White Gold Wielder Read Online Free PDF

moment after he met her gaze she rose to her feet. A knot of anxiety or anger marked her brows. Probing him with her health-sense, she stepped closer to the hammock. What she saw made her mouth severe.
    “Is that it?” she demanded. “You’ve decided to give up?”
    Mutely Covenant flinched. Was his defeat so obvious?
    At once, a look of regret changed her expression. She dropped her eyes, and her hands made an aimless half-gesture as if they were full of remembered failure. “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “That isn’t what I came to say. I wasn’t sure I should come at all. You’ve been so hurt—I wanted to give you more time.”
    Then she lifted her face to him again, and he saw her sense of purpose sharpen. She was here because she had her own ideas—about hope as well as about him. “But the First was going to come, and I thought I should do it for her.” She gazed into him as if she sought a way to draw him down from his lonely bed. “She wants to know where we’re going.”
    Where—? Covenant blinked pain at her. She had not withdrawn her question: she had simply rephrased it.
Where
? A spasm of grief gripped his heart. His doom was summed up in that one
Grim
word. Where
could
he go? He was beaten. All his power had been turned against him. There was nowhere left for him to go—nothing left for him to do. For an instant, he feared he would break down in front of her, bereft even of the bare dignity of solitude.
    She was saying, “We’ve got to go somewhere. The Sunbane is still there. Lord Foul is still there. We’ve lost the One Tree, but nothing else has changed. We can’t just sail in circles for the rest of our lives.” She might have been pleading with him, trying to make him see something that was already plain to her.
    But he did not heed her. Almost without transition, his hurt became resentment. She was being cruel, whether she realized it or not. He had already betrayed everything he loved with his mistakes and failures and lies. How much more responsibility did she wish him to assume? Bitterly he replied, “I hear you saved us from the
Nicor
. You don’t need me.”
    His tone made her wince. “Don’t
say
that!” she responded intensely. Her eyes were wide with awareness of what was happening to him. She could read every outcry of his wracked spirit.
I
need you.”
    In response, he felt his despair plunging toward hysteria. It sounded like the glee of the Despiser, laughing in triumph. Perhaps he had gone so far down this road now that he
was
the Despiser, the perfect tool or avatar of Lord Foul’s will. But Linden’s expostulation jerked him back from the brink. It made her suddenly vivid to him—too vivid to be treated this way. She was his love, and be had already hurt her too much.
    For a moment, the fall he had nearly taken left him reeling. Everything in the cabin seemed imprecise, overburdened with sunlight. He needed shadows and darkness in which to hide from all the things that surpassed him. But Linden still stood there as if she were the center around which his head whirled. Whether she spoke or remained silent, she was the one demand he could not refuse. Yet he was altogether unready to tell her the truth he had withheld. Her reaction would be the culmination of all his dismay. Instinctively he groped for some way to anchor himself, some point of simple guilt or passion to which he might cling. Squinting into the sunshine, he asked thickly, “What did they do about Seadreamer?”
    At that. Linden sagged in relief as though a crisis had been averted. Wanly she answered, “Honninscrave wanted to cremate him. As if that were possible.” Memories of suffering seemed to fray the words as she uttered them. “But the First ordered the Giants to bury him at sea. For a minute there, I thought Honninscrave was going to attack her. But then something inside him broke. It wasn’t physical—but I felt it snap.” Her tone said that she had sensed that parting like a