White Gold Wielder

like if venom was the keystone? If everything in the world, every particle of life, was founded on venom as well as wild magic? That would be as bad as the Sunbane.” Slowly, he lifted his head, met Linden with a glance that seemed to pierce her. “I won't do it.”

She felt helpless to reach him; but she could not stop trying. She heard the truth as he described it; he had named the change in himself for her. In the Banefire he had made himself as impotent as innocence. The power to resist Despite, the reason of his life, had been burned out of him. Aching for him, she asked, “Then what? What will you do?”

His lips drew taut, baring his teeth; for an instant, he appeared starkly afraid. But no fear marked his voice. “When I saw Elena in Andelain, she told me where to find Foul. In Mount Thunder-a place inside the Wightwarrens called Kiril Threndor. I'm going to pay him a little visit.”

“He'll kill you!” Linden cried, immediately aghast. “If you can't defend yourself, he'll just kill you and it'll all be wasted,” everything he had suffered, venom-relapses, the loss of Seadreamer and Honninscrave, of Ceer, Hergrom, and Brinn, the silence of the Elohim, his caamora for the Unhomed of Seareach, the tearing agony and fusion of the Banefire,

“Wasted! What kind of answer is that”

But his certainty was unshaken. To her horror, he smiled at her again. Until it softened, his expression wrung her out of herself, made her want to scream at him as if he had become a Raver. Yet it did soften. When he spoke, he sounded neither desperate nor doomed, but only gentle and indefeasibly resigned.

“There are a few things Foul doesn't understand. I'm going to explain them to him.”

Gentle, yes, and resigned; but also annealed, fused to the hard metal of his purpose. Explain them to him? she thought wildly. But in his mouth the words did not sound like folly. They sounded as settled and necessary as the fundament of the Earth.

However, he was not untouched by her consternation. More urgently, as if he also wanted to bridge the gulf between them, he said, 'Linden, think about it. Foul can't break the Arch without breaking me first. Do you really think he can do that? After what I've been through?”

She could not reply. She was sinking in a vision of his death-of his body back in the woods behind Haven Farm pulsing its last weak life onto the indifferent stone. The old man whose life she had saved before she had ever met Covenant had said to her like a promise. You will not fail, however he may assail you. There is also love in the world. But she had already failed when she had let Covenant be struck by that knife, let him go on dying. All love was gone.

But he was not done with her. He was leaning on the table now, supporting himself with his locked arms to look at her more closely; and the silver glow of the floor behind him limned his intent posture, made him luminous. Yet the yellow lamplight seemed human and needy as it shone on his face, features she must have loved from the beginning-the mouth as strict as a commandment, the cheeks lined with difficulties, the hair greying as if its colour were the ash left by his hot mind. The kindness he conveyed was the conflicted empathy and desire of a man who was never gentle with himself. And he still wanted something from her. In spite of what she had tried to do to him. Before he spoke, she knew that he had come to his reason for summoning her here-and for selecting this particular place, the room of a compassionate, dangerous, and perhaps wise man who had once been his friend.

In a husky voice, he asked, “What about you? What're you going to do?”

He had asked her that once before. But her previous response now seemed hopelessly inadequate. She raised her hands to her hair, then pushed them back down to her side. The touch of her unclean tresses felt so unlovely, impossible to love, that it brought her close to tears. “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what my choices are.”

For a moment, his certitude faded. He faced her, not because he was sure, but because he was afraid. “You could stay here,” he said as if the words hurt him. “The lore of the old Lords is still here. Most of it, anyway. Maybe the Giants could translate it for you. You might find a way out of this mess for yourself. A way back.” He swallowed at an emotion that leaked like panic past his resolve. Almost whispering, he added, “Or you could come with me.”

Come with-? Her percipience flared toward him, trying to read the spirit behind what he said. What was he afraid of? Did he dread her companionship, fear the responsibility and grief of having her with him? Or was he dismayed to go on without her?

Her legs were weak with exhaustion and desire, but she did not let herself sit down. A helpless tremor ran through her. 'What do you want me to do?”

He looked like he would have given anything to be able to turn his head away; yet his gaze held. Even now, he did not quail from what he feared.

“I want what you want. I want you to find something that gives you hope. I want you to come into your power. I want you to stop believing that you're evil-that your mother and father are the whole truth about you. I want you to understand why you were chosen to be here.” His visage pleaded at her through the lamplight. “I want you to have reasons.”

She still did not comprehend his apprehension. But he had given her an opportunity she coveted fervidly, and she was determined to take it at any cost. Her voice was thick with a kind of weeping she had suppressed for most of her life; but she no longer cared how much frailty or need she exposed. All the severity and detachment to which she had trained herself had fled, and she did not try to hail them back. Trembling fiercely to herself, she uttered her avowal.

“I don't want hope. I don't want power. I don't care if I never go back. Let Foul do his worst-and to hell with him. I don't even care if you're going to die.” That was true. Death was later: he was now. “I'm a doctor, not a magician. I can't save you unless you go back with me-and if you offered me that, I wouldn't take it. What's happening here is too important. It's too important to me.” And that also was true; she had learned it among the wounded in the forehall of the Keep. “All I want is a living love. For as long as I can get it.” Defying her weakness, she stood erect before him in the lamplight as if she were ablaze. “I want you.”

At that, he bowed his head at last; and the relief which flooded from him was so palpable that she could practically embrace it. When he looked up again, he was smiling with love-a smile which belonged to her and no one else. Tears streaked his face as he went to the door and closed it, shutting out the consequences of wild magic and venom. Then from the doorway he said thickly, “I wish I could've believed you were going to say that. I would've told Cail to bring us some blankets.”

But the safe gutrock of Revelstone enclosed them with solace, and they did not need blankets.

Twelve: Those Who Part

THEY did not sleep at all that night Linden knew that Covenant had not slept the previous night, on the verge of the jungle outside Revelstone; she had been awake herself, watching the stretched desperation of his aura with her percipience because Cail had refused to let her approach the ur-Lord. But the memory no longer troubled her; in Covenant's place, she might have done the same tiling. Yet that exigent loneliness only made this night more precious too precious-to be spent in sleep. She had not been in his arms since the crisis of the One Tree; and now she sought to impress every touch and line of him onto her hungry nerves.

If he had wanted sleep himself, she would have been loath to let him go. But he had resumed his certainty as if it could take the place of rest; and his desire for her was as poignant as an act of grace. From time to time, she felt him smiling the smile that belonged solely to her; and once he wept as if his tears were the same as hers. But they did not sleep.

At the fringes of her health-sense, she was aware of the great Keep around her. She felt Cail's protective presence outside the door. She knew when the Banefire went out at last, quenched by the sovereign waters of Glimmermere. And as the abused stone of the sacred enclosure cooled, the entire city let out a long granite sigh which seemed to breathe like relief through every wall and floor. Finally she felt the distant flow of the lake stop as Nom restored the stream to its original channel. For the remainder of this one night, at least, Revelstone had become a place of peace.