Donaldson, Stephen - Thomas Covenant 04 - The Wounded Land by Donaldson Stephen

Author:Donaldson, Stephen [Donaldson, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General, Epic
ISBN: 9780345418463
Google: 1ttYPwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0345348680
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1980-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN: "Because you can see"

No. Never again.

After Covenant had passed beyond the hillcrest in Andelain, Linden Avery sat down among the dead stones, and tried to recover her sense of who she was. A black mood was on her. She felt futile and bereft of life, as she had so often felt in recent years; all her efforts to rise above her parents had accomplished nothing. If Sunder or Hollian had spoken to her, she might have screamed, if she were able to summon the energy.

Now that she had made her decision, had struck a blow in defense of her difficult autonomy against Covenant's strange power to persuade her from herself, she was left with the consequences. She could not ignore them; the old and forever unassuaged barrenness around her did not permit them to be ignored. These dead hills climbed south and west of her, contradicting Andelain as if she had chosen death when she had been offered life.

And she was isolated by her blackness. Sunder and Hollian had found companionship in their mutual rejection of the Hills. Their lives had been so fundamentally shaped by the Sunbane that they could not question the discomfiture Andelain gave them. Perhaps they could not perceive that those lush trees and greenswards were healthy. Or that health was beautiful.

But Linden accepted the attitude of the Stonedownors. It was explicable in the context of the Sunbane. Her separateness from them did not dismay her.

The loss of Covenant dismayed her. She had made her decision, and he had walked out of her life as if he were taking all her strength and conviction with him. The light of the fertile sun had danced on the Mithil as he passed, burning about him like a recognition of his efficacy against the Land's doom. She had shared the utmost privacy of his life, and yet he had left her for Andelain. And the venom was still in him.

She would not have been more alone if he had riven her of all her reasons for living.

But she had made her decision. She had experienced Covenant's illness as if it were her own, and knew she could not have chosen otherwise. She preferred this lifeless waste of stone over the loveliness of Andelain because she understood it better, could more effectively seal herself against it. After her efforts to save Covenant, she had vowed that she would never again expose herself so intimately to anything, never again permit the Land-born sensitivity of her senses to threaten her independent identity. That vow was easier to keep when the perceptions against which she closed her heart were perceptions of ruin, of dead rock like the detritus of a cataclysm, rather than of clean wood, aromatic grasses, bountiful aliantha. In her private way, she shared Hollian's distrust. Andelain was far more seductive than the stone around her. She knew absolutely that she could not afford to be seduced.

Lost in her old darkness, with her eyes and ears closed as if she had nailed up shutters, barred doors, she did not understand Sunder's warning shout until too late.

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