The Druid of Shannara

They did not return to their normal place of concealment that night; it was already dusk when they departed the flats and the distance back through the city was too great to cover safely. Instead, they found a building close at hand, a low, squat structure with winding, narrow halls and rooms with doors opening through at both ends to provide a choice of escape routes if the Rake should appear. Settled deep within the stone interior of the building, shut away with barely enough light to see each other at arm’s length, they ate their dinner of dried fruits and vegetables, stale bread, and a little water and tried to banish the ghost of Carisman from their presence. The dead tunesmith surfaced in memories, in unspoken words, and in the faint, soft roll of the ocean’s distant waters. His face blossomed in the shadows they cast, and his voice whispered in the sound of their breathing. Walker Boh regarded Quickening without seeing her; his thoughts were of Carisman and of how he had let the tunesmith go when he could have stopped him from doing so. When Quickening touched him on the arm, he was barely aware of the pressure of her fingers. When she read his thoughts in the touch, he was oblivious. He felt drained and empty and impossibly alone.

Later, while she slept, he grew aware of her again. His self-reproach had exhausted itself, his sorrow had dried up; Carisman’s shade was banished, consigned at last to the place and time in which it belonged. He sat in a box of darkness, the stone of the walls and ceiling and floor pressing in around him, the silence a blanket that would suffocate him, time the instrument by which he measured the approach of his own death. Could it be far away now for any of them? He watched the girl sleeping next to him, watched the rise and fall of her breast as she breathed, turned on her side, her face cradled in the crook of her arm, her silver hair fanned back in a sweep of brightness. He watched the slow, steady beat of her pulse along the slim column of her throat, searched the hollows of her face where the shadows draped and pooled, and traced the line of her body within the covering of clothes that failed to hide its perfection. She was a fragile bit of life whatever her magic, and he could not escape the feeling that despite the confidence she evidenced in her father and the command with which she had brought them north she was in peril. The feeling was elusive and difficult to credit, but it took life in his instincts and his prescience, born of the magic that he had inherited from Brin Ohmsford, magic that still ebbed and flowed within him as the tide of his belief in himself rose and fell. He could not disregard it. Quickening was at risk, and he did not know how to save her.

The night deepened and still he did not sleep. They were all at risk, of course. What he sensed of danger to the daughter of the King of the Silver River was possibly no more than what he sensed of danger to them all. It had caught up with Carisman. It would eventually catch up with Quickening as well. Perhaps what he feared was not that Quickening would die, but that she would die before she revealed the secrets she knew. There were many, he suspected. That she hid them so completely infuriated him. He was surprised at the anger his realization provoked. Quickening had brought him face to face with the darkest of his fears and then left him to stand alone against it. His entire life had been shadowed by his apprehension that Allanon’s mysterious trust to the Ohmsfords, given over three hundred years ago to Brin and passed unused from generation to generation, might somehow require fulfillment by him. He had lived with the specter of it since childhood, aware of its existence as all of his family had been, finding it a ghost that would not be banished, that instead grew more substantial with the passing of the years. The magic of the Ohmsfords was alive in him as it had not been in his ancestors. The dreams of Allanon had come only to him. Cogline had made him his student and taught him the history of his art and of the Druid cause. Allanon had told him to go in search of the Druids and lost Paranor.

He shivered. Each step took him closer to the inevitable. The trust had been held for him. The phantom that had haunted him all these years had revealed a terrifying face.

He was to take the Black Elfstone and bring back Paranor.