White Gold Wielder

Starfare's Gem brunted through the crest of a wave and dove for the trough. Unable to steady himself, be pitched headlong toward the wall.

Hands caught him. Mistweave held him while Pitchwife pulled Linden from his embrace.

He was giddy and irresistible with fire. He jerked away from Mistweave, followed Pitchwife toward the stove on which sat the oblong stewpot. The floor seemed to yaw viciously, but he kept moving.

The stovetop was as high as his chin. He could see nothing of Linden past the pot's rim except a crown of hair as Seasauce held her head above water. But he no longer needed to see her. Pressing his forehead against the base of the stewpot, he spread his arms as far as possible along its sides. The guts of the stove were aflame; but that heat would take too long to warm so much stone and water. Closing his eyes against the ghoul whirl of his vertigo, he let wild magic pour down his arms.

This he could do safely. He had learned enough control to keep his power from tearing havoc through the galley. And Linden was buffered from his imprecise touch. With white passion he girdled the pot. Then he narrowed his mind until nothing else impinged upon it and let the fire flow.

In that way, he turned his back on silence and numbness.

For a time, he was conscious only of the current of his power, squeezing heat into the stone but not breaking it, not tearing the fragile granite into rubble. Then suddenly he realized that he could hear Linden coughing. He looked up. She was invisible to him, hidden by the sides of the pot and the steam pluming thickly into the air. But she was coughing, clearing her lungs more strongly with every spasm. And a moment later one of her hands came out of the vapour to clutch at the lip of the pot.

“It is enough,” Pitchwife was saying. “Giantfriend, it is enough. More heat will harm her.”

Covenant nodded dumbly. With a deliberate effort, he released his power.

At once, he recoiled, struck by the vertigo and fear he had been holding at bay. But Pitchwife put an arm around him, kept him on his feet. As tile spinning slowed, he was able to watch Seasauce lift Linden dripping from the water. She still looked as pallid and frail as a battered child; but her eyes were open, and her limbs reacted to the people around her. When Mistweave took her from the cook, she instinctively hugged his neck while he wrapped her in a blanket. Then Cail offered her Pitchwife's flask of diamondraught. Still shivering fiercely, she pulled the flask to her mouth. Gradually, two faint spots of colour appeared on her cheeks.

Covenant turned away and hid his face against Pitchwife's malformed chest until his relief eased enough to be borne.

For a few moments while the diamondraught spread out within her. Linden remained conscious. Though she was so weak that she tottered, she got down 'from Mistweave's arms. With the blanket swaddled around her, she stripped off her wet clothing. Then her gaze hunted for Covenant's. He met it as bravely as he could.

“Why-?” she asked huskily. Her voice quivered. “Why couldn't we help them?”

“It was the Soulbiter.” Her question made his eyes blur. Her heart was still torn by what she had seen, “They were illusions. We were damned if we refused to help. Because of how we would've felt about ourselves. And damned if we tried. If we brought one of those things aboard.” The Soulbiter, he thought as he strove to clear his vision. It was aptly named. “The only way out was to break the illusion.”

She nodded faintly. She was fading into the embrace of the diamondraught. “It was like watching my parents.” Her eyes closed. “If they were as brave as I wanted them to be.” Her voice trailed toward silence. “If I let myself love them.” Then her knees folded. Mistweave lowered her gently to her pallet, tucked more blankets around her. She was already asleep.

By increments, the galley recovered its accustomed warmth. Seasauce and Hearthcoal laboured like titans to produce hot food for the hard pressed crew. As Honninscrave became more confident of the dromond’s stance against the gale, be began sending Giants in small groups for aliment and rest.

A steady stream of them passed through the galley. They entered with hoar in their hair and strain in their eyes. The same gaunt look of memory marked every face. But the taste of hot food and the comradely bluster of the cooks solaced them; and when they returned to their tasks they bore themselves with more of their wonted jaunty sea love and courage. They had survived the Soulbiter. Valiantly, they went back to their battle with the bitter grue of the sea.

