“Ah, Giantfriend,” Pitchwife breathed at last. “You also are grieved beyond bearing. I know not how to solace you.” Abruptly, he stooped, and one hand lifted a leather flask into the hammock. “If you find no ease in my tale of the Chosen, will you not at the least drink diamondraught and grant your flesh rest? Your own story remains to be told. Be not so harsh with yourself.”
His words raised memories of dead Atiaran in Andelain. The mother of the woman he had raped and driven mad had said with severe compassion. In punishing yourself, you come to merit punishment. This is Despite. But Covenant did not want to think about Atiaran. Find no ease- Belatedly, he pictured Linden in the depths of the dromond, holding the survival of the Search in her hands. He could not bear the rhythm of her courage, but he saw her face. Framed by her wheaten hair, it was acute with concentration, knotted between the brows, marked on either side of the mouth by the consequences of severity-and beautiful to him in every bone and line.
Humbled by what she had done to save the ship, he raised the flask to his lips and drank.
When he awoke, the cabin was full of afternoon sunshine, and the pungent taste of diamondraught lingered on his tongue. The Giantship was moving again. He remembered no dreams. The impression he bore with him out of slumber was one of blankness, a leper's numbness carried to its logical extreme. He wanted to roll over and never wake up again.
But as he glanced blearily around the sun-sharp cabin, he saw Linden sitting in one of the chairs beside the table.
She sat with her head bowed and her hands open in her lap, as if she had been waiting there for a long time. Her hair gleamed cleanly in the light, giving her the appearance of a woman who had emerged whole from an ordeal-refined, perhaps, but not reduced. With an inward moan, he recollected what the old man on Haven Farm had said to her. There is also love in the world. And in Andelain dead Elena, Covenant's daughter, had urged him, Care for her, beloved, so that in the end she may heal us all. The sight of her made his chest contract. He had lost her as well. He had nothing left.
Then she seemed to feel his gaze on her. She looked up at him, automatically brushing the tresses back from her face; and he saw that she was not unhurt. Her eyes were hollow and flagrant with fatigue; her cheeks were pallid; and the twinned lines running past her mouth from either side of her delicate nose looked like they had been left there by tears as well as time. A voiceless protest gathered in him. Had she been sitting here with him ever since the passing of the Nicor? When she needed so much rest?
But a moment after he met her gaze she rose to her feet A knot of anxiety or anger marked her brows. Probing him with her health-sense, she stepped closer to the hammock. What she saw made her mouth severe.
“Is that it?” she demanded. “You've decided to give up?”
Mutely, Covenant flinched. Was his defeat so obvious?
At once, a look of regret changed her expression. She dropped her eyes, and her hands made an aimless half gesture as if they were full of remembered failure. “I didn't mean that,” she said. "That isn't what I came to say. I wasn't sure I should come at all. You've been so hurt-I wanted to give you more time.”
Then she lifted her face to him again, and he saw her sense of purpose sharpen. She was here because she had her own ideas — about hope as well as about him. “But the First was going to come, and I thought I should do it for her.” She gazed into him as if she sought a way to draw him down from his lonely bed. “She wants to know where we're going.”
Where — ? Covenant blinked pain at her. She had not withdrawn her question: she had simply rephrased it. Where? A spasm of grief gripped his heart. His doom was summed up in that one grim word. Where could he go? He was beaten. All his power had been turned against him. There was nowhere left for him to go — nothing left for him to do. For an instant, he feared he would break down in front of her, bereft even of the bare dignity of solitude.
She was saying, “We've got to go somewhere. The Sunbane is still there. Lord Foul is still there. We've lost the One Tree, but nothing else has changed. We can't just sail in circles for the rest of our lives.” She might have been pleading with him, trying to make him see something that was already plain to her.
But he did not heed her. Almost without transition, his hurt became resentment. She was being cruel, whether she realized it or not. He had already betrayed everything he loved with his mistakes and failures and lies. How much more responsibility did she wish him to assume? Bitterly, he replied, “I hear you saved us from the Nicor. You don't need me.”
His tone made her wince. “Don't say that!” she responded intensely. Her eyes were wide with awareness of what was happening to him. She could read every outcry of his wracked spirit. “I need you.”
In response, he felt his despair plunging toward hysteria. It sounded like the glee of the Despiser, laughing in triumph. Perhaps he had gone so far down this road now that he was the Despiser, the perfect tool or avatar of Lord Foul's will. But Linden's expostulation Jerked him back from the brink. It made her suddenly vivid to him too vivid to be treated this way. She was his love, and be had already hurt her too much.
For a moment, the fall he had nearly taken left him reeling. Everything in the cabin seemed imprecise, overburdened with sunlight. He needed shadows and darkness in which to hide from all the things that surpassed him. But Linden still stood there as if she were the centre around which his head whirled. Whether she spoke or remained silent, she was the one demand he could not refuse. Yet he was altogether unready to tell her the truth he had withheld. Her reaction would be the culmination of all his dismay. Instinctively, he groped for some way to anchor himself, some point of simple guilt or passion to which he might cling. Squinting into the sunshine, he asked thickly, “What did they do about Seadreamer?”
At that Linden sagged in relief as though a crisis had been averted. Wanly, she answered, “Honninscrave wanted to cremate him. As if that were possible.” Memories of suffering seemed to fray the words as she uttered them. “But the First ordered the Giants to bury him at sea. For a minute there, I thought Honninscrave was going to attack her. But then something inside him broke. It wasn't physical-but I felt it snap.”
Her tone said that she had sensed that parting like a rupture in her own heart. “He bowed to her as if he didn't know what else to do with all that hurt. Then he went back to the wheeldeck. Back to doing his job.” Her shoulders lifted in a pained shrug. “If you didn't look at his eyes, you wouldn't know he isn't as good as new. But he refused to help them give Seadreamer to the sea.”
As she spoke, his eyes blurred. He was unable to see her clearly in all that light. Seadreamer should have been burned, should have been freed from his horror in a caamora of white fire. Yet the mere thought made Covenant's flesh itch darkly. He had become the thing he hated. Because of a lie. He had known or should have known what was going to happen to him. But his selfish love had kept the truth from her. He could not look at her. Through his teeth, he protested, “Why did you have to do that?”
“Do-?” Her health-sense did not make her prescient. How could she possibly know what he was talking about?
“You threw yourself in the fire.” The explanation came arduously, squeezed out by grief and self recrimination. It was not her fault. No one had the right to blame her. “I sent you away to try to save my life. I didn't know what else to do. For all I knew, it was already too late for anything else the Worm was already awake, I'd already destroyed- ” A clench of anguish closed this throat. For a moment, he could not say, I didn't know how else to save you. Then he swallowed convulsively and went on. “So I sent you away. And you threw yourself in the fire. I was linked to you. The magic tied us together. For the first time, my senses were open. And all I saw was you throwing yourself in the fire.