The Wounded Land

healing.”

At this, she paused, trying to absorb what she had heard. Her head turned from side to side, searching the night for guidance. When she spoke again, her voice came faintly over the wet sounds of the River. 'You have redeemed my life. I will not doubt you. I am homeless and without purpose, for I cannot return to Crystal Stonedown, and the world is perilous, and I do not comprehend my fate. I must not doubt you.

“Yet I would ask you of your goal. All is dark to me. You have incurred the wrath of the Clave for me. You journey great distances under the Sunbane. Will you give me reason?”

Sunder said deliberately, “Linden Avery?” passing the question to her. She understood; he was discomfited by the answer, and Hollian was not likely to take it calmly. Linden wanted to reject the difficulty, force Sunder and Hollian to fend for themselves. But, because her own weakness was intolerable to her, she responded squarely, “We're going to Revelstone.”

Hollian reacted in horror. “Revelstone? You betray me!” At once, she thrust away from the raft, flailing for an escape.

Sunder lunged after her. He tried to shout something, but his damaged chest changed it to a gasp of pain.

Linden ignored him. His lunge had rolled the raft, dropping Covenant into the water.

She grappled for Covenant, brought him back to the surface. His respiration was so shallow that he did not even cough at the water which streamed from his mouth. In spite of his weight, he conveyed a conviction of utter frailty.

Sunder fought to prevent Hollian's flight; but he was hampered by his hurt ribs. “Are you mad?” he panted at her. “If we sought your harm, Sivit's intent would have sufficed!”

Struggling to support Covenant, Linden snapped, “Let her go!”

“Let-?” the Graveller protested.

“Yes!” Ferocity burned through her. “I need help. By God, if she wants to leave, that's her right!”

“Heaven and Earth!” retorted Sunder. “Then why have we imperilled our lives for her?”

“Because she was going to be killed! I don't care if we need her or not. We don't have the right to hold her against her will. I need help.”

Sunder spat a curse. Abruptly, he abandoned Hollian, came limping through the water to take some of Covenant's weight. But he was livid with pain and indignation. Over his shoulder, he rasped at Hollian, “Your suspicion is unjust!”

“Perhaps.” The eh-Brand trod water twenty feet away; her head was a piece of darkness among the shadows of the River. “Assuredly, I have been unjust to Linden Avery.” After a moment, she demanded, “What purpose drives you to Revelstone?”

“That's where the answers are.” As quickly as it had come, Linden's anger vanished, and a bone-deep dread took its place. She had been through too much. Without Sunder's aid, she could not have borne Covenant back to the raft. “Covenant thinks he can fight the Sunbane. But he has to understand it first. That's why he wants to talk to the Clave.”

“Fight?” asked Hollian in disbelief. “Do you speak of altering the Sunbane?”

“Why not?” Linden clung to the raft. Dismay clogged her limbs. “Isn't that what you do?”

“I?”

“Aren't you a Sun-Sage?”

“No!” Hollian declared sharply. “That is a lie, uttered by Sivit na-Mhoram-wist to strengthen his claim upon me. I am an eh-Brand. I see the sun. I do not shape it.”

To Linden, Sunder growled, “Then we have no need of her.”

Dimly, Linden wondered why he felt threatened by Hollian. But she lacked the courage to ask him. “We need all the help we can get,” she murmured. “I want her with us. If she's willing.”

“Why?”

At the same time, Hollian asked, “Of what use am I to you?”

Without warning, Linden's throat filled with weeping. She felt like a lorn child, confronted by extremities she could not meet. She had to muster all her severity in order to articulate, “He's dying. I can feel it.” In a shudder of memory, she saw Marid's fangs. “It's worse than it was before. I need help.” The help she needed was vivid and appalling to her; but she could not stop. “One of you isn't enough. You'll just bleed to death. Or I will.” Impelled by her fear of losing Covenant, she wrenched her voice at Hollian. “I need power. To heal him.”

She had not seen the eh-Brand approach; but now Hollian was swimming at her side. Softly, the young woman said, “Perhaps such shedding is unnecessary. It may be that I can succour him. An eh-Brand has some knowledge of healing. But I do not wish to fall prey to the Clave a second time.”

Linden gritted her teeth until her jaw ached, containing her desperation. “You've seen what he can do. Do you think he's going to walk into Revelstone and just let them sacrifice him?”

Hollian thought for a moment, touched Covenant's swelling gently. Then she said, “I will attempt it. But I must await the sun's rising. And I must know how this harm came upon him.”

Linden's self-command did not reach so far. Sunrise would be too late. Covenant could not last until dawn. The Chosen! she rasped at herself. Dear God. She left the eh-Brand's questions for Sunder to answer. As he began a taut account of what had happened to Covenant, Linden's attention slipped away to the Unbeliever's wracked and failing body.

She could feel the poison seeping past the useless constriction of his shirt sleeve. Death gnawed like leprosy at the sinews of his life. He absolutely could not last until dawn.

Her mother had begged to die; but he wanted to live. He had exchanged himself for Joan, had smiled as if the prospect were a benison; yet his every act showed that he wanted to live. Perhaps he was mad; perhaps his talk about a Despiser was paranoia rather than truth. But the conclusions he drew from it were ones she could not refute. She had learned in Crystal Stonedown that she shared them.

Now he was dying.

She had to help him. She was a doctor. Surely she could do something about his illness. Impossible that her strange acuity could not cut both ways. With an inward whimper, she abandoned resistance, bared her heart.

Slowly, she reached her awareness into him, inhabited his flesh with her private self. She felt his eviscerated respiration as her own, suffered the heat of his fever, clung to him more intimately than she had ever held to any man.

Then she was foundering in venom. She was powerless to repel it. Nausea filled her like the sick breath of the old man who had told her to Be true. No part of her knew how to give life in this way. But what she could do, she did. She fought for him with the same grim and secretly hopeless determination which had compelled her to study medicine as if it were an act of rage against the ineffectuality of her parents-a man and woman who had understood nothing about life except death, and had coveted the thing they understood with the lust of lovers. They had taught her the importance of efficacy. She had pursued it without rest for fifteen years.

That pursuit had taken her to Haven Farm. And there her failure in the face of Joan's affliction had cast her whole life into doubt. Now that doubt wore the taste and corruption of Covenant's venom. She could not quench the poison. But she tried by force of will to shore up the last preterite barriers of his life. This sickness was a moral evil; it offended her just as Marid had offended her, as Nassic's murder and the hot knife had offended her; and she denied it with every beat of her heart. She squeezed l air into his lungs, pressured his pulse to continue, opposed the gnawing and spread of the ill.

Alone, she kept him alive through the remainder of the night.

The bones of her forehead ached with shared fever when Sunder brought her back to herself. Dawn was in the air. He and Hollian had drawn the raft toward the riverbank. Linden looked about her tabidly. Her soul was full of ashes. A part of her panted over and over, No. Never again. The River ran through a lowland which should have been composed of broad leas; but instead, the area was a grey waste where mountains of preternatural grass had been beaten down by three days of torrential rain, then rotted by the sun of pestilence. As the approach of day stirred the air, currents of putrefaction shifted back and forth across the Mithil.

But she saw why Sunder and Hollian had chosen this place. Near the bank, a sandbar angled partway across the watercourse, forming a swath where Covenant could lie, away from the fetid grass.

The Stonedownors secured the raft, lilted Covenant to the sand, then raised him into Linden's arms. Hugging him erect, though she herself swayed with exhaustion, she watched as Sunder and Hollian hastened to the