Ilse Witch

Bek stared. “How could you?”


The other laughed softly. “I know you better than you know yourself. The truth of you is a secret. It is not for me to reveal it to you. The Druid must be the one to do that. But I can show you something of what it looks like. Are you interested?”

For an instant, Bek considered turning around and walking away. There was something dark in the other’s meaning, something that would change the boy once it was revealed. He understood that instinctively.

“We are alike, you and I,” the shape-shifter said. “We are nothing of what we seem or others think they know. We are joined1 in ways that would surprise and astonish. Perhaps our fates are linked in some way. What becomes of one depends on what becomes of the other.”

Bek could not imagine it. He could barely follow what the shape shifter was saying, let alone fathom what it meant. He made no reply.

“Lies conceal us as masks do thieves, boy. I, because I choose it to be so—you, because you are deceived. We are wraiths living in the shadows, and the truths of identities are carefully guarded secrets. But yours is the darker by far. Yours is the one that has its source in a Druid’s games-playing and a magic’s dark promise. Mine is simply the result of a twist of fate and a parent’s foolish choice.” He paused. “Come with me, and I’ll tell you of it.”

Bek shook his head. “I can’t leave—”

“Can’t you?” the other shot, cutting him short. “Down to the island and into the castle? Come with me, and we’ll bring the third key back to the Druid before he wakes. It’s lying there, waiting for us. You and I, we can do what the Druid cannot. We can find it and bring it back.”

Bek took a deep breath. “You know where the key is?”

The other shifted slightly, a flowing of darkness against the moonlight. “What matters is that I know how to find it. The Druid asked me earlier this night to seek it out, and so I did. But now I have decided to go back on my own and get it. Want to come along with me?”

The boy was speechless. What was going on here?

“This should be easy for you. I know your heart. You’ve been allowed to do nothing. You’ve been kept aboard for no reason you can determine. You’ve been lied to and put off as if you didn’t count. Aren’t you weary of it?”

Just two days earlier, Bek had mustered the courage to ask Walker about his use of the mind-summons on Shatterstone. The Druid had told him it was only a coincidence that he had settled his thoughts on Bek, that he had been thinking of the boy just before the attack and had flashed on him instinctively. It was such an obvious lie that Bek had simply walked away in disgust. Truls Rohk seemed to be speaking directly to this incident.

“This is your chance,” the shape-shifter pressed. “Come with me. We can do what Walker cannot. Are you afraid?”

Bek nodded. “Yes.”

Truls Rohk laughed, deep and low. “You shouldn’t be. Not of anything. But I’ll protect you. Come with me. Take back something of who you are from the Druid. Give him pause. Make him reconsider how he thinks of you. Find out something about yourself, about who you are. Don’t you want that?”

To be honest, Bek wasn’t sure. All of a sudden he wasn’t sure of anything. The shape-shifter frightened him for more reasons than he cared to consider, but chief among them was his dark intimation that Bek was nothing of who and what he assumed himself to be. Revelations of that sort usually damaged as much as they healed. Bek wasn’t sure he wanted them revealed by this man, in this way.

“I’ll keep my promise to you, boy,” Truls Rohk whispered. “I’ll tell you my truth. Not what you’ve heard from Panax. Not what you’ve imagined. The truth, as it really is.”

“Panax said you were burned in a fire—”

“Panax doesn’t know. No one does, save the Druid, who knows it all.”

1Bek stared. “Why would you choose to tell me?”

“Because we are alike, as I’ve said already. We are alike, and perhaps by knowing me you will come to know yourself, as well. Perhaps. I see myself in you, a long time ago. I see how I was, and I ache with that memory. By telling you my story, I can dispel a little of that ache.”