She prayed that he would not speak. At first, he did not. Then he advised sternly, “Heed the Ranyhyn, Chosen. Their gifts are many. It may be that they are able to divine coming disturbances of Time, or to perceive Falls in the instant of their creation. If so, they will forewarn you.”

After that, he was gone. With her health-sense, Linden watched him until she was sure that he had returned to the Giants and Mahrtiir. Then she finished her small meal, drank more water, and turned her attention to other things.

She needed a response to despair that did not require her own death; and she could not think of a way to help Jeremiah.

Fumbling, she searched around her for a stone that she could use: one with a raw edge or a jagged point.

The sky overhead was a glittering loveliness of stars, profuse and forsaken. Covenant had gone to face Joan without her. She had no way of knowing what the Ranyhyn wanted from her—or for her. The Worm of the World’s End was coming to the Land. If the stars were sentient in any sense, their bereavement was too vast and irreducible for comprehension.

Finally her fingers found a stone that suited her. It seemed sharp enough. It had a good point.

She rolled up her left sleeve, studied the faint pallor of her skin. But her father had killed himself by cutting his wrists. After all these years, she still intended to refuse his legacy. Tugging at the fabric of her jeans, she worked one leg up to her knee.

An answer to darkness. A way to control her despair so that she did not sink deeper.

Hunched over herself, she gripped the stone and began scraping cuts into the sensitive flesh of her shin.

That hurt. Of course it did. But the pain would also help her. As Berenford Memorial’s physician, she had worked with a number of cutters, self-mutilators. Cutting was a common symptom because it was so effective. Voluntary physical hurts suppressed helpless emotional anguish. Cutters damaged themselves so that the pain would calm them. It galvanized their few residual strengths. For some, it provided a relief as exquisite as joy.

It might do the same for her.

Using an edge and point as raw as the teeth of a saw, she tried to cut from memory the inadvertent pattern of the grass stains on her jeans into the human skin of her shin and calf.

Perhaps she would have succeeded. She might have attained the whetted peace that she had witnessed in her patients. Given time, she might even have managed to replicate the mark of fecundity and long grass, the sign that she had paid the price of woe. But while she gasped at each kind, cruel gouge and tear, she realized suddenly that Hyn was standing over her.