Sunder spat a curse. Abruptly, he abandoned Hollian, came limping through the water to take some of Covenant's weight. But he was livid with pain and indignation. Over his shoulder, he rasped at Hollian, “Your suspicion is unjust!”
“Perhaps.” The eh-Brand trod water twenty feet away; her head was a piece of darkness among the shadows of the River. “Assuredly, I have been unjust to Linden Avery.” After a moment, she demanded, “What purpose drives you to Revelstone?”
“That's where the answers are.” As quickly as it had come, Linden's anger vanished, and a bone-deep dread took its place. She had been through too much. Without Sunder's aid, she could not have borne Covenant back to the raft. “Covenant thinks he can fight the Sunbane. But he has to understand it first. That's why he wants to talk to the Clave.”
“Fight?” asked Hollian in disbelief. “Do you speak of altering the Sunbane?”
“Why not?” Linden clung to the raft. Dismay clogged her limbs. “Isn't that what you do?”
“I?”
“Aren't you a Sun-Sage?”
“No!” Hollian declared sharply. “That is a lie, uttered by Sivit na-Mhoram-wist to strengthen his claim upon me. I am an eh-Brand. I see the sun. I do not shape it.”
To Linden, Sunder growled, “Then we have no need of her.”
Dimly, Linden wondered why he felt threatened by Hollian. But she lacked the courage to ask him. “We need all the help we can get,” she murmured. “I want her with us. If she's willing.”
“Why?”
At the same time, Hollian asked, “Of what use am I to you?”
Without warning, Linden's throat filled with weeping. She felt like a lorn child, confronted by extremities she could not meet. She had to muster all her severity in order to articulate, “He's dying. I can feel it.” In a shudder of memory, she saw Marid's fangs. “It's worse than it was before. I need help.” The help she needed was vivid and appalling to her; but she could not stop. “One of you isn't enough. You'll just bleed to death. Or I will.” Impelled by her fear of losing Covenant, she wrenched her voice at Hollian. “I need power. To heal him.”
She had not seen the eh-Brand approach; but now Hollian was swimming at her side. Softly, the young woman said, “Perhaps such shedding is unnecessary. It may be that I can succour him. An eh-Brand has some knowledge of healing. But I do not wish to fall prey to the Clave a second time.”
Linden gritted her teeth until her jaw ached, containing her desperation. “You've seen what he can do. Do you think he's going to walk into Revelstone and just let them sacrifice him?”
Hollian thought for a moment, touched Covenant's swelling gently. Then she said, “I will attempt it. But I must await the sun's rising. And I must know how this harm came upon him.”
Linden's self-command did not reach so far. Sunrise would be too late. Covenant could not last until dawn. The Chosen! she rasped at herself. Dear God. She left the eh-Brand's questions for Sunder to answer. As he began a taut account of what had happened to Covenant, Linden's attention slipped away to the Unbeliever's wracked and failing body.
She could feel the poison seeping past the useless constriction of his shirt sleeve. Death gnawed like leprosy at the sinews of his life. He absolutely could not last until dawn.
Her mother had begged to die; but he wanted to live. He had exchanged himself for Joan, had smiled as if the prospect were a benison; yet his every act showed that he wanted to live. Perhaps he was mad; perhaps his talk about a Despiser was paranoia rather than truth. But the conclusions he drew from it were ones she could not refute. She had learned in Crystal Stonedown that she shared them.
Now he was dying.
She had to help him. She was a doctor. Surely she could do something about his illness. Impossible that her strange acuity could not cut both ways. With an inward whimper, she abandoned resistance, bared her heart.
Slowly, she reached her awareness into him, inhabited his flesh with her private self. She felt his eviscerated respiration as her own, suffered the heat of his fever, clung to him more intimately than she had ever held to any man.
Then she was foundering in venom. She was powerless to repel it. Nausea filled her like the sick breath of the old man who had told her to Be true. No part of her knew how to give life in this way. But what she could do, she did. She fought for him with the same grim and secretly hopeless determination which had compelled her to study medicine as if it were an act of rage against the ineffectuality of her parents-a man and woman who had understood nothing about life except death, and had coveted the thing they understood with the lust of lovers. They had taught her the importance of efficacy. She had pursued it without rest for fifteen years.
That pursuit had taken her to Haven Farm. And there her failure in the face of Joan's affliction had cast her whole life into doubt. Now that doubt wore the taste and corruption of Covenant's venom. She could not quench the poison. But she tried by force of will to shore up the last preterite barriers of his life. This sickness was a moral evil; it offended her just as Marid had offended her, as Nassic's murder and the hot knife had offended her; and she denied it with every beat of her heart. She squeezed l air into his lungs, pressured his pulse to continue, opposed the gnawing and spread of the ill.
Alone, she kept him alive through the remainder of the night.
The bones of her forehead ached with shared fever when Sunder brought her back to herself. Dawn was in the air. He and Hollian had drawn the raft toward the riverbank. Linden looked about her tabidly. Her soul was full of ashes. A part of her panted over and over, No. Never again. The River ran through a lowland which should have been composed of broad leas; but instead, the area was a grey waste where mountains of preternatural grass had been beaten down by three days of torrential rain, then rotted by the sun of pestilence. As the approach of day stirred the air, currents of putrefaction shifted back and forth across the Mithil.
But she saw why Sunder and Hollian had chosen this place. Near the bank, a sandbar angled partway across the watercourse, forming a swath where Covenant could lie, away from the fetid grass.
The Stonedownors secured the raft, lilted Covenant to the sand, then raised him into Linden's arms. Hugging him erect, though she herself swayed with exhaustion, she watched as Sunder and Hollian hastened to the riverbank and began hunting for stone. Soon they were out of sight.
With the thin remnant of her strength, Linden confronted the sun.
It hove over the horizon wearing incarnadine like the sails of a plague-ship. She welcomed its warmth-needed to be warm, yearned to be dry-but its corona made her moan with empty repugnance. She lowered Covenant to the sand, then sat beside him, studied him as if she were afraid to close her eyes. She did not know how soon the insects would begin to swarm.
But when Sunder and Hollian returned, they were excited. The tension between them had not relaxed; but they had found something important to them both. Together, they carried a large bush which they had uprooted as if it were a treasure.
“Voure!” Hollian called as she and Sunder brought the bush to the sandbar. Her pale skin was luminous in the sunlight. “This is good fortune. Voure is greatly rare.” They set the bush down nearby, and at once began to strip its leaves.
“Rare, indeed,” muttered Sunder. “Such names are spoken in the Rede, but I have never beheld voure.”
“Does it heal?” Linden asked faintly.
In response, the eh-Brand gave her a handful of leaves. They were as pulpy as sponges; clear sap dripped from their broken stems. Their pungent odour made her wince.