The First King of Shannara

“You had a difficult childhood. You’ve come to understand that better now that you are grown, haven’t you?”


The smile she gave him was cold and brittle. “I have come to understand many things that were hidden from me as a child. But let me finish my story and you can judge for yourself. What matters in all of this is that just before I left to apprentice to the potter, I began hearing things about my father. I was eleven by then and already knew that I would be apprenticed at twelve. I knew I would be leaving my home, and I suppose it made me consider seriously for the first time the scope and meaning of the wider world. Traders and trappers and tinkers passed through our village, so I knew there were other places to see, places far away. I wondered sometimes if my father was out there somewhere, waiting. I wondered if he knew of me. I had determined in my own childlike way that my parents had not married and so had not lived together as husband and wife. My mother bore me alone, my father already gone. What of him, then? No one would say. I thought to ask more than once, but there was something in the way my providers spoke of my mother and her life that made it clear I was not to ask. My mother had transgressed in some way, and she was forgiven her transgression only because she had died giving birth to me. I was a part of her transgression, but it was not clear to me how or why.

“When I was old enough to know that secrets were being kept from me, I began to want to uncover them. I was eleven — old enough to recognize deception and old enough to practice it. I began to ask questions about my mother, small and inconsequential questions that would not arouse anger or suspicion. I asked them mostly of my foster mother, because she was the less taciturn of the pair. I would ask the questions when we were alone, then listen at night at the door of my sleeping room to hear what she would say to her husband. Sometimes she would say nothing. Sometimes the words were obscured by the closed door. But once or twice I caught a sentence or two, a phrase, a word — some small mention of my father. It was not the words themselves that revealed so much, but the way in which they were spoken. My father was an outsider who passed through the village, stayed briefly, returned once or twice, and then disappeared. The people of the village shunned him, all save my mother. She was attracted to him. No reason for this was offered. Was she attracted to him for the way he looked or the words he spoke or the life he led? I could not learn. But it was clear they feared and disliked him, and some part of that fear and dislike had been transferred to me.”

She went quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She seemed small and vulnerable, but Bremen knew that impression ‘ was false. He waited, letting her eyes continue to hold his in the deep night silence.

“I knew even then that I was not like anyone else. I knew I had the magic, even though it was just beginning to manifest itself in me, not yet come to maturity, so that it was mostly vague stirrings and small mutterings in my child’s body. It seemed logical to conclude that it was the magic that was feared and disliked, and it was this that I had inherited from my father. Magic was mistrusted in general in my village — it was the unwanted legacy of the First War of the Races, when Men had been subverted by the rebel Druid Brona and defeated in a war with the other Races and driven south into exile. Magic had caused all this, and it was a vast, dark unknown that lurked at the comers of the subconscious and threatened the unwary. The people of my village were superstitious and not well educated and were frightened of many things. Magic could be blamed for much of what they didn’t understand. I think the people who raised me believed that I might grow into some manifestation of my father, the bearer of his magic’s seed, and so they could never quite accept me as their child. In the eleventh year of my life, I began to understand why this was so.

“The potter knew my history as well, though he did not speak of it to me in the beginning when I went to work for him. He would not admit that he was afraid of a child, even one with my history, and he took pride in the fact that he took me in when no one else would. I did not realize that at first, but he told me later.