Her hair straggled across her face. She thrust the tresses aside and saw Covenant swimming underwater toward her. The clarity of the lake made him appear at once close enough to touch and too far away to ever be equalled.
The sight burned her like the water's chill. She could see him-but not herself. Looking down at her body, she saw only the reflection of the sky and the hills. Her physical substance seemed to terminate at the waterline. When she raised her hand, it was plainly visible-yet her forearm and elbow beneath the surface were invisible. She saw only Covenant as he took hold of her legs and tugged her down to him.
Yet when her head was underwater and she opened her eyes, her limbs and torso reappeared as if she had crossed a plane of translation into another kind of existence.
His face rose before her. He kissed her happily, then swung around behind her as they bobbed back upward. Breaking water, he took a deep breath before he bore her down again. But this time as they sank he gripped her head in his hands, began to scrub her scalp and hair. And the keen cold water washed the dirt and oil away like an atonement.
She twisted in his grasp, returned his kiss. Then she pushed him away and regained the surface td gulp air as if it were the concentrated elixir of pleasure.
At once, he appeared before her, cleared his face with a jerk of his head, and gazed at her with a light like laughter in his eyes.
“You-!” she panted, almost laughing herself. “You've got to tell me.” She wanted to put her arms around him; but then she would not be able to speak. “It's wonderful!” Above her, the tops of the western hills were lit by the desert sun, and that shining danced across the tarn, “How come I disappear and you don't?”
“I already told you!” he replied, splashing water at her. “Wild magic and venom. The keystone of the Arch.” Swimming in this lake, he could say even those words without diminishing her gladness. “The first time I was here, I couldn't see myself either. You're normal!” His voice rose exuberantly. "Glimmermere recognizes me!”
Then she did fling her arms about his neck; and they sank together into the embrace of the tarn. Intuitively, for the first time, she understood his hope. She did not know what it meant, had no way to estimate its implications. But she felt it shining in him like the fiery water; and she saw that his certainty was not the confidence of despair. Or not entirely. Venom and wild magic: despair and hope. The Banefire had fused them together in him and made them clean.
No, it was not true to say that she understood it. But she recognized it, as Glimmermere did. And she hugged and kissed him fervently-splashed water at him and giggled like a girl-shared the eldritch lake with him until at last the cold required her to climb out onto a sheet of rock along one edge and accept the warmth of the desert sun.
That heat sobered her rapidly. As Glimmermere evaporated from her sensitive skin, she felt the Sunbane again. Its touch sank into her like Gibbon's, drawing trails of desecration along her bones. After all, the quenching of the Banefire had not significantly weakened or even hampered Lord Foul's corruption. The Land's plight remained, unaltered by Covenant's certitude or her own grateful cleansing. Viscerally unwilling to lie naked under the desert sun, she retrieved her clothes and Covenant's, dressed herself while he watched as if he were still hungry for her. But slowly his own high spirits faded. When he had resumed his clothing, she saw that he was ready for the questions he must have known she would ask.
“Covenant,” she said softly, striving for a tone that would make him sure of her, “I don't understand. After what I tried to do to you, I don't exactly have the right to make demands.” But he dismissed her attempted possession with a shrug and a grimace; so she let it go. “And anyway I trust you. But I just don't understand why you want to go face Foul. Even if he can't break you, he'll hurt you terribly. If you can't use your power, how can you possibly fight him?”
He did not flinch. But she saw him take a few mental steps backward as if his answer required an inordinate amount of care. His emanations became studied, complex. He might have been searching for the best way to tell her a lie. Yet when he began to speak, she heard no falsehood in him; her percipience would have screamed at the sound of falsehood. His care was the caution of a man who did not want to cause any more pain.
“I'm not sure. I don't think I can fight him at all. But I keep asking myself, how can he fight me?
“You remember Kasreyn.” A wry quirk twisted the comer of his mouth. “How could you forget? Well, he talked quite a bit while he was trying to break me out of that silence. He told me that he used pure materials and pure arts, but he couldn't create anything pure. In a flawed world purity cannot endure. Thus within each of my works I must perforce place one small flaw, else there would be no work at all. That was why he wanted my ring. He said, 'It's imperfection is the very paradox of which the Earth is made, and with it a master may form perfect works and fear nothing.' If you look at it that way, an alloy is an imperfect metal.”
As he spoke, he turned from her slowly, not to avoid her gaze, but to look at the fundamental reassurance of his reflection in the tarn. “Well, I'm a kind of alloy. Foul has made me exactly what he wants-what he needs. A tool he can use to perfect his freedom. And destroy the Earth in the process.
“But the question is my freedom, not his. We've talked about the necessity of freedom. I've said over and over again that he can't use a tool to get what he wants. If he's going to win, he has to do it through the choices of his victims. I've said that.” He glanced at her as if he feared how she might react. “I believed it. But I'm not sure it's true anymore. I think alloys transcend the normal strictures. If I really am nothing more than a tool now, Foul can use me any way he wants, and there won't be anything we can do about it.”
Then he faced her again, cocked his fists on his hips. “But that I don't believe. I don't believe I'm anybody's tool. And I don't think Foul can win through the kinds of choices any of us has been making. The kind of choice is crucial. The Land wasn't destroyed when I refused Mhoram's summons for the sake of a snake-bitten kid. It isn't going to be destroyed just because Foul forced me to choose between my own safety and Joan's. And the opposite is true, too. If I'm the perfect tool to bring down the Arch of Time, then I'm also the perfect tool to preserve it. Foul can't win unless I choose to let him.”
His surety was so clear that Linden almost believed him. Yet within herself she winced because she knew he might be wrong. He had indeed spoken often of the importance of freedom. But the Elohim did not see the world's peril in those terms. They feared for the Earth because Sun-Sage and ring-wielder were not one-because he had no percipience to guide his choices and she had no power to make her choices count. And if he had not yet seen the full truth of Lord Foul's machinations, he might choose wrongly despite his lucid determination.
But she did not tell him what she was thinking. She would have to find her own answer to the trepidation of the Elohim. And her fear was for him rather than for herself. As long as he loved her, she would be able to remain with him. And as long as she was with him, she would have the chance to use her health-sense on his behalf. That was all she asked: the opportunity to try to help him, redeem the harm of her past mistakes and failures. Then if he and the Land and the Earth were lost, she would have no one to blame but herself.
The responsibility frightened her. It implied an acknowledgment of the role the Elohim had assigned to her, an acceptance of the risk of Gibbon's malign promise. You are being forged- But there had been other promises also Covenant had avowed that he would never cede his ring to the Despiser. And the old man on Haven Farm had said. You will not fail, however he may assail you. For the first time, she took comfort in those words.