Le Guin carries on her quietly beautiful prose to bring to life, instead of Earthsea's far-roaming vistas, a single, dark holy place. With Tenar, we dance, stalk, and flee through that utter darkness at various points of the story as it fluctuates between cloaking her from danger and cloaking danger from her. Le Guin makes it, and the treasures and traps beneath it, as sacred to us as to its priestesses. Details trickle in, from the number of blind turns to get to the treasure room, to the dance of power between the tomb's original religion and that of the area's conquerors, to the kinds of fruit Tenar's friend smuggles her from the gardens, to build up a vivid sense of place.

Second only to the atmosphere is Tenar's inner journey. Starting the story from the perspective of her parents' smothered loss as she is taken from them to become the priestess, we are primed to pity her. But Tenar is not only a victim. I admire Le Guin's dedication to demonstrating her indoctrination to the point of having her make some reprehensible choices and not setting up some external circumstances to soften the consequences, while still using those consequences to drive the story forward naturally - for example, the prisoners she

condemns to starve to death are not miraculously spared, and that guilty mark on her soul propels her to be kinder to Ged

. An ounce of genre-savviness makes it obvious that Tenar will reexamine her religious and cultural prejudices over the course of the novel, yet it is no less satisfying or healing to follow her through it, and still provides a gentle jumping-off point for self-reflection.

Tenar and a recurring character from Earthsea (so much wiser and yet still in need of help and humbling) are also delightful together, almost as a softer version of Joel and Ellie of The Last of Us fame. I enjoyed the oddly-long final section for their small, uneventful journeying together even though the climax of the action was past, and, for once in my life, wished the book was longer.