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

“They are on the coast?” he asked finally, his voice empty of expression.

She nodded. “The vision suggests so. But the vision is not always what I think it is.”

His smile chilled her. “Things seldom are, little seer.”

“What matters is that Ahren Elessedil’s words generated these images,” she insisted. “Without them, I would have nothing.”

“In which case, I would have no further need of either of you, would I?” he asked. One hand lifted and gestured toward her almost languidly. “Or need of either of you if he can no longer be trusted to speak the truth, isn’t that so?”

The echo of his words hung in the air, an indictment she knew she must refute. “I do not need him to speak the truth in order to interpret my visions,” she said.

It was a lie, but it was all she had. She spoke it with conviction and held the warlock’s dark gaze even when she could feel the harm he intended her penetrating through to her soul.

After a long moment, the Morgawr shrugged. “Then we must let him live a little longer. We must give him another chance.”

He said it convincingly, but she could tell he was lying. He had made up his mind about Ahren as surely as Ahren had made up his mind about her. The Morgawr no longer believed in either of them, she suspected, but particularly in the Elven Prince. He might try using Ahren once more, but then he would surely get rid of him. He had neither time nor patience for recalcitrant prisoners. What he demanded of this land, of its secrets and magic, lay elsewhere. His disenchantment with Ahren would grow, and eventually it would devour them both.

Dismissed from his presence without the need for words, she left him and went back on deck. She climbed the stairs at the end of the companionway and walked forward to the bow. With her hands grasping the railing to steady herself, she stared at the horizon, at the vast sweep of mountains and forests, at banks of broken clouds and bands of sunlight. The day was sliding toward nightfall, the light beginning to fade west, the dark to rise east.

She closed her eyes when her picture of the world was clear in her mind, and she let her thoughts drift. She must do something to save the Elven Prince. She had not believed it would be necessary to act so soon, but it now seemed unavoidable. That she was committed to Walker’s plan for the Morgawr did not require committing Ahren, as well. His destiny lay elsewhere, beyond this country and its treacheries, home in the Four Lands, where his blood heritage would serve a different purpose. She had caught a glimmer of it in the visions she had shared with Walker. She knew it from what the Druid had said as he lay dying. She could feel it in her heart.

Just as she could feel with unmistakable certainty the fate that awaited her.

She breathed slowly and deeply to calm herself, to muster acceptance of what she knew she must do. Walker needed her to mislead the Morgawr, to slow him in his hunt, to buy time for Grianne Ohmsford. It was not something the Druid had asked lightly; it was something he had asked out of desperate need and a faith in her abilities. She felt small and frail in the face of such expectations, a child in a girl’s body, her womanhood yet so far away that she could not imagine it. Her seer’s mind did not allow for growing up in the ways of other women; it was her mind that was old. Yet she was capable and determined. She was the Druid’s right hand, and he was always with her, lending his strength.

She held that knowledge to her like a talisman as she made her plans.

When nightfall descended, she acted on them.

She waited until all of the Mwellrets were sleeping, save the watch and the helmsman. Black Moclips sailed through the night skies at a slow, languorous pace, tracking the edge of the coastline north and east as Ryer Ord Star slipped from her makeshift bed in the lee of the aft decking and made her way forward. Aden Kett and his crew stood at their stations, dead eyes staring. She glanced at them as she passed, but her gaze did not linger. It was dangerous to look too closely at your own fate.