The First King of Shannara

He nodded without speaking, thinking of how their relationship had evolved, how dramatically it had changed with Tay’s death.

He had pondered for a long time her admission that she might have loved his friend, that she might even have gone with him if he had asked. It did not bother him as much as perhaps it should.

He had loved Tay himself, and now that he was dead it was hard to begrudge him anything.

“You will sit on the High Council,” he told her quietly. “Vree Erreden will sit as well. When I am able to do so, I will make him First Minister. Do you approve?”

She nodded. “You have come a long way from your old opinion of the locat, haven’t you?”

He shrugged. “I will ask that the Elven army be mobilized for a march east — no, I will insist on it.” His shoulders bunched with his determination. “I will do what Tay would have done. I will see that the Dwarves are not abandoned. I will see that the Black Elfstone reaches Bremen. If I fail as king, then it will not be because I lacked courage or commitment.”

It was a brash, uncompromising declaration, a buttress against the doubts and uncertainties that still lurked at the edges of his confidence. Preia would know. He could not afford hesitation. The line between success and failure, between life and death, would be a thin one.

Preia pressed herself against him. “You will do what you must, what you know is right. You will be king, and there will be no regrets. You will lead your people and keep them safe. It is your destiny, Jerle. It is your fate. Vree has seen it in his visions. You must see that it is true.”

He took a long moment before answering. “I see mostly that I lack another choice and so must accept this one. And I think always of Tay.”

They stood without speaking for a long time. Then Preia led him through the darkness of the summerhouse to their bed and held him until morning.





Chapter Twenty-Five


Anxious to make up for the time they sensed they had already lost, the bearers of Urprox Screl’s newly forged sword purchased horses and rode north through the Southland toward the border country and the Silver River. They traveled steadily, stopping only for food and rest, and they did not say much to one another. Memories of the forging of the sword dominated their thoughts, the images so vivid that days later it seemed as if the event had happened only moments ago. That the effects of the magic invoked had transcended the forging itself was undeniable. In some way, perhaps differently for each, the creation of the talisman had transformed them. They were newly born, the forging having reshaped them as surely as it had cast the blade itself, and they were left to puzzle out what form they had taken.

It was given to Kinson Ravenlock to bear the sword on their journey back. Bremen entrusted it to him as soon as they had departed the city, compelled to do so by a need that the Druid could not quite manage to hide from his friend. It was almost as if he could not bear the weight of the weapon, could not tolerate the feel of it. It was a strange, disturbing moment, but Kinson took the sword without a word and strapped it across his back. Its weight was nothing to him, though its importance to the future of the Races was impossible to ignore. But, not having witnessed for himself the visions at the Hadeshorn, Kinson was not burdened by a Druid’s insight into what that future might be, and so the sword did not have the same power over him. He bore it as he would any weapon, and while his mind retraced endlessly the moments of its creation, it was not the past with which he was concerned, but the present.

At night, sometimes, he would take the blade out and examine it. He would not have done so if Mareth had not asked it of him on the first night out, her curiosity stronger than her trepidation, her own ruminations on what had transpired at the forge fueling her need to look closer at what they had made. Bremen had not objected, though he had risen and walked off into the dark, so Kinson had seen no reason not to accede to Mareth’s request.