Impassively Branl continued, “If you assert that humility necessitates an acknowledgment that we are not equal to all things, as the Elohim describe themselves, I reply that we are indeed humble in our acceptance. With Clyme and lost Galt, I am our humility made flesh. But if you avow that humility requires relief from the consequence of being less than equal to all things, I reply that you speak of humiliation, not of humility. Any abrogation of the outcome of our deeds diminishes us.

“If you wish it, ur-Lord, I will describe the self-denigration implicit in Cail’s return to the Land. That was the failure for which our ancestors judged him. They did not denounce his seduction by the merewives, but rather his acceptance of rescue from the cost of his surrender, and his insistence that in his place his kinsmen would have acted as he did.

“Or if you wish it, I will speak of Stave—”

“No,” Covenant interrupted gruffly. He had been goaded too far. “Please don’t.” He hated the way that Cail had been repudiated. He did not want to hear any accusation against Stave. “Sometimes you people make me crazy.” Like Stave, Covenant had a son. “You’ve accepted gifts, haven’t you? From High Lord Kevin, if not from anybody else. What’s so wrong about accepting a gift from Linden?”

“First,” Branl answered without hesitation, “our ancestors accepted no gift from the Landwaster until they had determined how they would repay his largesse, with the Vow by which Haruchai became Bloodguard. Thus they preserved the import of their lives. Second, his gifts were not imposed. The freedom of refusal was not denied to our ancestors as it was to us.”

“Then don’t blame Linden,” Covenant retorted. “Your grievance is with me, not her. And I didn’t deny you anything. I just told you what I was going to do if you refused. You could have accepted that cost.

“If Joan doesn’t kill us,” he promised, “you’ll get your chance to repay Linden. Or me, if you judge me the way you judge her.”

When he squinted ahead, he saw the terrain changing. Beyond the flint, sandstone and shale gathered into mounds like barrows or glacial moraines. He had the impression that huge creatures had been buried there: buried, or plowed under by warfare. But he did not try to remember the forces which had shaped that landscape. He did not want to fall into the past again.

As the horses pounded toward the mounds, the Humbled regarded him steadily. “Still you do not comprehend us, ur-Lord,” Branl observed. “It is not without cause that you have been named the Unbeliever.”