The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

Now she understood. The Moric had been sent to complete the task that the Dagda Mor had failed to accomplish more than five hundred years earlier—to break down the walls of the prison behind which the dark things of Faerie had been shut since before the dawn of Man.

Her mind raced. To do that, it would have to destroy the Ellcrys, the magic-born Elven tree that had been created to ward the Forbidding. How would it manage that, when the tree was always so closely guarded?

More important, how could she stop it from happening?

“Does the Moric have a way to destroy the barrier?” she asked Weka Dart.

He shook his head. “It was to find one once it crossed over into your world. It is very talented and very smart. It will have done so by now.”

She ignored the fear that rushed through her at the thought that the Ulk Bog might be right. “Do you have a way to get me out of here?” she asked quickly.

On the landing above them, at the top of the stairway, a door opened and closed with a thud. Footsteps sounded on the stone steps, coming down.

“On the floor!” he hissed at her, and darted away.

She threw herself back down, sprawling in the same position in which he had found her, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed. Don’t move, she told herself. Don’t do anything.

The steps approached her cell and came to a stop. A silence settled in like morning mist.

Eyes closed, body still, she waited.





TWENTY-NINE


Pen Ohmsford’s ascent from the ravine was an endless slog. Burdened with self-recrimination and despair, it was all he could do to place one foot in front of the other. He kept thinking he should go back, should attempt one final time to free Cinnaminson, make one more plea or take one last stand. But he knew it was pointless even to think about doing so. Nothing would change until he had some better means of succeeding. Yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling that he should have done more.

Lead-footed, he climbed through the hazy darkness, working his way up the narrow switchback trail, ducking under vines and brushing past brambles and scrub, leaning on his staff for support, his thoughts scattered all over the place. His grip about the rune-carved handle of the darkwand helped to center him, a reassurance that he had accomplished something in the midst of all the failures. Lives had been lost and hopes blown away like dried leaves in a strong wind, and he blamed himself for most of it. He should have done better, he kept telling himself, even though he could not think what more he might have done or exactly what he might have changed. Hindsight suggested possibilities, but hindsight was deceptive, sifted through a filter of distance and reason. Things were never so easy as they seemed later. They were mostly wild and confused and emotionally charged. Hindsight pretended otherwise.

But knowing so didn’t make him feel any better. Knowing so only made him work harder to find a reason to believe he had failed.

He took some comfort in the fact that he had gotten to Stridegate at all, that he had confronted the tanequil and found a way to communicate with it, that he had secured the limb he needed and shaped it into the darkwand. He had gotten much farther with his quest than he had ever believed he would. He had never spoken of it, but he had always thought in the back of his mind that what the King of the Silver River had sent him to do was impossible. He had always thought that he was the wrong choice, a boy with little experience and few skills, a boy asked to do something that most grown men would not even attempt. He did not know what had persuaded him to try. He guessed it was the expectations of those who had accompanied him. He guessed it was his own need to prove himself.

These and other equally troubling thoughts roiled through his brain as he climbed, working along the tunnels of his conscience like worms, probing and sifting for explanations that would satisfy them. He tried to lay them to rest, but he only managed to settle with a few. The rest continued on, digging away, finding fresh food in his doubts and fears and frustrations, growing and fattening and taking up all the space his emotional well-being would allow.

He rested at one point, dropping down on his haunches with his back against the wall of the ravine, feeling the cold and damp of the earth seep through his clothing and enter his body, too tired to care. He leaned on the darkwand for support as he lowered his head and cried soundlessly, unable to help himself. He was not the hero and adventurer he had envisioned himself to be. He was just a boy who wanted to go home.