Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin

A sea-stack, it jutted up black and black-shadowed from the sleek planes and shining levels of the sands, grim rock, obdurate, the top of it arched and towered, a carving more fantastic than even wind or sea could make. From the city wall at the brink of the cliff, over dykes and dunes and straight out over the beach and the slick-shining tidal sands for half a mile, striding on immense arches of stone, a causeway went, linking the city to a strange black island among the sands. Outside the walls and beneath the cliffs where they ran lower south of the town were miles of pastureland and fields, all dyked and terraced, neat as patterned carpets. High, bright-painted stone houses jumbled window below window and roof below roof down the slanting cliff-top to the brink. Sitting in the shelter of a huge stump, she could look out on the remote and radiant west, the endless gray reaches of the tidal plain, and, a little below her and to the right, walled and red-roofed on its sea-cliffs, the city of the farborns.

The dead forest had been cleared from the west face of the ridge. The wind blew him on his way to Tevar with his news-storm, disaster, winter, war.… Incurious, Rolery turned and followed her own evasive path, which zigzagged upward among the great, dead, groaning trunks until at last on the ridge-top she saw sky break clear before her, and beneath the sky the sea.

From the north he came at a steady, pounding, lung-bursting pace, and never glanced at Rolery among the trees but pounded past and was gone. Where the path forked at the foot of the Border Ridge she went on straight, but before she had gone ten steps she turned back quickly towards a pulsing rustle that approached from behind.Ī runner came down the northward track, bare feet beating in the surf of leaves, the long string that tied his hair whipping behind him. She followed a faint path that led west, scored and rescored in grooves by the passing southward of the footroots, choked in places by fallen trunks or huge drifts of leaves. She went alone and no one called after her.

Slight and shadowy as a wild animal in her light furs, the girl Rolery slipped through the woods, through the storming of dead leaves, away from the walls that stone by stone were rising on the hillside of Tevar and from the busy fields of the last harvest. In the last days of the last moonphase of Autumn a wind blew from the northern ranges through the dying forests of Askatevar, a cold wind that smelled of smoke and snow.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin