Somehow Stave the outcast and Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever had swayed the Humbled.

Chapter 5. - Preparations

5.

Preparations

Linden hardly knew how to feel. She was awash in so many conflicting emotions that she could not steer her way through them. Dismay still filled the bottom of her heart like shoals. But over those unanswerable rocks, strong currents and eddies seemed to run in every direction.

She had resurrected Covenant at a terrible cost. She had purchased the means to reach her son by making herself powerless to aid him. Yet Covenant had reaffirmed his belief in her, his unmerited support. Indeed, he had backed her with such certainty that even the Humbled—the Humbled—had been moved.

She was desperately grateful for everything that he had said and done; for anything that hinted that his love might be great enough to cover even her vast crime. Nevertheless his attitude weakened her. Like Liand��s overt compassion in Revelstone days ago, Covenant’s reasoning eroded her grip on herself. According to the contradictory logic of her emotions, he diminished her by denying that her every deed was wrong. If everything that she had done deserved repudiation, at least she knew where she stood. Blame told her who she was. It gave her meaning. Without it, she was less than powerless: she was insignificant.

In that way, her gratitude implied both hope and despair.

Perhaps this was what it meant to have friends and the possibility of love: to become smaller, too inadequate and fallible for words—and thereby to find herself no longer alone. No longer either solely culpable or solely necessary.

If so, her position now was the opposite of Stave’s. Being cast out had given him the strength to stand alone, entirely isolated from his people. And that in turn had made it possible for him to be her friend in ways that no other Haruchai could comprehend, by solitary choice rather than by communal necessity.

Long ago, Covenant’s circumstances had resembled Stave’s. Being a pariah on Haven Farm had taught him the courage and fortitude to care for Joan unaided.

Linden, too, had once been alone. Alone and strong. Now the poles of her dilemma had been reversed. She had been weakened by acceptance and affirmation and trust. Together the Giants and the Ramen, Liand and Stave, Covenant and even the Humbled: they had brought her to the end of her choices.

She was not sure that she could bear it.

She was sitting on the grass again with her knees gripped to her chest; hiding her face. She needed time to recover from the joy and terror of Covenant’s declarations.

Have you never bothered to wonder why Lord Foul and Kastenessen and the damn Harrow and even my lost son want Jeremiah so badly?

Roger and the croyel dreamed of becoming gods.

Apparently Covenant believed that Jeremiah’s plight and the Land’s could not be distinguished from each other.