The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

She felt her throat tighten, and her eyes filled with tears as she thought of Ahren Elessedil, dead in the Slags. Her mentor, her surrogate father, her best friend—gone, killed by another Druid. Druids at war with Druids—it was an abomination. She had wanted so badly to be one of them, but now she wasn’t sure. Ahren was dead, Grianne Ohmsford was locked in the Forbidding, and the very order she had so desperately wanted to join was responsible for all of it. She had learned a little of how to employ elemental magic, but so far it hadn’t proved very useful. She carried the Elfstones, but they weren’t really hers. In plain language, she was a rank amateur, a thief, and a runaway, and she was risking her life to achieve something she wasn’t sure she believed in.

She gave vent to her disappointment and despair, crying silently, keeping her face turned away from the other two so as not to wake them. She stopped after a few moments, deciding she had been self-indulgent enough, and composed herself. She could not afford to waste time. The decision had been made, the journey had been undertaken, and there was no turning back. She had believed rescuing the Ard Rhys was the right thing to do when she had started out, and nothing had changed. The loss of her uncle was staggering, but she knew that if he were there he would tell her not to give up, to remember what was at stake, to be brave and to trust in what her instincts and common sense told her was true. He had come through worse on the voyage of the Jerle Shannara. He had found strength in recognition of his own failures and his ability to confront them. A boy younger than she was now, he had remade himself into a man. She must do no less for herself, if she was to be deserving of his trust.

Absorbed in her thoughts, she very nearly missed seeing the sleek, dark shape of the Skatelow as it appeared on the horizon and turned toward them.

“Pen!” she hissed frantically. “Tagwen!”

They jerked awake, the Dwarf starting so violently that he nearly rolled off his perch. She seized his shoulder to steady him, then pointed out to where the airship sailed through the starlit sky like a dark phantom. “That’s her,” Pen whispered.

“I’m going down,” Khyber announced, climbing to her feet. “Don’t forget. Once you see that thing leave the airship, move into the trees. Even if it brings Cinnaminson into the rocks, Pen. No matter what.”

She didn’t hear his response, if he gave one, and she didn’t look back at him. She couldn’t worry about him anymore. He was going to have to do his part, just as she was going to have to do hers, and that meant he was going to have to put all thoughts of Cinnaminson behind him. She wasn’t sure he could do that, but it was out of her control.

Her heart was beating rapidly and her face felt flushed as she hurried through the maze toward the fire, blood singing through her veins. She forced herself to focus on the task ahead, picturing herself flinging the tar ball at the creature, imagining it coated in black goo. She glanced skyward once or twice, but she was too deep in the rocks to see what was happening with the Skatelow. The creature hunting them had to have seen the fire. Patience, she told herself. It was coming.

She reached the clearing and retrieved the tar ball from beside the fire. The tar was warm and pliable through its leafy wrapping, in perfect condition for its intended use. She turned back to her hiding place and stepped inside. The crevice was deeply shadowed and slightly elevated from the fire and the three cloaked forms stretched out around it. She could see everything that might happen and not be seen herself. Moon and stars lit the open space, revealing the opening to the passageway through which the creature would enter the clearing. But the angle of the moon left her own hiding place in the rocks shadowed and dark.

She hefted the tar in her hands and settled back to wait.

If she had been a little more proficient with her magic, she might have floated the tar out over the entry point, as Ahren had taught her to do with a leaf, dropping it on the creature when it appeared. But that required skill and timing she did not yet possess, and she could not afford to miss on her one opportunity. Thinking of her inability to use her magic made her wish she had studied longer and harder when she’d had the chance, when Ahren was still there to teach her. Who would teach her now? There was only so much she could do for herself, and now no one in the Druid ranks whom she could turn to.

If she even got the chance to try.

The minutes passed. The darkness was deep and silent, a sweeping shroud lying soft and gentle across the world. Nothing moved. The clearing remained empty.

The longer she stood there waiting, the more certain she became that the whole plan was doomed to fail. The thing that hunted them was quick and agile. Her chances of actually hitting it were poor, and her chances of escaping afterwards were poorer still. She began to think of ways in which she could use her small magic to slow it down—something, anything she could do to get far enough ahead of it that it couldn’t catch her. A cold certainty began to creep through her that she didn’t possess the necessary tools. She was just learning magic, just beginning to make the sort of progress that would lead her to a command of real power.