welcomed them and him.
“I know it's been terrible,” he went on. “Are you all right?”
She nodded along the wind that seemed to rush without motion around her as if it bad no meaning except loss. I think so. Maybe. It doesn't matter. She only wanted to hear his voice while the chance lasted. She knew it would not last long. To make him speak again, she said the first words that occurred to her.
“You were wonderful. But how did you do it? I don't have any idea how you did it”
In response, he sighed-an exhalation of weariness and remembered pain, not of rue. “I don't think I did it at all. All I did was
“Caer-Caveral made it possible. Hile Troy.” An old longing suffused his tone. “That was the 'necessity' he talked about. Why he had to give his life. It was the only way to open mat particular door. So that Hollian could be brought back. And so that I wouldn't be like the rest of the Dead-unable to act He broke the Law that would've kept me from opposing Foul. Otherwise I would’ve been just a spectator.
“And Foul didn't understand. Maybe be was too far gone. Or maybe he just refused to believe it. But he tried to ignore the paradox. The paradox of white gold. And the paradox of himself. He wanted the white gold-the ring. But I'm the white gold too. He couldn't change that by killing me. When he hit me with my own fire, he did me one thing I couldn't do for myself. He burned the venom away. After that, I was free.”
He paused for a moment, turned inward, “I didn't know what was going to happen, I was Just terrified that he would let me live until after he attacked the Arch.” Dimly, she remembered the way Covenant had jibed at Lord Foul as if he were asking for death.
“We aren't enemies, no matter what he says. He and I are one. But he doesn't seem to know that Or maybe he hates it too much to admit it Evil can't exist unless the capacity to stand against it also exists. And you and I are the Land-in a manner of speaking, anyway. He's just one side of us. That's his paradox. He's one side of us. We're one side of him. When he killed me, he was really trying to kill the other half of himself. He just made me stronger. As long as I accepted him-or accepted myself, my own power, didn't try to do to him what he wanted to do to me- he couldn't get past me.”
There he fell silent But she had not been listening to him with any urgency. She had her own answers, and they sufficed. She listened chiefly to the sound of his voice, cared only that he was with her still. When he stopped, she groped for another question. After a moment, she asked him how the First and Pitchwife had been able to escape the Cavewights.
At that, a note like a chuckle gleamed along the wind. “Ah, that” His humour was tinged with grimness; but she treasured it because she had never heard him come so close to laughter. “That I'll take credit for.
“Foul gave me so much power-And it made me crazy to stand there and not be able to touch you. I had to do something. Foul knew what the Cavewights were doing all along. He let them do it to put more pressure on us. So I made something rise out of the Wightbarrow. I don't know what it was-it didn't last long. But while the Cavewights were bowing, the First and Pitchwife had a chance to get away. Then I showed them how to reach you.”
She liked his voice. Perhaps guilt as well as venom had been burned out of it. They shared a moment of companionship. Thinking about what he had done for her, she almost forgot that she would never see him alive again.
But then some visceral instinct warned her that the darkness was shifting-that her time with him was almost over. She made an effort to articulate her appreciation.
“You gave me what I needed. I should be thanking you. For all of it. Even the parts that hurt. I've never been given so many gifts. I just wish- ”
Shifting and growing lighter. On all sides, the void modulated toward definition. She knew where she was going, what she would find when she got there; and the thought of it brought all her hurts and weaknesses together into one lorn outcry. Yet that cry went unuttered back into the dark. In mute surprise, she realized that the future was something she would be able to bear.
Just wish I didn't have to lose you.
Oh, Covenant!
For the last time, she lifted her voice toward him, spoke to him as if she were a woman of the Land.
“Farewell, beloved.”
His response came softly, receding along the wind. “There's no need for that I'm part of you now. You'll always remember.”
At the edge of her heart, he stopped. She was barely able to hear him.
“I'll be with you as long as you live.”
Then he was gone. Slowly, the gulf became stone against her face.
Light swelled beyond her eyelids. She knew before she raised her head that she had come back to herself in the ordinary dawn of a new day.
The air was cool. She smelled dew and springtime and cold ash and budding trees. And blood that was already dry.
For a long moment, she lay still and let the translation complete itself. Then she levered her arms under her.
At once, a forgotten pain laboured in the bones behind her left ear. She groaned involuntarily, slumped again to the stone.
She would have been willing to lie still while she persuaded herself that the hurt did not matter. She was in no hurry to look at her surroundings. But as she slumped, unexpected hands came to her shoulders. They were not strong in the way she had learned to measure strength; but they gripped her with enough determination to lift her to her knees. “Linden,” a man's care aged voice breathed. “Thank God.”
Her eyes were slow to focus; her sight seemed to come back from a great distance. She was conscious of the dawn, the blurred grey stone, the barren hollow set like a bowl of death into the heart of the green woods. But gradually she made out Covenant's form. He was stretched on the rock nearby, within the painted triangle of blood. The light stroked his dear face like a touch of annunciation.
From the centre of his chest jutted the knife which had made everything else necessary.
The man holding her repeated her name. “I'm so sorry,” he murmured. “I never should've gotten you into this. We shouldn't have let him keep her. But we didn't know he was in this much danger.”
Slowly, she turned her head and met the alarmed and wearied gaze of Dr. Berenford.
His eyes seemed to wince in their sockets, making the heavy pouches under them quiver. His old moustache drooped over his mouth. The characteristic wry dyspepsia of his tone was gone; it failed him here. Almost fearfully, he asked her the same question Covenant had asked. “Are you all right?”
She nodded as well as the pain in her skull allowed. Her voice scraped like rust in her throat. “They killed him.” But no words were adequate to her grief.
“I know.” He urged her into a sitting position. Then he turned away to snap open his medical bag. A moment later, she smelled the pungence of antiseptic. With reassuring gentleness, he parted her hair, probed her injury, began to cleanse the wound. But he did not stop talking.
“Mrs. Jason and her three kids came to my house. You probably saw her outside the courthouse the first day you were here. Carrying a sign that said, 'Repent.' She's one of those people who thinks doctors and writers Just naturally go to hell. But this time she needed me. Got me out of bed a few hours ago. All four of them- ” He swallowed convulsively. “Their right hands were terribly burned. Even the kids.”
He finished tending her hurt, but did not move to face her. For a while, she stared sightlessly at the dead ash of the bonfire. But then her gaze returned to Covenant. He lay there in his worn T-shirt and old jeans as if no cerements in all the world could give his death dignity. His features were frozen in fear and pain-and in a kind of intensity that looked like hope. If Dr. Berenford had not been with her. she would have taken Covenant into her arms for solace. He deserved better than to lie so untended.
“At first she wouldn't talk to me,” the older man went on. “But while I drove them to the hospital, she broke down. Somewhere inside her, she had enough decency left to be horrified. Her kids were wailing, and she couldn't bear it. I guess none of them knew what they were doing. They thought God had finally recognized their righteousness. They all had the same vision, and they just obeyed it. They whipped themselves into a tizzy killing a horse to get the blood they used to mark his house. They weren't sane anymore.
“Why they picked on him I don't know.” His voice shook. “Maybe because he wrote un-christian books”. She
