Tales From Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

same. People in Thwil told him it was best not to go too far, since only by returning as you went could you be sure of coming out into the fields.
    “How far does the forest go?” Medra asked, and Ember said, “As far as the mind goes.”
    The leaves of the trees spoke, she said, and the shadows could be read. “I am learning to read them,” she said.
    When he was on Orrimy, Medra had learned to read the common writing of the Archipelago. Later, Highdrake of Pendor had taught him some of the runes of power. That was known lore. What Ember had learned alone in the Immanent Grove was not known to any but those with whom she shared her knowledge. She lived all summer under the eaves of the Grove, having no more than a box to keep the mice and wood rats from her small store of food, a shelter of branches, and a cook fire near a stream that came out of the woods to join the little river running down to the bay.
    Medra camped nearby. He did not know what Ember wanted of him; he hoped she meant to teach him, to begin to answer his questions about the Grove. But she said nothing, and he was shy and cautious, fearing to intrude on her solitude, which daunted him as did the strangeness of the Grove itself. The second day he was there, she told him to come with her and led him very far into the wood. They walked for hours in silence. In the summer midday the woods were silent. No bird sang. The leaves did not stir. The aisles of the trees were endlessly different and all the same. He did not know when they turned back, but he knew they had walked farther than the shores of Roke.
    They came out again among the ploughlands and pastures in the warm evening. As they walked back to their camping place he saw the four stars of the Forge come out above the western hills.
    Ember parted from him with only a “Good night.”
    The next day she said, “I’m going to sit under the trees.” Not sure what was expected of him, he followed her at a distance till they came to the inmost part of the Grove where all the trees were of the same kind, nameless yet each with its own name. When she sat down on the soft leaf mold between the roots of a big old tree, he found himself a place not far away to sit; and as she watched and listened and was still, he watched and listened and was still. So they did for several days. Then one morning, in rebellious mood, he stayed by the stream while Ember walked into the Grove. She did not look back.
    Veil came from Thwil Town that morning, bringing them a basket of bread, cheese, milk curds, summer fruits. “What have you learned?” she asked Medra in her cool, gentle way, and he answered, “That I’m a fool.”
    “Why so, Tern?”
    “A fool could sit under the trees forever and grow no wiser.”
    The tall woman smiled a little. “My sister has never taught a man before,” she said. She glanced at him, and gazed away, over the summery fields. “She’s never looked at a man before,” she said.
    Medra stood silent. His face felt hot. He looked down. “I thought,” he said, and stopped.
    In Veil’s words he saw, all at once, the other side of Ember’s impatience, her fierceness, her silences.
    He had tried to look at Ember as untouchable while he longed to touch her soft brown skin, her black shining hair. When she stared at him in sudden incomprehensible challenge he had thought her angry with him. He feared to insult, to offend her. What did she fear? His desire? Her own?—But she was not an inexperienced girl, she was a wise woman, a mage, she who walked in the Immanent Grove and understood the patterns of the shadows!
    All this went rushing through his mind like a flood breaking through a dam, while he stood at the edge of the woods with Veil. “I thought mages kept themselves apart,” he said at last. “Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.”
    “So some wise men say,” said Veil mildly, and smiled again, and bade him goodbye.
    He spent the whole afternoon in confusion,