be coming behind him. At the Sea-House, he saves a bit of meat from his dinner and tries to coax the otak, Hoeg, out of the fold of his hood where it has cowered all that day, but the creature will not eat and instead creeps into his pocket to hide. By this, by his own dull uncertainty, by the very look of the darkness in the corners of the great room, Ged knows that the shadow is not far from him.

Isolation Among Strangers

No one in the Sea-House knows him; they are travelers from other isles who have not heard the Song of the Sparrowhawk, and none speaks to him. He chooses a pallet at last and lies down, but all night long he keeps his eyes open there in the raftered hall among the sleep of strangers. Throughout the night he tries to choose his way, to plan where he should go, what he should do, but each choice and each plan is blocked by a foreboding of doom. Across every path he might take lies the shadow. Only Roke is clear of it, and to Roke he cannot go, forbidden by the high, enwoven, ancient spells that keep the perilous island safe—the Roke-wind that rose against him is proof the thing that hunts him must be very close upon him now.

The Shadow's Proximity

The thing that hunts Ged is bodiless, blind to sunlight, a creature of a lightless, placeless, timeless realm. It must grope after him through the days and across the seas of the sunlit world, and can take visible shape only in dream and darkness. Ged knows that if once the shadow caught up with him it could draw his power out of him, and take from him the very weight and warmth and life of his body and the will that moved him. That is the doom he sees lying ahead on every road. He also knows that he might be tricked toward that doom, for the shadow, growing stronger always as it is nearer him, might even now have strength enough to put evil powers or evil men to its own use—showing him false portents, or speaking with a stranger's voice. For all he knows, in one of these men who sleep in this corner or that of the raftered hall tonight, the dark thing lurks, finding a foothold in a dark soul and there waiting and watching Ged and feeding, even now, on his weakness, on his uncertainty, on his fear.

Flight at Dawn

The situation becomes past bearing. Ged must trust to chance and run wherever chance takes him. At the first cold hint of dawn he gets up and goes in haste under the dimming stars down to the wharves of Serd, resolved only to take the first ship outward bound that would have him. A galley loading turbie-oil is to sail at sunrise, bound for Havnor Great Port. Ged asks passage of her master; a wizard's staff is passport and payment on most ships, and they take him aboard willingly. Within that hour the ship sets forth, and Ged's spirits lift with the first lifting of the forty long oars and the drumbeat that keeps the stroke, making a brave music to him. Yet even as he sails away, he does not know what he will do in Havnor, or where he will run from there—northward is as good as any direction, and beyond such vague ideas there is no plan in his head, only the imperative to run.