The Elves of Cintra (Book 2 of The Genesis of Shannara)

Why wouldn’t he listen to her? Why wouldn’t her parents?

Why wouldn’t anyone? But only the Ghosts had ever listened. Only the Ghosts had known the value of her voices.

She took slow, deep breaths to calm herself, to blot out the fear and the horror, to make the moments pass more quickly. She hugged herself more tightly, feeling cold and abandoned. Then, unable to stand the waiting further, she stilled her breathing and listened.

Silence.

She waited a long time for the silence to break, for the sounds of whatever predator was out there, but she heard nothing. She got to her feet and peered through the grasses toward the roadway. Nothing moved. She hesitated, wanting to know for sure, but at the same time wanting to keep alive some small hope that she was wrong. The latter won out. There was nothing to be gained by looking. She turned away from the highway and continued walking through the grasses to their end, and from there across an empty, barren stretch of earth that had once been a planted field, and from there through a yard past several farm buildings and back toward the highway and the family from which she had been taken.

She was very tired and very sad.

They won’t come for you, you know. No one ever comes for you once you’re gone.

She could hear the boy with the ruined face speaking those cruel words, and the memory chilled her. But he was wrong. This was her family, and her family would never leave her. Not the Ghosts. Not Owl and Sparrow and Panther and the others. They would come.

She gained the highway and followed it south toward the place where she had left them. They would come, she told herself again and again.

Just before dawn, as the rising sun turned the sky a strange silvery red below a bank of heavy smoke and ash from a fire whose origins she could only guess at, they did.





Chapter TWENTY-TWO


FOR NEARLY TWO WEEKS, Simralin led her brother and Angel Perez north through the high desert east of the Cintra, following the spine of the mountains they had entered after fleeing Arborlon. The days were hot, the nights cool, and the air dry and filled with the taste and smell of iron. They traversed long stretches of sandy soil studded with scrub brush and wiry trees whose branches had somehow kept their bristle-ridged leaves and rocky lava fields that suggested how the world might have looked when it was first being born. The miles disappeared behind them, but the look of the land never changed. After a time, Kirisin began to wonder if they were actually getting anywhere or simply going in circles, but he kept his concerns to himself and placed his trust in his sister.

In any case, all his spare energy was tied up in keeping watch for the demons tracking them. He knew they were back there, following soundlessly and invisibly, waiting for their chance. Sooner or later they would appear, intent on killing them all, probably when least expected. He tried not to let his distress show, to be more like his sister and Angel Perez, who were always so calm and steady. Nothing seemed to disturb either of them. Of course, they were more used to living like this, to being either the hunter or the hunted. They had learned long ago to coexist with uncertainty and edginess. He was still trying to figure out how to deal with both, and the effort was draining him. He wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t eating, and he was barely able to think of anything else. The repetitive nature of their travel only added to his sense of dread. Each day was a fresh slog through a forest of fears, a mind-numbing trek toward the disaster he knew was waiting. Nothing he did could dispel this certainty and the effect it was having on him. He could barely remember what life had been like before. His time as a Chosen, as a caretaker for the Ellcrys, might have happened a hundred years ago.

But there was an unintended and oddly positive aspect to his distress that he had not anticipated. He had begun this journey filled with pain and grief for the dead he had left behind. He had thought he would never feel good about anything again, haunted by what he had witnessed and how he had failed to prevent it. But day by day he found himself experiencing a gradual erosion of his despair, a wearing-away of the once seemingly unforgettable images of Erisha as she lay dying. He was able to stop trying to picture Ailie and old Culph in their final moments, as well. It didn’t happen all at once or even in a way that was immediately recognizable. It wasn’t that he was healing, but that his hurt and grief had been crowded out by his fears and dark expectations. There was no room for the former when the latter consumed his every waking minute.