The Elf Queen of Shannara

“Where, Stresa?”


The other pricked his ears. “Its lair, I expect. It has one deep within a hollow at the In Ju’s center.”

She felt a new weariness steal through her. Of course, a lair—there would have to be. “Any sign of the Ruhk Staff?”

The Splinterscat shook his head. “Gone.”

So unless Gavilan had abandoned it—something he would never do—it was still with him. She shuddered in spite of her resolve. She was remembering her brief encounter with the Wisteron on her way in. She was remembering how just its passing had made her feel.

Poor, foolish Gavilan. There was no hope for him now

She looked at the others, one by one. “We have to get the Ruhk Staff back. We can’t leave without it.”

“No, Lady Wren, we can’t,” Triss echoed, hard-eyed.

Garth stood, his great hands limp at his sides.

Stresa shook out his quills and his sharp-nosed face lifted to her own. “Rrwwll Wren of the Elves, I expected nothing less of you. Hssttt. But you will have to—sspppptt—use the Elf Magic if we are to survive. You will have to, against the Wisteron.”

“I know,” she whispered, and felt the last vestige of her old life drop away.

“Chhttt. Not that it will make any difference. Phhfftt. The Wisteron is—”

“Stresa,” she interrupted gently. “You needn’t come.”

The silence of the moment hung against the screen of the jungle. The Splinterscat sighed and nodded. “Phhfft. We have come this far together, haven’t we? No more talk. I will take you in.”





XXV


In the long, deep silence of Paranor’s endless night, in the limbo of her gray, changeless twilight, Walker Boh sat staring into space. His hand was closed into a fist on the table before him, his fingers locked like iron bands about the Black Elfstone. There was nothing more to do—no other options to consider, no further choices to uncover. He had thought everything through to the extent that it was possible to do so, and all that remained was to test the right and wrong of it.

“Perhaps you should take a little more time,” Cogline suggested gently.

The old man sat across from him, a frail, skeletal ghost nearly transparent where caught against the light. Increasingly so, Walker thought in despair. White, wispy hair scattered like dust motes from the wrinkled face and head, robes hung like laundry set to dry on a line, and eyes flickered in dull glimmerings from out of dark sockets. Cogline was fading away, disappearing into the past, returning with Paranor to the place from which it had been summoned. For Paranor would not remain within the world of Men unless there was a Druid to tend it, and Walker Boh, chosen by time and fate to fill those dark robes, had yet to don them.

His eyes drifted over to Rumor. The moor cat slouched against the far wall of the study room in which they were settled, black body as faint and ethereal as the old man’s. He looked down at himself, fading as well, though not as quickly. In any event, he had a choice; he could leave if he chose, when he chose. Not so Cogline or Rumor, who were bound to the Keep for all eternity if Walker did not find a way to bring it back into the world of Men.

Strangely enough, he thought he had found that way. But his discovery terrified him so that he was not certain he could act on it.

Cogline shifted, a rattle of dry bones. “Another reading of the books couldn’t hurt,” he pressed.

Walker’s smile was ironic. “Another reading and there won’t be anything left of you at all. Or Rumor or the Keep or possibly even me. Paranor is disappearing, old man. We can’t pretend otherwise. Besides, there is nothing left to read, nothing to discover that I don’t already know.”

“And you’re still certain that you’re right, Walk?”

Certain? Walker was certain of nothing beyond the fact that he was most definitely not certain. The Black Elfstone was a deadly puzzle. Guess wrong about its workings and you would end up like the Stone King, enveloped by your own magic, destroyed by what you trusted most. Uhl Belk had thought he had mastered the Stone’s magic, and it had cost him everything.

“I am guessing,” he replied. “Nothing more.”

He allowed his hand to open, and the Elfstone to come into the light. It lay there in the cup of his palm, smooth-faced, sharp-edged, opaque and impenetrable, power unto itself, power beyond anything he had ever encountered. He remembered how it had felt to use the Stone when he had brought back the Keep, thinking it would end then, that the retrieval out of limbo where Allanon had sent it was all that was required. He remembered the surge of power as it joined him to the Keep, the entwining of flesh and blood with stone and mortar, the reworking of his body so that he was as much ghost as man, changing him so that he could enter Paranor, so that he could discover the rest of what he must do.