But he did not silence his power. He altered it. Suddenly, wild magic flooded into her through his embrace. She went rigid with dismay and intuitive comprehension, tried to resist. But she was composed of nothing except flesh and blood and emotion; and he had changed in a moment from unchecked virulence to wild magic incarnate, deliberate mastery. Her grip on his fire was too partial and inexperienced to refuse him.
His might bore her away. It did not touch her physically. It did not unbind her arms from him, did not harm her body. But it translated everything. Rushing through her like a torrent, it swept her out of herself, frayed her as if she were a mound of sand eroded by the sea, hurled her out among the stars.
Night burst by her on all sides. The heavens writhed about her as if she were the pivot of their fate. Abysms of loneliness stretched out like absolute grief in every direction, contradicting the fact that she still felt Covenant in her arms, still saw the enclosure of the well. And those sensations were fading. She clung to them with frenzy; but wild magic burned them to ash in her grasp and cast her adrift. She floated away into fathomless midnight.
Echoing without sound or hope, Covenant's voice rose after her:
“Save my life!”
She was hurtling toward a fire which became yellow and vicious as she approached it. It defined the night, pulling the dark around it so that it was defended on all sides by blackness.
Then the blaze began to fade as if it had already consumed most of its fuel. As the flames shrank, she sprawled to the ground, lay on her back on a surface of stone. She was in two places at once. The wild magic continued to flow through her, linking her to Covenant, to the cavern of the One Tree. But at the same time she was elsewhere. Her head throbbed as if she had been struck a heavy blow behind one ear. When she tried to rise, the pain almost broke the fragile remnant of her link.
With a fatal slowness, her sight squeezed itself into focus.
She was lying on a rough plane of native rock beside the relict of a bonfire. The rock was in the bottom of a barren and abandoned hollow. Nothing obscured her view of the night sky. The stars were distant and inconceivable. But around the rims of the hollow she saw shrubs, brush, and trees, gaunt and spectral in the dark.
She knew where she was, what Covenant was doing to her. Defying the pain, she heaved upright and faced the body stretched at her side.
His body.
He lay as if he had been crucified on the stone. But the wound was not in his hands or feet or side: it was in his chest. The knife jutted like a plea from the junction of his ribs and sternum. The viscid and dying pool of his life dominated the triangle of blood which had been painted on the rock.
She felt that terrible amounts of time had passed, though she was only three heartbeats away from the cavern of the One Tree. The link was still open. Covenant was still pouring wild magic toward her, still striving to thrust her back into her old world. And that link kept her health-sense alight. When she looked at his body beside her-at the flesh outraged by the approach of death-she knew that he was alive.
The blood oozing from around the knife, the internal bleeding, the loss of fluid were nearly terminal; but not yet, not yet. Somehow, the blade had missed his heart. Flickers of life ached in his lungs, quivered in the failing muscles of his heart, yearned in the passages of his brain. He could be saved. It was still medically feasible to save him.
But before her own heart beat again, another perception altered everything.
Nothing would save him unless he did to himself what he had just done to her-unless he came to reoccupy his dying body. While his spirit, the part of him which desired life, remained absent, his flesh could not rally. He was too far from any other kind of help, too far even from her medical bag. Only his will for life had a chance to sustain him. And his will still burned in the cavern of the One Tree, spending itself to preserve her from doom. He had sent her away as he had once sent Joan, so that his life would be forfeit instead of hers.
First her father.
Then her mother.
Now Covenant.
Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and white gold wielder, leper and lover, who had taught her to treasure the danger of being human.
Dying here in front of her.
Her heart lurched wildly. The link trembled. She started to protest, No! But before the word reached utterance she changed it into something else. As she scrambled to her feet, she clawed at the bond of power connecting her to Covenant. Her senses raced back along the current of wild magic. It was all she had. She had to make it serve her, wrest it from his grasp if necessary, anything rather than permit his death. Striving with every fraction of her strength, she cried out across the distance:
“Covenant!”
The sound fell stillborn in the woods. She did not know how to make him hear her. She clung to the link, but it resisted her service. If she had had the entire facilities and staff of a modern emergency room at her immediate disposal, she would not have been able to save him. His grip on the wild magic was too strong. The effort of mastering it had made him strong. Despair made him strong. And she had never wielded power before. In a direct contest for control of his might, she was no match for him.
But her percipience still lived. She knew him in that way more intimately than she had ever known herself. She felt his fierce grief and extremity across the gap between worlds. She knew—
Knew how to reach him.
She did not stop to count the cost. There was no time. Madly, she hurled herself into the dying bonfire as if it were her personal caamora.
For one splintered instant, those yellow flames leaped at her flesh. Harbingers of searing shot along her nerves.
Then Covenant saw her peril. Instinctively, he tried to snatch her back.
At once, she took hold of the link with every finger of her passion. Guided by her senses, she began to fight her way toward the source of the connection.
The woods became as insubstantial as mist, then fell into shreds as the winds between the stars tugged through them. The stone under her feet evaporated into darkness. Covenant's prone form denatured, disappeared. She began to fall, as bright as a comet, into the endless chasm of the heavens.
As she hurtled, she strove to muster words. You've got to come with me! It's the only way I can save you! But suddenly the power was quenched as if Covenant himself had been snuffed out. Her spiritual plummet among the stars seemed to become a physical plunge, a fall from a height which no human body might endure. Her heart wanted to scream, but there was no air, had never been any air, her lungs could not support the ether through which she dropped. She had gone off the edge of her fate. No cry remained which would have made any difference.
Helpless to catch herself, she stumbled forward onto her face on the floor of the cavern. Her pulses raced, chest laboured. Reminders of the bonfire flushed over her skin. A moment passed before she was able to realize that she had suffered no hurt.
Hands came to her aid. She needed the help. Her brain was giddy with transcendent dread. The stone seemed to buck and tremor under her. But the hands lifted her upright. She read the nature of their strength: they were Haruchai hands, Cail's hands. She welcomed them.
But she was blind. The floor went on lurching. The Isle had begun to tremble like the presage of a convulsion. There was no light. The stars of the Worm's aura were gone. Covenant's fire was gone. Dazzled by powers and desperation, her eyes refused to adjust to the gloom. All her companions were invisible. They might have been slain.