The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

She kicked at him, and he started off again, skittering away through the grasses. There was no point in telling him everything. Certainly not that she was waiting for a mysterious boy, for something of which she could barely conceive, for a miracle. She hated having told him she would try to get him out of the Forbidding. She would not have done so if there had been any other way of securing his help. She had no idea if there was a way to free him. Or even if such freedom was a good idea. In fact, it probably wasn’t. But she would have said or done anything to escape Tael Riverine and thwart his plan to make her the bearer of his spawn. She shuddered at the thought of that, determined that she would die before she would let herself be taken by him again.

They slogged on through the fading daylight, nightfall tracking them west until, sweeping slowly across the flats, it began to overtake them. They crossed out of the swamp and found dry ground beyond, a wintry plain in which the grasses were as dry as old bones, crackling beneath their feet as they stepped through them. Ahead the land stretched away, bleak and empty, crisscrossed by deep ravines and dotted by hummocks.

After a time, Weka Dart dropped back to walk beside her.

“I didn’t mean what I said before.” He looked at her with his sharp, restless eyes, and then glanced away quickly. “I know you keep your promises. I know you haven’t lied to me. If anyone has lied …” He shook his head. “I can’t help myself, you know. I have lied about everything all my life because that is how Ulk Bogs are. That is how we live. That is how we stay alive. We lie to keep others from gaining an advantage over us.”

“I don’t think lying does as much for you as you think,” she replied. “Do you know what they say about lies? They say that lies have a way of coming back to haunt you.”

He shrugged. “I just want you to know that I will change when you take me to your country. I won’t lie anymore. Or, at least, I will try hard not to lie. I will be a good companion for you, Grianne of the kind eyes. I will help you do your work, whatever your work is. You will see that I am always there to do your bidding. Here, I would do the bidding of a Straken to stay alive. I would do it because I would have no choice. But it will not be like that with you. I will do your bidding because I want to. Because I respect you.”

She sighed wearily. “You don’t know me well enough to promise that, Weka Dart. I am not what you think. I have dark secrets in my life. I have a history that is every bit as bad as that of Tael Riverine. I might not be like the demon now, but I was once, not so long ago.” She paused. “I might still be like him in some ways.”

But the Ulk Bog shook his head stubbornly. “No, you are not like him. You could never be like him.”

But I was like him, she thought, the weight of the admission infusing her with a sadness she could barely stand. I could be like him again.

Ahead, the flats turned rocky and were eroded by gullies and pocked by wormholes, the grasses and scrub disappearing entirely, the whole of the landscape changing abruptly to something Grianne hadn’t seen before. Weka Dart, who was walking next to her but paying little attention to the land into which they were walking, suddenly caught sight of where they were going and drew up short, putting out his arm urgently.

“Wait, stay where you are!” he snapped.

He scanned the rocky flats, searching for something, then hissed sharply. “This wasn’t here before!” he exclaimed. “This is new! They’ve migrated from somewhere else and set up their colony here! How long, I wonder? Very recent. Very.”

She looked down at him. “What are you talking about?”

He gave her one of his frightening grins, the ones that showed all his needle-sharp teeth. “Asphinx! This flat is riddled with them.”

“The snakes?”

His head cocked. “Do you know about them?”

She did. Asphinx had been exiled to the Forbidding with the other dark things of Faerie. Except for one that had been sealed in a crevice by the Stone King, Uhl Belk, in the caverns of the Hall of Kings to guard the Black Elfstone. Walker Boh, before he became a Druid, had been bitten while searching for the talisman, and his arm had turned to stone. The story was a part of Bek’s histories of the Shannara kin, a story she remembered as crucial to what happened to Walker later in his transformation into Allanon’s heir.

She glanced back at the flats. “How many are out there?”

He shrugged. “Thousands. Want to have a look?”

“No, I don’t want to have a look. Can we get around them?”

He gestured left. “This way. Stay off the rocks and you won’t have to deal with them. But watch your step anyway. If one bites you, you will make a nice statue for the birds to perch on.”

They walked carefully around the colony, staying on the grassy fringe and keeping well back from where the rocks began. It took them a long time to get all the way to the other side, and by then darkness had settled in so thoroughly that it was difficult to see more than a dozen feet.

Weka Dart took a quick visual survey of their surroundings and nodded. “We’ll camp over there, in that stand of wincies.” He gestured toward a small grove of needled trees that looked like diseased pines. “Wincies give us some protection. Snakes don’t like their scent, and flying things can’t get through the screen of their branches without first landing, which they won’t do at night. A good place for us to get some rest.”