Fatal Revenant

Quenching the Staff so that it would not imperil her companions, she approached them with her refusal plainly written on her face.

“Linden, God damn it!” Covenant raged down at her. Wailing like a child, Jeremiah protested. “Mom!”

She ignored them until she was near enough to meet Jeremiah’s stricken stare, Covenant’s hot ire. Then she stopped.

“It’s too dangerous,” she repeated as if she were as resolute as Stave, as certain as Mahrtiir. “Fire is the only barrier that I know how to make. I won’t risk the trees.

“If you can’t outrun the Viles, you’ll have to come up with another plan,” another trick.

God, she missed Thomas Covenant: the man he had once been. Her disappointment in her companions was too profound for indignation.

They froze, poised on the brink of eruptions. Briefly their disparate faces mirrored each other. In them, Linden saw, not alarm or dismay, but naked anger and frustration. Jeremiah’s eyes were as dark as blood. Ruddy heat shone from Covenant’s gaze. She had time to think, They don’t care about the Deep. Or Caerroil Wildwood. Or me. Maybe they don’t even care about the Arch. They just want to do what they’ve been planning all along.

Then together Covenant and Jeremiah wheeled and ran, rushing to collect the last twigs and branches.

A moment later, they were done: their pile of deadwood was complete. In the distance, music and vitriol vied for harm. Quickly Covenant and Jeremiah moved to stand facing each other, leaving space between them for Linden and the Staff.

Grieving, she entered the ready arch of their arms.

According to Jeremiah, their next dislocation took them four leagues farther along the Last Hills. Another burst of power crossed five. Then three. Then five again. Indirectly they violated time rather than space: they excised the hours and effort necessary to travel such distances.

Their mound of broken wood accompanied them through every imponderable leap. Somehow they drew it with them without enclosing it in their arc of power.

Eventually they stopped. While Linden stumbled to her knees, utterly disoriented by the shifting ground and the veering horizons, the unsteady stagger of the world, Covenant and Jeremiah retreated from her. “This should be far enough.” Covenant seemed to struggle for breath. “We can rest here. At least for a few minutes.”

The anger in his voice was as raw as his respiration.

Linden’s head reeled: her entire sensorium foundered. She could not discern any sign of the distant battle.

“Covenant,” Jeremiah gasped. He sounded more tired than irate. “This isn’t a surprise.” He may have been warning his only friend. “She is who she is. She’s never going to trust us. Not until we prove ourselves.”

Breathing deeply, Linden lifted her head; focused her eyes on the Staff of Law and refused to blink until it no longer yawed from side to side. Through her teeth, she insisted. “It was too dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?” asked Covenant. His tone had become level despite his hard breathing. Apparently he had decided to curb his anger. “All you had to do was give me my ring.”

When she was sure of the ground under her, she climbed to her feet. “Not that,” she said, trembling. “Fire. The only barrier that I know how to make. I might have broken the Arch.”

Jeremiah did not look at her. His face was slick with sweat, flushed with intense exertion. His tic signalled feverishly. But Covenant faced her. Apart from his ragged respiration, he now seemed completely blank, sealed off; as severe as one of the Masters. The sporadic embers in his eyes were gone, extinguished or shrouded. In spite of her resolve to avoid challenging him, she had made him wary.

“I don’t see how.”

She forced herself to hold his gaze. “Flames would have spread to the trees. I couldn’t prevent that unless I stayed behind.” Surely she was still Covenant’s and Jeremiah’s only protection against the Elohim? “But even if they didn’t,” even if she had remained to control her conflagration, “the Forestal would have forgotten about the Viles as soon as I raised fire that close to the Deep. Or he would have joined them. They had a common enemy.” That was Covenant’s doing, and Jeremiah’s. “They might have come after us together.” Cold seeped through her cloak, her robe. It oozed into her clothes. “Then-”

Covenant cut her off. “Oh, that. That was never going to happen.”

In a tone of enforced patience, he said. “I know I haven’t given you all the explanations you want. And you obviously don’t like it. But we didn’t have time. I couldn’t afford to spend a few hours teaching you other ways to use the Staff. And I didn’t know I needed to tell you why the Arch wasn’t in danger.

“The Viles aren’t stupid. They’re capable of alliances. But Wildwood isn’t. I don’t mean he’s stupid. He just doesn’t think that way.

“He’s a Forestal. He doesn’t think like people-or even Viles. He thinks like trees. And for them, life is pretty simple. Soil and roots. Wind and sun and leaves. Birds and seeds. Sap. Growth. Decay.” Just for an instant, Covenant’s deliberate restraint cracked. “Vengeance.” Then he flattened the emotion in his voice. “As far as they’re concerned, there’s no distinction between sentience and fire or axes. Anything that’s mobile and has a mind can kill them. The Viles are just like us. We’re already Wildwood’s enemies. By definition.

“Trust me,” he concluded heavily. “There was never any chance he would join the Viles.”

Never any chance that the logic of the Land’s past might be severed

“He’s right, Mom,” Jeremiah offered. His gaze had paled to the hue of sand. “We couldn’t make Wildwood team up with the Viles even if we wanted to. Which of course we don’t. All we want is to get to Melenkurion Skyweir. So Covenant can save the Land-and you can save me.”

Linden could not argue; not with her boy. But she was not appeased. She had been used. -a rock and a hard place. Covenant and Jeremiah had deliberately exposed her to the Viles-and for what? So that she would surrender Covenant’s ring? And when she ignored him in order to argue with the Viles, he and Jeremiah had created a conflict between them and Caerroil Wildwood.

What would he have done if she had complied? Would he have abandoned her to the debate of the Demondim-makers?

His design for the salvation of the Land made no provision for his ex-wife’s wedding band-or for their fatal son.

“What about the battle’?” she asked in anger and misery. “Doesn’t that affect history?”

“Hell, no,” Covenant snorted as if he had come to the end of his forbearance. It confirms what was going to happen anyway. Now the Viles despise Wildwood. They despise Garroting Deep. They’re ready to listen to the Ravers. And nobody else knows they ever fought. We didn’t change anything.”

He made the statement sound like an accusation.

A moment later, he and Jeremiah prepared their next arch so that they could move on. As she stepped between them, Linden felt like weeping. But she refused her tears; her intensifying bereavement. They had become useless to her.

Chapter Eleven: Melenkurion Skyweir

Sickened by disorientation and doubt, Linden Avery arrived with her companions on the broad plateau of Melenkurion Skyweir high above Garroting Deep early in the afternoon of that same day.

Safe from the Viles, Covenant and Jeremiah moved in longer and longer jumps, carrying their jumble of wood with them. But they continued to respect the threat of Caerroil Wildwood’s power. Instead of crossing over the forest, they followed the line of the Last Hills until they gained the packed snow and ice of the Westron Mountains at the northwestern limit of the Deep. Then they turned toward the south among the crags, devouring distance in instantaneous bursts of twenty or thirty leagues.

The intervening crests and tors blocked Linden’s first sight of Melenkurion Skyweir