Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson

that anybody has to Beware the halfhand ?”
    â€œWildwielder.” Esmer seemed to throw up his hands in disgust or apprehension. “Always you persist in questions which require no response, or which serve no purpose, or which will cause my destruction. You waste my assistance, when any attempt at aid or guidance is cruel to me. Do you mean to demand the entire knowledge of the Earth, while the Land itself is brought to ruin, and Time with it?”
    â€œIt’s not that simple!” she snapped urgently. “Practically everything is being hidden from me,” and not only by Cail’s son. “When I do learn something, it isn’t relevant to my problems. Even with the Staff, I might as well be blind.
    â€œYou’ve at least got eyes . You see things that I can’t live without. You’re in my debt. You said so. Maybe that’s why these ur-viles and Waynhim are here. Maybe it isn’t. But if I’m asking the wrong questions, whose fault is that? I’ve got nothing but questions. How am I supposed to know which are the right ones? How can I help wasting you when you won’t tell me what I need to know?”
    Esmer’s sudden anguish was so acute that it seemed to splash against her skin like spray; and the doleful green of his gaze cried out to her. In response, her stomach twisted as though she had swallowed poison. Another mutter arose from the watching creatures, a sound as sharp as fangs. The air felt too thick to breathe: she had difficulty drawing it into her lungs.
    As if the words were being wrung from him by the combined insistence of the Waynhim and ur-viles, he hissed, “You must be the first to drink of the EarthBlood.”
    For a moment longer, he remained in front of her, letting her see that his distress was as poignant as a wail. Then he left.
    She did not see him vanish. Instead he seemed to sink back like a receding wave until he was gone as if he had never been there at all, leaving her with the fate of the Land on her shoulders and too little strength to carry it alone.
    The abrupt cessation of her nausea gave her no relief at all.

3.
Love and Strangers
    Linden hardly saw the ur-viles and Waynhim disperse, withdrawing apparently at random across the hillsides. With Esmer gone, they seemed to have no further purpose. They kept their distance from Glimmermere. And none of them headed toward Revelstone. As they drifted away, small clusters of Waynhim followed larger groups of ur-viles, or chose directions of their own. Soon they were gone, abandoning her to her dilemmas.
    You must be the first to drink of the EarthBlood .
    In the west, a storm-front continued to accumulate behind the majesty of the mountains. Leery of being scourged by winds and rain and hostility, she peered for a moment at the high threat of the thunderheads, the clouds streaming past the jagged peaks. But she saw nothing unnatural there: no malice, no desire for pain. The harm which had harried her return to the Verge of Wandering—malevolence that she now believed had arisen from Kastenessen’s frustration and power—was entirely absent. When this storm broke over the plateau, it would bring only torrents, the necessary vehemence of the living world. And when it passed, it would leave lucent and enriched the grass-clad hillsides, the feather-leaved swaths of mimosa, the tall stands of cedar and pine.
    Aching, she wished that she could find ease in such things. But Thomas Covenant and Jeremiah had refused to let her touch them; and Esmer had foiled her efforts to find out what was wrong with them. Her fear that they had been herded toward her remained unresolved.
    Covenant had claimed responsibility for that feat—but how could she know whether his assertions were even possible? How did his place in the Arch of Time enable him to violate time’s most fundamental strictures? Had he indeed become a being of pure paradox, as capable of saving or damning the Earth