“Liand,” said the Manethrall more firmly, “desist. Every friend of the Ringthane shares your apprehensions. Yet this choice is hers, not ours. And there lives no parent among the Ramen who would not choose as she does. Only the opposition of the Ranyhyn would suffice to deter us—and behold!” He gestured around the vale. “They have departed. By this token is their faith in the Ringthane confirmed.”

The absence of the horses did not concern Linden. They would return when they were called; or when they were needed.

“She has followed her heart to our present straits,” Mahrtiir concluded. “If she does not continue to do so, all that she has hazarded and lost will come to naught.”

At the Manethrall’s command, Liand subsided; and Rime Coldspray nodded her approval. If Stave agreed with either Liand or Mahrtiir, he did not say so. But he had sons among the Masters, sons who had participated in casting him out of their mental communion. Nevertheless he had said of them—and of all the children of the Haruchai—that They are born to strength, and it is their birthright to remain who they are.

Had Covenant not told Linden long ago that Lord Foul could not gain his ends through decisions like the one she made here?

She held Covenant’s wedding band in her left hand as though she were testing the weight of her surrender. The fingers of her right gripped the Staff as they had under Melenkurion Skyweir; as if they were still cramped and sealed by pain and blood.

Extending her arms toward the Harrow cost her an effort so severe that she feared it might burst a vessel in her brain. His grin stretched into a shape that resembled madness or murder as he reached out to accept the instruments he craved.

A new voice stopped him: a voice that she had never heard before. Its pitch lay midway between the Theomach’s light assurance and the Harrow’s ripe bass, and it lisped slightly, giving each word a foppish timbre.

“For this I have come.”

The Harrow jerked up his head, already glaring in surprise and indignation. Snatching at their weapons, the Giants and Mahrtiir whirled to face the newcomer. While Liand stared, Stave adjusted his protective posture at Linden’s shoulder.

She dropped her arms as though her burdens had become too heavy for her. Then she turned.

Into the vale from the north rode a stranger. He was mounted on a mangy, shovel-headed horse so spavined that it should have been unable to support his improbable bulk. In spite of its gaunt ribs and sagging spine, however, the beast looked irascible enough to be a mule; and it bore its rider with an air of sideways malice, as if it had been waiting indefinitely for its chance to do him harm.

But Linden spared only a glance for the horse. Its rider compelled her attention.

Her first impression was one of grotesque corpulence; but then she saw that his apparent size was exaggerated by his apparel. He seemed to be clad entirely in ribbands: thousands of them in every conceivable hue and texture. Garish in the krill’s light, they fluttered and streamed from his head, his limbs, his torso, as if they were constantly unwinding themselves without ever quite flying loose. Independent of the night’s stillness and his own movements, they flapped in all directions, surrounding him like a penumbra of wind-tugged cloth; a personal effluvium of cerise and incarnadine and carbuncle, ecru and ivory, turquoise and viridian and azure, blue as deep as velvet, yellows ranging from the fulvous and the sulphuric to the palest gold.