Hollian thought for a moment, touched Covenant's swelling gently. Then she said, “I will attempt it. But I must await the sun's rising. And I must know how this harm came upon him.”
Linden's self-command did not reach so far. Sunrise would be too late. Covenant could not last until dawn. The Chosen! she rasped at herself. Dear God. She left the eh-Brand's questions for Sunder to answer. As he began a taut account of what had happened to Covenant, Linden's attention slipped away to the Unbeliever's wracked and failing body.
She could feel the poison seeping past the useless constriction of his shirt sleeve. Death gnawed like leprosy at the sinews of his life. He absolutely could not last until dawn.
Her mother had begged to die; but he wanted to live. He had exchanged himself for Joan, had smiled as if the prospect were a benison; yet his every act showed that he wanted to live. Perhaps he was mad; perhaps his talk about a Despiser was paranoia rather than truth. But the conclusions he drew from it were ones she could not refute. She had learned in Crystal Stonedown that she shared them.
Now he was dying.
She had to help him. She was a doctor. Surely she could do something about his illness. Impossible that her strange acuity could not cut both ways. With an inward whimper, she abandoned resistance, bared her heart.
Slowly, she reached her awareness into him, inhabited his flesh with her private self. She felt his eviscerated respiration as her own, suffered the heat of his fever, clung to him more intimately than she had ever held to any man.
Then she was foundering in venom. She was powerless to repel it. Nausea filled her like the sick breath of the old man who had told her to Be true. No part of her knew how to give life in this way. But what she could do, she did. She fought for him with the same grim and secretly hopeless determination which had compelled her to study medicine as if it were an act of rage against the ineffectuality of her parents-a man and woman who had understood nothing about life except death, and had coveted the thing they understood with the lust of lovers. They had taught her the importance of efficacy. She had pursued it without rest for fifteen years.
That pursuit had taken her to Haven Farm. And there her failure in the face of Joan's affliction had cast her whole life into doubt. Now that doubt wore the taste and corruption of Covenant's venom. She could not quench the poison. But she tried by force of will to shore up the last preterite barriers of his life. This sickness was a moral evil; it offended her just as Marid had offended her, as Nassic's murder and the hot knife had offended her; and she denied it with every beat of her heart. She squeezed l air into his lungs, pressured his pulse to continue, opposed the gnawing and spread of the ill.
Alone, she kept him alive through the remainder of the night.
The bones of her forehead ached with shared fever when Sunder brought her back to herself. Dawn was in the air. He and Hollian had drawn the raft toward the riverbank. Linden looked about her tabidly. Her soul was full of ashes. A part of her panted over and over, No. Never again. The River ran through a lowland which should have been composed of broad leas; but instead, the area was a grey waste where mountains of preternatural grass had been beaten down by three days of torrential rain, then rotted by the sun of pestilence. As the approach of day stirred the air, currents of putrefaction shifted back and forth across the Mithil.
But she saw why Sunder and Hollian had chosen this place. Near the bank, a sandbar angled partway across the watercourse, forming a swath where Covenant could lie, away from the fetid grass.
The Stonedownors secured the raft, lilted Covenant to the sand, then raised him into Linden's arms. Hugging him erect, though she herself swayed with exhaustion, she watched as Sunder and Hollian hastened to the riverbank and began hunting for stone. Soon they were out of sight.
With the thin remnant of her strength, Linden confronted the sun.
It hove over the horizon wearing incarnadine like the sails of a plague-ship. She welcomed its warmth-needed to be warm, yearned to be dry-but its corona made her moan with empty repugnance. She lowered Covenant to the sand, then sat beside him, studied him as if she were afraid to close her eyes. She did not know how soon the insects would begin to swarm.
But when Sunder and Hollian returned, they were excited. The tension between them had not relaxed; but they had found something important to them both. Together, they carried a large bush which they had uprooted as if it were a treasure.
“Voure!” Hollian called as she and Sunder brought the bush to the sandbar. Her pale skin was luminous in the sunlight. “This is good fortune. Voure is greatly rare.” They set the bush down nearby, and at once began to strip its leaves.
