I listened to this chapter recently, and was struck by a couple of things.
In [i]The One Tree[/i] was wrote:"I gave her what she wanted. God Himself couldn't do anything except let her suffer, but I gave her what she wanted.
"It was evil."
He started to protest as if he felt more grief than she had ever allowed herself. She cut him off.
"That's why I didn't want to believe in evil. I didn't want to have to look at myself that way. And I didn't want to know your secrets because I didn't want to tell you mine."
I think the clues were there in there in the earlier chapters in TWL. But here it is, in stark black and white.
I didn't want to believe in evil. This explains why she was horrified by the hot knife that slew Nassic. This is why Gibbon Raver shook the foundations of her soul. Coming face to face with evil means admitting evil exists means admitting she is evil means facing what she was hiding from herself and hiding herself from all those years.
Also:
In [i]The One Tree[/i] was wrote: She had needed the power to take some kind of action, create some kind of defense; and because her conscious mind lacked the strength, the dark hunger she had inherited from her father's death had raised its head in her. You never loved me anyway. Swarming up from the floorboards of the attic, spewing like a hatred of all life from his stretched and gleeful mouth. His mouth, which should have been open in pain or love. Facing her mother, the blackness had leaped up like a visage of nightmare, had appeared full-formed, precise, and unquestionable not in her mind but rather in her hands, so that her body knew what she meant to do while her brain could only watch and wail, not prevent, control, or even choose.
The blackness is very real in Linden. It is her inner darkness, her inner Despiser. Her father gave it to her. And it kills.
Which I mention because it ties to this next bit:
In [i]The One Tree[/i] was wrote:"All my life" - her hands flinched - "I've had the darkness under control. One way or another. But I had to give that up, so I could get far enough inside you. I didn't have any left for Ceer."
This is something that I had not noted in my earlier reads through this chapter: That the blackness, the one that rose up and killed her mother, rose up again here. And tried to kill Ceer.
Because Linden had nothing left to hold it back.
Abandoning herself entirely, she fell like a dying star into the blankness behind which the Elohim had hidden his soul. Linden gave up everything, and that included her ability to keep her blackness in check. And so it emerged.
What this means, to me, is that Linden wasn't trying to slay Ceer because she was dreaming or reliving a memory or otherwise deluded. No. Her lost control, and her memories of her mother, let loose the blackness within her. The evil in her. It came out, and it tried to kill.
Ceer was trying to rise, defend the group against the Hustin. And Linden perceived this as trying to die.
Help me rise!
In [i]The One Tree[/i] was wrote:She heard him - and did not hear him. Let me die! She had heard that appeal before, heard it until it had taken command of her. It had become the voice of her private darkness, her intimate hunger. The stone around her was littered with fallen spears, some whole, some broken. Unconsciously, her hands found an iron-tipped section of wood as long as her forearm. When Gibbon-Raver had touched her, part of her had leaped up in recognition and lust: her benighted powerlessness had responded to power. And now that response came welling back from its fountainhead of violence. You never loved me anyway. Silence bereft her of the severe resolve which had kept that black greed under control. Power!
Silence bereft her of the severe resolve which had kept that black greed under control. She took the
Elohim silence. And held nothing back. The control was gone. The black greed emerged.
Power! "The power to take some kind of action." The power to kill.
This, I think, explains a lot about Linden's responses in this chapter. She never tries to excuse her act against Ceer as a delusional response. She's a doctor, and she knows that is a perfectly valid excuse, but she doesn't go that way. Instead, she knows, as well as the
Haruchai know, that she acted evilly.
No, instead she cries out that they cannot judge her. Not a defense of her action, but an accusation against her judgers.
The idea of service, and of the fact that hope lies in that which is served rather than the servant (which Foamfollower & TC discuss), is fascinating, especially in terms of the Haruchai, who (I think) don't hope at all.