The Last Dark (66 page)

Fortunately Stave did not appear to expect a response. Without a sign from her, he guided her toward Covenant.

As she drew near, Covenant turned away from Rime Coldspray and the lean Giant. His gaze was feverish with pain, and the lines of his face had been cut deeper: he seemed to have aged years in the past few hours. Even without his memories of the Arch, he bore the burden of too much time. His damaged chest was the least of his hurts. At the core, he was defined by his rage for lepers; for the innocent victims of Despite. He hated the necessary fact that other people suffered so that he might oppose Lord Foul.

Wincing whenever his ribs shifted, he held out his arms to his wife.

Fearing that she had just sacrificed her son—the first step toward sacrificing herself—Linden stepped into Covenant’s embrace as if she were falling.

It was a mercy that he did not speak. Words were demands. For a few moments, at least, she simply needed to be held. And no one else’s arms felt like his. Even Jeremiah’s hugs could not comfort her now.

But as she leaned on Covenant, she felt his injuries more keenly, his bodily hurts and his aggrieved spirit. He held himself responsible for too much. And she had done nothing to ease or heal him.

With her health-sense, she reached out for the Earthpower of the Staff. As she had done once to relieve a suffering Waynhim, she invoked healing from a distance.

At first, she focused her heart on the distress in Covenant’s chest. But when she had restored the integrity of his ribs and cartilage, she turned the balm of Law on the scalds and exhaustion of the Giants.

“Thanks, love,” Covenant murmured when she was done. “That helps.” His arms tightened around her.

Rime Coldspray and several of the other Giants stood straighter. In spite of their sadness, they smiled.

“Thomas.” Linden held Covenant closer. She wished that she could talk to him privately. The things which she had to say were difficult enough: she did not want anyone else to hear them. But she had learned to distrust that impulse. “I need to tell you something.”

While I still can.

He released a pent up breath. “So tell me.”

“I love you.” There was no good way to say it. Words were inadequate. “I want to help you. I want you to stop Lord Foul. I want the Land to be saved, and the Earth, and the stars, and the
Elohim
,” although she could not imagine how any of those deeds might be accomplished. “I want Jeremiah safe, and all of our friends, and everything that we’ve ever cared about.

“But I’m done fighting.”

Covenant stiffened as if she had frightened him. His voice was harsh with strain as he asked, “And you think you have a choice?”

He did not let her go.

She nodded against the thin fabric of his T-shirt.

“So tell me,” he repeated through his teeth.

To make room for what she had to say, she eased away until she could touch his chest. Kissing the tips of her fingers, she slipped them through the old knife cut in his shirt. “You said it yourself. We have to face the things that scare us the most. There’s really no other way. Escape isn’t worth what it costs.

“But the Despiser isn’t what scares me the most. Even losing Jeremiah isn’t. Or losing you. That might break me, but it isn’t my worst fear. And the Worm—

“Thomas, I’ve hardly seen the Land the way it was when you fell in love with it. That first time, when we came here together, it was all the Sunbane. And since then, we’ve lost too much, and I’ve been going crazy about Jeremiah.

“Oh, Andelain has changed my life. More than once.” Glimmermere and
aliantha
and percipience and the Ranyhyn had all changed her. “But I simply haven’t learned how to care about this world as much as you do. The Worm isn’t my worst fear.”

Before he could prompt her, she said, “My worst fear is what I might become. Or what I’ve already become. I need to face that somehow.”

“Then how—?” Covenant began. But he stopped himself. For a moment, he seemed to scramble like a man who felt the ground shifting under his feet. Then his head jerked up as if his chest had been pierced again; as if she had stabbed him. She felt the jolt of his intuitive leap. “Oh.
That
fear. Now I get it.”

Linden nodded again. Trying to be clear, she said, “Days ago, you left me because you had to deal with Joan. If we live long enough, I’ll have to leave you.”

And her son.

Gripping her shoulders, he stared like wild magic into her face. “That’s why you gave Jeremiah your Staff.”

“One of the reasons,” she conceded. Now that he understood, she found it comparatively easy to bear his gaze. “Earthpower and Law can’t help me. I have to use my ring.”

At once, he pulled her close again, hugged her as though his heart refused to go on beating without her. “Hellfire, Linden,” he breathed. “That’s insane. It might be exactly what we need.”

She matched his embrace. “And I’m the only one who can even try. You said that, too. You have to face Lord Foul. And Jeremiah has to decide for himself. That leaves me.”

“I remember,” he said gruffly. “I must have been out of my mind.”

Then he held her at arm’s length again so that he could study the doubts and determinations following each other like ocean swells in her eyes.

“Well, why not?” he growled. “I didn’t ask you and the First and Pitchwife to do my fighting for me when I decided to give up using power all those millennia ago, but you kept me alive anyway. Maybe I even expected you to do that. Why shouldn’t it be your turn now? Sure, we have more enemies this time. But we also have more friends. And I think we’re capable of things damn Foul has never seen before. Why shouldn’t you get a chance to take your own risks?”

Linden smiled through a brief relapse of tears. “I knew that you would understand.” Then she added, “But I haven’t told Jeremiah. We aren’t there yet. We might not live long enough to get there. And he has other things on his mind. I don’t want to scare him until I’m sure that he needs to know.”

Covenant nodded; but abruptly he was distracted. “I get it.” He was no longer looking at her. “But suddenly things aren’t as simple as they were a minute ago.”

When she followed his gaze, her heart seemed to stop.

