“You don’t understand,” Linden replied more severely than she intended, “but you should. You called yourself a small creature. That’s how I feel. All the time.” She gestured around her. “I’m too little for all this. I want to save my son. If I can’t do that, I want to keep him safe as long as possible. That’s as far as I go. The rest of it—” She had made too many promises which she could not keep. Even resurrecting Covenant was a promise she had already broken by failing to resurrect him whole. “The rest is too much for me. It’s someone else’s problem.”

A frown complicated the Cord’s mien. “I discern sooth,” she repeated. Then she said more strongly, “Nonetheless I deem that you are mistaken in yourself. Time and again, you have vindicated the Timewarden’s faith in you. Time and again, you have wrought miracles for our redemption. If you name yourself a small creature, as I am, you gauge yourself unjustly.”

“No, I don’t,” Linden retorted with more vehemence. “You still don’t understand what I’m trying to say. Liand isn’t small, and neither are you. If there’s any greatness left in the world, it’s yours.” And Covenant’s. “Greatness isn’t about power. It’s about who you are. You’re so unselfish that it staggers me. You make yourselves greater every day. I’m just shrinking.”

Stricken by horror and weakness, she had drowned in She Who Must Not Be Named: she knew the truth.

Why else did she need Covenant so badly?

Why else had he refused her?

Now the girl faced Linden again. With none of her familiar unassuming shyness, she said, “Then truly, Ringthane, you have no choice—you who are called the Chosen. You must relieve your son from the toils of the croyel. If you do not, you will founder in bitterness, and Fangthane’s triumph over you will be complete.”

Linden ground her teeth. “In that case”—abruptly she withdrew her feet from the stream and stood up—“we should get started on—on whatever it is we’re going to do. I hope you’re wrong. But I doubt it.”

Where her son was concerned, she had made the only choice that mattered when she adopted him.

Graceful as water, Pahni also rose. Her eagerness to return to Liand was palpable as she went to retrieve Linden’s boots.

But Linden was not eager. She was simply vexed. Yet behind her ire lay an ache of dread. Covenant had already pushed her away. If he also pushed away the decisions and responsibilities that she had trusted him to assume—if he repudiated all of her reasons for restoring his life—

She was not sure that she would be able to face him.

Plodding through arid heat over the baked hills, Linden was sweating in spite of her soaked boots and damp socks as she rejoined the company.