The Other Wind

Alder is a village sorcerer whose gift is mending broken things, and since his wife Lily died he has dreamed every night of the low wall of stones at the border of the dry land, where she stands and calls him and reaches out to touch him. The dead should not be able to do that. Sent for help, he comes to Gont and to Ged, who is no longer a mage and can offer him only a cat, a night's sleep and a direction, and then on to Havnor and the young king Lebannen, whose court is presently occupied with two other difficulties: dragons attacking the western isles, and a Kargish princess sent as a bride he has no wish to marry. Tenar and Tehanu are there, and a wizard of Roke, and a woman of the old Kargish faith, and between them they must confront the thing done at the beginning of the world, when men bargained away their share of eternity for the power of names. Le Guin's last Earthsea novel unpicks the theology of the earlier books deliberately and with great calm, and ends the sequence not with a battle but with a repair.