The Elf Queen of Shannara

The admission was a bitter one. Garth was a proud man and he did not accept defeat easily. She looked into his eyes and touched him briefly in response. You will find a way, she signed.

They ate again, mostly because it was necessary, huddled together on a small patch of damp earth that was dryer than anything about it. Ellenroh slept, wrapped in two blankets, shaking with cold and fever, mumbling from time to time, and tossing within her dreams. Wren marveled at her grandmother’s strength of will. Not once while she had struggled with her illness had she relaxed her hold on the Ruhk Staff. She clutched it to her still, as if she might with her own body protect the city and people the Loden’s magic enclosed. Gavilan had offered more than once to relieve her of the task of carrying the staff, but she had steadfastly refused to give it up. It was a burden she had resolved to shoulder, and she would not be persuaded to lay it down. Wren thought of what it must have cost her grandmother to become so strong—the loss of her parents, her husband, her daughter, her friends—almost everyone close to her. Her whole life had been turned about with the coming of the demons and the walling away of the city of Arborlon. All that she remembered as a child of Morrowindl was gone. Nothing remained of the promise she must have once felt for the future save the possibility that the Elves and their city might, through her resolve and trust, be reborn into a better world.

A world of Federation oppression and Shadowen fear, a world in which, like Morrowindl, use of magic had somehow gone awry.

Wren’s smile was slow, bitter, and ironic.

She was struck suddenly by the similarities between the two, the island and the mainland, Morrowindl and the Four Lands—different, yet afflicted with the same sort of madness. Both worlds were plagued with creatures that fed on destruction; both were beset with a sickness that turned the earth and the things that lived upon it foul. What was Morrowindl if not the Four Lands in an advanced state of decay? She wondered suddenly if the two were somehow connected, if the demons and the Shadowen might have some common origin. She wondered again at the secrets that the Elves were keeping from her of what had happened on Morrowindl years ago.

And again she asked herself, What am I doing here? Why did Allanon send me to bring the Elves back into the Four Lands? What is it that they can do that will make a difference, and how will any of us ever discover what that something is?

She finished eating and sat for a time with her grandmother, studying the other’s face in the fading light, trying to find in the ravaged features some new trace of her mother, of the vision she had claimed from that now long-ago, distant dream when her mother had pleaded, Remember me. Remember me. Such a fragile thing, her memory, and it was all that she had of either parent, all that remained of her childhood. As she sat there with her grandmother’s head cradled in her lap, she contemplated asking Garth to tell her something more of what had been, though she no longer had any real expectation that there was anything else to be told, knowing only that she was empty and alone and in need of something to cling to. But Garth stood watch, too far away to summon without disturbing the others and too distanced from her to be of any real comfort, and she turned instead to the familiar touch of the Elfstones within their leather pouch, running the tips of her fingers over their hard, smooth surfaces, rolling the Stones idly beneath the fabric of her tunic. They were her mother’s legacy to her and her grandmother’s trust, and despite her misgivings as to their purpose in her life she could not give them up. Not here, not now, not until she was free of the nightmare into which she had so willingly journeyed.

I chose this, she whispered to herself, the words bitter and harsh. I came because I wanted to.

To learn the truth, to discover where and what she was, to bring past and future together once and for all.

And what do I know of any of that? What do I understand?

Eowen came to sit next to her, and she realized how tired she had grown. She gave her grandmother over to the red-haired seer and crept silently away to her own bed. Wrapped in her blankets, she lay staring out into the impenetrable night, the swamp a maze that would swallow them all and care nothing for what it had done, the world a blanket of indifference and deceit, of dangers as numerous as the shadows gathered about, and of sudden death and the taunting ghosts of what might have been. She found herself thinking of the years she had trained with Garth, of what he had taught her, of what she had learned. She would need all of it if she were to survive, she knew. She would need everything she could summon of strength, experience, training and resolve, and she would need more than a little luck.