The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

He came racing over, eyes bright with excitement. “I am here, Straken Queen.”


“No sign of further pursuit?” she asked. “No sign of Tael Riverine or his creatures?”

The Ulk Bog grinned wickedly. “He won’t have learned of Hobstull’s new employment as a resting post for birds quite yet,” he said. “It will take time for word to reach him. Too much time for him to do anything about it. We will be well away and out of his reach by then.”

“Run on ahead a distance and see if the land is clear that way. I want to turn north soon toward the mountains.”

He glanced in that direction. “Nothing lies there. What is the point of wasting my time …?”

“Don’t argue, little man!” she snapped. “Remember your promise to serve and protect.”

He was gone without another word, a dark spot rapidly disappearing into the haze. She felt bad about snapping at him, but he responded better when she did, and she needed to talk with Pen alone.

“A word, Pen,” she said to him when Weka Dart was safely away. “I made a promise to the Ulk Bog in return for his help in getting free of the Straken Lord’s prisons. I’ll explain about that later. My promise was that I would do what I could to get him out of the Forbidding and into the Four Lands. He wants to come with us.”

Pen gave her an anxious look. “I thought that was what he meant. But I don’t think we can do it. The darkwand will take only you and me out of the Forbidding. It will not allow anyone else to go with us. The King of the Silver River told me so.”

She had suspected as much. Creatures consigned to the Forbidding by Faerie magic could not be set free without a disruption of the wall that separated the two worlds. The darkwand was not created for that purpose. It was created for putting things back the way they were meant to be.

“I’ll have to tell him,” she said quietly, already wondering how she was going to do that. “I can’t let him think he still has a chance of getting out when I know he doesn’t.”

They walked on, the boy keeping pace with her, his head lowered, his staff serving as a walking stick, its runes glowing softly in the dusky light.

Her thoughts stayed with Weka Dart. He was so convinced that she could do anything, that her Straken powers were omnipotent. He had already made up his mind that she would be able to break him free of the Forbidding and bring him back into the Four Lands. She had warned him not to expect too much, but after the encounter with the Graumth, he had ceased believing there was anything to worry about.

Now she was going to have to disappoint him in the way she had disappointed so many others—by not being able to do enough, by being less able than he needed her to be. She felt shackled by her inability, by her weakness, by her humanity. It was almost better not to have any power than to have a lot. Having a lot always created expectations, and somewhere along the way those expectations would not be met because that was the way the world worked.

“Do you remember when you asked me once if I had any of my father’s magic?” Pen asked her suddenly.

She glanced over at him, happy for the distraction. “I remember.”

“I told you I hadn’t. But that wasn’t entirely true. I hadn’t any of the wishsong’s magic. But I had another kind. It was such a small magic that I didn’t think it worth mentioning. It allowed me to sense what animals and plants and birds were thinking or why they were acting as they were. I didn’t think it was worth anything. I never even told my parents about it. Especially my mother, who is afraid of the Ohmsford magic.”

Grianne nodded. “I know. She is right to be afraid.”

He sighed. “Well, now I think maybe my magic does come from the wishsong. It changed when I took the limb from the tanequil and shaped it into the darkwand. It changed when I began to bond with the darkwand so that it responded to me. I found I could make it do things by humming and singing, in the way of the wishsong.”

“It came late to your father, too,” she said. “He was older than you before he discovered he had use of it. Walker let him see by giving him the Sword of Shannara and telling him he would have to use it. That bonding triggered a surfacing. Just as with you.”

“I sense it changing still. I think I am just beginning to understand what’s there.”

“There is a history of that in our family. It happened with Jair Ohmsford. Do you know the story? His sister had full use of the wishsong, the first of the Ohmsfords to have it. Jair, the brother, had a magic that gave the appearance of being wishsong magic, but was only illusion. Except that some years after their quest to destroy the Ildatch, he discovered that it had evolved and he had the same use of it as she had, even though it had started out as something else.”