The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

Night arrived, and the storm began to diminish. The winds died away and the rain slowed to a drizzle. Mist and clouds still masked the horizon in all directions, but the buffeting the cat had experienced earlier was gone. With darkness to help conceal them, Pen felt marginally safer. The Galaphile had not reappeared, and he was beginning to think that their last encounter had happened solely by chance. Otherwise, she would have found him again by then. He knew he was grasping at straws, but straws were all he had.

He told Tagwen that he could come up on deck, and after hesitating, the Dwarf did so. Pen gave him the controls to hold and dragged out an all-weather cloak from a storage bin to throw over his soaked clothes. The temperature was dropping quickly, even though the winds had died away and the rains slowed, and he needed to stay warm. He was navigating by compass readings, unable to catch more than a brief glimpse of the land below and nothing of the stars above. At least he was no longer simply running away; he was flying toward something, as well. Having fled Patch Run, his plan was to undertake a search for his parents in the Wolfsktaag Mountains as Tagwen had suggested. It wouldn’t be easy, and it might not even be possible, but it was all he could think to do. If he could manage to locate them, Tagwen could explain what had brought him to Patch Run, Pen could relate what had happened since, and they could decide what to do from there. The whole business would be safely out of Pen’s hands, which was the only sensible place for it to be.

Riding through the empty, misted night, cold and miserable, he found himself missing his parents in a way he would not have believed possible a day earlier. It made him realize how much of a boy he still was. He didn’t like to think of himself that way, but it was hard to pretend he was all grown up when he felt the way he did. All he wanted was to find his father and mother and go home again. No more running away and hiding from terrifying Dwarf Druids and their Gnome strongmen. No more flying blind in a damaged ship through strange lands.

All of which served to remind him of how much trouble he was really in. Sooner or later he was going to have to set down to make repairs to the cat’s damaged mast and then take a look around to determine how far east the storm had blown him. All that was left for him to do was to decide how long he would wait before doing so.

In the end, the decision was made for him. He must have expended more power than he thought, or perhaps had less to start with, because sometime around midnight the diapson crystals began to give out. He knew at once what was happening when the ship began to stall, slowing sharply and dipping its bow in fits and starts. Enough power remained to land, and he did so at once. With Tagwen shouting in his ear, demanding to know what was wrong, he put the cat into a slow glide and eased her downward in search of somewhere flat and open to land.

He had no idea where he was but was relieved to find patchy stretches of forest clearings bordering the recognizable expanse of Rainbow Lake only a few miles to the north, and he steered the failing cat in that direction. He took a quick look about, peering through the mist, but saw nothing of their pursuers. Maybe things were going to work out, after all.

A broad, dark stretch of ground opened ahead of him, and he took the cat toward it. He was almost on the ground when he realized it was a marsh. Angling the nose of the cat up sharply, he skipped over the bog and settled down hard at the very edge of a thick stand of trees east. The cat slammed into the ground, skidded wildly for a moment, and then bumped up against a tree trunk and stopped.

“Haven’t you had any practice landing this thing!” Tagwen demanded irritably, hauling himself out of the hold into which he had tumbled.

Pen finished hooding the parse tubes and bringing the thrust levers all the way back. “Don’t be so grumpy. We’re lucky to be down in one piece. Smooth landings are for undamaged ships.”

Tagwen huffed, then looked around. “Where are we?”

Pen shook his head, peering over the lip of the pilot box at the broken mast and damaged rigging. “Don’t know.”

“Well, wherever it is, I don’t much care for the look of it.”

“The Highlands have rough features, but they’re safe enough. At least, that’s what my parents say.”

The Dwarf climbed back onto the deck and stood staring out at the night. “This doesn’t look like the Highlands to me.”

Pen glanced up at once. A quick survey of the surrounding countryside confirmed Tagwen’s assessment. Instead of hills and valleys, the terrain consisted of low, flat stretches of marshy ground abutting heavy stands of forest that soon turned into a solid wall to the east. Rainbow Lake was still there, glimmering dully in the misty dark, but nothing else seemed quite right.

He looked at the black trunks of the massive trees ahead of them, many of them well over a hundred feet tall. There were no trees like those in the Highlands. A chill ran through him, and it was from more than the damp and the cold. This wasn’t Leah. The storm had blown them right through the Highlands and into the country beyond—country so dangerous that his parents had forbidden him to go into it under any circumstances.

He was inside the Black Oaks.





NINE