Long ago, he had told Linden, There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything . Give him back something broken. In Andelain, he had done that to her. But now he knew a deeper truth. Even broken things were precious. Like Jeremiah, they could become more precious than life. And they could still be taken away.

He was more afraid of making a promise to Linden that he could not keep than he was of Joan.

And he had another reason for treating Linden severely. Any promise—even an implied one—might encourage her to insist on accompanying him. To choose him instead of her son.

Perhaps everything would have been different if he could have explained why her desire to help him face Joan would effectively doom Jeremiah. But he had no explanation. He had told her, You have other things to do, but he had no real idea what they were. He only knew that they were crucial. They may have been more important than his own need to confront Joan.

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.