Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

When she was sure of the ground under her, she climbed to her feet. “Not that,” she said, trembling. “Fire. The only barrier that I know how to make. I might have broken the Arch.”

Jeremiah did not look at her. His face was slick with sweat, flushed with intense exertion. His tic signalled feverishly. But Covenant faced her. Apart from his ragged respiration, he now seemed completely blank, sealed off; as severe as one of the Masters. The sporadic embers in his eyes were gone, extinguished or shrouded. In spite of her resolve to avoid challenging him, she had made him wary.

“I don’t see how.”

She forced herself to hold his gaze. “Flames would have spread to the trees. I couldn’t prevent that unless I stayed behind.” Surely she was still Covenant’s and Jeremiah’s only protection against the Elohim ? “But even if they didn’t,” even if she had remained to control her conflagration, “the Forestal would have forgotten about the Viles as soon as I raised fire that close to the Deep. Or he would have joined them. They had a common enemy.” That was Covenant’s doing, and Jeremiah’s. “They might have come after us together.” Cold seeped through her cloak, her robe. It oozed into her clothes. “Then-”

Covenant cut her off. “Oh, that. That was never going to happen.”

In a tone of enforced patience, he said. “I know I haven’t given you all the explanations you want. And you obviously don’t like it. But we didn’t have time . I couldn’t afford to spend a few hours teaching you other ways to use the Staff. And I didn’t know I needed to tell you why the Arch wasn’t in danger.

“The Viles aren’t stupid. They’re capable of alliances. But Wildwood isn’t. I don’t mean he’s stupid. He just doesn’t think that way.

“He’s a Forestal. He doesn’t think like people-or even Viles. He thinks like trees. And for them, life is pretty simple. Soil and roots. Wind and sun and leaves. Birds and seeds. Sap. Growth. Decay.” Just for an instant, Covenant’s deliberate restraint cracked. “ Vengeance .” Then he flattened the emotion in his voice. “As far as they’re concerned, there’s no distinction between sentience and fire or axes. Anything that’s mobile and has a mind can kill them. The Viles are just like us. We’re already Wildwood’s enemies. By definition.

“Trust me,” he concluded heavily. “There was never any chance he would join the Viles.”

Never any chance that the logic of the Land’s past might be severed

“He’s right, Mom,” Jeremiah offered. His gaze had paled to the hue of sand. “We couldn’t make Wildwood team up with the Viles even if we wanted to. Which of course we don’t. All we want is to get to Melenkurion Skyweir. So Covenant can save the Land-and you can save me.”

Linden could not argue; not with her boy. But she was not appeased. She had been used. - a rock and a hard place. Covenant and Jeremiah had deliberately exposed her to the Viles-and for what? So that she would surrender Covenant’s ring? And when she ignored him in order to argue with the Viles, he and Jeremiah had created a conflict between them and Caerroil Wildwood.

What would he have done if she had complied? Would he have abandoned her to the debate of the Demondim-makers?

His design for the salvation of the Land made no provision for his ex-wife’s wedding band-or for their fatal son.

“What about the battle’?” she asked in anger and misery. “Doesn’t that affect history?”

“Hell, no,” Covenant snorted as if he had come to the end of his forbearance. It confirms what was going to happen anyway. Now the Viles despise Wildwood. They despise Garroting Deep. They’re ready to listen to the Ravers. And nobody else knows they ever fought. We didn’t change anything.”

He made the statement sound like an accusation.

A moment later, he and Jeremiah prepared their next arch so that they could move on. As she stepped between them, Linden felt like weeping. But she refused her tears; her intensifying bereavement. They had become useless to her.

Sickened by disorientation and doubt, Linden Avery arrived with her companions on the broad plateau of Melenkurion Skyweir high above Garroting Deep early in the afternoon of that same day.

Safe from the Viles, Covenant and Jeremiah moved in longer and longer jumps, carrying their jumble of wood with them. But they continued to respect the threat of Caerroil Wildwood’s power. Instead of crossing over the forest, they followed the line of the Last Hills until they gained the packed snow and ice of the Westron Mountains at the northwestern limit of the Deep. Then they turned toward the south among the crags, devouring distance in instantaneous bursts of twenty or thirty leagues.

The intervening crests and tors blocked Linden’s first sight of Melenkurion Skyweir until Covenant and Jeremiah paused to rest before opening their final portal. While they recovered from their exertions, however, she was given a brief opportunity to study the mighty peak; see it for what it was.

The effects of dislocation and the hard cold of the mountains, the air as sharp and pointed as augury, had already left her gasping. Otherwise Melenkurion Skyweir might have taken her breath away.

Made brilliant by sunshine, it dominated the south. Indeed, it seemed to command the entire range. Although the neighbouring peaks and spires-mottled by endless ice and snow, defined by raw granite against the pale cold depth of the sky-were gigantic in themselves, they resembled children beside the towering head of the Skyweir, with its crown and chin raised to the heavens as if in defiance. As it presented its nearly sheer front to the east, it created the impression that it had been frozen in the act of striding massively toward Landsdrop and the Sunbirth Sea, drawing with it like acolytes or escorts all of the other mountains.

But while its eastern face fell precipitously for fifteen or twenty thousand feet, its other slopes were more gradual. On the north and west, they blended with the lower peaks in scalloped cols and coombs, or in ragged moraines. Those sides held centuries or millennia of impacted ice like glacial fragments; scraps and swaths of ice so old and deep that in sunlight they were more blue than the winter sky.

Backed by rugged grandeur, the single titan of Melenkurion Skyweir confronted the east and Garroting Deep as though here, at least, if nowhere else in the Land, the Earth’s fundamental rock had risen up to watch over the dark trees.

Somehow the mountain appeared impervious to doubt or reproach; immune to time.

The thin, sharp air held no taint, and the angle of the sun had not yet cast the Skyweir’s eastern face into shadow. As a result, Linden could discern the precise contours of the plateau which girdled the tremendous stone. It began among Melenkurion Skyweir’s northern slopes, spread out below the stark eastward cliffs, and disappeared behind the mountain’s bulk toward the south. From her vantage, the plateau resembled a wide altar, a gathering place for humility and worship. The whole mountain and its surrounding rock might have been a fane erected for and sanctified to the august beauty of the world.

And somewhere deep within that temple lay hidden the spring of EarthBlood, the source of the Power of Command: the Power with which Covenant had promised to end Lord Foul’s malice, and Kastenessen’s: the Power that would enable Linden to redeem her son.

She would be left behind; alone and lost in this time. Jeremiah would be free at last. But there would be no one to prevent Roger from seeking out his mother’s ring.