The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

“Something lives here,” Cinnaminson whispered, her smooth face lifting toward the light. “Something waits.”


Pen shook his head slowly. The voice that called his name went silent. He was aware of something else then, perhaps the same thing that had attracted Cinnaminson’s attention. It was close, but it was deep underground, he thought. It was huge and ancient. It was not human. He was sensing it through his magic at every turn. He was reading it from the things that grew in the gardens, from the small rustlings and movements of the plants and flowers, vines and grasses. They whispered of it. They responded to it. Insects and birds and animals, they carried knowledge of it. They could not give it a name or a description; they could only give it a presence.

Pen took a deep breath. “I sense it, too,” he whispered.

Cinnaminson was already moving ahead into the gardens, her sun-browned face intense and her blind eyes sweeping over everything as if seeing what no one else could. She moved swiftly and determinedly, passing by Kermadec, who turned at her approach but did not try to stop her. Instead he joined her and beckoned for the others to follow.

Khyber was already hurrying after them. Pen stood rooted in place, still hesitating.

“There is something wrong here,” Tagwen said uneasily, standing beside him. “These gardens are beautiful, but there is something wrong about them.”

Pen felt it, too, although he couldn’t explain it. “We’d better go.”

They followed the others, Pen casting wary glances left and right, still searching for the voice, for the presence, for anything that would explain what they were seeing. But nothing appeared, and the gardens stretched on in a profusion of brilliant colors and sweet smells. Even in the enfolding twilight, they shimmered with a vibrancy that seemed so foreign to everything that had gone before that it was as if the travelers had entered a dream world.

Pen stared about in wonder. How could it be possible?

They caught up to the rest of the company, which was still following Cinnaminson. The Rover girl was walking as if she knew exactly where she was going, her head lifted into the breeze, her path steady and undeviating. It seemed to Pen as if she were listening to something. He wondered suddenly if the spirits of the air had returned, if she was responding to their voices. Was that who he had sensed, as well?

The group reached a set of broad stone stairs that led upward until they disappeared into the twilight haze. Cinnaminson never paused. She began to climb the steps as soon as she reached them, and the rest of them had no choice but to follow if they were to see where she was going. Pen and Tagwen still trailed the larger group. The boy was beginning to sense something again, a stirring or a whisper, it was hard to tell. He put out feelers, reaching for what was clearly there, but although he could sense it easily, he could not identify it. There was something confusing about what he was finding; it was almost as if he lacked a frame of reference with which to understand it.

At the top of the stairs, the little company came to a halt behind Cinnaminson, who had stopped finally and was pointing ahead. The Rover girl’s face was intense and she was breathing hard. Kermadec was trying to talk to her, but she wasn’t responding. Pen, seeing what was happening, abandoned Tagwen and hurried forward.

“Cinnaminson,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and turning her to face him.

Her young face was flushed with excitement. “We have to go there. We have to follow them,” she said.

He looked in the direction she was pointing. An ancient stone arch, pitted by weather and time, bridged from the grassy area on which they stood to a forest of massive trees that sat atop a pinnacle of rock, a forested island surrounded by a deep ravine that ringed it like a moat, stretching away for as far as his eyes could see in the rapidly dimming daylight. The trees on the pinnacle were tall and straight and unbroken, rising hundreds of feet against the skyline, their bark mottled by greenish gray patches of moss. Their branches were deeply intertwined, forming a canopy so thick that it shut away the sky, but their trunks were widely spaced and the ground beneath opened through, clear and uncluttered by undergrowth. The forest backed away from the edge of the ravine in front of them until it joined with the curtain of the encroaching night.

Cinnaminson lowered her head against his shoulder, as if all the strength had gone out of her. “Did you hear them, too, Pen? Did you hear their voices?”

He wrapped her in his arms and stroked her long hair. “The spirits of the air?” he guessed. “The ones from before?”

She nodded. “From the edge of the gardens. Did you hear them?”

“I sensed them, but they spoke only to you.” Something else spoke to me.