Covenant remained in the galley for a while to watch over Linden. Her slumber was so profound that he distrusted it instinctively. He expected her to slip back into the tallow pallor of frostbite. She looked so small, frail, and desirable lying there nearly under the feet of the Giants. But her form curled beneath the blankets brought back other memories as well; and eventually he found himself falling from relief and warmth into bereavement She was the only woman he knew who understood his illness and still accepted him. Already, her stubborn commitment to him-and to the Land-had proved itself stronger than his despair. He yearned to put his arms around her, clasp her to him. But he did not have the right. And in her sleep she did not need the loyalty of his attendance. To escape the ache of what he had lost, he sashed his robe tightly about him and went out into the keening wind.

Instantly, he stumbled into the swirl of a snowfall as thick as fog. It flurried against his face. Ice crunched under his boots. When he blinked his eyes clear, he saw pinpricks of light around the decks and up in the rigging. The snow veiled the day so completely that the Giants were compelled to use lanterns. The sight dismayed him. How could Honninscrave keep the Giantship running, headlong and blind in such a sea, when his crew was unable to tend the sails without lamps?

But the Master had no choice. While this wind held, the dromond could do nothing but grit its teeth and endure.

The matter was out of Covenant's hands. Braving the flung snow and the ice-knurled decks with Cail's support, he went looking for the First.

But when he found her in the cabin she shared with Pitchwife, he discovered that he did not know what to say. She was polishing her longsword and her slow stroking movements had a quality of deliberate grimness which suggested that the survival of Starfare's Gem was out of her hands as well. She had broken the spell of the Soulbiter; she could do nothing now. For a long moment, they shared a hard stare of determination and helplessness. Then he turned away.

The snowfall continued. It clung to the air, and the wind whipped it forward, darkening the day as if the sky were clogged with ashes.

It brought with it a slight moderation of the temperature; and the fierceness of the blast was softened somewhat. But in reaction the seas grew more tempestuous. And they no longer followed the thrust of the gale. Other forces bent them out of the grasp of the storm, forcing Starfare's Gem to slog and claw its way across the grain of the current. Honninscrave shifted course as much as he dared to accommodate the seas; but the wind did not give him much latitude. As a result, the massive vessel pounded forward with a wild gait, a slewing pitch and yaw with a sickening pause on the seatops while the dromond hung momentarily out of control, followed by a plunge which buried the stern to its taffrail in black water. Only the unfrightened demeanour of the Giants convinced Covenant that Starfare's Gem was not about to founder.

Shortly before sunset, the snow lifted, letting a little dirty yellow light lick briefly across the battered seas. At once, Honninscrave sent Giants into the tops to scan the horizons before the illumination failed. They reported no landfall in sight. Then a night blinded by clouds closed down over the Giantship, and Starfare's Gem went running into the pit of an unreadable dark.

In the galley, Covenant rode the storm with his back braced between one wall and the side of a stove and his gaze fixed on Linden. Blank to the vessel's staggering, she slept so peacefully that she reminded him of the Land before the onset of the Sunbane. She was a terrain which should never have been violated by bloodshed and hate, a place that deserved better. But the Land had men and women-however few-who had fought and would fight for its healing. And Linden was among them. Yet in the struggle against her own inner Sunbane she had no one but herself.

The night stretched out ahead of Starfare's Gem. After a meal and a cup of thinned diamondraught Covenant tried to rest Recumbent on his pallet, he let the seas flop him from side to side and strove to imagine that he was being cradled. Fitfully, he dozed his way into true sleep.

But almost at once he began to flounder. He was back in me Sandhold, in Kemper's Pitch, strapped motionless for torture. He had passed, untouched, through knives and fire; but now he was being hurled down into himself, thrown with the violence of greed toward the hard wall of his fate. Then, however, he had been saved by