White Gold Wielder by Stephen R. Donaldson Read Free Book Online Page B

thought was immediately and intimately terrible to him. That metal circle meant too much: it contained every hard affirmation of life and love that he had ever wrested from the special cruelty of his loneliness, his leper’s fate. The alternative was better.
Yes
. To destroy. Or to risk destroying in any kind of search for a different outcome.
    His dilemma silenced him. In his previous confrontation with Lord Foul, he had found and used the quiet center of his vertigo, the still point of strength between the contradictions of his plight; but now there seemed to be no center, no place on which he could stand to affirm both the Earth and himself. And the necessity of choice was dreadful.
    But Linden had taken hold of herself again. The conceptions which hurt her most were not the ones which pierced Covenant; and he had given her a chance to recover. The look she cast at him was brittle with stress; but it was alert once more, capable of reading his dismay. For an instant, empathy focused her gaze. Then she swung back toward the Appointed, and her voice bristled dangerously.
    “That’s just speculation. You’re afraid you might lose your precious freedom, so you’re trying to make him responsible for it. You still haven’t told us the truth.”
    Findail faced her; and Covenant saw her flinch as if the
Elohim
’s eyes had burned her. But she did not stop.
    “If you want us to believe you, tell us about Vain.”
    At that, Pindail recoiled.
    Immediately she went after him. “First you imprisoned him, as if he was some kind of crime against you. And you tried to trick us about it, so we wouldn’t know what you were doing. When he escaped, you tried to kill him. Then, when he and Seadreamer found you aboard the ship, you spoke to him.” Her expression was a glower of memory. “You said, ‘Whatever else you may do,
that
I will not suffer.’ ”
    The Appointed started to reply; but she overrode him. “Later you said, ‘Only he whom you name Vain has it within him to expell me. I would give my soul that he should do so.’ And since then you’ve hardly been out of his sight—except when you decide to run away instead of helping us.” She was unmistakably a woman who had learned something about courage. “You’ve been more interested in him than us from the beginning. Why don’t you try explaining
that
for a change?”
    She brandished her anger at the
Elohim
; and for a moment Covenant thought Findail would answer. But then his grief-ensnared visage tightened. In spite of its misery, his expression resembled the hauteur of Chant and Infelice as he said grimly, “Of the Demondim-spawn I will not speak.”
    “That’s
right
,” she shot back at him at once. “Of course you won’t. If you did, you might give us a reason to do some hoping of our own. Then we might not roll over and play dead the way you want.” She matched his glare; and in spite of all his power and knowledge she made him appear diminished and judged. Sourly she muttered, “Oh, go on. Get out of here. You make my stomach hurt.”
    With a stiff shrug, Findail turned away. But before he could depart. Covenant interposed, “Just a minute.” He felt half mad with fear and impossible decisions; but a fragment of lucidity had come to him, and he thought he saw another way in which he had been betrayed. Lena had told him that he was Berek Halfhand reborn. And the Lords he had known had believed that. What had gone wrong? “We couldn’t get a branch of the One Tree. There was no way. But it’s been done before. How did Berek do it?”
    Findail paused at the wall, answered over his shoulder. “The Worm was not made restive by his approach, for he did not win his way with combat. In that age, the One Tree had no Guardian. It was he himself who gave the Tree its ward, setting the Guardian in place so that the vital wood of the world’s life would not again be touched or broken.”
    Berek? Covenant was too astonished to watch the
Elohim
melt out of