The Last Dark: The climax of the entire Thomas Covenant Chronicles (Last Chronicles of Thomas Cove)

than she remembered it: higher and more cruel, as if it had absorbed a terrible increase of savagery from the killing of a Raver’s physical form, the destruction of a fragment of the Illearth Stone. The very dirt radiated hunger, thirst, desire, as though every clod and pebble craved the taste of blood; of slaughter enough to drench the soul of the forest. Here the Deep had no language for its bereavement except rage. Utterly dead, the Howe piled darkness upward as if it were impervious to sunshine; as if no light from the heavens could touch it. And near the crest arose the two dead trunks which supported the Forestal’s gibbet.
    From the branches of the crossbar hung two nooses, ready and willing.
    Beside his gibbet, Caerroil Wildwood stood with his arms folded over his scepter as if he had been waiting for an age of the Earth. Around his neck he wore a garland braided from the stems and blooms of accusations. The song he spread around him had once been a dirge, but it had become as harsh and heavy as drumbeats announcing judgment.
    His presence stopped Linden and Mahrtiir at the foot of the slope.
    “Ringthane,” the Manethrall breathed, suddenly aghast. “This place—Mane and Tail! Tales name it, but no Raman has beheld it. It is the Forestal’s heart. It cannot be answered.”
    “I know,” Linden said hoarsely. The labor of her pulse seemed to clog her throat. “But he has a right to it. I felt like that, and all I lost was my son. What he’s suffered is worse.
    “The
Elohim
made this possible.” One of them had planted the seeds of power and lore which had germinated to become Forestals. “But they don’t die, so they don’t grieve. They had no idea what his life would be like.”
    A handful of Forestals had not sufficed to save the woods. As benign as Gilden and oaks, Caerroil Wildwood and his kind had been slow to recognize hate and heedlessness. They had taken too long to learn anger, too long to summon their strength. As a result, they had been forced to watch millions of living things in their care perish.
    “But you said it yourself,” Linden went on. “He’ll hear us anyway. He needs something to hope for.”
    She had to believe that.
    Touching Mahrtiir’s shoulder, she urged him to join her as she began her ascent of Gallows Howe.
    He may have faltered for a moment—but only for a moment. Then he found his resolve, and his features seemed to become sharper.
You’ll have to go a long way to find your heart’s desire
. With his chin jutting, he moved upward at Linden’s side.
    Death accumulated under her boots at every step. The dirt heeded no appeal and would never be appeased: it had lost too much. On this hill in another era, she had found the granite rage which had carried or driven her from her battle with Roger and the
croyel
to Thomas Covenant’s resurrection. She understood the Howe’s ire in the deepest channels of her heart.
    As she climbed the hill’s accreted hunger, however, she recognized other emotions as well. Listening with her nerves, her health-sense, she heard more. The passion of Gallows Howe was for revenge, retribution: the ground burned to repay its ancient pain. But that trenchant yearning arose from a foundation of unannealed bereavement. Trees beyond counting had been destroyed before the woods had awakened to anger. Grief came first. Without woe and protest, there would have been no wrath.
    Then inchoate perceptions which had tugged at the edges of her thoughts for days shifted toward clarity, and she heard still more. In spite of their avid bitterness, the songs sung by Caerroil Wildwood beside his gibbet were more complex than they appeared to be. First came grief. Yes. It led inexorably to rage. But it did so only because a different need had been denied. Between the underlying loss and the accumulated gall lay a yearning of another kind altogether: a vast, sorrowing, stymied desire, not for revenge, but for
restitution
. The forests, and the emblem of Gallows Howe, would not have grown so dark if they had not first failed to reclaim what they had lost. If the Forestals had not failed at restitution, they would not have succumbed to ire and viciousness.
    That unbidden insight humbled Linden. It daunted her when she could not afford to flinch or turn away. It had too many personal implications.
    She, too, had gone from loss to rage when her first efforts to find her son had failed. Nevertheless Jeremiah had been restored to her. Even though she