And the Ardent had failed the will of the Insequent. Liand was severely injured: he may have been dying. Anele had fled. The rest of Linden’s companions were held in thrall by the astonishment of the palace.

Sobbing at the scream in her knee, she dove headlong toward Liand’s orcrest.

If the Sunstone reawakened even a few tiny glints of her percipience, she would be able to reach out for Earthpower and Law. She did not need to hold the Staff in order to use it: not now. She needed only a small spattering of health-sense—

A body hurtled past her into the chamber. She had no idea who or what it was. Pain and desperation blinded her to everything except orcrest. She hardly heard Roger’s eager roar of defiance.

When her straining fingers closed on the Sunstone, she felt nothing. Nothing at all. The orcrest was only a lump of rock. She could not see it; could not touch its true vitality.

A surge of absolute despair broke over her: a crashing wave. Then it receded. She was too frantic to drown in it, or to be swept away.

Wrenching herself into a sitting position, she cocked her arm to hurl the Sunstone at Roger’s head: the last throw of a woman whose fate was written in water.

Covenant’s ring still lay amid a tumble of chain near Jeremiah’s bare feet. The runed ebony length of the Staff rested an arm’s length away. Roger had not claimed either instrument.

He had not had time.

Through a blaze of argent, Linden saw Thomas Covenant.

Somehow he had emerged from his memories; had shrugged off the enchantment of the palace. He must have sensed Roger’s power, or the croyel’s; must have realized that Linden needed him.

Braced in the act of trying to slash downward with Loric’s krill, Covenant confronted his son. He gripped the dagger in both fists, apparently striving to cripple or sever Kastenessen’s hand. But Roger had blocked his father’s cut with a blast of heat and scoria. Straining to strike, Covenant stood with his blade embedded in the furnace of Roger’s power.

They had not touched each other physically: their blows met in the air between them. Roger’s pyrotic theurgy held Covenant’s blade in a grip of crimson and sulphur, as fluid and fatal as lava. Covenant answered with the salvific possibilities of wild magic channeled and focused by High Lord Loric’s mighty lore. The krill’s pure gem was an expanding cynosure of incandescence.

Too much incandescence. Linden did not need health-sense to guess that Joan was pouring out her madness, trying to hurt the man who had been her husband. Somehow Joan—or turiya Herem—had recognized Covenant’s grip on the krill, Covenant’s intention. While he struggled against their son, she wielded her own ring in an effort to incinerate him.