Chapter 12 1. Iria

Her father's ancestors had a vast and fertile territory on the vast and fertile Isle of Way.During the reign of the king, the family had no titles, nor did they enjoy the privileges bestowed by the court; in the dark period after Maharian's death, they controlled their land and people with firm hands, returned the surplus to the territory, and maintained a certain degree of justice, against toubob infestation.Under the influence of the wise men of Roke, order and peace returned to the Kingdom of the Isles, and the house and its farms and villages prospered for a time.The grasslands, the highland pastures, and the dense oak forests here are so prosperous and beautiful that the local proverbs, people will say "as fat as an Iriad cow" or "as lucky as an Iriad man".The local lords and tenant farmers put the name of the land before their own names and called themselves Iriah.However, although farmers and shepherds continue to prosper like oak trees season by season, year by year, and generation to generation, the family that owns this land gradually changes and withers with time and luck.

Two brothers are fighting for inheritance, and one heir is greedy and the other stupid, thus ruining the estate.The daughter of one married a merchant and tried to run a territory from the city.Another man's grandchildren quarreled again, dividing the already fractured territory.When the girl named Dragonfly was born, the territory of Iria, though still one of the most beautiful forests, fields, and grasslands in Earthsea, had become a battleground for family feuds and lawsuits.The farm is overgrown with weeds, the farmhouse has no tiles, and the milk shed is abandoned. The shepherd follows the sheep and turns to the other side of the mountain to seek more luscious pasture.The old house that was once located in the center of the territory gradually collapsed among the oak forests on the top of the hill.

The owner of the old house was one of four who claimed to be Lord of Iria, and the other three called him Lord of Old Iria.He poured his youth and what was left of his legacy into the courtroom and the lord's reception hall on the Isle of Way in Shrith, trying to prove that he had the right to inherit the entire territory, just as he had for a hundred years.He went home with failure and bitterness, spent his life in the stale red wine of the last vineyard, and patrolled the borders of the territory with a pack of battered, scrawny dogs to keep nightclubs from trespassing. He was married in Shrith, to a woman unknown in Iria, who was said to come from some island somewhere in the West.She never set foot on Iria, for she died in childbirth in the city.

He returned home with his three-year-old daughter, handed her over to the housekeeper, and then forgot about her.When he was drunk, he would occasionally think of her.If he could find her, he made her stand beside a chair, or sit on his lap, and hear all the wrongs he and Iriah's family had suffered.He cursed, wept, drank, and made her drink, and made her swear to honor the family and serve Iria.She swallowed a mouthful of wine, but hated the curses, the vows, the tears, and the tears and snot of love that followed.She ran away at every opportunity, toward dogs, horses, and cattle.She swore to them allegiance to her mother, to a woman whom no one knew, honored, or served but herself.

When she was thirteen, the old vine gardener and housekeeper, the only ones left in the house, told the master that her daughter's name day was coming.They asked whether they should invite the warlocks from Xichi Village, or the local village witches.The Lord of Iria suddenly screamed and scolded: "Village witch? The old witch wants to give Iria's daughter a real name? The upstart who stole my grandfather's Xichi Village? That despicable traitor? How dare you set foot on it? In my territory, I will let the dog tear out his heart! Tell him that if you want!" and so on.The old Aju returned to the kitchen, the old Atu returned to the vineyard, and the thirteen-year-old Dragonfly ran out of the house and down the mountain to the village, imitating her father and cursing the group who were so excited by his screams and followed her howling and barking dog.

"Stand back! You black-hearted bitch!" she yelled. "Go home, you begging traitor!" The dog was quiet, tail down, and obediently returned to the house. The dragonfly found the witch, who was removing maggots from an infected gash on the sheep's rump.The witch's common name was Rose, like that of many women on Way and the kingdoms of the Hardic Archipelago.A man who has a secret real name with power in it, like a diamond in its radiance, usually wishes his common name to be as ordinary as possible, like everyone else. Rose muttered a series of standard mantras, but it was her hands and the sharp dagger that contributed the most.The ewe patiently endured the cutting edge of the knife, her long and narrow amber eyes stared silently, and only occasionally paused on her small left front foot and sighed.

The dragonfly approached and peeped at the rose's work.Rose stabbed a maggot, dropped it on the ground, spit, and continued digging.The girl leaned sideways to the ewe, and the ewes also leaned sideways to comfort each other.Rose took out, dropped, and spat at the last maggot, saying, "Give me that bucket." She washed the wound with salt water.The ewe sighed deeply, walked out of the yard suddenly, and walked home.It's medically fed up. "Fawn!" cried the rose.A dirty little child emerged from the bushes where he had been sleeping, and now he followed the ewe's footsteps, euphemistically caring for her, but it was older, stronger, fuller, and probably as well. wiser.

"They said you should give me my real name," Dragonfly said. "Father lost his temper, so forget it." The witch said nothing, knowing that the girl was right.Once the Lord of Iria speaks for or against a matter, he never changes his mind, and prides himself on his intransigence, for in his eyes only weak people backtrack. Rose washed her hands and blade with salt, and Dragonfly asked, "Why can't I give myself my real name?" "It can't be done." "Why not? Why does it have to be a witch or a warlock? What the hell are you doing?" "Well..." said Rose, spilling salt water on the dry soil in her small front yard.Her house, like most witches' dwellings, was some distance from the village. "Well..." she said, getting up and looking around briefly, as if looking for an answer, or a ewe, or a towel. "You have to know something about power, don't you?" she finally said, looking at the dragonfly with one eye and tilting the other slightly to one side.Sometimes the dragonfly thought that Rose was squinting with the left eye, and sometimes it seemed that it was the right eye, but one eye was always looking straight ahead, and the other was looking at something out of sight, around a corner or somewhere else.

