The Magic Kingdom of Landover Volume 1

Strabo burst through the opening in the wall of the Courts Building five stories up and nearly collided with a helicopter. Machine and beast veered away from each other, slicing through the chill night air and the narrow beams of several spotlights situated in the streets below. Neither was sure of what the other had encountered, each a dark shape against the city, and the confusion was evident. The helicopter disappeared skyward with a roar of its engine. Strabo dropped down between the buildings, flattening out.

There were screams from the people in the streets.

“Climb, dragon!” Questor Thews cried frantically.

Strabo soared skyward once more, arcing between a pair of tall buildings, steam rolling off his scaled hide. Ben and his companions clung to him for dear life despite the fact that Questor’s magic strapped them all securely in place. The helicopter roared back around the corner of a building, lights searching. A second ship followed. Strabo shrieked.

“Tell him not to use his fire on them!” Ben cried to Questor in warning, picturing flaming ships and buildings and Miles and Elizabeth in jail.

“He can’t!” Questor shouted back, head bent close. “His magic is as limited in this world as my own! He has only a little fire and he must save it if we are to make the crossover!”

Ben had forgotten. Strabo needed his fire to open a passage back into Landover. That was how he had brought them out of Abaddon when the demons had trapped them there.

They dodged and twisted, but the helicopters followed. Strabo rounded the corner of a building and shot out toward the bay. Wharfs, piers and jettys, shipyards with their dry docks and containers of freight, giant cranes that looked like goose-necked dinosaurs, and a kaleidoscope of vessels of all sizes and shapes passed away underneath. Ahead, far beyond, loomed a massive range of mountains. Below, the lights of the city winked and flashed.

A ship whistle sounded with a shriek, frightening them all with its closeness. Strabo shuddered, twisted left, and began to climb. Ben squinted. Something huge loomed close behind, dropping rapidly, small red and green lights blinking.

“A jet!” he cried in frantic warning. “Look out, Questor!”

Questor screamed something to Strabo, and the dragon whipped aside, just as the huge airplane dropped past on its path of descent. Engines roared, the wind screamed, and every other sound disappeared into white silence.

Strabo came around again and started back for the city, blackened teeth showing.

“No!” Questor howled. “Climb, dragon—take us home!”

But Strabo was too infuriated. He wanted someone or something to fight. Steam blew in jets from his nostrils and there were strange, frightening sounds emanating from his throat.

He passed back over the harbor and spotted the helicopters. He roared in challenge, and now fire burned redly from his jaws.

Ben was wild. “Turn him, Questor! If he uses up all his fire, we’ll be trapped here!”

Questor Thews shouted in warning at the dragon, but Strabo ignored him. He went straight for the helicopters, slashed between them so that they were forced to veer frantically aside to avoid a collision, then sped back into the midst of the city buildings. Spotlights whipped across the sky in search of them. Ben was certain he could hear people screaming. He was certain he could hear gunfire. Strabo, heaven help them, was flying blind.

Then, just when it appeared that matters were completely out of control, the dragon seemed to remember himself. With a shriek that froze the entire night into stillness, Strabo suddenly shot skyward. Ben, Questor, Abernathy, and Willow were thrust back viciously. Wind whipped and tore at them, threatening to unseat them, chilling them to the bone. Sound and sight disappeared in a vortex of motion. Ben held his breath and waited for them all to disintegrate. That was how this chase was going to end, he decided. They were simply going to come apart. There wasn’t any doubt of it.

He was wrong. Strabo shrieked a second time and suddenly breathed out a rush of fire. The air seemed to melt and the sky to open. A jagged hole appeared, black and empty, and they flew into it.

The blackness swallowed them. There was a flare of light and a surge of heat. Ben closed his eyes, then slowly opened them again.

A scattering of colored moons and solemn, twinkling stars brightened the night like a child’s picture book. Mountain walls rose all about and trailers of mist played hide-and-seek through craggy peaks and great, silent trees.

Ben Holiday let his breath escape in a slow hiss of relief.

They were home.

STOPPER



The little company spent the remainder of that night on the western slope of the valley just north of the Heart. They settled themselves in a grove of fruit trees mixed with a scattering of crimson-leaved maples, the smell of berries and apples mingling with hardwood bark and new sap in the cool night air. Cicadas hummed, crickets chirped, night birds called from near and far, and the whole of the valley whispered in the softest cadence that all was well. Sleep was an old and valued friend on such a night. For all but one of the worn and harried members of the little company, it came easily.

