Novel: Tehanu

Setting and Premise
Earthsea has a king again and great wrongs have been mended, but the fourth Earthsea novel turns from courts and schools to the everyday life of Gont. Tenar, once Arha, the Eaten One of Atuan, later the student of the mage Ogion, now lives as a farmer’s widow. In a land where men own the public magic and women are kept to hedge-witchery and housework, she takes in a child left for dead: a little girl burned and brutalized by adults who should have protected her. Tenar calls her Therru and chooses to keep her, despite gossip, fear, and the practical burden of healing deep wounds of body and spirit.

Tenar and Therru
The story centers on Tenar’s stubborn compassion and the slow emergence of trust in a child who has learned to expect cruelty. Therru scarcely speaks, hides her scarred face, and flinches from touch, but she also displays a strange poise, a listening stillness that unsettles people. Tenar finds help from Moss, a local witch who respects the old balance of names and powers, and from her own daughter Apple, but the prevailing current is suspicion, of women who make choices outside the village’s bounds, of a child marked by fire, of dignity claimed without a man behind it.

Ogion’s Death and Ged’s Return
News comes that Ogion is dying, and Tenar brings Therru to his lonely house in the hills. She tends the old mage through the last snows until he passes, leaving no grand bequests, only the example of patience and restraint. Soon after, a dragon deposits a man on Gont’s coast. It is Ged, once Archmage, emptied of wizardry by the deed that closed the breach between life and death. Tenar shelters him at Ogion’s house. Without power or status, Ged must relearn a life measured by meals, sleep, and work. Between him and Tenar grows a quiet intimacy grounded in shared history and in caring for Therru. Power, once his instrument, becomes a question they live with rather than an answer he commands.

Threats and Humiliation
The wider world presses in. A wizard named Aspen, vain and predatory, takes an interest in Tenar and in Ged’s fall. His craft is the brittle magic of mastery; he tries to bind, coerce, and shame. Meanwhile, the men who harmed Therru prowl the countryside, intent on reclaiming their victim as property and silencing those who protected her. The danger is not only sorcerous. It is the ordinary violence of men who assume they can take what they want, buttressed by the prestige of those who speak the grand words.

Flight, Fire, and Naming
The story’s crisis brings Tenar and Therru face to face with their pursuers. Tenar is seized and threatened; Therru, cornered, stands with a gaze older than her years. In that moment the language of dragons answers her. Kalessin, eldest of the dragons, comes, and in his presence the pretenses of wizards and thugs alike fall away. He names the child in the Old Speech, Tehanu, a name that reveals rather than bestows, declaring her kinship to fire and flight as well as to flesh. The men who preyed upon her are scattered and destroyed, and the sorcery that sought to dominate is shown hollow beside the older covenant between dragons and true names.

Aftermath and Meaning
With the threats passed, Tenar, Ged, and Tehanu choose a modest future together on Gont. Ged accepts a life without spells; Tenar claims the authority of her own experience; Tehanu, still a child, carries a secret grandeur that needs no display. The novel gathers its power from small acts, cooking, mending, watching over sleep, set against a world that equates greatness with force. It reframes Earthsea’s magic through the lives of women and the wounded, insisting that care, naming, and consent are truer measures of strength than rule or renown.