THE VOYAGE OF THE JERLE SHANNARA : Morgawr (BOOK THREE)

He nodded, touching her knee in soft reproach. “I know. But suppose we could figure out what it would take to wake her. We’ve tried everything we could think of, both of us. But we keep trying in a general way, a kind of blanket approach to bringing her out of her sleep. Walker said she wouldn’t come back to us until she found a way to forgive herself for the worst of her wrongs. I think that’s the key. We have to figure out what that wrong is.”


She lifted her head, her red hair falling back from her face. “How can you possibly do that? She has hundreds of things to forgive herself for. How can you pick out one?”

“Walker said it was the one she believed to be the worst.” He paused, thinking. “What would that be? What would she see as her worst wrong? Killing someone? She’s killed lots of people. Which one would matter more than the others?”

Rue furrowed her smooth brow. “Maybe this was something she did when she first became the witch, when she was still young, something that goes to the heart of everything she’s done since.”

He stared at her for a long time, remembering his dream of the other night. It had been nagging at him ever since, reduced to a vague image, the details faded. It hovered now, just beyond his grasp. He could practically reach out and touch it.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I think there’s something in what you just said that might help, something about her childhood.” He stared at her some more. “I have to go down and sit with her. Maybe looking at her, being in the same room for a while, will help.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

When he hesitated, she reached out and cupped his face in her hands. “Go by yourself, Bek. Maybe you need to be alone. I’ll come later, if you need me to.”

She kissed him hard, then slipped from his side and disappeared back into the bowels of the airship. He waited only a moment more, still wrestling with his confusion, then followed her inside.





There was no reason to think that this night would be different from any other, but Bek was convinced by feelings he could not explain that it might be. Nothing he had tried—and he had tried everything—had gotten so much as a blink out of Grianne from the moment he had found her kneeling with the bloodied Sword of Shannara grasped in her hands. Only when he broke down in frustration and cried that one time, when he wasn’t even trying to make her respond, had she come out of her catatonia to speak with him. She had done so for reasons he had never been able to figure out, but tonight, he thought, he must. The secret to everything lay in connecting the reason for that singular awakening with the wrong she had committed somewhere in her past that she regarded as unforgivable.

He told Redden Alt Mer what he was going to do and suggested someone else might want to take up watch from one of the taller towers. Alt Mer said he would handle it himself, wished Bek good luck, and went over the side of the airship. Bek stood alone on the empty deck, thinking that perhaps he should ask Rue to help him after all. But he knew he would be doing so only as a way of gaining reassurance that he had done everything he could, should things not work out yet again. It was not right to use her that way, and he abandoned the idea at once. If he failed this night, he wanted it to be on his head alone.

He went down to the Captain’s quarters and slipped through the doorway. Quentin Leah lay asleep in his bed, his breathing deep and even, his face turned away from the single candle that burned nearby. The windows were shuttered and curtained so that no light or sound could escape, and the air in the room was close and stale. Bek wanted to blow out the candle and open the shutters, but he knew that would be unwise.

Instead, he walked over to his sister. She was lying on her pallet with her knees drawn up and her eyes open and staring. She wore her dark robe, but a light blanket had been laid over her, as well. Rue had brushed her hair earlier that day, and the dark strands glimmered in the candlelight like threads of silk. Her fingers were knotted together, and her mouth was twisted with what might have been a response to a deep-seated regret or troublesome dream.

Bek raised her to a sitting position, placed her against the bulkhead, and seated himself across from her. He stared at her without doing anything more, trying to think through what he knew, trying to decide what to do next. He had to break down the protective shell in which she had sealed herself, but to do that he had to know what she was protecting herself from.

He tried to envision it and failed. On the surface, she looked to be barely more than a child, but beneath she was iron hard and remorseless. That didn’t just disappear, even after a confrontation with the truth-inducing magic of the Sword of Shannara. Besides, what single act set itself apart from any other? What monstrous wrong could she not bring herself to face after perpetrating so many?