It was conceivable that he could not remember them because he had never known. Even from his perspective within the Arch, the future may have been undefined; less certain than it was to the Elohim, whose fluid relationship with time confused linear distinctions. His mortality made it easy for him to believe that he had never possessed any prescient insight into the Land’s need.

Then why was he certain that Linden’s support against Joan would prove fatal to Jeremiah—and therefore to the Land as well? He had no answer. Yet he was sure of it. And his only justification, although it sounded contradictory, was that he trusted her. He trusted her more than he trusted himself.

He trusted the implications of her devotion to her son.

Still the ache of leaving her forlorn seemed to consume his heart. During his participation in the Arch of Time, he had witnessed so much loss and wrong that eventually he had imagined himself inured to ordinary woe. But now—Ah, now he acknowledged that his share of immortality had blunted his perceptions of individual human anguish. Across the ages, his sense of scale had changed to accommodate vaster possibilities.

Watching Linden’s struggles, first to retrieve the Staff of Law, then to survive Roger and the croyel, then to reach Andelain, he had understood her pain. But he had also seen beyond it. He had known far more than she did about what was at stake, and about how her actions might affect the Earth. Now he was human again: he could no longer see past his own limitations. Like every creature that died when its time was done, he could only live in his circumscribed present.

This was the truth of being mortal, this imprisonment in the strictures of sequence. It felt like a kind of tomb.

In his earlier state, he had recognized that this prison was also the only utile form of freedom. Another contradiction: strictures enabled as much as they denied. The Elohim were ineffectual precisely because they had so few constraints. Linden was capable of so much because her inadequacies walled her on all sides.

Now, however, he had to take that perception on faith.

But there were other truths as well, or other aspects of the same truth. His imprisonment had its own demands: it insisted upon them. And one of them was his body. The flesh which reified his spirit was both needy and exigent. He could only spend a certain amount of time in grief before the jarring of his inexpert horsemanship demanded precedence. The gait of the Ranyhyn was as smooth as water: the destrier’s was not. Already his joints were beginning to hurt. And when he finally realized that he was sitting too stiffly to endure a long ride, he also became aware that he was thirsty. The first premonitions of dehydration throbbed in his temples, and his tongue felt so dry and thick that he could hardly swallow.