Novel: The Other Wind

Overview
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind returns to Earthsea to resolve a long-brewing rift between the living and the dead, and between humans and dragons. It is a quiet, steadfast quest centered not on conquest but on healing, unmaking, and consent. Through councils, journeys in waking and in dream, and an act of undoing rather than doing, the book closes the circle begun in A Wizard of Earthsea, recasting the world’s deepest laws.

Premise
Alder, a village mender and sorcerer, is haunted by dreams of his dead wife, who stands with other shades at a wall in the Dry Land, begging him to “break it.” Their touch pulls him toward death. Seeking help, Alder travels first to Gont, where Ged, Sparrowhawk, now powerless and living quietly with Tenar and the strange, half-dragon woman Tehanu, listens and sends him on to King Lebannen in Havnor. Rumors meanwhile tell of dragons reclaiming the West Reach, and of Kargish envoys pressing a royal marriage to seal peace. The Masters of Roke grow uneasy: summoning and binding no longer behave as they should. Something fundamental has gone wrong in the balance of Earthsea.

Gathering and Revelations
Lebannen convenes a council that draws together old and new strands of power: the king and his wizard counselors; Tenar and Tehanu; Alder; the Masters of Roke, including the Patterner of the Immanent Grove; Irian, a woman who is also a dragon; and Seserakh, a sharp-sighted princess from the Kargad Lands whose lore carries an older, unsettling memory of the dead. Through debate, story, and the Grove’s wordless knowledge, a forgotten history surfaces. Long ago, humans and dragons were one people who chose different fates: dragons kept the freedom of flight and fire and the Old Speech; humans chose names, property, and time. Seeking to escape death, ancient human mages stole a portion of the dragons’ western realm and fixed it with spells into the unchanging Dry Land, bounded by a wall of stones. There the human dead endure, speechless, timeless, star-lit, and imprisoned. The dragons’ wrath and the slow failure of summoning flow from that theft. Alder’s gift as a mender, an unbinder, makes him the hand the dead can seize.

Climax
The company gathers on Roke and at the Immanent Grove to attempt a righting that no single power can command. Alder is set to sleep and walks once more to the Dry Land’s wall, where his wife and the hushed multitudes wait. In the living world, Ged offers plain counsel and restraint; Lebannen grants consent and witness; Tenar and Seserakh hold memories that bridge cultures; the Masters keep the balances; Irian stands as dragon, and Tehanu speaks from both lineages. At the wall Alder does not conjure, he unknots. With the dragons’ fire and the true words that unmake binding, the wall falls. The fixed stars go out; the earth of the Dry Land loosens; the dead pass beyond the reach of summoners, beyond prisons of name and spell. What was stolen returns west to dragon country, and the old bargain is remade in new understanding.

Aftermath and Meaning
Alder is released from his nightmares and goes home to a life that can ripen again. Ged and Tenar remain on Gont in earned obscurity. Tehanu chooses the western wind and leaves with the dragons, a parting that hurts and heals at once. Lebannen accepts marriage with Seserakh as a meeting of equals, binding Archipelago and Kargad without conquest. Roke relinquishes the need for an Archmage; mastery becomes listening, not command. Necromancy withers because there is no longer a place to hold the dead. The Other Wind restores the world by accepting loss and limit, showing that the true act of power is to unbind what never should have been bound, so that life and death, human and dragon, can each keep their own true way.