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

What I mean is…I just want to know. I want to understand. Are you put together differently? When you were born, were you…?”


She squeezed her eyes shut, and he saw tears. “Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wish I hadn’t asked. It doesn’t matter. You are still the boy I fell in love with. You are the one I will always love. It doesn’t matter how you are made or what you can do or any of it.” She clasped his hands tightly in her own. “Just forget I asked. Please. We won’t say anything about it again. Let’s talk about something else. Tell me what we are going to do?”

Cheney was waking up now, his big head lifting to look over at them. His gray eyes were calm, and his gaze steady. He did not look to Hawk as if he thought anything strange had happened to him. He looked just the way he always looked—alert and ready.

“I don’t know where we are going,” he told Tessa, getting to his feet and then helping her stand, as well. “I don’t even know where we are. I know there is a river in the gorge below us. That’s about all.”

“You must have some idea,” she insisted. Her dusky face broke into a sudden grin. “How can you save anyone if you don’t know how to find them?”

He shrugged. “I’m kind of new at this. I have to learn as I go. Do you have any ideas?”

She looked around. “Let’s walk over to the edge of the bluff and see if we can tell anything from that.”

They left the shelter of the trees, walked across the bluff to its edge, and peered over. A solitary boat was making a slow, arduous passage from their side of the river to the far bank. There were four passengers. The first of them, cloaked and hooded in black, stood at the steering wheel on the bridge, staring forward into the haze. Two more were seated on the decking benches just below. The last—a woman, Hawk thought—stood at the aft railing looking up at him. For a moment it seemed their eyes met, and it almost felt to him that they knew each other.

Then the mist rolled in again, and the boat disappeared.

Hawk stared after it for a long time without speaking.

“We have to cross that river,” he said finally.

“Do you know where we are now?” Tessa asked him.

“No, but it doesn’t matter. What I know is that we have to cross that river.”

“How do you know that?”

He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. I just do.” He looked over at her. “Something inside tells me.”

Cheney moved up beside them, his big head lowering to sniff the ground. A light rain was beginning to fall, and the mist on the water was thickening.

The dawn should have brought a steady brightening into day; instead, the light seemed to be failing and the dark growing stronger.

“I wish I could tell you something more,” Hawk said softly.

Tessa looked at him for a moment, and then she took his arm and turned him toward her. “You’ve told me enough. We’d better get started.”

HAWK CHOSE THEIR PATH. They could have turned either way along the riverbank, but his instincts sent them right, upriver toward the faint brightness of the sunrise. The rain fell steadily, but not in sheets, only as something slightly damper than a mist. Rain of any sort was unusual, and particularly so for any length of time. But it rained all morning as they traveled, and into the afternoon. The river followed a mostly straight course, and they were able to stay within sight of it as they walked the bluff. They saw no other traffic on the river and no sign of life on the banks. The land stretched away about them—hills and forests, fields and meadows dotted with rocky monoliths, and in the distance huge, barren mountains.

By early afternoon, Hawk was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake.

It bothered him that the King of the Silver River had deposited him back in the world with no clear idea of where he was supposed to go. It was difficult enough coming to terms with the idea that he wasn’t entirely human, that he was in part, at least, a creature of Faerie, imbued with wild magic and the promise of performing an impossible feat. How he was supposed to find and lead thousands of people—children, in particular—to safety, to the gardens from which he had been sent, was difficult to imagine, no matter what anyone said. At least he should have been given a better idea of how and where he was supposed to undertake this task.

Instead he was in a foreign place, not even Seattle and Pioneer Square, the only home he had ever known. He was separated from the Ghosts, his only family, and told that his memories of his early life of growing up in Oregon were not real. All he had to sustain him was his dog and the girl he loved.