“I don’t know anything about hope.” Her heart was full of darkness. “But I’m sure that Sunder and Hollian have always been proud of you. As proud as I am.” Her voice caught. She had to struggle to finish. “You could have just let Jeremiah suffer, but you didn’t. You didn’t.”

“Thus I am made whole,” Anele sighed. The words were a hoarse rattle of fluids. “I am content.”

Then his eyelids closed on all that he had lost or surrendered. Slowly his body settled until it seemed to belong to the Earth.

There is no death that is not deeply felt,
No pain that does not bite through flesh and bone.

Now Linden understood the necessity of his madness. Without it—without that form of concealment—Kastenessen or Lord Foul might have realized that Anele was far more dangerous to their intentions for Jeremiah than Liand or orcrest. More dangerous than Linden herself. Kastenessen might have killed the old man at his first opportunity, in the Verge of Wandering.

All hurt is like the endless surge of seas,
The wear and tumbling that leaves no welt
But only sand instead of granite ease.

As she had with Stave, Linden wanted to stay with Anele awhile. Her debt to him was boundless: he deserved more than her paltry sentences. But there was nothing left that she could do for him, and other needs demanded her care.

Feeling as blood-stained and barren as the hills, she climbed upright, secured her grasp on the Staff, and turned to the Giants.

Some of them were close to joining Anele and Galt. And Liand.

One of the Waynhim stood in front of her, snuffling damply to ascertain her scent. The creature lifted a small iron cup of vitrim. She took it gratefully, drained it in three unsteady swallows.

While the piercing tonic of the Demondim-spawn raced along her nerves, she raised fire from the heartwood of her Staff: fire that should never have been used to deliver death. Though her flame was black, it was still Earthpower. It still articulated Law. Setting aside her despair, she faced the Swordmainnir and reassumed the forsaken task of healing.

As she did so, she heard or felt Covenant’s ascent on the ridgeside. He came wreathed in an air of ferocity that she had seen before, long ago—although she had never seen it expressed in bloodshed like hers. Behind him, Pahni trailed numbly, still preoccupied by Liand’s passing and her own woe.

Linden ignored him; left Mahrtiir and Bhapa to greet or forestall him. She had already kept the Giants waiting too long.

With a quick sweep of her health-sense, she assessed the urgent clamor of wounds, some more immediately cruel than others, all potentially fatal. Then she wrapped a cocoon of Earthpower and Law around Onyx Stonemage to stabilize the Giant’s heartbeat while flames as poignant as lamentation massaged healing into cuts and deep gashes, severed thews, bitter contusions.