“It’s quite a list, the things you’ve accomplished that should have been impossible. I don’t know if you realize just what you’ve done, or how hard it was, or how many different forces were trying to stop you. I could start with escaping Mithil Stonedown and the kresh to find the Ramen, or risking a caesure to look for your Staff, or finding a way to bring the Demondim with you when you escaped the past.” He could have started with the imponderable use of wild magic by which she had saved herself and Anele from the collapse of Kevin’s Watch; but he no longer knew how she had achieved that feat. “But you won’t take credit for any of that. You’ll say you didn’t do it on your own, you had help, you couldn’t have done it alone.

“Well, I’m not going to argue with you. Of course you had help. We’ve all had help. It doesn’t diminish what you’ve done.”

The rising sun had reached her face. Her head rested against his chest in a way that allowed the light to strike her troubled eyes, although their lids were closed and clenched. Hoping to ease her, he cupped one hand to provide a patch of shade.

“But think about it, Linden. We only have Jeremiah now because you broke the construct hiding him. Nobody helped you with that. Nobody else could have saved Liand,” whose fate seemed to thicken around him as he slept. “And I only have hands I can still use because you healed them. For that alone, I’m so grateful I don’t know how to contain it.”

Everything that he required of himself while life remained in his body depended on his ability to grip and hold.

Gradually a low breeze began to blow, drawn by the warmed cliff of Landsdrop. It cooled the mounting pressure of the sun; but it could not ease his thirst. His voice had become an effortful scrape of sound. His tongue felt stupid in his mouth, and sand seemed to clog his attempts to swallow.

“But you didn’t stop there. You’re the reason we survived She Who Must Not Be Named.”

With his peripheral vision, he saw that Stave had turned to study him. The Humbled had set aside the pretense that they were not listening.

They wanted to know what he meant.

He was thinking of Elena, agonized and frantic. She was his daughter by rape; and he had not stopped her from drinking the Blood of the Earth, even though he had suspected that her intentions were distorted or dangerous. Now her pain had been consumed by the bane’s larger and more rabid torment—

—because Linden had not granted her the compassion which Kevin Landwaster had received from his forefathers.