The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

“Yes, Master,” she whispered.

The Straken Lord nodded. “You have excelled in your testing. You have proved your worth. I am pleased.”

The demon picked her up as if she were weightless and bore her from the arena to the thunderous roar of the assembled, to cheers and grunts and stamping of feet, to unmistakable acclaim. Yet she felt no euphoria; she felt only disgust and an appalling rage at what she had been forced to do. She had survived, as was her intention, but the cost could not be measured. It had taken more than she wanted to acknowledge, her emotional sanity compromised, her carefully constructed integrity destroyed. She had walked into the arena as the Ard Rhys, but she had emerged as something else. She had reverted to the monster she had once been. In the arena she had become the Ilse Witch again in everything but her heart, and that becoming could not be easily undone, if at all. She was blackened through and through by the change she had wrought in herself, by the adopting of the Fury persona.

She had made herself sick, and although it made her weep inside to acknowledge it, she did not think she would ever be well again.





EIGHTEEN


“Captain, he’s calling for you.”

Pied Sanderling, Captain of the Elven Home Guard, looked up from the maps he had been studying since rising early that morning and stared at the tent flap wordlessly. He had been expecting it, but he had hoped that somehow it might be avoided. He couldn’t understand how the King could be so mistaken about something so obvious. But the King saw things differently, and perhaps that was why he was King, although Pied was inclined to think that being King was mostly an accident of birth.

Not that he had any room to talk. He was the King’s first cousin, and that had played a significant part in his ascension through the ranks of the Home Guard and eventual selection as Captain. There had been Sanderlings standing with the Elessedil Kings for as long as anyone could remember. A Sanderling had stood beside Wren Elessedil when she had fought at the Valley of Rhenn and driven the Federation and its allies back into the deep Southland more than 150 years ago.

“Pied, are you there?” Drumundoon pressed anxiously.

Sanderling could picture his aide’s young, anxious face with its fringe of black beard, high forehead, swept-back hair, and deeply slanted Elven features. Drum was already anticipating the worst, imagining how it would be if it were left to him to face the King alone, unable to explain what had become of his trusted cousin. But that was Drumundoon, always seeing the goblet as being half empty, always missing the silver lining behind any dark cloud. If he wasn’t so good at organizing and managing, wasn’t so dependable, and wasn’t so impossibly loyal …

But he was, of course.

“One minute,” he called to his aide, alleviating the other’s fears.

He rose, stretched to relieve cramped muscles, and stared down at the maps one final time. The whole of the Prekkendorran lay revealed in cartographic rendering, the positions of each army, Free-born and Federation, painstakingly delineated. It had taken someone a long time to do this, he thought. But it was a onetime job, since neither army had moved more than a few feet in over two years.

Until now, perhaps.

He reached for his weapons and began buckling them on. A brace of long knives went about his waist, and a short sword was strapped over one shoulder. He picked up his longbow as well, an unusual weapon for a member of the Home Guard. Their primary duty was to defend the King, which more often than not entailed hand-to-hand combat. But Pied favored the longbow, a weapon both versatile and reliable. Like most members of the Elven army, he had done a tour of duty on the Prekkendorran, serving as an archer in the ranks for six months, then as the leader of a long-range scouting unit that spent the bulk of its time deep in enemy territory. Both assignments required extensive reliance on the longbow, and he had never felt comfortable without it since. It was his work on the Prekkendorran that had gotten him noticed and appointed to the Home Guard on his return. The longbow was his good-luck charm.

Besides, he was short and slight of build, and hand-to-hand combat with broadswords was never going to favor him. Skill and quickness were what he relied on, and the longbow was a weapon that utilized both.

He glanced around his quarters to see if anything else needed doing, decided it didn’t, that he had stalled as long as he was able—though not nearly long enough to suit him—threw on his cloak, and went out through the tent flap.