The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

A terrible certainty swept through him, harsh and implacable, so traumatizing that he could not give voice to it, but only whisper it in the silence of his mind. He thought he had understood. He hadn’t. He assumed that the loss of his fingers was enough to balance the scales. It wasn’t.

Something more was required.

Cinnaminson.





TWENTY-FIVE


Shadea a’Ru stood at the window of her sleeping chambers and looked out from Paranor’s towers over the forested sweep of the land beyond. The sun was rising, a soft golden glow in the east that silhouetted the jagged peaks of the Dragon’s Teeth against its bright backdrop and gave promise to the coming of a warm, languorous summer day.

Her lips compressed into a tight, angry line. It would not be such a good day for her. And less so for some others.

She glanced down at the note she held in her hand, at the words written on it, then looked away again. Idiots! She brushed absently at her short, spiky blond hair and flexed her shoulders. Her muscles were stiff and tight. She missed the training and fighting that had been so central to her life when she had been a soldier in the Federation army. She missed the discipline and the routine. She had never thought she would feel that way, but after weeks of struggling as Ard Rhys of the Third Druid Order, she was ready to abandon it all for a chance to go back to a time when things were less complicated and more direct.

Her gaze drifted back to the note. It had arrived during the night, while she slept, and she had found it on waking, tied to the leg of the arrow swift. The bird’s dark, fierce face had peered out at her from its enclosure, almost daring her to reach inside. But it was her bird, one of the many she had appropriated and trained to carry her messages from her co-conspirators and servants in the plot against Grianne Ohmsford. Its countenance only mirrored the intensity that could be found in her own.

She knew the bird. Split was its name, chosen for the strange wedge in its tail feathers, an accident of birth. The arrow swift was one of those assigned to Traunt Rowan on his departure to the Northland; it had been sent by him.

She had reached inside for the message, untied it from Split’s leg, withdrawn it from the cage, opened it, and her face had gone dark with rage immediately.

THE BOY AND HIS COMPANIONS

ESCAPED FROM TAUPO ROUGH.

HAVE FOLLOWED THEM INTO THE KLU.



And lost them there, of course, though the writer had been careful not to say so.

She looked back at the message again, still furious with its contents and its incompetent sender. She had expected better of Traunt Rowen. She had expected better of Pyson Wence, as well, and better still of the two of them working together to track that boy!

She gritted her teeth. Why was it so difficult for anyone to find and hold him? The effort had cost Terek Molt his life. It had cost Aphasia Wye her respect, a respect she had thought nothing could diminish. What would it cost her this time? The lives of two more of her allies, men whose support she could scarcely afford to lose, even if they were proving less competent than she had imagined possible? Her respect for them had long since vanished, so there was no danger of losing that.

She crumpled the note in her hand, then set it in a small bowl on her desk, fired it with magic, and scattered the ashes out the window. She watched the breeze carry the ashes away and wished her anger and disappointment could be made to vanish as easily.

What was she going to have to do to finish this business?

For a moment, for just an instant, she toyed with the idea of breaking off the hunt entirely. It was requiring much more time and effort than she cared to spend and netting no favorable results at all. She had the boy’s parents safely locked away in her dungeons. Couldn’t she just wait for him to come for them? He would surely do so, once he found out where they were, and it would be easy enough to make him aware.

Her frustration building toward a headache, she rubbed at her temples with her fingers. The trouble with ignoring him was that she was almost certain she knew what he was doing. He was trying to find a way to reach his aunt. She had no idea how he planned to do that and believed it beyond his or anyone else’s capability. But she could not chance being wrong. If he had found a way into the Forbidding, if he had discovered an avenue about which she knew nothing, then she had to stop him from using it. Because if he managed the impossible and actually reached Grianne Ohmsford from Paranor’s side of the wall, he might find a way to guide her back again.

If that happened, Shadea knew she was finished. They were all finished, all who had conspired with her.

The chance of that happening was so small that it was scarcely measurable, but she knew better than to put anything past the Ohmsfords. Their history spoke for itself. They had survived impossible situations before, several generations of them. They were imbued with both magic and luck, and the combination had kept them from harm more times than anyone could count.