Holding the Staff, Jeremiah had summoned his heritage of Earthpower. Small flames spread from his hands onto the shaft. They traced the cryptic lines of the runes, blossomed briefly on the iron heels, measured the wood.

They were his—and they were stark black, as dark as ichor squeezed from the marrow of the world’s bones.

“Jeremiah!” When Linden’s pulse resumed its labor, it pounded in her temples, in her ears, at the base of her throat. “What are you doing?” She had asked him to change the Staff. Instead her own darkness was changing him.

He did not glance at her. “Don’t bother me.” His eyes echoed the hue of his flames. “I’m trying to concentrate. This is temporary. I mean, I think it’s temporary. I just don’t know what to do about it yet.”

Scowling to himself, he muttered, “You’re stronger than I thought. I can’t figure out how you did it.”

Linden meant to intervene. She thronged with objections, warnings, supplications. But Covenant stopped her. With his hand on her cheek, he urged her to face him.

“Leave him alone for a while,” he advised softly. “He wants to try. Maybe this is how he has to learn. Maybe he has to go through you to get to himself.”

Covenant may have meant, Maybe he’s starting to face his worst fear.

Linden wanted to believe him, but she could not. Her father had kept her locked in the attic with him while he killed himself. Her mother had begged her to end her life. Linden had given her Staff to Jeremiah of her own free will; but she did not know how to distance herself from his peril.

Yet what else could she do? She had already decided to leave him when last came to last. When there was nothing left for her except the dark.

Instead of stopping her son, she clung to her husband as if he were the only defense she had.

ut slowly food, diluted
diamondraught
, and the aftereffects of Earthpower steadied Linden. By degrees, she regained a semblance of calm.

The same benefits wrought on her companions, the Giants if not the
Haruchai
, until the frenzy and desperation of battle began to fade. And as the Giants recovered, their need for tales grew.

Clearly the newcomers and the Swordmainnir were well known to each other. But much had occurred since they had parted: both groups had much to tell, and to hear. In particular, the sailors wanted to understand the confluence of events which had brought about the crisis of the Defiles Course. Because they were Giants, they knew about Covenant and Linden; but everything that pertained to Jeremiah was a mystery to them. And the Swordmainnir were eager to hear how their people had contrived to arrive when they were most needed.

When everyone had eaten, the sailors bundled up their supplies, leaving out a little food in case Linden or Covenant or Jeremiah wanted more. Then the Ironhand announced that the time had come, and her people gathered around her, aching and ready.

Linden stood among them with Covenant behind her, his arms around her. Branl joined Coldspray so that the
krill
would shed as much light as possible for the Giants. But Jeremiah seemed to have no interest in stories or woe. His immersion in his task was complete, as it always was when he worked on his constructs. His eyes watched flames while his hands made them dance and gambol on the Staff, or gave them shapes that suggested Ranyhyn, flickering portals, evanescent
Elohim
. Gradually he attuned himself. Nevertheless his every expression of magic remained as benighted as the world’s doom.

Perhaps to reassure Linden, Stave positioned himself near her son; but he did nothing to distract Jeremiah.

The Ironhand began by introducing the newly arrived Giants, seven men and four women. Hurl Linden had already met. Their leader was the Anchormaster of Dire’s Vessel, the Giantship which had brought the Swordmainnir and Longwrath to the Land. His name was Bluff Stoutgirth, although he was lean to the point of emaciation; and his mien hinted that he was more inclined to hilarity than to command. Here, however, his manner was grave and grieving. His sailors and Rime Coldspray’s Swordmainnir had endured much together during their voyage to the Land. They felt their losses keenly.

For Linden and Covenant, and for the
Haruchai
, Bluff Stoutgirth named his comrades—Etch Furledsail, Squallish Blustergale, Keenreef, Wiver Setrock, others—but Linden doubted that she would remember them all. Still she was grateful for the knowledge that they had come from Dire’s Vessel. That detail made the fact, if not the timeliness, of their arrival comprehensible.

The Anchormaster offered to tell his tale first. It was, he suspected, both shorter and kinder than that of the Swordmainnir, though perhaps no less unforeseen. With Rime Coldspray’s assent, he began.

After the departure of the Ironhand’s company, Dire’s Vessel had remained in the anchorage of ancient
Coercri
, The Grieve of the Unhomed. For a number of days, the sailors busied themselves with the mundane tasks of repairing and maintaining their Giantship. Then they began to notice changes in the littoral’s weather, disturbances in the sea. Storms lashed the coast and disappeared again without apparent cause. Downpours drenched Dire’s Vessel out of clear skies. Currents ran awry, heaving the Giantship from side to side until anchors were set at every point of the compass. Still the Swordmainnir did not return. They had vanished among the uncertainties of their quest.

Five mornings ago, however, the sun astonished the crew—Stoutgirth said this with improbable good cheer—by failing to rise. Stars began to disappear from the firmament of the heavens. Mighty swells from the southeast threatened Dire’s Vessel’s moorings. Such occurrences augured some immense and dolorous ill, but the sailors could not interpret the signs.

Yet on the following day a new astonishment appeared. Striding forth from tales many centuries old, a man made himself manifest upon the foredeck of Dire’s Vessel.

That he was a man of immense age was plain. The lines upon his visage were such that they mapped a world. Indeed, his years had been so prolonged that they appeared to erode his substance where he stood. His raiment was ancient, an unkempt robe of indeterminate hue, and his limbs wore hatchments of scars. Yet he bore himself as one who could not be bowed, and his glances had the effect of lightnings.