The First King of Shannara

They fled once more into the night, the king, the Druid, and a handful of Home Guard. Smoke and ash chased after them, and farther off, lighting the whole of the horizon like beacons, the fires from the supply wagons and the siege machines burned on. Preia Starle returned out of the dark, breathless, harried, eyes revealing both anger and fear. She shouldered her way under Jerle Shannara’s left arm and bolstered him as he walked. The king did not resist. His eyes met her own and looked away. His mouth was set.

The fear that smoldered in the dark comers of his consciousness had burst forth in flames this night — fear that somehow the sword with which he had been entrusted was not right for him and would not respond when needed. It had emerged to challenge him, and he had failed to meet that challenge. If not for Bremen, he would be dead. A thing of lesser magic would have finished him, a thing of far less power than the Warlock Lord. Doubt riddled his resolve.

All he had believed possible just hours earlier was lost. The magic of the sword was wrong for him. The magic would not answer to his call. It needed someone else, someone more attuned to its use.

He was not that man. He was not.

He could hear the words echo in the pounding of his heart, cold and certain. He tried to close his mind and his ears to the sound, but found he could not. In hopeless despair, he ran on.





Chapter Twenty-Nine


With Bremen gone west to bear the Druid sword to the Elves, Kinson Ravenlock and Mareth turned east along the Silver River in search of the Dwarves. They traveled that first day through the hill country that buttressed the river’s north bank, winding their way steadily closer to the forests of the Anar. Mist clung to the hills with dogged persistence, then began to burn away as the sun rose higher in the midday sky. By early afternoon, the travelers had reached the Anar and started in.

Here the land flattened and smoothed. Sunlight pierced the leafy canopy and dappled the earthen carpet. They had enough food and water for that day only, and they divided it carefully when they paused for their lunch, reserving enough for dinner in the event that no better choice presented itself.

The Anar was bright with the green of the trees and the blue of the river, with shafts of sunlight from the mostly cloudless sky, and with birdsong and the cluttering of small creatures darting through the undergrowth. But the trail was trampled and strewn with the leavings of the Northland army, and no human life revealed itself anywhere. Now and again the faint scent of charred wood and old ashes wafted on the wind, and moments of silence would descend — a quiet so intense it caused the man and the woman to look about guardedly. They passed small cottages and outbuildings, some still standing, some burned out, but all vacant.

No Dwarves appeared. No one passed them on the trail.

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” Mareth observed at one point when Kinson had remarked on the subject. “The Warlock Lord has only just withdrawn from the Eastland. The Dwarves must still be in hiding.”

It seemed a logical conclusion, but it bothered Kinson nevertheless to pass through country so improbably deserted. The absence of even the most transient peddler was disturbing to him.

It suggested that there was no reason for anyone to be here anymore, as if life no longer had a purpose in these forests. It gave him pause to think that an entire people could vanish as if they had never been. He had no frame of reference for an eradication of this magnitude. What if the Dwarves had been annihilated? What if they had simply ceased to exist? The Four Lands would never recover from such a loss. They would never be the same.

As they walked, content to stay silent, mulling over their separate thoughts, the Borderman and the Druid apprentice did not speak to each other much. Mareth walked with her head up and her eyes forward, and her gaze seemed directed to something beyond what either of them could see. Kinson found himself wondering if she was pondering the possibility of her heritage in light of what she had learned from Bremen. That she was not his daughter, after thinking for so long that she must be, would be shock enough for anyone. That she was perhaps the daughter of one of the dark things that served the Warlock Lord was worse.

Kinson did not know how he would react to such a revelation. He did not think he would accept it easily. It did not matter, he thought, that Bremen insisted it could have no bearing on the sort of person Mareth was. There was more than logic at issue here.