One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson

on the verge of the last rigor.
    But the Giant—! His life was seeping out of him. She could feel it flow as if it formed a palpable pool around her knees. Like the wound in her nightmare.
    No!
    As it flashed, Covenant’s power gathered for one more blast. The import of that accumulation was written in the distress of his aura. He was preparing to release his white fire, let go of it entirely. Then the last barrier between him and the venom would be gone. She knew without seeing him that his whole right side from hand to shoulder, waist to neck, was grotesquely swollen with poison.
    One or the other, Covenant or the Giant.
    While she sat there, stunned with indecision, they might both die.
    No!
    She could not endure it. Intolerable that either of them should be lost!
    Her voice broke as she cried out, “Galewrath!” But she did not listen to the way her call cracked across the foredeck, did not wait for an answer. Cail tugged at her shoulder; she ignored him. Pantingurgently, frenetically,
Covenant!
she plunged back into the stricken Giant.
    The injuries which would kill him most quickly were
there
and
there
—two hurts bleeding too heavily to be survived. His lungs might go on working, but his heart could not continue. It had already begun to falter under the weight of so much blood-loss. With cold accuracy she saw what she would have to do. To keep him alive. Occupying his abdomen with her percipience, she twisted his nerves and muscles until the deeper of the two bleedings slowed to a trickle.
    Then Heft Galewrath arrived, knelt opposite her. Covenant was going to die. His power gathered. Still Linden did not permit herself to flinch. Without shifting her attention, she grabbed Galewrath’s hand, directed the thumb to press deeply into the Giant’s stomach at a certain point.
There
. That pressure constricted the flow of the second fatal hurt.
    “Chosen,” Call’s tone was as keen as a whip.
    “Keep pressing there.” Linden sounded wild with hysteria, but she did not care. “Breathe into him. So he doesn’t drown on blood.” She prayed that the experience of the seas had taught Galewrath something akin to artificial respiration.
    In a frenzy of haste, she scrambled toward Covenant.
    The foredeck appeared interminable. The Giants straining at the hawser dropped behind her one by one as if their knotted muscles and arched backs, the prices they were willing to pay in Covenant’s name, measured out the tale of her belatedness. The sun shone into their faces. Beyond Foodfendhall, the flickering of Covenant’s power grew slower as it approached its crisis.
    Hergrom seemed to materialize in front of her, holding open the door to the housing. She hurdled the storm-sill, pounded through the hall. Ceer flung open the far door.
    With a wrench of nausea, she felt white fire collecting in Covenant’s right side. Gathering against the venom. In his delirium, blind instinct guided him to direct the power inward, at himself, as if he could eradicate the poison by fire. As if such a blast would not also tear his life to shreds.
    She had no time to try for any control over him. Springing out onto the afterdeck, she dove headlong toward him, skidded across the stone past Vain’s feet to collide with Covenant so that any fire he unleashed would strike her as well. And as she hurled herself into danger, she drove her senses as far into him as she could reach.
    Covenant! Don’t!
    She had never made such an attempt before, never tried to thrust a message through the link of her percipience. But now, impelled by desperation and hazard, she touched him. Far below his surface extremity, the struggling vestiges of his consciousness heard her. Barriers fell as he abandoned himself to her. A spring of fire broke open from his right hand, releasing the pressure. Flame gushed out of him and flowed away, harming nothing.
    A wave of giddiness lifted her out of herself. She tottered to her feet, staggered against Cail. Her lips formed