The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

Then she bit down on a small piece of wood she found in a pile of scraps, summoned an image of Ahren and Emberen and better times to distract her, and laid the flat of the knife against the wound.

The pain was enormous. Trying not to and failing, she screamed into the wood, into the silence, smelling her flesh as it burned and seared. She did not lose consciousness, although she thought it might have been better if she had. When she could stand it no longer, she took the knife away, tears streaming down her cheeks, fire coursing through her body. She summoned more of the numbing magic and applied it with small strokes to the cauterized area. It took her a long time to make a difference, but finally the pain decreased.

She looked down at her side and then quickly away again. At least the wound was closed and the bleeding stopped. She had done what she could.

She pulled her tunic back on, wrapped herself in her cloak, and lay down to sleep, the knife gripped tightly in one hand.


Bek stood at the controls of Swift Sure, easing the airship down the line of the Charnals toward the Dragons Teeth and Paranor. The sky was hazy and gray, the midday sun blocked by storm clouds that were building into thunderheads. He watched the approaching weather mostly out of habit; his thoughts were elsewhere. On the deck below the pilot box, Trefen Morys and Bellizen sat together, heads bent close as they conversed. Kermadec, his brother Atalan, and a handful of other Rock Trolls were scattered about the aft decking, wrapped in blankets and asleep. Tagwen was belowdecks, fighting airsickness yet again, apparently unable to come to terms with flight motion even with help from Rue, who had given him herbs and a drink to calm his stomach. Some people were like that; no matter how hard they tried or how hard others tried for them, they simply couldn’t make the adjustment.

He glanced over his shoulder. Somewhere behind them, perhaps half a day out, the balance of Taupo Rough’s Rock Trolls followed aboard the huge flat transports that Trolls favored for conveying their armies to a place of battle. Slow and cumbersome, they rarely got more than a few hundred feet off the ground. But Kermadec had insisted they would reach Paranor in time to be of help. His job, and the job of the small company he had brought with him, was to get inside the Keep and secure at least one of the gates. Bek wasn’t sure that eight or nine Trolls could manage that against a fortress of Druids and Gnome Hunters, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He wasn’t sure, after all, that he could do what he intended, either.

He was flying the ship alone at that point, something he enjoyed and was comfortable with. He liked the feeling of satisfaction it gave him to be able to control her all by himself. He liked the way she rose and fell beneath his feet in response to the air currents. He knew Swift Sure better than any ship he had ever flown, and he had been flying for more than twenty years, ever since his journey to Parkasia aboard the Jerle Shannara, where Redden Alt Mer had taught him his flight skills and Rue Meridian had caused him to fall in love.

If Tagwen was to be believed, “falling in love” appeared to have happened all over again with his son and the blind Rover girl, Cinnaminson. An improbable happening under any circumstance, it seemed particularly strange here. Pen, following in the steps of his father, had fallen in love on a dangerous expedition, at a place and a time when falling in love was not convenient. Of course, that was the way love worked. You couldn’t control the where or the when.

So many similarities in their lives. Pen, too, was a flier, although he had learned to fly much earlier and was already as comfortable aboard an airship as his father. It was strange to think of Pen traveling down such a familiar road, but the comparisons were inescapable.

But the strong possibility that, like himself, Pen possessed a secret magic gave Bek pause. He had been wrestling with the idea since the moment he had realized in his efforts to track his son that he was able to do so only because Pen had the use of a magic that neither he nor Rue had known anything about. Still, he could not ignore what reason and common sense told him about his connection to his son and, consequently, what it suggested about the possibility of another similarity in their lives. Bek, too, had possessed magic when he had gone with the Druid Walker to Parkasia, and he hadn’t known of it. It was only after they were well out over the Blue Divide and confronted with the barriers of Ice Henge and the Squirm that Walker had revealed the truth about who he really was and how the magic had been passed down to him.