"What kind of power?" "That kind." Rose replied.Like a ewe leaving, she suddenly walked into the house.Dragonfly followed her, but only to the door.No one goes into a witch's house without being invited. "You said I have." The girl said to the smelly and dark one-room hut. "I said you have power, great power." The witch said from the darkness: "You know that too. What you will do, I don't know, and you don't know. You have to find it. But no power can do it for you." Name it yourself." "Why? What is more yourself than your real name?"

There was a long silence. The witch came out of the house with a soapstone spindle and a ball of greasy wool, sat down on the bench by the door, spun the spindle, and spun a yard of gray-brown wool before answering: "My real name is me, yes. But what is a name? It's how people call me. If there's no one but me, then what's the use of my name?" "But..." Dragonfly stopped talking immediately, realizing Rose's argument.She then asked, "So, the real name has to be given?" Rose nodded. "Give me my real name, Rose," said the girl. "Your father said no."

"I said yes." "He is the master here." "He can make me poor and dumb and useless, but he can't make me without a real name!" The witch sighed like a ewe, restless and reluctant. "Tonight," said the Dragonfly, "by our brook, below Mount Iria. What he does not know will not harm him." Her voice was half coaxing, half tyrannical. "You should have a real name-day, a big feast, and dance to celebrate, like other young people." Said the witch. "The real name should be given at the crack of dawn. And there should be music, and a feast, and so on, a feast. Not sneaking around in the middle of the night." Well, no one knows..." "I will know. Rose, how do you know what to say? Did the water tell you?" The witch shook her steel-gray head. "I can't tell you." Her "can't" wasn't "won't".Dragonfly waits. "I said, that's power, and here it is." Rose stopped spinning, raised one eye to a cloud in the west, and looked at the northern sky with the other. "You are in the water, together, you and the child. You take the child's name. People may continue to use that name as a common name, but it is not her name, it never was. So she is not a child now, and has no name , and then you wait. Standing in the water. You open your heart like a door, let the wind blow in. It just comes. Your tongue speaks the name, your breath creates the name, and you will The name, the breath is given to the child, you can't think about it, you can only let it come. The name must be conveyed to her who belongs to the name through you and water. This is power, the way power works, it's all like this. This is not What you do. You know how to let it do it. That's the trick." "Mages can do more," said the girl after a moment. "No one can do more," said Rose. The dragonfly turned its neck, turned its head back until the cervical spine clicked, and then stretched its long arms and legs anxiously. "Will you?" she asked. After a while, Rose nodded. The two met in the alley at the foot of Mount Iria in the dark night. It was a long time before sunset and still far from dawn.The rose made a little phosphorous fire, and gave off a faint light, so that the two of them would walk on the muddy road beside the spring and not fall into the limestone pit among the reeds.Beneath a few stars and the black arc of the hills, in the cold dark night, the two undressed and waded into the shallow water, their feet sunk deep in the velvety mud.The witch touched the girl's hand and said, "Son, I will take your name. You are not a child. You have no name." Everything was silent. The witch whispered, "Woman, you are named. You are Irian." 『Note: Irian means "Irian". 』 The two stood still for a moment, the night wind blowing over their bare shoulders, then they shivered out of the water, dried their bodies as best they could, struggled with bare feet to get out of the sharp reeds and tangled roots, and found their way to the alley.Once in the alley, Dragonfly asked in a hoarse, angry whisper, "How can you name me that?" The witch said nothing. "No, that's not my real name! I thought my real name would make me me, but it's worse! You're wrong, you're just a witch. You're wrong. It's his name, and he'll take it if he wants it. He is so proud, so proud of his stupid territory, his stupid grandpa. I don't want it, I don't accept it. It's not me. I still don't know who I am. I'm not Irian!" After saying his real name, She was suddenly quiet. The witch remained silent.The two walked side by side in the dark.Finally, Rose said in a soothing, frightened voice, "Here it is..." "If you tell anyone, I will kill you," Dragonfly said. Upon hearing this, the witch stopped in her tracks.She roared like a cat in her throat: "Tell someone else?" The dragonfly also stopped.After a while, she said, "I'm sorry. But I feel as if... I feel as if you betrayed me." "I say your real name. It's different from what I thought. I feel uneasy, as if the matter is not finished. But it is your real name, and if it betrays you, it is the fact of this real name." Rose hesitated a little, then Said in a calmer but colder tone: "Irian, if you want power to betray me, I will give it to you. My real name is Altodis." The wind picked up again.Both were shaking, their teeth chattering.They stood facing each other in the dark alley, barely seeing each other.The dragonfly reached out an exploring hand and touched the witch's.The two embraced each other with their arms around each other.Then hastening on, the Witch went to her hut near the village, and the Iriah Heiress went up the hill to her ruined house.The dogs that let her go without trouble greeted her with a bark that woke everyone in a half-mile radius except the master, dead drunk, by the cold fire.