Indomitable: The Epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara

He finished putting the suspended bite into his mouth, chewed it carefully, and then said, “What about you? What brings you to the east side of the Ravenshorn? Pardon me for saying so, but you don’t look like you belong here.”


Jair exchanged a quick glance with Kimber. “Traveling up to Dun Fee Aran,” Cogline announced before they could stop him. “Got some business ourselves. With the rets.”

The peddler made a face. “I’d think twice about doing business with them.” His tone of voice made clear his disgust. “Dun Fee Aran’s no place for you. Get someone else to do your business, someone a little less . . .”

He trailed off, looking from one face to the next, clearly unable to find the words that would express his concern that a boy, a girl, and an old man would even think of trying to do business with Mwellrets.

“It won’t take long,” Jair said, trying to put a better face on the idea. “We just have to pick something up.”

The peddler nodded, his thin face drawn with more than the cold and the damp. “Well, you be careful. The Mwellrets aren’t to be trusted. You know what they say about them. Look into their eyes, and you belong to them. They steal your soul. They aren’t human and they aren’t of a human disposition. I never go there. Never.”

He went back to eating his meal, and while he finished, no one spoke again. But when he put his plate aside and picked up his cup of ale again, Kimber filled it anew and said, “You’ve never had any dealings with them?”

“Once,” he answered softly. “An accident. They took everything I had and cast me out to die. But I knew the country, so I was able to make my way back home. Never went near them again, not at Dun Fee Aran and not on the road. They’re monsters.”

He paused. “Let me tell you something about Dun Fee Aran, since you’re going there. Haven’t told this to anyone. Didn’t have a reason and didn’t think anyone would believe me, anyway. But you should know. I was inside those walls. They held me there while they decided what to do with me after taking my wares and mule. I saw things. Shades, drifting through the walls as if the stone were nothing more than air. I saw my mother, dead fifteen years. She beckoned to me, tried to lead me out of there. But I couldn’t go with her because I couldn’t pass through the walls like she could. It’s true. I swear it. There was others, too. Things I don’t want to talk about. They were there at Dun Fee Aran. The rets didn’t seem to see them. Or maybe they didn’t care.”

He shook his head. “You don’t want to go inside those walls again once you’ve gotten out of them.”

His voice trailed off and he stared out into the darkness as if searching for more substantial manifestations of the memories he couldn’t quite escape. Fear reflected in his eyes with a bright glitter that warned of the damage such memories could do. He did not seem a cowardly man, or a superstitious one, but in the night’s liquid shadows he had clearly found demons other men would never even notice.

“Do you believe me?” he asked quietly.

Jair’s mouth was dry and his throat tight in the momentary silence that followed. “I don’t know,” he said.

The man nodded. “It would be wise if you did.”



At dawn, the peddler took his leave. They watched him lead his mule through the trees and turn north along the Silver River. Like one of the shades he claimed to have seen in the dungeons at Dun Fee Aran, he walked into the wall of early-morning mist and faded away.

They traveled all that day through country grown thick with scrub and old growth and layered in gray blankets of brume. The world was empty and still, a place in which dampness and gloom smothered all life and left the landscape a tangled wilderness. If not for the Silver River’s slender thread, they might easily have lost their way. Even Cogline paused more than once to consider their path. The sky had disappeared into the horizon and the horizon into the earth, so that the land took on the look and feel of a cocoon. Or a coffin. It closed about them and refused to release its death grip. It embraced them with the chilly promise of a constancy that came only with an end to life. Its desolation was both depressing and scary and did nothing to help Jair’s already eroded confidence. Bad enough that the peddler had chilled what little fire remained in his determination to continue on; now the land would suffocate the coals as well.