White Gold Wielder

“Is that it?” she demanded. “You've decided to give up?”

Mutely, Covenant flinched. Was his defeat so obvious?

At once, a look of regret changed her expression. She dropped her eyes, and her hands made an aimless half gesture as if they were full of remembered failure. “I didn't mean that,” she said. 'That isn't what I came to say. I wasn't sure I should come at all. You've been so hurt-I wanted to give you more time.”

Then she lifted her face to him again, and he saw her sense of purpose sharpen. She was here because she had her own ideas — about hope as well as about him. “But the First was going to come, and I thought I should do it for her.” She gazed into him as if she sought a way to draw him down from his lonely bed. “She wants to know where we're going.”

Where — ? Covenant blinked pain at her. She had not withdrawn her question: she had simply rephrased it. Where? A spasm of grief gripped his heart. His doom was summed up in that one grim word. Where could he go? He was beaten. All his power had been turned against him. There was nowhere left for him to go — nothing left for him to do. For an instant, he feared he would break down in front of her, bereft even of the bare dignity of solitude.

She was saying, “We've got to go somewhere. The Sunbane is still there. Lord Foul is still there. We've lost the One Tree, but nothing else has changed. We can't just sail in circles for the rest of our lives.” She might have been pleading with him, trying to make him see something that was already plain to her.

But he did not heed her. Almost without transition, his hurt became resentment. She was being cruel, whether she realized it or not. He had already betrayed everything he loved with his mistakes and failures and lies. How much more responsibility did she wish him to assume? Bitterly, he replied, “I hear you saved us from the Nicor. You don't need me.”

His tone made her wince. “Don't say that!” she responded intensely. Her eyes were wide with awareness of what was happening to him. She could read every outcry of his wracked spirit. “I need you.”

In response, he felt his despair plunging toward hysteria. It sounded like the glee of the Despiser, laughing in triumph. Perhaps he had gone so far down this road now that he was the Despiser, the perfect tool or avatar of Lord Foul's will. But Linden's expostulation Jerked him back from the brink. It made her suddenly vivid to him too vivid to be treated this way. She was his love, and be had already hurt her too much.

For a moment, the fall he had nearly taken left him reeling. Everything in the cabin seemed imprecise, overburdened with sunlight. He needed shadows and darkness in which to hide from all the things that surpassed him. But Linden still stood there as if she were the centre around which his head whirled. Whether she spoke or remained silent, she was the one demand he could not refuse. Yet he was altogether unready to tell her the truth he had withheld. Her reaction would be the culmination of all his dismay. Instinctively, he groped for some way to anchor himself, some point of simple guilt or passion to which he might cling. Squinting into the sunshine, he asked thickly, “What did they do about Seadreamer?”

At that Linden sagged in relief as though a crisis had been averted. Wanly, she answered, “Honninscrave wanted to cremate him. As if that were possible.” Memories of suffering seemed to fray the words as she uttered them. “But the First ordered the Giants to bury him at sea. For a minute there, I thought Honninscrave was going to attack her. But then something inside him broke. It wasn't physical-but I felt it snap.”

Her tone said that she had sensed that parting like a rupture in her own heart. “He bowed to her as if he didn't know what else to do with all that hurt. Then he went back to the wheeldeck. Back to doing his job.” Her shoulders lifted in a pained shrug. “If you didn't look at his eyes, you wouldn't know he isn't as good as new. But he refused to help them give Seadreamer to the sea.”

As she spoke, his eyes blurred. He was unable to see her clearly in all that light. Seadreamer should have been burned, should have been freed from his horror in a caamora of white fire. Yet the mere thought made Covenant's flesh itch darkly. He had become the thing he hated. Because of a lie. He had known or should have known what was going to happen to him. But his selfish love had kept the truth from her. He could not look at her. Through his teeth, he protested, “Why did you have to do that?”

“Do-?” Her health-sense did not make her prescient. How could she possibly know what he was talking about?