“Rare, indeed,” muttered Sunder. “Such names are spoken in the Rede, but I have never beheld voure.”
“Does it heal?” Linden asked faintly.
In response, the eh-Brand gave her a handful of leaves. They were as pulpy as sponges; clear sap dripped from their broken stems. Their pungent odour made her wince.
“Rub the sap upon your face and arms,” said Hollian. “Voure is a potent ward against insects.”
Linden stared until her senses finally registered the truth of the eh-Brand's words. Then she obeyed. When she had smeared sap over herself, she did the same to Covenant.
Sunder and Hollian were similarly busy. After they had finished, he stored the remaining leaves in his knapsack.
“Now,” the eh-Brand said promptly, “I must do what lies within my capacity to restore the Halfhand.”
“His name is Covenant,” Linden protested dimly. To her, Halfhand was a Clave word: she did not like it.
Hollian blinked as if this were irrelevant, made no reply.
“Do you require my aid?” asked Sunder. His stiffness had returned. In some way that Linden could not fathom, Hollian annoyed or threatened him.
The eh-Brand's response was equally curt. “I think not.”
“Then I will put this voure to the test.” He stood up. “I will go in search of aliantha.” Moving brusquely, he went back to the riverbank, stalked away through the rotting grass.
Hollian wasted no time. From within her shift, she drew out a small iron dirk and her Iianar wand. Kneeling at Covenant's right shoulder, she placed the Iianar on his chest, took the dirk in her left hand.
The sun was above the horizon now, exerting its corruption. But the pungence of the voure seemed to form a buckler against putrefaction. And though large insects had begun to buzz and gust in all directions, they did not come near the sandbar. Linden ached to concentrate on such things. She did not want to watch the eh-Brand's bloody rites. Did not want to see them fail. Yet she attached her eyes to the knife, forced herself to follow it.
Like Sunder's left forearm, Hollian's right palm was laced with old scars. She drew the iron across her flesh. A runnel of dark rich blood started down her bare wrist.
Setting down her dirk, she took up the Iianar in her bleeding hand. Her lips moved, but she made no sound.
The atmosphere focused around her wand. Abruptly, flames licked the wood. Fire the colour of the sun's aura skirled around her ringers. Her voice became an audible chant, but the words were alien to Linden. The fire grew stronger; it covered Hollian's hand, began to tongue the blood on her wrist.
As she chanted, her fire sent out long delicate shoots like tendrils of wisteria. They grew to the sand, stretched along the water like veins of blood in the current, went searching up the riverbank as if they sought a place to root.
Supported by a shimmering network of power tendrils, she tightened her chant, and lowered the Iianar to Covenant's envenomed forearm. Linden flinched instinctively. She could taste the ill in the fire, feel the preternatural force of the Sunbane. Hollian drew on the same sources of power which Sunder tapped with his Sunstone. But after a moment Linden discerned that the fire's effect was not ill. Hollian fought poison with poison. When she lifted her wand from Covenant's arm, the tension of his swelling had already begun to recede.
Carefully, sh
e shifted her power to his forehead, set flame to the fever in his skull.
At once, his body sprang rigid, head jerked back; a scream ripped his throat. From his ring, an instant white detonation blasted sand over the two women and the River.
Before Linden could react, he went completely limp.
The eh-Brand sagged at his side. The flame vanished from her Iianar, leaving the wood pale, clean, and whole. In the space of a heartbeat, the fire-tendrils extinguished themselves; but they continued to echo across Linden's sight.
She rushed to examine Covenant. Apprehension choked her. But as she touched him, he inhaled deeply, began to breathe as if he were only asleep. She felt for his pulse; it was distinct and secure.
Relief flooded through her. The Mithil and the sun grew oddly dim. She was prone on the sand without realizing that she had reclined. Her left hand lay in the water. That cool touch seemed to be all that kept her from weeping.
