White Gold Wielder

When he weakly lifted his half band, began tugging the ring from his finger. Linden forgave him. No choice but to surrender it. He had done everything possible, everything conceivable, had surpassed himself again and again in his efforts to save the Land. That he failed now was cause for grief, but not for blame.

Only his eyes showed no collapse. They burned like the final dark, the last deep midnight where no Sunbane shone.

His surrender took no more than three heartbeats. One to raise his hand, take bold of the ring. Another to pull the band from his finger as if in voluntary riddance of marriage, love, humanity. A third to extend the immaculate white gold toward the Despiser.

But extremity and striving made those three moments as long as agony. During them. Linden Avery pitted her ultimate will against her possessor.

She forgave Covenant. He was too poignant and dear to be blamed. He had given everything that her heart could ask of him.

But she did not submit.

Gibbon had said. The principal doom of the Land is upon your shoulders. Because no one else had this chance to come between Covenant and his defeat. You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth. Forged to fail here. Because you can see.

Now she meant to determine what kind of metal had been made of her.

Gibbon-Raver had also told her she was evil. Perhaps that was true. But evil itself was a form of power.

And she had become intimately familiar with her possessor. From the furthest roots of its past. she felt springing its contempt for all things that had flesh and could be mastered-a contempt born of fear. Fear of any form of life able to refuse it. The Forests. Giants. The Haruchai. It was unquenchably hungry for immortal control, for the safety of sovereignty. All refusals terrified it. The logic of its failures led inexorably to death. If it could be refused, then it could also be slain.

She had no way to understand the lost communal mind of the Forests. But Giants and Haruchai were another question. Though moksha Jehannum ripped and shrieked at her, she picked up the strands of what she knew and wove them to her purpose.

The Giants and Haruchai had always been able to refuse. Perhaps because they had not suffered the Land's long history of Ravers, they had not learned to doubt their autonomy. Or perhaps because they used little or no outward expressions of power, they comprehended more fully that true choice was internal. But whatever the explanation, they were proof against possession where the people of the Land were not. They believed in their capacity to make choices which mattered.

That belief was all she needed.

Moksha was frantic now, savage and brutal. It assailed every part of her that was able to feel pain. It desecrated her as if she were Andelain. It made every horrifying memory of her life incandescent before her: Nassic's murder and Gibbon's touch; the lurker of the Sarangrave; Kasreyn's malign cunning; Covenant bleeding irretrievably to death in the woods behind Haven Farm. It poured acid into every wound which futility had ever inflicted upon her.

And it argued with her. She could not choose: she had already made the only choice that signified. When she had accepted the legacy of her father and stuffed it in handfuls of tissue down her mother's throat, she had declared her crucial allegiance, her definitive passion-a passion in no way different than her possessor's. Despite had made her what she was, a lost woman as ravaged as the Land, and the Sunbane dawning in her now would never set.

But the sheer intensity of her hurt made her lucid. She saw the Raver's lie. Only once had she tried to master death by destroying life. After that, all her striving had gone to heal those who suffered. Though she had been haunted and afraid, she had not been cruel. Suicide and murder were not the whole story. When the old man on Haven Farm had collapsed in front of her, the stink issuing from his mouth had sickened her like the foretaste of Despite; but she had willingly breathed and breathed that fetor in her efforts to save him.

She was evil. Her visceral response to the dark might of her tormentors gave her the stature of a Raver. And yet her instinct for healing falsified moksha.

That contradiction no longer paralyzed her. She accepted it. It gave her the power to choose.

Squalling like a butchered thing, the Raver fought her. But she had entered at last into her true estate. Moksha Jehannum was afraid of her. Her will rose up in its shackles. Tested the iron of her possessor's malice. Took hold of the chains.

And broke free.

Lord Foul had not yet grasped the ring. There was still an instant of space between his hand and Covenant's. Rocklight yowled desire and triumph from the walls.

Linden did not move. She had no time to think of that Motionless as if she were still frozen, she hurled herself forward. With her Land-born health-sense, she sprang into Covenant, scrambled toward the fiery potential of his wedding band.

Empowered by wild magic, she drew back his hand.

At that, rage swelled Lord Foul: he sent out a flood of fury which should have washed her away. But she ignored him. She was sure that he would not touch her now-not now, while she held possession of Covenant and the ring. She was suddenly strong enough to turn her back upon the Despiser himself. The necessity of freedom protected her. The choice of surrender or defiance was hers to make.

In the silent privacy of his mind, she faced the man she loved and took all his burdens upon herself.

He could not resist her. Once before, he had beaten back her efforts to control him. But now he had no defence. With his own strength, she mastered him as completely as ever the Elohim or Kasreyn had mastered him.

No evil! she breathed at him. Not this time. Her previous attempt to possess him had been wrong, inexcusable. She had read in him his intent to risk the Banefire, and she had reacted as if he meant to commit suicide. Instinctively, she had tried to stop him. But then his life and the risk had been his alone. She had had no right to interfere.

Now, however, he surrendered the Earth as well as himself. He was not simply risking his own life: he was submitting all life to certain destruction. Therefore she had the responsibility to intervene. The responsibility and the right.

The right! she cried. But he made no answer. Her will occupied him completely.

She seemed to meet him where they had met once before, when she had surrendered herself to save him from the silence of the Elohim- in a field of flowers, under an inviolate sky, a clean sun. But now she recognized that field as one of the rich leas of Andelain, bordered by hills and woods. And he was no longer young. He stood before her exactly as he stood before the Despiser-altogether untouchable, his face misshaped by bruises he did not deserve, his body nearly prostrate with exhaustion, the old knife-cut in the centre of his shirt gaping. His eyes were fixed on her, and they flamed hot midnight, the final extremity of the heavens.

No smile in the world could have softened his gaze.

He stood there as if he were waiting for her to search him, catechize him, learn the truth. But she failed to close the gulf between them. She ran and ran toward him, aching to fling her arms around him at last; but the field lay as still as the sunlight, and his eyes shone darkness at her, and all her strength brought her no nearer. She knew that if she reached him she would understand-that the vision or despair which he had found in the Banefire would be communicated to her-that his certainty would become comprehensible. He was certain, as sure as white gold. But she could not approach him. He met her appeal with the indefeasible Don't touch me of leprosy or ascension, apotheosis.

His refusal made grief well up in her like the wail of a lost child.

Then she wanted to turn and hurl all her newfound force at the Despiser, wanted to call up white fire and scourge him from the face of the Earth, Some infections have to be cut out. Why else do you have all that power? She could do it He had hurt Covenant so deeply that she was no longer able to reach him. In her anguish she was greedy for fire. She possessed him heart and limb-and his left hand held the ring, gripped it