The One Tree

“Does he speak truly? Do we lack all power against him?”

Linden nodded. But her thoughts were already racing in another direction, already struggling for the self- command she

required. She might prove Findail wrong. But she needed to master herself. Searching for a focal point, an anchorage against which to brace her resolve, she lifted her face to the First.

“Tell me about your examination. In Elemesnedene. What did they do to you?”

The First was taken aback by the unexpectedness, the apparent irrelevance, of the question. But Linden held up her demand; and after a moment the First drew herself into a formal stance. “Pitchwife has spoken to you,” she said flatly.

“Yes.”

“Then perhaps you will comprehend that which befell me.” With one hand, she gripped the hilt of her falchion. The other she held straight at her side as if to restrain it from impatience or protest.

“In my testing,” she said, “one of the Elohim came before me in the semblance of a Giant. By some art, he contrived to wear the lineaments and countenance of Pitchwife. But not my husband as I have known him. Rather, he was Pitchwife as he might have grown from a perfect birth-flawless of limb, tall and proud of stance, hale in every way which becomes a Giant.” Memory suffused her gaze; but her tone held its cutting edge. “He stood thus before me as Pitchwife should have been born and grown, so that the outward seeming well became the spirit I have learned to love.”

Pitchwife stood near her, listening with a crooked smile. But he did not try to express the things which shone in his orbs.

The First did not waver. “At first I wept. But then I laughed. For all his cunning, that Elohim could not equal the joy which enlightens Pitchwife my husband.”

A glint of hard humour touched her tone. “The Elohim misliked my laughter. But he could not answer it, and so my examination was brought to a displeasurable ending for him.”

Pitchwife's whole face chortled, though he made no sound.

A long shiver of recollection ran through Linden. Speaking half to the First, half to the discomfited sea and the acute sky, she said, “The only thing Daphin did to me was answer questions.” Then she stepped past the Giants, left their incomprehension behind as she made her way toward Foodfendhall and the underdecks. Toward Covenant's cabin.

The uncertainty of the dromond's footing affected her balance. Starfare's Gem moved with a tight slewing pace, veering and shaking its head at the unexpected force of the swells. But Linden caught herself against walls when she had to, or against Cail, and kept going. Maybe she had no power to extort the truth from Findail. But Covenant did. If she could somehow pierce the veil which covered his consciousness like a winding-sheet. She was suddenly eager to make the attempt.

She told herself that she was eager for his restitution. She wanted his companionship, his conviction. But she was thin-lipped and stiff with anger, and within her there was darkness stirring.

At the door of Covenant's cabin, she met Brinn. He had come out to meet her. Stolidly, he barred her way. His distrust was tangible in the air of the companionway. Before Elemesnedene, he had never questioned her right of access to Covenant; but now he said bluntly, “Chosen, what is your purpose here?”

She bit back a curse. Breathing deeply in an effort to steady herself, she said, “We've got an Elohim aboard, in case you haven't heard. It's Findail. They sent him here for something, and there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it. The only one of us who has that kind of power is Covenant. I'm going to try to reach him.”

Brinn glanced toward Cail as if he were asking Cail to vouch for her. Then he gave her a slight bow of acquiescence and opened the door.

Glaring, she moved into the cabin, then watched him until he closed the door after her, leaving her alone with Covenant.

There for a moment she hesitated, trying to muster her courage. But Covenant's featureless presence gripped her like a hand on the back of her neck; it compelled her to face him.

He sat in a stone chair beside the small round table as if he had been deliberately positioned there. His legs were straight, formally placed; he did not slouch; his forearms lay on his thighs, with his hands open and the palms laid bare. A tray on the table contained the remains of a meal. Apparently, Brinn had been feeding the Unbeliever. But Covenant was unaware of such things. His slack face confronted the empty air as if it were just another avatar of the emptiness within him.

Linden groaned. The first time she had ever seen him, he had thrown open the door of his house like a hurling of vituperation, the fire and fever of his eyes barely restrained; his mouth had been as strict as a commandment. In spite of

his exhaustion, he had been living the life he had chosen, and he had appeared to her strangely indomitable and pure.

But now the definition of his features was obscured by the scruffy helplessness of his beard; and the gray which raddled the hair over his forehead gave him an appearance of caducity. The flesh of his face sagged as if he had lost all hope. His eyes were dry-lustreless as death.

He looked like her father had looked when his last blood had fallen to the warped old floorboards of the attic.

But Covenant still had pulse and respiration. Food and fluids sustained his life. When he uttered his refrain, as distinct as an augur, he seemed beneath all his loss to be aware of her-and terrified of what she meant to do to him.

She would have to possess him. Like a Raver. The thought filled her mouth with acid revulsion. But she did not hesitate. She could feel paralysis crouching around her. The fear which had so often bereft her of will was imminent in every wrench of her heart. The fear of what she would become. Trembling, she pulled the other chair close to Covenant's knees, sat down, placed her hands in his flaccid grasp as if even now he might preserve them from failure. Then she tried to open herself to his dead gaze.

Again, his darkness flooded into her, pouring through the conduit of her senses.

There she saw the danger. Inspired by his passive slackness, his resemblance to futility, her old hunger rose up in her gorge.

Instinctively, she fought it, held herself in the outer twilight of his night, poised between consciousness and abandonment. But she could not look away from the fathomless well of his emptiness. Already she was able to perceive facets of his condition which were hidden from the outside. She saw to her surprise that the power which had silenced his mind had also stilled the venom in him. It was quiescent; he had sunk beyond its reach.

Also she saw the qualities which had made him pervious to the Elohim. They would not have been able to bereave him so deeply if he had not already been exposed to them by his native impulse to take all harm upon himself. From that source arose both his power and his defenselessness. It gave him a dignity which she did not know how to emulate.

But her will had fallen into its familiar trap. There could be no right or valid way to enter him like this, to desecrate his integrity with her uninvited exigencies-and no right or bearable way to leave him in his plight, to let his need pass without succour. And because she could not resolve the contradiction, she had no answer to the dark, angry thing in the pit of her heart which came leaping up at the chance for power. Covenant's power: the chance to be a true arbiter of life and death.

Fierce with hunger, she sprang down into him.

Then the night bore her away.

For a time, it covered all the world. It seemed to stagger every firmament like a gale; yet it was nothing like a gale. Winds had direction and timbre; they were soft or strong, warm or chill. But his darkness was empty of anything which would have named it, given it definition. It was as lorn as the abysm between stars, yet it held no stars to chart its purpose. It filled her like Gibbon's touch, and she was helpless against it, helpless-her father had thrown the key out the window and she possessed no strength or passion that could call him back from death.

The dark swept her around and down like a maelstrom without movement or any other sensation except