The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

For now, there was the matter of the bell and what it signified. She rose from her desk and walked to the alcove window that opened north. On the ledge just outside the frame, she had constructed a platform and secured a wire cage for her carrier birds, the same species that Grianne Ohmsford had used when the chambers had been hers. The sound of the bell meant that the one she was expecting had finally returned.

She opened the window and peered inside the wire enclosure. The fierce, dark face of the arrow swift peered back at her, its sleek, swept-back wings folded into the sides of its distinctively narrow body, its right leg bound with the tiny message tube. She reached into the cage and stroked the bird familiarly, speaking soothingly, calming it. The birds imprinted on their owners early and never shifted their allegiance. She had been forced to destroy all her predecessor’s birds because they were useless to her. Their loyalty was legendary, and like creatures that mate for life, they would not accept a new master.

After a moment, she slipped the tube from the swift’s leg and brought it into the light. Unfastening the tip, she pulled out the tiny piece of paper inside and carefully unrolled it.

The familiar block printing confirmed what she had suspected for days:

GALAPHILE DESTROYED. TEREK MOLT AND

AHREN ELESSEDIL DEAD. I TRACK THE BOY.



The scrye waters had told them already of the destruction of the Galaphile, and she had assumed that Terek Molt was gone, as well, especially since there had been no word from him since. That Ahren Elessedil was dead was the first positive piece of news she had received on the matter. She was more than pleased to have Grianne Ohmsford’s strongest ally out of the way.

I track the boy.

She felt a shiver of excitement at the words. Aphasia Wye still hunted Penderrin Ohmsford. The boy was doomed. Once Aphasia began to hunt, there was no escape. It was only a matter of time. She had feared the assassin had perished in the conflagration that had consumed the Galaphile, and after days with no communication, she had dispatched the arrow swift to seek him out. It did not matter to her how he had survived, only that he had.

She carried the tiny message back to her writing table and fed it into the flame of the candle. The paper blackened and curled and turned to ash. She bore the charred fragments back to the window, blew them into dust, and watched them drift away on the wind.

Aphasia Wye.

She had found him quite by accident, an outcast and recluse living at the edge of the teeming, squalid hovels that encircled the city of Dechtera. She had been in the last year of her service with the Federation, a big, strong woman with little fear and a burning ambition. Her introduction to Aphasia Wye came about because she was looking for a certain deserter from the army, a man she knew well enough to dislike and stay clear of in other circumstances. But a rumor of his presence in the tenement sections of the city having surfaced, she was assigned to find and bring him back. She was given no choice in the matter.

Aphasia Wye, however, had found him first. A street child of unknown origins, Aphasia had grown up as something of a legend to those who populated the dark undersurface of Dechtera. At some point in his early life, he had been badly disfigured, but not before he had been so severely mistreated that the damage to his physical appearance could not begin to approach the damage to his psyche. Emotionally and psychologically, he dwelled in a realm few others had ever occupied, dark and soulless and empty of feeling. If he had a code of conduct, Shadea had never been able to figure out what it was. That it involved killing as a ritual cleansing was something she learned when she went looking for the deserter. That it was quixotic and arbitrary became clear when she discovered that Aphasia felt an unexpected connection to her.

His attraction to her might have had something to do with their similar backgrounds as orphans and children of the street, outcasts who had been forced to make their own way in the world. It might have had something to do with their mutual acceptance of violence as a way of life. When she found out what he had done to the deserter, her only response had been to ask for a piece of the man to prove that he was dead. She had not sought an explanation of the circumstances. She had neither approved nor disapproved of the act. That might have impressed him.