Free the wind's twelve quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

shutting it behind him. No servant came; the house was dark, silent. They had all been taken, all the Learners, they would all be questioned and tortured and killed.  
    “Who’s that?”  
    Yin stood on the stair-landing, lamplight bright on his white hair. He came to Ganil and helped him up the stairs. Ganil spoke very fast: “I was followed here, a girl from the shop, Lee’s daughter, if she tells him he’ll recognize your name, he’ll send the guards here—” “I sent the others away three days ago.” At the sound of Yin’s voice Ganil stopped, stared at the old man’s creased, quiet face, and then said childishly, “Look,” holding out his right hand, “look, like yours.” “Yes. Come sit down, Ganil.”  
    “They condemned him. Not me, they let me go. He said he couldn’t teach me, I couldn’t learn. To save me—”  
    “And your mathematics. Come here now, sit down.” Ganil got control of himself, and obeyed. Yin made him lie down, then did what he could about cleaning and bandaging his hand. Then, sitting down between Ganil and the glowing fire, he gave a wheezy sigh. “Well,” he said, “now you’re a heresy suspect. I’ve been one for twenty years. You get used to it.... Don’t worry about our friends. But if the girl tells Lee and your name gets linked with mine... We’d better leave Edun. Separately. But tonight.”  
    Ganil said nothing. To leave his shop without the Overmaster’s permission meant excommunication, the loss of his Mastership. He would be barred from his own trade. What could he do, with his crippled hand, where could he go? He had never been out of Edun in his life.  
    The silence of the house spread out above and below them. Ganil strained to hear sounds down in the street, the tramping of a troop of guards come to re-arrest him. He had to get out, to get away, tonight— “I can’t,” he said abruptly. “I have to be—to be at the College tomorrow, at noon.”  
    Yin knew what he meant. Again the silence closed round them. The old man’s voice was very dry and weary when he finally spoke. “That’s the condition of your release, eh? All right; go do it; you don’t want them hunting you through the Forty Towns as a condemned heretic. A suspect isn’t hunted, merely outcast. It’s preferable. Get some sleep now, Ganil. Before I go I’ll tell you where to meet me. Leave as soon as you can; and travel light....”  
    When Ganil left the house late in the morning, however, he carried something with him, a roll of papers hidden under his cloak, each sheet covered edge to edge with Mede Fairman’s clear writing: “Trajectories,” “Speed of Falling Bodies,” “The Nature of Motion...” Yin had left before daybreak, jogging calmly out of town on a grey donkey. “I’ll see you in Keling” had been his only parting with Ganil. Ganil had seen none of the other Learners. Only serfs, servants, beggars, truant schoolboys, and women with their nursemaids and whining children stood with him now in the dull light of noon on the great forecourt of the College. Only riffraff and the idle gathered to see a heretic die. A priest had ordered Ganil to stand at the very front of the crowd. Many people glanced curiously at him, standing there alone in his Master’s cloak.  
    On the other side of the square, in the front of the crowd, he saw a girl in a violet gown. He was not sure it was Lani. Why would she be here to see Mede die? She did not know what it was she hated; or what it was she loved. Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing, Ganil thought. She loved him, she stood separated from him only by the width of that square. She would never be willing to see that she was separated from him by her own act, by ignorance, by exile, by death.  
    They brought Mede out just before noon. Ganil glimpsed his face; it was very white, all his deformity exposed, the atavistic pallor of skin, hair, eyes. There was no drawing-out of the scene; a