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Ged stirs without sense, without place, beyond time and beyond its pain. He is for a moment that shimmering, miasmic air over the water, full of colored and changeful light, then the heaviness of his body, and the weakness of himself, without any of that unmalicious mischief that hangs jeweled on a witched air. His eyelids make a spastic motion, and something like vision occupies him.
Long, damp strands of sable and grey fall against his unfelt body--perhaps his shoulder, his breast, even his cheek, but there is no meaningful sensation by which he can articulate the differences, all melted away. At first, he thinks them feathers, but lacks the strength to exhibit alarm--indeed, they do not alarm him, nor puzzle him, nor anything else, and meanly, he likes the little touch. Lebannen's fingers touch his temples with the faintness with which one handles a corpse, fearing to either hearken something departed or invite something crouched, unseen.
What a look on him; and what of Ged being in this salt place to see it.
It was the lad who bore such a face, in the dark and haggard and starved place, with the air diffuse with sourceless light to which the seemings of objects fail to bear themselves--in his hand a gleam, a sliver of live steel in continuity with the slim rise of the vein at the wrist, and in his face a little lightness, the wet glimmer of a tear. A tender, patient face, the mouth made matte with the littlest catching of dust, but the expression intent, focused, mournful, very loving, impossible to resent. This wondrousness near to despondence, this ponderance like faith is so fitted to the long silver-cast make of his face that the object, this spirit of it becomes truer, as if returned to some fixed state for which it had been made.
Arren, of earnest heart, had smiled much, flushed much, scowled much, beneath his courtly exterior; he had adopted these little expressions of doggish devotion, verging on silliness, of warmth so absolute that it had worn a mask of daftness, and it had been clear that he had not known himself to be wearing such expressions, to be shining so brightly beneath his cloak and his manner. And again here Lebannen does not know what he is, what he does, and in Ged's eyes are a well of uninterrupted darkness from which no draught can be taken, a place that takes no light and shows no reflection, and reveals nothing of himself.
Ged looks long at his face as it hovers above, upside down, and sees the shape of himself in that barest brightness, on the dark water of his weeping iris, and the sickness etched into his being, the mutilation of his face and ear and spirit, the deep grooves made in his shoulder beneath the ambiguity of his cloak. Old shame resurfaces, he closes his eyes, then opens them again, with much labor, and much heartsick; he recognizes a lurch of his heart as anger. Lebannen's mouth makes slight, harried movements, and Ged cannot map them for any meaning, and so he looks at him as he is whole, and he begins to pulse with tears.
The young man, in an instant, speaks a few little, meaningless words, some like refutations, others encouragement, and does not know he is speaking, not imagining himself capable of such an act. His dry throat barely permits it, though the mist so canvasses his lips as to restore their color, though his clothing sticks fast to his skin with thoroughness of the saltwater.
Ged deigns to raise his hand, and fails in this, his shoulder slipping slightly where Lebannen has his hands fitted behind them; the loosening gesture feels to the young man as if the relenting of death, and the man's body becomes even heavier in his clumsy hold. Lebannen looks at him with absolute terror, so overwhelming that it comes near to loathing, the black look that comes before strangulation.
Ged is not frightened by this expression, but it wounds him, and this wound gratifies him sickly. With that perverse satisfaction glowing lowly in him, he falls to dimness again, not unconsciousness, but, untethered, to un-Ged-ness, only the sourceless impression of heat girding him. The young man fails to cry out, instead breathes a hard, obstructing breath, holding that breath low in the sternum and hanging his jaw open as he exerts his stiff, seizing limbs.
Together, they make a damp, clay-colored streak up the sandbar, so that Ged lays strewn beyond the grasp of those turning waters, and Arren intends to live.
The forge speaks to him, and in his arms awaken old pain, old soreness, and the muscles of his shoulderblades spasm beneath his skin with exertion, roving like worms. For that single moment, there is a terrible looming, a simple fear of being struck, and he deigns to raise his head with that notion already souring in his mind. There is a scurf of sand against his cheek when he raises it, and his body is bare and warmed and humming with their heat at the high of his shoulder and his hind, and before him, through the little dangling of grit in his lashes, is...
His name had come to him on that clean-burnt, furnace air, and even his pain, all-worn and all-broken, seems to writhe and dance, and a strangeness is in his heart. He lays in the bosom of the dune and looks wild-eyed about him, only breathing, and hoping by his breath and the wild roving of his half-seeing look to restore some strength, some utility. There the gusty, continuous sound of the surf, and there the scuffing of his young lord's bare feet in the sand, coming to kneel beside him, and there the heat-hum that rises from the animal body of the dragon.
His body fails him as he raises himself, and the young man holds him with one arm about his back, the other tender on his hand. And looking at him with that face, slightly fierce with resolve. Ged trusts himself totally to these attendants.
"Kalessin," he said, "sevanissai'n ar Roke!"
His head falls to the smooth, bronze jut of his shoulder, and feels the cool vivacity of that living flesh seeping unwilling into the weakness of his own, breathing a little, and Lebannen's own breath stirs his hair.