The One Tree

might pass beyond our reach, immerse himself in that from which we would be unable to extricate him, he could not have done so with the woman for companion. Her mortal flesh forbade. Yet he would not part from her, and so we came upon him and took him.

“Her we gave what care we could, though the harm or love within her lay beyond our solace. And him we bore to the fire which burned in the north. To us he remained Elohim, not to be freed from his burden. But to him he was no longer of us, or of the Earth, but only of the woman he had lost. He became a madness among us. He would not accept that he had been Appointed, or that the need of the Earth was not one which might be eschewed. He railed against us, and against the heavens, and against the Wurd. To me especially he gave curses, promising a doom which would surpass all his dismay-for I had been nearer to him among the Elohim than any other, and I would not hear him. Because of his despair, we were compelled to bind him to his place, reaving him of name and choice and time to set him as a keystone for the threatened foundation of the north. Thus was the fire capped, and the Earth preserved, and Kastenessen lost.”

Findail stopped. For a moment, he remained still amid the stillness of the Giants; and all his hearers were voiceless before him, lost like Kastenessen in the story of the Appointed. But then he turned to Linden and Covenant, faced them as if everything he had said was intended to answer their unresolved distrust; and a vibration of earnestness ran through his voice.

“Had we held any other means to combat the fire, we would not have Appointed Kastenessen as we did. He was not chosen in punishment or malice, but in extremity.” His yellow eyes appeared to collect the lantern-light, shining out of the dark with a preternatural brightness. “The price of sight is risk and dare. I desire to be understood.”

Then his form frayed, and he flowed out of the gathering, leaving behind him silence like an inchoate and irrefragable loneliness.

When Linden looked up at the stars, they no longer made sense to her. Findail might as well have said, This is ruin.

For three more days, the weather held, bearing Starfare's Gem with brisk accuracy at a slight angle along the wind. But on the fifth day out from Bhrathairealm, the air seemed to thicken suddenly, condensing until the breeze itself became sluggish, vaguely stupefied. The sky broke into squalls as if it were crumbling under its own weight. Abrupt gusts and downpours thrashed the Giantship in all directions. At unpredictable intervals, other sounds were muffled by the staccato battery of canvas, the hot hissing of rain. Warm, capricious, and temperamental, the squalls volleyed back and forth between the horizons. They were no threat to the dromond; but they slowed its progress to little more than a walk, made it stagger as it tacked from side to side. Hampered by the loss of its midmast, Starfare's Gem limped stubbornly on toward its goal, but was unable to win free of the playground of the storms.

After a day of that irregular lurch and stumble, Linden thought she was going to be seasick. The waves confused the stability she had learned to expect from the stone under her bare feet. She felt the protracted frustration of the crew vibrating through the moire-granite, felt the dromond's prow catch the seas every way but squarely. And Covenant fretted at her side; his mood gave a pitch of urgency to the Giantship's pace. Beneath the surface of their companionship, he was febrile for his goal. She could not stifle her nausea until Pitchwife gave her a gentle mixture of diamondraught and water to quiet her stomach.

That night she and Covenant put together a pallet on the floor of her cabin so that they would not have to endure the aggravated motion of the hammock. But the next day the squalls became still more sportive. After sunset, when a gap in the clouds enabled him to take his bearings from the stars, Honninscrave announced that the quest had covered little more than a score of leagues since the previous morning. “Such is our haste,” he muttered through his beard, 'that the

Isle of the One Tree may sink altogether into the sea ere we draw nigh to it.'

Pitchwife chuckled. “Is it a Giant who speaks thus? Master, I had not known you to be an admirer of haste.”

Honninscrave did not respond. His eyes held reminders of Seadreamer, and his gaze was fixed on Covenant.

After a moment, Covenant said, “A few centuries after the Ritual of Desecration, a Cavewight named Drool Rockworm found the Staff of Law. One of the things he used it for was to play with the weather.”

Linden looked at him sharply. She started to ask, Do you think someone is causing-? But he went on, “I blundered into one of his little storms once. With Atiaran.” The memory roughened his tone. “I broke it. Before I believed there even was such a thing as wild magic.”

Now everyone in the vicinity was staring at him. Unspoken questions marked the silence. Carefully, the First asked, “Giantfriend, do you mean to attempt a breaking of this weather?”

For a time, he did not reply. Linden saw in the set of his shoulders, the curling of his fingers, that he wanted to take some kind of action. Even when he slept, his bones were rigid with remembered urgency. The answer to his self-distrust lay at the One Tree. But when he spoke, he said, “No.” He tried to smile. The effort made him grimace. “With my luck, I'd knock another hole in the ship.”

That night, he lay facedown on the pallet like an inverted cenotaph of himself, and Linden had to knead his back for a long time before he was able to turn and look at her.

And still the storms did not lessen. The third day made them more numerous and turbid. Linden spent most of her time on deck, peering through wind and rain for some sign that the weather might change. Covenant's tension soaked into her through her senses. The One Tree. Hope for him. For the Land. And for her? The question disturbed her. He had said that a Staff of Law could be used to send her back to her own life.

During a period of clear sky between squalls in the middle of the afternoon, they were standing at the rail halfway up the starboard foredeck, watching clouds as black as disaster drag purple and slashing rain across the water like sea-anchors, when a shout sprang from the foremast. A shout of warning. Honninscrave replied from the wheeldeck. An alarm spread through the stone. Heavy feet pounded the decks. The First and Pitchwife came trotting toward Linden and Covenant.

“What-?” Covenant began.

The Swordmain reached the rail beside Linden, pointed outward. Her gaze was as acute as a hawk's.

Pitchwife positioned himself directly behind the Unbeliever.

Suddenly, Seadreamer also appeared. For an instant, Linden leaped to the impossible conclusion that the Isle of the One Tree was near. But Seadreamer's stare lacked the precise dread which characterized his Earth- Sight. He looked like a man who saw a perilous wonder bearing down on him.

Her heart pounding, she swung to face the sea.

The First's pointing arm focused Linden's senses. With a shock of percipience, she felt an eldritch power floating toward the Giantship.

The nerves of her face tasted the weird theurgy before her eyes descried it. But then an intervening squall abruptly frayed and fell apart, dissipated as if its energy had encountered an apt and hungry lightning rod. She saw an area of calm advancing across the face of the sea.

It was wider than the length of the dromond, and its periphery was not calm. Around the rim, waterspouts kicked into the air like geysers. They burst straight upward as if no wind could touch them, reached as high as the Giantship's spars, then fanned into spray and rainbows, tumbled sun-bedizened back into the sea. In turn, irrhythmically, now here, now at the farther edge, the spouts stretched toward the sky like celebrants, defining the zone of calm with their innominate gavotte. But within their circle the sea lay fiat, motionless, and reflective-a sopor upon the heart of the deep.

The waterspouts and the calm, were moving with slow, bright delicacy toward Starfare's Gem.

Covenant tried again. “What-?” His tone was clenched and sweating, as if he felt the approaching power as vividly as Linden did.

Stiffly, the First replied, “Merewives” And Pitchwife added in a soft whisper, “The Dancers of the Sea.”

Linden started to ask, What are they? But Pitchwife had already begun to answer. Standing at Covenant's back, he breathed, “They are a widely told tale. I had not thought to be vouchsafed such a sight.”