Ben Holiday alone remained awake. Even Strabo slept, curled up some distance off within the shelter of a low ravine, but Ben stayed awake. Sleep would not come for him. He leaned back against Willow and waited for the dawn, troubled and anxious. Willow was a tree now. She had made the transformation moments after they had eased her down off the back of the dragon, barely conscious. She had tried to reassure Ben with a quick squeeze of one hand and a momentary smile, and then she was changing. Ben remained unconvinced. He stayed awake next to her, wishing that it was not just in his imagination that he could seem to hear the sound of her breathing grow steadily stronger, smoother, deeper in tone. He knew she believed the transformation was necessary, that whatever the nature of the illness that had ravaged her in his world, whatever the form of the poison that attacked her, the soil of her own world would heal her. Maybe yes, maybe no, Ben thought. He had seen it work before, but that was before. He continued to keep an uneasy watch.

Even so, he tried several times to snatch a bit of sleep, tried to close his eyes and let it embrace him, but his thoughts were dark and filled with the promise of terrifying dreams. He could not shake the memory of how close they had all come to not making it back. He could not forget the sense of helplessness he had experienced there in that empty courtroom when all his options had been stripped from him, a trial lawyer whose arguments and appeals had finally been exhausted. He could not forgive himself for so completely losing control.

Questions whispered to him from the night. How far away from himself had he come in giving up his old life for his new? How much had he sacrificed to regenerate his sense of purpose? Too much, perhaps—so much that he was in very real danger of losing his identity.

He drifted in and out of a sort of half sleep, through uneven bouts of self-recrimination and second-guessing, plagued by demons of his own making. He knew he should dismiss them, yet he could not find the means. He grappled with them helplessly, each encounter provoking new pain and doubt. He was too vulnerable, and he could not seem to protect himself. He simply drifted.

When dawn’s light did begin at last to creep into the dark recesses of his consciousness, the eastern sky lightening and the night fading west, he found he had slept somehow, if only briefly. He jolted awake from a fitful doze, his eyes searching quickly for Willow, finding her asleep beside him, her color strong again, her life miraculously restored. There were tears in his eyes, and he brushed at them, smiling. Then, finally, the demons began to slip away, and he could feel again some small measure of hope that he might yet make sense out of who and what he was and take back into his own hands the lines that measured out his life.

He confronted then, for the first time, something he had carefully avoided that entire night—the prospect of dealing with Nightshade and the Darkling. The specter of such an encounter had been lurking at the edge of his subconscious ever since Questor had told him after landing what had become of the bottle, kept just back of where he would be forced to think about it. But now he must think of it, he knew. He could put it off no longer. Everything that had gone before in his long search for the medallion and Abernathy would be rendered pointless if he did not find a way, once and for all, to dispose of that damnable bottle. That meant he must face Nightshade. And that could easily cost him his life.

He sat in the gradually brightening clearing, feeling the pulse of the morning begin to quicken and the sluggishness of its night sleep begin to fade. He let his hand drift down to Willow’s face and his fingers brush her skin softly. She stirred, but did not waken. How was he to do what must be done? he wondered. How was he to retrieve the bottle from Nightshade so that the demon could be put back inside? The doubts and fears had left him now, their needles withdrawn. He was able to think in clear, pragmatic terms. He must become the Paladin again, he realized, the knight-errant that was the alter ego of the Kings of Landover, that frightening iron juggernaut that seemed to claim a bit more of his soul each time he called upon its services. He shuddered involuntarily at the surge of ambivalent emotions that were stirred within him. He would need the Paladin’s strength to withstand Nightshade’s magic, not to mention the demon’s. Questor Thews would help, of course. Questor would lend his own magic to the cause. The real question was, would the two of them be enough? Even forgetting Nightshade for the moment, how could they overcome the Darkling? How could anyone overcome a creature whose power was apparently limitless?

Ben Holiday sat alone in the brightening dawn and pondered this puzzle. He was still pondering it when the others came awake, the solution he sought as elusive as summer frost.



He was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when halfway through a breakfast in which he was principally concerned with assuring himself that Willow was well again, the answer came to him.

He was surprised, too, when, following breakfast, Strabo offered to carry them all north to the Deep Fell. He needn’t have been. The dragon didn’t make the offer because he felt an obligation to do anything further to help, or because he felt Questor had any further hold over him either. He had no sense of responsibility or concern for the success of their endeavors. He made it because he was anxious to let Holiday and Nightshade have at each other and he wanted to be there to enjoy the show. Someone’s spilled blood was necessary to satisfy his irritation at having been dragged into this conflict in the first place, and he could only hope that witch and King would both bleed freely in the battle that was to follow.

“You owe me, Holiday!” the dragon announced with a venomous hiss on making the offer to convey Ben to his own funeral. “This makes twice now that I have saved your worthless skin and twice now that you have given me nothing in return! If Nightshade dispatches you, I will consider the debt paid—but not otherwise! Think of what I have suffered for you! I was attacked, Holiday—chased and hounded by metal flying things, hunted with lights, screamed at and threatened by others like yourself, my system fouled by poisons I can only guess at, and my equanimity thoughtlessly disrupted!” He took a long, careful breath. “Let me put it another way. I find you the most annoying, bothersome creature I have ever had the misfortune of encountering and I long for the day you are finally no more!”

