The Last Dark Read Online Free PDF

she had never met the underlying
him
until this moment: until he had arisen from his absence and looked at her and spoken.
    The way in which she repeated his name was weeping; but that, too, she did not realize. She was no more aware of her tears than she was of Stave and the Ranyhyn and passing time and the ancient ruin of bones. Holding Jeremiah in her arms—and being held by him—was enough.
    She had no better name for what she felt than exaltation.
    Yet the exaltation was Jeremiah’s, not hers. He had become transcendent, numinous: an icon of transfiguration. He seemed to glow with warmth and health in her arms as if he had become the Staff of Law: not
her
Staff, runed and ebony, transformed to blackness by her sins and failures, but rather the Staff of Law as it should have been, pure and beneficent, the Staff that Berek Halfhand had first created to serve the beauty of the Land.
    The gift that Anele had given Jeremiah elevated him in ways that Linden could not define. He had not simply become responsive and aware. He appeared to dismiss the past ten years of his life as if they had no power over him.
    Such things could not be dismissed.
    “Chosen,” Stave said as if he sought to call her back from an abyss. “Linden Avery.” An uncharacteristic timbre of pleading or regret ached in his voice. “Will you not harken to me?”
    She was not ready to hear him. She did not want to step back from Jeremiah. He vindicated everything that she had done and endured in his name. If she withdrew from exaltation, she would be forced to think—
    And every thought led to fear and contradiction; to dilemmas for which she was unprepared. No one could endure what her son had suffered without emotional damage; without scars and scarification. Yet she could not discern damage. In her embrace, he felt more than physically well. He seemed entirely
whole
, mentally and spiritually intact.
    That Linden could not believe. She knew better.
    “Mom.” Like hers, Jeremiah’s voice wept gladly. “Mom, stop crying. You’re getting me all wet.”
    For his sake, she tried.
    Long ago under
Melenkurion
Skyweir, she had forgotten the sensations of being a healer. Although she had cared for her companions in various ways, she had responded to their injuries as if her own actions were those of a stranger. But she had not forgotten what she had learned during her years in Berenford Memorial, tending the wounded souls of the abused and broken.
    Training and experience had taught her that an escape from unreactive passivity was a vital step, crucial to everything that it enabled—but it was only the
first
step. When a crippled spirit found the courage to emerge from its defenses, it then had to face the horrors which had originally driven it into hiding. Otherwise deeper forms of healing could not occur.
    She realized now that she was expecting a rush of agony from Jeremiah: the remembered anguish of every cruelty which the Despiser and Roger and the
croyel
had inflicted. That prospect appalled her.
    But when she considered her son clinically, she recognized that the outbreak which she dreaded was unlikely. Immediate firestorms of memory were rare. More commonly, a new form of dissociation intervened to protect the harmed mind while its new awareness was still fragile. Full recall came later—if it came at all. Jeremiah felt whole to her because his worst recollections had not arisen from their graves.
    For all she knew, they might remain buried indefinitely.
    Why, then, was she afraid? Why did she contemplate anything except her son’s restoration? Why could she not be content with miracles, as any other mother might have been?
    She could not because Lord Foul’s prophecies might still prove true, if the Despiser contrived to recapture Jeremiah—
    —or if events triggered more memories than he could withstand.
    She had failed to resurrect Covenant without his leprosy. Other restorations might go awry. With or without Lord Foul’s connivance,