The First King of Shannara

“How did they know?” he pressed.

He could feel her shrug. “They didn’t. They guessed. The outposts are no secret. The Gnomes knew we would come searching for the Black Elfstone. They simply waited for us. They are waiting at all of the outposts, I imagine.” She paused. “If they had known our plans exactly, if they had known how to find us, they would have gotten me as well as Kipp. But I found them just before they found me.”

“You had to fight to get away, though. We found your bow.”

She shook her head. “I was afraid you would. It could not be helped.”

“We thought...”

“I dropped it fleeing them,” she cut him off before he could say what they had thought. “Then I went after Kipp. That was where the fighting took place. At the outpost, just after they seized him. But there were too many for me. I had to leave him.”

The words were edged with bitterness. It had cost her to tell him this. “We had to leave him as well,” he admitted.

She did not turn. “Alive?”

He shook his head slowly.

He felt her sigh. “I could not get back to warn you. There were too many Gnomes between us. I had to go on ahead to try to secure the horses. I knew that without horses, we were finished. I thought, too, that I could draw some of them off.” Her laugh was small and hollow. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Anyway, I was able to steal a horse from under their noses last night while they slept, ride it south to an outpost beyond the valley that I knew they would not have discovered, secure these horses we ride now, herd them back again, and hide until you appeared.”

Tay stared at her, astonished. “How in the world did you manage an that in one day?”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard.” There was a long pause, with only the soft thud of the horses’ hooves. “Not as hard as what you had to do.” She looked back at him once more, her smile sad and uncertain. “You did well, Tay.”

He forced himself to smile back. “You did better.”

“I wouldn’t want to lose you,” she said suddenly, and turned away.

He sat silent behind her, unable to offer a reply.

They rode on through the night and made camp just before dawn in a shallow ravine grown thick with slender-boughed ash and white birch. They slept only a few hours, rose, ate, and went on. The rain had returned, a steady drizzle, and with it a mist that clouded the whole of the land in roiling gray. The mist and the rain hid them, and so they pressed on through that day and the next and deep into the second day’s night, hidden from those who searched for them. Tay rode point with Preia Starle, using his magic to scan the heavy gloom, worried not so much that they might be discovered by Gnome Hunters as that they might accidentally stumble across them. They walked their horses most of the time, anxious to save their strength for when it would be needed and to guard against missteps in the rain-soaked earth.

Tay and Preia did not talk, concentrating on keeping watch, he with his magic, she with her eyes. But they pressed close against each other in the rain, and for Tay, that was enough. He allowed himself to imagine they meant more to each other than they did. It was a pointless exercise, but it made him feel for a short time as if he had found a place for himself in the world beyond Paranor. He thought that if he tried hard enough, perhaps he could find a way to belong again, even without Preia. He knew that she could not accompany him, but perhaps she could help him find a path. He held her loosely about the waist, shielding her from the weather with his taller frame, feeling the heat of her body seep into his. He wondered at how he had gotten to where he was in life. He wondered at the choices he had made and whether, if made over again, they might be different.

They slept near dawn of the third day, finding shelter this time in a grove of towering hardwoods set back within a blind draw at the edge of the Kensrowe. They had traveled far north of where they had come into the valley, and were now close to its west end.

Ahead lay the dark stretch of the Innisbore and the pass through Baen Draw that would take them to the Breakline. Tay had found no trace of Gnomes that day. He was beginning to believe they had outdistanced their pursuers and would lose them for good in the tangle of the mountains ahead:

Tay rose early and found Jerle Shannara already awake, standing at the edge of the camp looking out into the new day. It was gloomy and dark once more, the weather unchanged.

The big man turned at his approach. ‘Tay. Too short a night, wasn’t it?”

Tay shrugged. “I slept well enough.”

“Not like you’re used to sleeping, though. Not like you did at Paranor with the Druids, in a bed, in a dry room, with hot food waiting when you rose.”