White Gold Wielder Read Online Free PDF Page B

rupture in her own heart. “He bowed to her as if he didn’t know what else to do with all that hurt. Then he went back to the wheeldeck. Back to doing his job.” Her shoulders lifted in a pained shrug. “If you didn’t look at his eyes, you wouldn’t know he isn’t as good as new. But he refused to help them give Seadreamer to the sea.”
    As she spoke, his eyes blurred. He was unable to see her clearly in all that light. Seadreamer should have been burned, should have been freed from his horror in a
caamora
of white fire. Yet the mere thought made Covenant’s flesh itch darkly. He had become the thing he hated. Because of a lie. He had known—or should have known—what was going to happen to him. But his selfish love had kept the truth from her. He could not look at her. Through his teeth, he protested, “Why did you have to do that?”
    “Do—?” Her health-sense did not make her prescient. How could she possibly know what he was talking about?
    “You threw yourself in the fire.” The explanation came arduously, squeezed out by grief and self-recrimination. It was not her fault. No one had the right to blame her. “I sent you away to try to save my life. I didn’t know what else to do. For all I knew, it was already too late for anything else—the Worm was already awake, I’d already destroyed—” A clench of anguish closed this throat. For a moment, he could not say, I didn’t know how else to save you. Then he swallowed convulsively and went on. “So I sent you away. And you threw yourself in the fire. I was linked to you. The magic tied us together. For the first time, my senses were open. And all I saw was you throwing yourself in the fire.
    “Why did you force me to bring you back?”
    In response, she flared as if he had struck a ragged nerve. “Because I couldn’t help you the way you were!” Suddenly she was shouting at him. “Your body was there, but
you
weren’t! Without you, it was just so much dying meat! Even if I’d had you in a hospital—even if I could’ve given you transfusions and surgery right then—I could not have saved you!
    “I needed you to come back with me. How else was I supposed to get your attention?”
    Her pain made him look at her again; and the sight went through him like a crack through stone, following its flaws to the heart. She stood below him with her face hot and vivid in the light and her fists clenched, as intense and uncompromising as any woman he had ever dreamed. The fault was not hers, though surely she blamed herself. Therefore he could not shirk telling her the truth.
    At one time, he had believed that he was sparing her by not speaking, that he was withholding information so that she would not be overwhelmed. Now he knew better. He had kept the truth to himself for the simple reason that he did not want it to be true. And by so doing he had falsified their relationship profoundly.
    “I should’ve told you,” he murmured in shame. “I tried to tell you everything else. But it hurt too much.”
    She glared at him as if she felt the presence of something horrible between them; but he did not look away.
    “It’s always been this way. Nothing here interrupts the physical continuity of the world we came from. What happens here is self-contained. It’s always the same. I go into the Land hurt—possibly dying. A leper. And I’m healed. Twice my leprosy disappeared. I could
feel
again, as if my nerves—” His heart twisted at the memory—and at the poignant distress of Linden’s stare. “But before I left the Land, something always happened to duplicate the shape I was in earlier. Sometimes my body was moved. I stopped bleeding—or got worse. But my physical condition was always exactly what it would’ve been if I’d never been to the Land. And I’m still a leper. Leprosy doesn’t heal.
    “So this time that knife hit me—and when we got to the Land I healed it with wild magic. The same way I healed those cuts the Clave gave me.”