White Gold Wielder

affirmed that she was evil.

But she was another woman now. She had found the curative use of her health-sense, the access to beauty. She had told Covenant the stories of her parents, drawn some of their sting from her heart. She had learned to call her hunger for power by its true name. And she knew what she wanted Covenant's love. And the end of the Sunbane.

Smiling grimly, she replied, “Try to stop me.”

She expected her answer to relieve him. But he only nodded, and she saw that he still had not said what was in him. Several false starts passed like shadows across the background of his expression. In an effort to reach him, she added, 'I need the relief. The sooner I get out of the Sunbane, the saner I'll be.”

“Linden- ” He said her name as if she were not making his way easier. “When we were in Mithil Stonedown- and Sunder told us he might have to kill his mother- “ He swallowed roughly. “You said he should be allowed to put her out of her misery. If that was what he wanted.” He looked at her now with the death of her mother written plainly in his gaze. “Do you still believe that?”

She winced involuntarily. She would have preferred to put his question aside until she knew why he asked it. But his frank need was insistent. Carefully, she said, “She was in terrible pain. I think people who're suffering like that have the right to die. But mercy killing isn't exactly merciful to the people who have to do it. I don't like what it does to them.” She strove to sound detached, impersonal; but the hurt of the question was too acute. “I don't like what it did to me. If you can call what I did mercy instead of murder.”

He made a gesture that faltered and fell like a failed assuagement, His voice was soft; but it betrayed a strange ague. “What're you going to do if something's happened to Andelain? If you can't get out of the Sunbane? Caer-Caveral knew he wasn't going to last. Foul's corrupted everything else. What'll we do?” His larynx jerked up and down like a presage of panic. “I can stand whatever I have to. But not that. Not that”

He looked so belorn and defenceless that she could not bear it. Tears welled in her eyes. “Maybe it'll be all right,” she breathed. 'You can hope. It's held out this long. It can last a little longer.”

But down in the cold, dark roots of her mind she was thinking. If it doesn't, I don't care what happens. I'll tear that bastard's heart out. I'll get the power somewhere, and I'll tear his heart out.

She kept her thoughts to herself. Yet Covenant seemed to sense the violence inside her. Instead of reaching out to her for comfort, he withdrew into his certainty. Wrapped in decisions and perceptions she did not understand and could not share, he remained apart from her throughout the night

A long time passed before she grasped that he did not mean to reject her. He was trying to prepare himself for the day ahead.

But the truth was plain in the sharp, grey dawn, when he rolled, bleak and tense, out of his blankets to kiss her. He was standing on an inner precipice, and his balance was fragile. The part of him which had been fused in the Banefire did not waver; but the vessel bearing that sure alloy looked as brittle as an old bone. Yet in spite of his trepidation he made the effort to smile at her.

She replied with a grimace because she did not know how to protect him.

While Pitchwife prepared a meal for the company Covenant went over to Sunder. Kneeling behind the Graveler, he massaged Sunder's locked shoulders and neck with his numb fingers.

Sunder did not react to the gesture. He was aware of nothing except Hollian's pallid form and his own fixed purpose. To Linden's health-sense, his body ached with the weakness of inanition. And she felt the hot blade of the krill scalding his unshielded belly under his jerkin. But he seemed to draw strength from that pain as if it were the promise that kept him alive.

After a while, Covenant rejoined the two Giants and Linden. “Maybe he'll meet her in Andelain,” he sighed. “Maybe she'll be able to get through to him.”

“Let us pray for that outcome,” muttered the First. 'His endurance must fail soon.”

Covenant nodded. As he chewed bread and dried fruit for breakfast, he went on nodding to himself like a man who had no other hope.

A short time later, the sun rose beyond the rim of the world; and the companions stood on the rain-swept sheetrock to meet the daybreak.

It crested the horizon in a flaring of emerald, cast green spangles up the swift, broken surface of the River.

At the sight, Linden went momentarily weak with relief. She had not realized how much she had feared another sun of rain.

Warmth: the fertile sun gave warmth. It eased the vehemence of the current, softened the chill of the water. And it shone on her nerves like the solace of dry, fire-warmed blankets. Supported by the First, with Covenant beside her and Pitchwife and Sunder only a few short strokes away, she rode the Soulsease and thought for the first time that perhaps the River had not been gratuitously named.

Yet relief did not blind her to what was happening to the earth on either side of the watercourse. The kindness of the fertile sun was an illusion, a trick performed by the River's protection. On the banks, vegetation squirmed out of the ground like a ghoul-ridden host. Flailed up from their roots, vines and grasses sprawled over the rims of the channel. Shrubs raised their branches as if they were on fire; trees clawed their way into the air, as frantic as the damned. And she found that her own relative safety only accentuated the sensations pouring at her from the wild, unwilling growth. She was floating through a wilderness of voiceless anguish: the torment around her was as loud as shrieks. Tortured out of all Law, the trees and plants had no defence, could do nothing for themselves except grow and grow-and hurl their dumb hurt into the sky.

Perhaps after all the Forestal of Andelain was gone. How long could he bear to hear these cries and be helpless?

Between rising walls of agony, the River ran on toward the east and Mount Thunder after a long south- eastward stretch. Slowly, Linden fell into a strange, bifurcated musing. She held to the First's shoulder, kept her head above water, watched the riverbanks pass, the verdure teem. But on another level she was not aware of such things. Within her, the darkness which had germinated at Gibbon's touch also grew. Fed by the Sunbane, it twined through her and yearned. She remembered now as if she had never forgotten that behind the superficial grief and pain and abhorrence had lurked a secret glee at the act of strangling her mother-a wild joy at the taste of power.

In a detached way, she knew what was happening to her. She had been too long exposed to Lord Foul's corruption. Her command over herself, her sense of who she wanted to be, was fraying.

She giggled harshly to herself-a snapping of mirth like the sound of a Raver. The idea was bitterly amusing. Until now it had been the sheer difficulty and pain of travelling under the Sunbane which had enabled her to remember who she was. The Despiser could have mastered her long ago by simply allowing her to relax.

Fierce humour rose in her throat Fertility seemed to caper along her blood, frothing and chuckling luridly. Her percipience sent out sneaky fingers to touch Covenant's latent fire as if at any moment she would muster the courage to take hold of it for herself.

With an effort of will, she pulled at the First's shoulder. The Giant turned her head, murmured over the wet mutter of the River, “Chosen?”

So that Covenant would not hear her. Linden whispered, “If I start to laugh, hit me. Hold me under until I stop.”

The First returned a glance of piercing incomprehension. Then she nodded.

Somehow, Linden locked her teeth against the madness and did not let it out.

Noon rose above her and passed by. From the truncated perspective of the water-line, she could see only a short distance ahead. The Soulsease appeared to have no future. The world contained nothing except tortured vegetation and despair. She should have been able to heal that. She was a doctor. But she could not. She had no power.

But then without transition the terrain toward which the company was borne changed. Beyond an interdict as precise as a line drawn in the Earth, the wild fertility ended; and a natural woodland began on both sides of the Soulsease.

The shock of it against her senses told her what it was. She had seen it once before, when she had not been ready for it. It rushed into her even from this distance like a distillation of all vitrim and diamondraught, a cure for all darkness.

The First nudged Covenant, nodded ahead. Thrashing his legs, he surged up in the water; and his crow split