“You threw yourself in the fire.” The explanation came arduously, squeezed out by grief and self recrimination. It was not her fault. No one had the right to blame her. “I sent you away to try to save my life. I didn't know what else to do. For all I knew, it was already too late for anything else the Worm was already awake, I'd already destroyed- ” A clench of anguish closed this throat. For a moment, he could not say, I didn't know how else to save you. Then he swallowed convulsively and went on. “So I sent you away. And you threw yourself in the fire. I was linked to you. The magic tied us together. For the first time, my senses were open. And all I saw was you throwing yourself in the fire.

“Why did you force me to bring you back?”

In response, she flared as if he had struck a ragged nerve. “Because I couldn't help you the way you were!” Suddenly, she was shouting at him. “Your body was there, but you weren't! Without you, it was just so much dying meat! Even if I'd had you in a hospital-even if I could've given you transfusions and surgery right then-I could not have saved you!

“I needed you to come back with me. How else was I supposed to get your attention?”

Her pain made him look at her again; and the sight went through him like a crack through stone, following its flaws to the heart. She stood below him with her face hot and vivid in the light and her fists clenched, as intense and uncompromising as any woman he had ever dreamed. The fault was not hers, though surely she blamed herself. Therefore he could not shirk telling her the truth.

At one time, he had believed that he was sparing her by not speaking, that he was withholding information so that she would not be overwhelmed. Now he knew better. He had kept the truth to himself for the simple reason that he did not want it to be true. And by so doing be had falsified their relationship profoundly.

“I should've told you,” he murmured in shame. “I tried to tell you everything else. But it hurt too much.”

She glared at him as if she felt the presence of something horrible between them; but he did not look away.

“It's always been this way. Nothing here interrupts the physical continuity of the world we came from. What happens here is self-contained. It's always the same. I go into the Land hurt-possibly dying. A leper. And I'm healed. Twice my leprosy disappeared. I could feel again, as if my nerves- ” His heart twisted at the memory-and at the poignant distress of Linden's stare. “But before I left the Land, something always happened to duplicate the shape I was in earlier. Sometimes my body was moved. I stopped bleeding-or got worse. But my physical condition was always exactly what it would've been if I'd never been to the Land. And I'm still a leper. Leprosy doesn't heal.

“So this time that knife hit me-and when we got to the Land I healed it with wild magic. The same way I healed those cuts the Clave gave me.” They had slashed his wrists to gain blood for their soothtell; yet already the scars had faded, were nearly invisible. “But it doesn't make any difference. What happens here doesn't change what's going on there. All it does is change the way we feel about it.”

After that, his shame was too great to hold her gaze. “That's why I didn't tell you about it. At first-right at the beginning-I thought you had enough to worry about. You would learn the truth soon enough. But after a while I changed. Then I didn't want you to know. I didn't think I had the right to ask you to love a dead man.”

As he spoke, her shock boiled into anger. The moment he stopped, she demanded, “Do you mean to say that you've been planning to die all along?” Her voice was abruptly livid against the quiet background of the ship and the sea. “That you haven’t even been trying to find a way to survive?”

“No!” In despair, he sought to defend himself. “Why do you think I wanted a new Staff of Law — needed it so badly? It was my only hope. To fight for the Land without risking wild magic. And to send you back. You’re a doctor, aren’t you? I Wanted you to save me.” But the anguish of her stare did not waver; and he could not meet it, could not pretend that what he had done was justified. “I’ve been trying,” he pleaded. But no appeal was enough. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted to love you for a while. That’s all.”

He heard her moving; and the fear that she would walk out of the cabin, turn her back on him forever, wrenched at him. But she was not leaving. She retreated to the chair, seated herself there as if something in her had broken. Her hands covered her face as she hunched forward, and her shoulders jerked. Yet she made no sound. At her mother’s death-bed, she had learned to keep her weeping to herself. When she spoke, her voice shook.

“Why do I end up killing everybody I care about?”