But then she shook her head; resisted an impulse to slap herself.—spoken of trust. She needed some way to control her accelerating descent into darkness; and she knew from long experience that she could not refuse the logic of despair if she became incapable of trust. Eventually she would succumb—

Days ago, she had urged her companions to doubt her. All well and good, as far as it went. She had doubted herself: therefore she had needed to believe that her friends made their own choices freely. But the ultimate implication of her insistence then was that she had doubted them.

Was that not why Kevin Landwaster had committed the Ritual of Desecration? He had blamed himself for the Land’s plight—and had not trusted any other power to accomplish what he could not.

Now Mahrtiir had effectively challenged her to admit the truth about her doubts; and she could not. She had already done too much harm. She no longer had any real choice except to cling to her friends and the Ranyhyn.

In the end, every other alternative would lead her back to She Who Must Not Be Named.

Her silence seemed to satisfy Mahrtiir. He held his head high and his back straight, concentrating ahead of Narunal as he led the company off the flints into a region of shale and sandstone mounded like barrows or the detritus of glaciers.

There the Ranyhyn could have quickened their pace safely. But they did not. Even at a canter, Covenant and the Humbled might be leagues ahead of them by now. Nevertheless Narunal continued to move as if the Ranyhyn had no purpose other than to conserve the stamina of the Giants. As if Linden and her companions had chosen to put their faith in an illusion.

As if the Ranyhyn intended to let her slip deeper into despair.

As the sun sank past the rim of Landsdrop, casting the abused terrain of the Lower Land into shadow, caesures began to appear. At first, they were sporadic and transient; frequent only in comparison to their occurrence on the Upper Land. They danced at intervals across ground that had been laid waste by ancient battles and rapine, storms of theurgy, bitter despoilage: danced and flickered and went out, posing no threat. But as night gathered over the extended litter of mounds, the Falls came more often, and lasted longer. They hit with the force of a concussion, stirred time and stone and air into turmoil. When they vanished, the sudden vacuum of their absence tugged at the breath in Linden’s lungs.

Somewhere Joan’s hysteria appeared to be approaching a crisis. Watching the horizons anxiously, Linden could only surmise that Covenant was headed in the right direction—and that Joan knew he was coming.

Joan, or turiya Herem: there was no useful distinction, apart from the fact that Joan was weaker than the Raver.