Covenant had rushed into the caesure because Joan was there.

She was the only road that might lead him back to life and Linden, and to the last, necessary battles for the Land.

He had known the danger; the acute extremes of his vulnerability. Oh, he had known! He had never learned how to ward off the seductions of lost time, the dizzying call of chasms. For that reason, he had trusted—

But he could no longer remember who or what he had trusted. Alone in an irredeemable wilderness of cold while burrowing agony exposed every nerve, he was Joan. Her torment was his. He remembered nothing that was not her.

Somewhere among the multiplied dimensions of his extinction, his human hands still gripped the krill: High Lord Loric Vilesilencer’s supreme achievement. But it was wasted here because Covenant himself was helpless. He could not unravel his own mind from the skein of Joan’s deranged memories. The dagger’s implicit fire had no effect on his torment.

You have sold your freedom to purchase the misery of love, turiya Herem told him, laughing. While you remained within the Arch, you were capable of opposition. You enforced boundaries upon the World’s End. Now you are naught but fodder for my delight. Here your life is mine.

Covenant heard the Raver, but he did not listen. He was Joan. When the tsunami came, it would destroy her—and him with her. Only turiya would survive.

If or when Lord Foul decided that he wanted white gold, his servant would know exactly where to find it.

There every tale that Covenant had ever loved would end.

He no longer wondered why the old beggar had not given Linden warning of her peril. The Creator had recognized his own defeat. He had abandoned his creation.

Yet Joan did not think such thoughts; and so Covenant did not. She experienced only pain and betrayal. She felt only rage, wild and ultimately futile. She wanted only to make it stop.

At one time in her life, many years earlier, she had craved the opposite. More than anything, she had desired her life then to go on and on just as it was, sunlit and always content. With Covenant on Haven Farm. Pregnant with Roger. Surrounded by her beloved horses. Training them, not by breaking them to her will, but rather by comforting them until they trusted her. By luring them one gentle step at a time to want what she wanted. Happy. Passive.

She had found pleasure in Covenant’s first ecstasy of writing. She had enjoyed his passion for her body. The hurt of childbirth was nothing to her because her husband had written a bestseller, and because she had a son, and because her heart sang in the presence of horses.

Turiya Raver relished those memories. They supplied the excoriation for everything that followed. Without them, she would not have felt so profoundly betrayed by Covenant’s leprosy.