“Now, then, you look beautiful!” said Tenar in her seamstress’s pride, when Therru first tried it on.
Therru turned her face away.
“You are beautiful,” Tenar said in a different tone. “Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren’t the scars. You aren’t ugly. You aren’t evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress.”
The child listened, the soft, unhurt side of her face as expressionless as the rigid, scar-masked side.
She looked down at Tenar’s hands, and presently touched them with her small fingers. “It’s a beautiful dress,” she said in her faint, hoarse voice.
When Tenar was alone, folding up the scraps of red material, tears came stinging into her eyes. She felt rebuked. She had done right to make the dress, and she had spoken the truth to the child. But it was not enough, the right and the truth. There was a gap, a void, a gulf, on beyond the right and the truth. Love, her love for Therru and Therru’s for her, made a bridge across that gap, a bridge of spiderweb, but love did not fill or close it. Nothing did that. And the child knew it better than she.”
- Tehanu, Ursula K. LeGuin
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Man, the way this quote has lived rent free in my brain ever since I first read it. I just knew I had to try and illustrate it. It took me far too long to get it done but, I'm glad to see it done at last.
Process [X]
