| Chapter 11: The Unhomed |
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"The Gray Slayer has returned. I chose that path because I desired healing for myself. What will happen to the Lords if I ask them to help me now?" And give up your revenge? Covenant wondered. He could not comprehend. He turned completely toward her and studied her face, trying to see her health, her spirit. She looked as if she were in the grip of a ravaging illness. Her mien had thinned and sharpened; her spacious eyes were shadowed, veiled in darkness; her lips were drained of blood. And vertically down the center of her forehead lay a deep line like a rift in her skull--the tool work of unblinkable despair. Etched there was the vastness of the personal hurt which she contained by sheer force of will, and the damage she did herself by containing it. At last Covenant saw clearly the moral struggle that wasted her, the triple conflict between her abhorrence of him, her fear for the Land, and her dismay at her own weakness--a struggle whose expense exhausted her resources, reduced her to penury. The sight shamed his heart, made him drop his gaze. Without thinking, he reached toward her and said in a voice full of self-contradicting pleas, "Don't give up." "Give up?" she gasped in virulence, backing away from him. "If I gave up, I would stab you where you stand!" Suddenly, she thrust a hand into her robe and snatched out a stone knife like the one Covenant had lost. Brandishing it, she spat, "Since the Celebration--since you permitted Wraiths to die--this blade has cried out for your blood. Other crimes I could set aside. I speak for my own. But that--! To countenance such desecration--!" She hurled the knife savagely at the ground, so that it stuck hilt-deep in the turf by Covenant's feet. "Behold!" she cried, and in that instant her voice became abruptly gelid, calm. "I wound the Earth instead of you. It is fitting. I have done little else since you entered the Land." "Now hear my last word, Unbeliever. I let you go because these decisions surpass me. Delivering children in the Stonedown does not fit me for such choices. But I will not intrude my desires on the one hope of the Land--barren as that hope is. Remember that I have witheld my hand--I have kept my Oath." "Have you?" he asked, moved by a complex impulse of sympathy and nameless ire. She pointed a trembling finger at her knife. "I have not harmed you. I have brought you here." "You've hurt yourself." "That is my Oath," she breathed stiffly. "Now, farewell. When you have returned in safety to your own world, remember what evil is." |