In a weak voice, Hollian asked, “Is he well?”
Linden did not answer because she had no words.
Shortly, Sunder returned, his hands laden with treasure-berries. He seemed to understand the exhaustion of his companions. Without speaking, he bent over Linden, slipped a berry between her lips.
Its deliciousness restored her. She sat up, estimated the amount of aliantha Sunder held, took her share. The berries fed a part of her which had been stretched past its limits by her efforts to keep Covenant alive.
Hollian watched in weariness and dismay as Sunder consumed his portion of the aliantha. But she could not bring herself to touch the berries he offered her.
As her strength returned, Linden propped Covenant into a half-sitting position, then pitted berries and fed them to him. Their effect was almost immediate; they steadied his respiration, firmed his muscle tone, cleansed the colour of his skin.
Deliberately, she looked at Hollian. The exertion of aiding Covenant had left the eh-Brand in need of aliment. And her searching gaze could find no other answer. With a shudder of resolution, she accepted a berry, put it in her mouth. After a moment, she bit down on it.
Her own pleasure startled her. Revelation glowed in her eyes, and her fear seemed to fall away like a discarded mantle.
With a private sigh, Linden lowered Covenant's head to the sand, and let herself rest.
The companions remained on the sandbar for a good part of the morning, recuperating. Then, when Covenant's swelling had turned from black to a mottled yellow-purple, and had declined from his shoulder, Linden judged that he was able to travel. They set off down the Mithil once more.
The voure continued to protect them from insects. Hollian said the sap would retain its potency for several days; and Linden began to believe this when she discovered that the odour still clung to her after more than half a day immersed in the water.
In the lurid red of sunset, they stopped on a broad slope of rock spreading northward out of the River. After the strain of the past days, Linden hardly noticed the discomfort of sleeping on stone. Yet part of her stayed in touch with Covenant, like a string tuned to resonate sympathetically at a certain pitch. In the middle of the night, she found herself staring at the acute sickle of the moon. Covenant was sitting beside her. He seemed unaware of her. Quietly, he moved to the water's edge for a drink.
She followed, anxious that he might be suffering from a relapse of delirium. But when he saw her, he recognized her with a nod, and drew her away to a place where they could at least whisper without disturbing their companions. The way he carried his arm showed that it was tender but utile. His expression was obscure in the vague light; but his voice sounded lucid.
“Who's the woman?”
She stood close to him, peered into the shadow of his countenance. “You don't remember?”
“I remember bees.” He gave a quick shudder. “That Raver. Nothing else.”
Her efforts to preserve his life had left her vulnerable to him. She had shared his extremity; and now he seemed to have a claim on her which she would never be able to refuse. Even her heartbeat belonged to him, “You had a relapse,”
“A relapse-?” He tried to flex his sore arm.
“You were stung, and went into shock. It was like another snakebite in the same place, only worse. I thought-” She touched his shoulder involuntarily. “I thought you weren't going to make it.”
“When was that?”
“A day and a half ago.”
“How did-?” he began, then changed his mind. “Then what?”
“Sunder and I couldn't do anything for you. We just went on.” She started to speak rapidly. “That night, we came to another Stonedown.” She told him the story as if she were in a hurry to reach the end of it. But when she tried to describe the power of his ring, he stopped her. “That's impossible,” he whispered.
“You don't remember at all?”
“No. But I tell you it's impossible. I've always-always had to have some kind of trigger. The proximity of some other power. Like the orcrest. It never happens by itself. Never.”
“Maybe it was the Rider.”
“Yes.” He grasped the suggestion gratefully. “That must be it. That sceptre-his rukh” He repeated the name she had told him as if he needed reassurance.
She nodded, then resumed her narration.
When she was done, he spoke his thoughts hesitantly. “You say I was delirious. I must have been-I don't remember any of it. Then this Rider tried to attack. All of a sudden, I had power.” His tone conveyed the importance of the question. “What set me off? I shouldn't have been able to defend myself, if I was that sick. Did you get hurt? Did Sunder-?”