Having said that, he knelt down so that the object of his derision might mount him. Ben glanced at Questor, who shrugged and said, “What else can you expect from a dragon?”

Willow and Abernathy gave him fits as well by insisting that they should accompany him. When he had the temerity to suggest that he didn’t think this was such a good idea, given the extent of the danger Questor and he would likely be facing from the witch and the bottle demon, both immediately suggested that perhaps he had better think again.

“I did not survive the acute discomforts of Graum Wythe’s dungeons and the vicissitudes of Michel Ard Rhi’s personality to be left behind now!” his scribe announced rather irritably. “I intend to see this matter through to its proper conclusion! Besides,” he huffed, “you need someone to keep an eye on the wizard!”

“Nor do I intend to be left behind, either,” Willow hastened to add. “I am well now, and you may have need of me. I have told you before, Ben Holiday—what happens to you happens to me.”

Ben was hardly convinced by either argument; neither appeared to him to have fully recovered from the hardships of the journey over and back and neither would be of much help in dealing with Nightshade and the Darkling. But he knew there wasn’t anything he could say that would change their minds and he decided it would be easier to take them than to try to force them to remain behind. He shook his head. Things never seemed to work out quite the way he wanted them to.

So they lifted skyward aboard the dragon, departing the grove of fruit and maple trees that had been their night’s camp, leaving behind the Heart with its rows of flags, stanchions, and polished oak benches and the distant, tiny island where rested castle Sterling Silver, and passing finally out of the hill country of the south into the plains and grasslands of the north. They flew until the Greensward was behind them and the wall of the Melchor rose ahead. Then Strabo dipped earthward, sailing lazily across the dark, misted bowl of the Deep Fell, presumably so that Nightshade couldn’t miss seeing them, settling at last on a small scrap of grassland a short distance from the hollows’ edge.

Ben and his companions eased themselves down from the dragon’s back, casting furtive glances toward the rim of the witch’s home. Mist swirled sluggishly in the windless midday air as if stirred by some invisible hand, and silence masked all signs of whatever life waited below. The air was sultry and fetid, and the clouds were gathered thick across this stretch of the mountains. East, sunlight brightened the land; here, gray haze cloaked everything.

Signs of the wilt that had marked the land at the time of Ben’s arrival in Landover were evident again. Leaves were withered and sick-looking; whole stands of trees and patches of scrub were black. The devastation spread outward from the Deep Fell for as far as the eye could see—almost as if some sickness had crawled out of the hollows and begun devouring what lay beyond in ever-widening circles.

“A fitting place for your demise, Holiday!” sneered the dragon, bending close. “Why don’t you get on with it?”

He spread his wings and soared off into the mountains, settling comfortably upon an outcropping of rock that overlooked the hollows and gave him a clear view of everything below.

“I find him quite intolerable these days,” Questor Thews said quietly.

“I find it hard to believe he was ever anything else,” Ben said.

He positioned Willow and Abernathy in a broken stand of Bonnie Blues some distance back, pleading with them to stay out of sight until matters with the witch and the demon were resolved. He had no real expectation that his entreaties would be heeded, but he at least had to make the effort.

He returned to Questor and spoke quietly with him then, explaining for the first time his plan for dealing with the Darkling. Questor was thoughtful for a moment, then announced, “High Lord, I think you may have found the answer.”

Ben’s smile was faint. “Finding the answer is one thing; applying it is another. You know what I mean, don’t you? This will be tricky, Questor. It has to be done just so. Much depends on you.”

Questor’s owlish face was solemn. “I understand, High Lord. I won’t let you down.”

Ben nodded. “Just don’t let yourself down. Are you ready?”

“Ready, High Lord.”

Ben turned to face the Deep Fell and called out sharply, “Nightshade!” The name echoed and slowly died away. Ben waited, then called again. “Nightshade!” Again, the name echoed into silence. Nightshade did not appear. Beside him, Questor shifted his booted feet uneasily.

Then a swirl of black mist lifted out of the hollows, churning and seething as it settled on the parched grasses at its rim, and Nightshade appeared at last. She stood there against the mist, robes and hair black, face and hands white, a stark and forbidding vision. One hand clutched the familiar bottle, its painted surface luminescent in the gray air.

“Play-King!” she whispered with a hiss. With her free hand, she pulled the stopper on the bottle. The Darkling crept forth, wizened spider’s body dark, sticklike, and covered with hair. Red eyes gleamed and fingers curled on the bottle’s edge. “See, precious one?” the witch asked softly and pointed. “See what comes to amuse us?”

