Pahni ignored her Manethrall. “Liand, please. You are my love! I will beseech you on my knees, if that will sway you. Leave this hazard to those who are not so loved.”

Linden watched the coming storm of evil and readied herself. But she studied Liand more closely than she regarded the caesure, praying that he would not falter. That the Sunstone would not crumble to dust in his fist.

Liand turned from Jeremiah to wrap his arms around Pahni. So quietly that Linden barely heard him, he told the Cord, “Fear for me, my love. I fear for myself. Yet in Linden Avery’s company, and in your embrace, and in orcrest, I have found myself when I had not known that I was lost. If I do not give of my utmost here, I will become less than my aspirations. I will prove unworthy of the gifts which I have discovered in you.”

“But if you are slain—!” Pahni moaned.

“If I am slain,” he replied so tenderly that Linden’s heart lurched, “you will remain to serve the Land, and the Ranyhyn, and the Ringwielder, as you must. My love will abide with you. Grief is strength. The use that you will make of it vindicates me.”

While Liand held Pahni tight, a second caesure violated the night.

It opened its destructive horrors to Linden’s left—and closer than the first; much closer. Like an eruption, it split the air no more than half a dozen paces from Clyme’s position north of the ridge. Then the chaos of instants lunged toward him. But he sprang away, preternaturally swift. Scanning the hills for other threats, he kept his distance from the Fall.

Like the first, this caesure swarmed toward Jeremiah and the croyel as if it were drawn by the bright passion of Loric’s krill.

Through his teeth, Covenant rasped, “Soon would be good. Now would be better.”

He may have been speaking to Linden as much as to Liand.

Gently Liand separated himself from Pahni, raised his Sunstone high; strode toward Jeremiah.

The croyel’s look of triumph was gone. The nausea in the creature’s eyes echoed the sick squirming in Linden’s chest.

As he advanced, Liand made his light brighter, and still brighter. It lit Jeremiah’s slack features like a small sun, challenging the night; burned like ruin on the monster’s sweating face. Impossibly torn, Linden tried to concentrate on the caesures, and could not. She needed to stop those gyring evils. But her need to witness what happened between Liand and the croyel—what happened to her son—was greater.

“Hellfire, Linden!” Covenant shouted. “Pay attention! Joan isn’t done. Look at the krill! Saving Jeremiah won’t do any good if a caesure gets us!”

The gem around which High Lord Loric had forged his dagger was throbbing like a heart in ecstasy.

Caesures aren’t the only bad thing that can happen—