mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This sequel to A Wizard of Earthsea follows a girl named Tenar who is believed to be the reincarnation of a high-ranking priestess. She's taken from her family at a young age and raised by a strict religious order, cloistered away from the rest of the world and taught to navigate the dark underground labyrinth where a powerful magic artifact lies hidden. When a strange wizard comes looking for the artifact and gets trapped in the maze, Tenar has to start thinking for herself for the first time in her life.

I always enjoy this book when I re-read it, but I don't have such strong feelings about it as I do about A Wizard of Earthsea. I think as a kid what I found most compelling was the labyrinth and the worldbuilding around it, this idea of a place where light is forbidden and if you miss one memorized turn you might be lost forever. But I also think some of my memories of it are mixed up with another book I read around the same time that also has someone trying to navigate a completely dark labyrinth and almost dying, which I believe was Walter Farley's The Island Stallion but I'm not completely sure. I just know there are some moments and bits of description that I always think are in Tombs but aren't. [eta: It was!]

Similarly, re-reads always remind me that a lot of what I love about Tenar is not in this book, but in Tehanu (book four). She has character growth here, but by the end she's still really young and hasn't had a lot of crucial experiences yet. This was Le Guin's first crack at writing a novel centering a female protagonist, and while it was obviously an important step in her creative development, I think in retrospect it sometimes does have a little bit of the feeling of her gripping the pencil in an awkward fist trying to Write Female Characters rather than just writing.

Reading as an adult, I especially notice that although Tenar grows up in an all-female religious order, the book still seems suspicious of women's power. Tenar is taught to wield authority with cruelty and violence. The order's eventual leader is a cynical hypocrite, and while other priestesses are sincere believers, their beliefs are revealed to be completely wrongheaded and the beings they worship are actually evil. The book doesn't explicitly state "this is what happens when you put women in charge" but it's sort of implied. We're very much not out of the "wicked as women's magic" era of Earthsea.

The scenes between Tenar and Ged are wonderful, though. He's a little older and wiser than we last saw him, but not so far away from adolescence that he can't understand Tenar's position and the burden of responsibility she bears. It's painfully apparent that Tenar has never had a friend because she's never had a peer—she doesn't know how to interact with people outside of horribly warped power dynamics. Reading as an adult, it's more clear to me that the heart of the book is in the forest after their escape, where they exist as individuals in a liminal space without authority figures or power structures. No wonder Tenar's first instinct is that she wants to stay there; it's her first time breathing freely after a life of near-suffocation. She doesn't want to go back to that, even if it's within a different power structure than the one she's known, and she's able to articulate that and take another path. As a child I don't think I was able to grasp the massive significance of that.