Thomas Covenant 8 - The Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

for yourself.”
    She held his gaze until he nodded. Then she turned to stride up the hillside without him.
    Almost at once, he seemed to fall out
    of her awareness. Her memories of Covenant and Glimmermere sang to her, dismissing other considerations. At one time, she had been loved here. That experience, and others like it, had taught her how to love her son. She needed to immerse herself in Earthpower and clarity; needed to recover her sense of her own identity. Then she could try to make herself heard; heeded.
    She was breathing hard—and entirely
    unconscious of it—as she passed the crest of the hill and caught sight of the lake where Thomas Covenant had given her a taste of joy; perhaps the first joy that she had ever known.
    In one sense, Glimmermere was exactly as she remembered it. The lake was not large: from its edge, she might have been able to throw a stone across it. On all sides except its outlet to the south, it was concealed by hills as though the earth of the plateau had
    cupped its hands in order to isolate and preserve its treasure. And no streams flowed into it. Even the mighty heads of the Westron Mountains, now no more than a league distant, sent their rivers of rainfall and snowmelt down into the Land by other routes. Instead Glimmermere was fed by hidden springs arising as if in secret from the deep gutrock of the Land.
    The surface of the water also was as Linden remembered it: as calm and
    pure as a mirror, reflecting the hills and the measureless sky perfectly; oblivious to distress. Yet she had not been here for ten long years, and she found now that her human memory had failed to retain the lake’s full vitality, its untrammeled and
    untarnishable lucid purity. Remembering Glimmermere without percipience to refresh her recall, she had been unable to preserve its image undimmed. Now she was shocked almost breathless by the crystalline
    abundance and promise of the waters.
    Taken by the sight, she began to jog down the hillside. She knew how cold the water would be: she had been chilled to the core when Covenant had called her into the lake. And now there was no desert sun to warm her when she emerged. But she also knew that the cold was an inherent aspect of Glimmermere’s power to cleanse; and she did not hesitate. Covenant and Jeremiah had been returned to her, but
    she no longer knew them—or herself. When she reached the edge of the lake, she dropped the Staff of Law unceremoniously to the grass; tugged off her boots and socks, and flung them aside; stripped away her grass-stained pants as well as her shirt as if by that means she could remove her mortality; and plunged headlong into the tonic sting of memory and Earthpower.
    In the instant of her dive, she saw that
    she cast no reflection on the water. Nothing of her interrupted
    Glimmermere’s reiteration of its protective hills and the overarching heavens. The clustered rocks around the deep shadow of the lake’s bottom looked sharp and near enough to break her as soon as she struck the surface. But she knew that she was not in danger. She remembered well that Glimmermere’s sides were almost sheer, and its depths were unfathomable.
    Then she went down into a fiery cold so fierce that it seemed to envelop her in liquid flame.
    That, too, was as she remembered it: inextricable from her happiness with Covenant; whetted with hope. Nevertheless its incandescence drove the breath from her lungs. Before she could name her hope, or seek for it, she was forced gasping to the surface.
    For a brief time, no more than a
    handful of heartbeats, she splashed and twisted as if she were dancing. But she was too human to remain in the lake: not alone, while Covenant’s recalled love ached within her. Scant moments after she found air, she swam to the water’s edge and pulled herself naked up onto the steep grass. There she rested in spite of the wet cold and the chill of spring, giving herself time to absorb, to recognize, Glimmermere’s