“No.” Suddenly, the darkness between them was full of significance. She had risked herself extravagantly to keep him alive-and for what? In his power and delirium he had believed nothing about her except that she had abandoned him. And even now he did not know what he had cost her. No. She could hardly muffle her bitterness as she replied, “We're all right. It wasn't that.”
Softly, he asked, “Then what was it?”
“I made you think Joan was in danger.” He flinched; but she went on, struck at him with words. “It was the only thing I could find. You weren't going to save yourself-weren't going to save me. You kept accusing me of deserting you. By God,” she grated, “I've stood by you since the first time I saw Joan. No matter how crazy you are, I've stood by you. You'd be dead now if it weren't for me. But you kept accusing me, and I couldn't reach you. The only name that meant anything to you was Joan.”
She hurt him. His right hand made a gesture toward her, winced away. In the darkness, he seemed to have no eyes; his sockets gaped at her as if he had been blinded. She expected him to protest that he had often tried to help her, often striven to give her what support he could. But he stood there as he had stood when she had first confronted him on Haven Farm, upright under the weight of impossible burdens. When he spoke, his voice was edged with rage and exquisite grief.
"She was my wife. She divorced me because I had leprosy. Of all the things that happened to me, that was the worst. God knows I've committed crimes. I've raped-killed- betrayed-But those were things I did, and I did everything I could to make restitution. She treated me as if I were a crime. Just being who I was, just suffering from a physical affliction I couldn't have prevented or cured anymore than I could have prevented or cured ray own mortality, I terrified her. That was the worst. Because I believed it. I felt that way about leprosy myself.
“It gave her a claim on me, I spent eleven years living with it — I couldn't bear being the cause. I sold my soul to pay that debt, and it doesn't make any difference.” The muscles of his face contorted at the memory. “I'm a leper. I'm never going to stop being a leper. I'm never going to be able to quit her claim on me. It goes deeper than any choice.” His words were the colour of blood.
“But, Linden,” he went on; and his direct appeal stung her heart. “She's my ex-wife.” In spite of his efforts to control it, his voice carried fatality like a l
ament. “If the past is any indication, I'm never going to see her again.”
She clung to him with her eyes. Uncertainties thronged in her. Why would he not see Joan again? How had he sold himself? How much had he withheld? But in her vulnerability one question mattered more than all the others. As steadily, noncommittally, as she could, she asked, “Do you want to see her again?”
To her tense ears, the simplicity of his reply bore the weight of a declaration. “No. I don't particularly like being a leper.”
She turned away so that he would not see the tears in her eyes. She did not want to be so exposed to him. She was in danger of losing herself. And yet her relief was as poignant as love. Over her shoulder, she said flatly, “Get some rest. You need it.” Then she went back to where Sunder and Hollian lay, stretched out on the rock, and spent a long time shivering as if she were caught in a winter of unshielded loneliness.
The sun had already risen, red and glowering, when she awoke. A pile of aliantha near Sunder's knapsack showed that the Stonedownors had foraged successfully for food. Covenant and the eh-Brand stood together, making each other's acquaintance. Sunder sat nearby as if he were grinding his teeth.
Linden climbed to her feet. Her body felt abused by the hardness of her bed, but she ignored it. Averting her eyes from Covenant as if in shame, she went to the river to wash her face.
When she returned, Sunder divided the treasure-berries. The travellers ate in silence: aliantha was a food which imposed stillness. Yet Linden could not deafen herself to the ambience of her companions. Covenant was as rigid as he had ever been on Haven Farm. Hollian's delicate features wore perplexity as if it were a kind of fear. And the darkness of the Graveller's mood had not lifted-resentment directed at the eh-Brand, or at himself.
They made Linden feel lost. She was responsible for their various discomforts-and inadequate to do anything about it. In sustaining Covenant, she had opened doors which she now could not close, though she swore she would close them. Muttering sourly to herself, she finished her aliantha, scattered the seeds beyond the rock, then went severely through the motions of preparing to enter the River.
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