The Elf Queen of Shannara

“But not sufficiently to provoke you to answer?”


Walker shook his head in disgust. “Answers are pointless. Any answer I might give would only come back to haunt me later. I feel I am betrayed by my own thoughts in this business. Better to deal with what is given than what might be, isn’t it?” He sighed. The cold of the stone seeped into him, felt now for the first time. “I am as trapped here as you are,” he whispered.

Cogline leaned back against the castle wall, looking momentarily as if he might disappear into it. “Then make your escape, Walker,” he said quietly. “Not by running from your fate, but by embracing it. You have insisted from the beginning that you would not allow yourself to be manipulated by the Druids. Do you suppose that I feel any different? We are both victims of circumstances set in motion three hundred years ago, and we would neither of us be so if we had the choice. But we don’t. And it does no good to rail against what has been done to us. So, Walker, do something to turn things to your advantage. Do as you are fated, become what you must, and then act in whatever ways you perceive to be right.”

Walker’s smile was ironic. “So you would have me transform myself. How do I do that, Cogline? You have yet to tell me.”

“Begin with the Druid Histories. All of the secrets of the magic are said to be contained within.” The old man’s hand gripped his arm impulsively. “Go up into the Keep and take the Histories from their vault, one by one, and see for yourself what they can teach. The answers you need must lie therein. It is a place to start, at least.”

“Yes,” Walker agreed, inwardly mulling over the possibility that Cogline was right, that he might gain what he sought not by pushing his fate away but by turning it to his own use. “Yes, it is a start.”

He rose then, and Cogline with him. Walker faced the old man in silence for a moment, then reached out with his good arm and gently embraced him. “I am sorry for what has been done to you,” he whispered. “I meant what I said back at Hearthstone before Rimmer Dull came—that I was wrong to blame you for any of what has happened, that I am grateful for all you have done to help me. We shall find a way to get free, Cogline. I promise.”

Then he stepped back, and Cogline’s answering smile was a momentary ray of sunlight breaking through the gloom.



So Walker Boh went up into the Keep, following the lead of Cogline and Rumor, three specters at haunt in a twilight world. The castle of the Druids was dark and heavy, shimmering like an image reflected in a pool of water adrift with shadows. The stone of the walls and floors and towers was cold and empty of life, and the hallways wound about like tunnels beneath the earth, dark and dank. There were bones scattered here and there along the carpeted, tapestried halls, the remains of those Gnomes who had died when Allanon had invoked the magic that sent the Keep out of the Four Lands three hundred years earlier. Piles of dust marked the end of the Mord Wraiths trapped there, and all that remained of what they had been was a whisper of a memory sealed away by the walls.

Passageways came and went, stairways that ran straight and curved about, a warren of corridors burrowing back into the stone. The silence was pervasive, thick and deep as leaves in late autumn in the forest, rooted in the castle walls and inexorable. They did not challenge it, wordless as they passed through its curtain, focusing instead on what lay ahead, on the path they followed to the paths that waited. Doors and empty chambers came and went about them, stark and uninviting within their trappings of gloom. Windows opened into grayness, a peculiar haze that shaded everything beyond so that the Keep was an island. Walker searched for something of the forestland that ringed the empty hill on which Paranor had stood, but the trees had disappeared; or he had, he amended—come out of the Four Lands into nothingness. Color had been drained from the carpets and tapestries and paintings, from the stone itself, and even from the sky. There was only the gloom, a kind of gray that defied any brightening, that was empty and dead.