The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

He pushed his face up against the bars. “You can help me, Straken. If I can help you, surely you can help me! How hard can it be for someone like you to give me what I want?”


In truth, she didn’t know. What would it take to escape the Forbidding? Was the boy foreseen by the shade of the Warlock Lord real? Was he coming to set her free, or was the prophecy a cruel trick? She couldn’t be certain, but it was the only hope she had. The shade of Brona had not lied about the truth behind the reason she had been sent into the world of the Jarka Ruus—Weka Dart had confirmed that. She was here so that a demon could be free, a demon that would destroy the wall of the Forbidding. If Brona’s shade had told the truth about that, then it might well have been telling the truth about the mysterious boy.

So she must gamble on the words of a monster. She must accept the possibility that her only chance for escape was through the coming of a boy she didn’t know. It didn’t seem to her that Weka Dart’s hopes for escape were any less realistic than her own. While she did not relish setting the Ulk Bog free in her world, it would be infinitely worse to refuse his bargain if it meant that she must stay imprisoned, as well.

“If you release me,” she said, “I will try to find a way out of the world of the Jarka Ruus and back to my own world. If it is within my power to do so, I will take you with me. I can promise you nothing more.”

“I have your word?”

“You do.” She held up one cautionary finger. “But remember, I don’t know yet that I can find a way back for either of us. I don’t know that I can save us, even if you set me free. I don’t know that I can find a way to stop the Moric from destroying the Forbidding. I don’t know that.”

He was already working the key to her cell into the lock. “You will find a way. I know you will.”


He released her from the cell, then used a second, smaller key to unlatch the conjure collar. Stepping back, he handed her the collar, his wizened face bright with pleasure.

“I kept my keys to the cells and the collars from my days as Catcher,” he said to her. “Tael Riverine never suspected I would dare to do such a thing.”

“He has misjudged us both,” she said. She cast the collar aside. She would never wear such a thing again or ever again be anyone’s slave. “How do we get past all the guards and their demonwolves?” she asked as they stood facing each other in the empty hall.

He grinned, all his teeth showing. “We won’t go that way. That way is death. We will go another way, a way I know that few others do. It is how I got into Kraal Reach to find you in the first place. I know secrets, little Straken. I know many secrets.”

She didn’t doubt him. But she refrained from saying anything, gesturing for him to lead the way. She was weak from her imprisonment and lack of nourishment, and she was already wondering how far she could go before her strength failed completely. She had no idea how long she had lain semicomatose in her delusional state in that cell, but it had to have been days. During that time, she had not eaten or drunk anything that she could remember. She had barely slept, suspended between sleeping and waking, beset by dreams and dark imaginings, still caught up in the subterfuge she had used to survive her ordeal in the arena of the Furies.

Some part of her was still there, she knew, amid the cat-things, unable to quite let go of the identity of the creature she had pretended so hard to be. Her magic was a powerful thing, and when it was employed as she had employed it in the arena, she could do or be anything. But the aftereffects were equally powerful and tended to cling to her psyche like the damp leavings of a sweat brought on by nightmares. She was Grianne Ohmsford again. She was Ard Rhys of the Third Druid Order once more. But she was also the Ilse Witch and the things the Ilse Witch could become. She had opened a door she had kept carefully closed for more than twenty years, and she was not sure what it would take to close it again.

They went down a corridor lined with doors that opened into cells like her own, some of them empty, some of them become containers for piles of bones and small lumps at which she chose not to look too closely. The corridor was silent and musty and empty of life. She heard Weka Dart’s breathing and the scrape of his boots, but her own passage was soundless, a wraith’s passage through darkest night.

The corridor ended at a set of narrow steps leading up, but Weka Dart took her into the shadows behind the stairs, where a rusted iron door was seated in the stone. He worked its ancient latch back and forth, a slow creaking in the deep silence, and at last the door opened into a wall of blackness.

“Very dark down here,” the Ulk Bog announced solemnly.