One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson Read Free Book Online

over the ship. Covenant stood motionless near the rail, as distinct in her sight as if he wore a penumbra of fire. All the rats that could still move were scrabbling in his direction. But now they were driven by their fears, not by the Raver. Instead of trying to harm him, they ran headlong into the Sea.
    Linden had taken two steps toward him before her knees failed. The relief of the Raver’s flight turned her muscles to water. If Cail had not caught her, she would have fallen.
    As she started forward again, Covenant looked down at his leg, saw the blood.
    Everyone else was silent. The Giantship lay still as if it had been nailed to the water. The atmosphere seemed to sweat as realization whitened his features. His eyes widened; his lips fumbled denials; his hands pleaded at the empty air.
    Then she reached him. He stumbled backward, sat down on the coiled hawser. At once, she stooped to his leg, pulled his pants up to the knee.
    The rat-bite had torn a hunk out of his shin between the bones. It was not a large wound, though it bled copiously. For anyone else, the chief danger would have arisen from infection. Even without her bag, she could have treated that.
    But before she could act, Covenant’s whole frame sprang rigid. The force of the convulsion tore a curse from his corded throat. His legs scissored; the involuntary violence of his muscles knocked her away. Only Brinn’s celerity kept him from cracking his head open as he tumbled off the coil.
    Impossible that any venom could work so swiftly!
    Blood suffused his face as he struggled to breathe. Spasms threatened to rend the ligatures of his chest and abdomen. His heels hammered the deck. His beard seemed to bristle like an excrudescence of pain.
    Already his right forearm had begun to darken as if an artery were hemorrhaging.
    This was the way the venom affected him. Whether it was triggered by bee stings or spider bites, it focused on his forearm, where Marid’s fangs had first pierced his flesh. And every relapse multiplied the danger horrendously.
    “Hellfire!” His desperation sounded like fury. “Get back!”
    She felt the pressure rising in him, poison mounting toward power, but she did not obey. Around her, the Giants retreated instinctively, mystified by what they were seeing. But Brinn and Hergrom heldCovenant’s shoulders and ankles, trying to restrain him. Cail touched Linden’s arm in warning. She ignored him.
    Frantically she threw her senses into Covenant, scrambled to catch up with the venom so that she might attempt to block it. Once before, she had striven to help him and had learned that the new dimension of her sensitivity worked both ways: it made her so vulnerable that she experienced his illness as if it were her own, as if she were personally diseased by the Sunbane; but it also enabled her to succor him, shore up his life with her own. Now she raced to enter him, fighting to dam the virulence of the poison. His sickness flooded coruscations of malice through her; but she permitted the violation. The pounding along his veins was on its way to his brain.
    She had to stop it. Without him, there would be no Staff of Law—no meaning for the quest; no hope for the Land; no escape for her from this mad world. His ill hurt her like a repetition of Gibbon-Raver’s defilement; but she did not halt, did not—
    She was already too late. Even with years of training in the use of her health-sense, she would have been no match for this poison. She lacked that power. Covenant tried to shout again. Then the wild magic went beyond all restraint.
    A blast of white fire sprang from his right fist. It shot crookedly into the sky like a howl of pain and rage and protest, rove the air as if he were hurling his extremity at the sun.
    The concussion flung Linden away like a bundle of rags. It knocked Brinn back against the railing. Several of the Giants staggered. Before the blast ended, it tore chunks from the roof of Foodfendhall and burned through two of