The Wounded Land by Stephen R. Donaldson Read Free Book Online

soak into the tissue, she knew she should do something to treat that injury. But an essential part of her had failed, proved itself inadequate to Joan; she could not bear to touch him. She had no answer to what she had seen. For a moment, her eyes were helpless with tears. Only the old habit of severity kept her from weeping. Only her need kept her from fleeing into the night. It drove her to say grimly, “Now you’re going to tell me what’s wrong with her.”
    “Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose I am.”

THREE: Plight
    He guided her back to the living room in silence. His hand on her arm was reluctant, as if he dreaded that mere human contact. When she sat on the sofa, he gestured toward his injury, and left her alone. She was glad to be alone. She was stunned by her failure; she needed time to regain possession of herself.
    What had happened to her? She understood nothing about evil, did not even believe in it as an idea; but she had seen it in Joan’s feral hunger. She was trained to perceive the world in terms of dysfunction and disease, medication and treatment, success or death. Words like good or evil meant nothing to her. But Joan—! Where did such malignant ferocity come from? And how—?
    When Covenant returned, with his right hand wrapped in a white bandage, she stared at him, demanding explanations.
    He stood before her, did not meet her gaze. The slouch of his posture gave him a look of abandonment; the skin at the corners of his eyes crumpled like dismay pinching his flesh. But his mouth had learned the habit of defiance; it was twisted with refusals. After a moment, he muttered, “So you see why I didn’t want you to know about her,” and began to pace.
    “Nobody knows”—the words came as if he were dredging them out of the privacy of his heart—“except Berenford and Roman. The law doesn’t exactly smile on people who keep other people prisoner—even in her condition. I don’t have any legal rights at all as far as she’s concerned. What I’m supposed to do is turn her over to the authorities. But I’ve been living without the benefit of law so long now I don’t give a damn.”
    “But what’s wrong with her?” Linden could not keep her voice from twitching; she was too tightly clenched to sound steady.
    He sighed. “She needs to hurt me. She’s starving for it—that’s what makes her so violent. It’s the best way she can think of to punish herself.”
    With a wrench, Linden’s analytical instinct began to function again. Paranoiac, she winced to herself. He’s paranoiac. But aloud she insisted, “But why? What’s happened to her?”
    He stopped, looked at her as if he were trying to gauge her capacity for the truth, then went back to his pacing.
    “Of course,” he murmured, “that isn’t how Berenford sees it. He thinks it’s a psychiatric problem. The only reason he hasn’t tried to get her away from me is because he understands why I want to take care of her. Or part of it. His wife is a paraplegic, and he would never consider dumping the problem off on anyone else. I haven’t told him about her taste for blood.”
    He was evading her question. She struggled for patience. “Isn’t it a psychiatric problem? Hasn’t Dr. Berenford been able to rule out physical causes? What else could it be?”
    Covenant hesitated, then said distantly, “He doesn’t know what’s going on.”
    “You keep saying that. It’s too convenient.”
    “No,” he retorted, “it’s not convenient. It’s the truth. You don’t have the background to understand it.”
    “How can you be so goddamn sure?” The clench of her self-command made her voice raw. “I’ve spent half my life coping with other people’spain.” She wanted to add, Can’t you get it through your head that I’m a doctor? But her throat locked on those words. She had failed—
    For an instant, his gaze winced as if he were distressed by the idea that she did in fact have the necessary background. But then he