

It was hard to be certain in that flickering shift of shadow and warm light. His face might have been cast in golden bronze, it was so finely molded and so still.īehind him, fifteen feet away perhaps, under the trees at the other end of the small central lawn, a man stood, or seemed to stand.

He was nearly a man, but still a boy slender, dressed richly. A boy sat there on the low hump of marble and moss, his gaze following the fall of the fountain’s central jet. Veins of bright green moss filled the cracks, spreading up from the grassy plot around the basin. The tree nearest the fountain, a well-grown rowan, had humped and cracked the marble pavement with its roots. For Roke is the Isle of the Wise, where the Art Magic is taught and the Great House is the school and central place of wizardry and the central place of the House is that small court far within the walls, where the fountain plays and the trees stand in rain or sun or starlight. Behind those were rooms and courts, passages, corridors, towers, and at last the heavy outmost walls of the Great House of Roke, which would stand any assault of war or earthquake or the sea itself, being built not only of stone, but of incontestable magic. About that roofless court stood four high walls of stone.

IN THE COURT OF THE fountain the sun of March shone through young leaves of ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow and clear light. Vursell Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are the National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Harold D. Her first major work of science fiction, "The Left Hand of Darkness", is considered epochmaking in the field because of its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her best-known fantasy works, the Earthsea books, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Le Guin is the author of more than one hundred short stories, two collections of essays, four volumes of poetry, and nineteen novels. In addition to his acting work, Scott choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films such as Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The Audie- and Earphone Award-winning actor has read several Macmillan Audio audioBooks, including Dune: The Butlerian Jihad and Dune: The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. He's read over 150 audiobooks in four years-for that, AudioFile magazine named Scott "a rising and shining star" and awarded him as one of the magazine's Golden Voices. His stage appearances throughout the U.S. Scott Brick has performed on film, television and radio.