Neither Ben nor Questor moved. They became statues, waiting to see what would happen next. The Darkling crept about the lip of its bottle like an anxious cat, searching here and there, whispering and hissing words that no one but the witch could hear. “Yes, yes,” she soothed, over and over, bent down now. “Yes, little demon, they are the ones!”

Finally, she looked up again. Her free hand slipped the stopper into her robes, and her fingers stroked the fawning demon. “Come play with us, High Lord and Court Wizard!” she called over. “Come play! We have games for you! Such games! Come closer!”

Ben and Questor held their ground. “Give us the bottle, Nightshade,” ordered Ben quietly. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

“Anything I wish belongs to me!” Nightshade screeched.

“Not the bottle.”

“Especially the bottle!”

“I will bring the Paladin, if I must,” Ben threatened, his voice still quiet.

“Bring whomever you like.” Nightshade’s smile was slow and wicked. Then she whispered, “Play-King, you are such a fool!”

The Darkling shrieked suddenly, leaped upward, and thrust its tiny crooked fingers toward them. Fire and shards of iron flew at them with the blink of an eye, slicing through the hazy afternoon air. But Questor’s magic was already in place, and the fire and shards of iron passed harmlessly by. Ben’s hand was about the medallion, his fingers closed upon its metal surface, the heat beginning to surge through him. Light flared less than a dozen yards off, and the Paladin appeared, white knight on white charger, a ghost come out of time. Fire burned in the medallion, then surged outward through mist and gray to where the ghost took form. Ben felt himself ride the light, borne on its stinging brightness as if a mote of dust, carried from his body as if weightless. Then he was inside the iron shell, and the transformation had begun. A second more and it was completed. Iron plates closed about, clasps, straps, and buckles tightened, and the harness latched in place. Ben Holiday’s memories faded and were replaced by those of the Paladin—memories of countless battles fought and won, of struggles unimaginable, of blood and iron, of screams and cries, and of the testing of courage and strength-of-arms on distant fields of combat. There was that strange mix of exhilaration and horror—the Paladin’s sharpened expectation of another fight, Ben Holiday’s repulsion at the thought of killing.

Then there was only the feel of iron and leather, muscle and bone, the horse beneath, and the weapons strapped close—the Paladin’s body and soul.

The King’s champion surged toward Nightshade and the Darkling.

The lance of white oak dropped into place.

But the witch and the demon were already fusing hatred and dark magic to produce something they believed not even the Paladin could withstand. It climbed out of the hollows behind them, born of green fire and steam, clawing free of the mists and the haze, a huge, lumbering thing as white as the Paladin himself.

It was a second Paladin—of sorts.

From behind the shield of his magic, Questor Thews blinked and stared. He had never seen anything quite like this monster. It was a perversion—a joining of what appeared to be a huge, squat, lizardlike creature and an armored rider twice the size of the knight-errant, all twisted and sprouting weapons of bone and iron. It was as if some impossibly warped mirror had produced a distorted image of the Paladin, as if that image had been reflected in the most loathsome way possible and given life.

The monstrous creature—a single being—wheeled from the hollows’ rim and lumbered to meet the charge of the Paladin.

They came together with a thunderclap of sound, white oak and bone shattering, iron scraping and clanging, beasts grunting and shrieking their pain and anger. They slid off each other and passed by, dust and debris flying. Back around came the Paladin, discarding the remains of his lance, reaching down for the battle axe. The creature of the witch and demon slowed, turned, and seemed to swell in size, growing as if fed by the force of the conflict, lifting until it towered over everything.

All eyes were fixed at that moment on the creature.

Questor Thews made a slight motion with his hands. He seemed to shimmer, disappear, then reappear looking vaguely translucent. No one noticed.

The Paladin attacked, battle axe swinging. Nightshade and the Darkling fed their combined magics into their creation, shrieking with delight as it swelled even further, then lifted on its hindlegs and waited. It was as big as a house now, a mass of sluglike flesh. The Paladin rushed it, and the creature surged forward, trying to crush its attacker. The earth shook with the force of its weight as it struck. The Paladin just managed to slip past, the battle axe ripping along the beast’s thick hide. But the wound closed over almost at once. Magic gave the creature life, and magic was not subject to the laws of man and nature.

Back came the Paladin, broadsword drawn now, the gleaming blade cutting and hacking with tremendous fury, carving lines of red along the length of the beast. But the wounds closed as quickly as they were made, and the creature kept lunging for the knight, waiting for its chance. Nightshade and the Darkling urged the monster on. The witch’s face was rapt with pleasure. The demon’s tiny body was stretched taut. Magic surged from both of them, feeding their creature, keeping it strong. They could see that the beast’s lunges were getting closer now to the attacking knight. It would not be long now, they knew.

From within the cover of the decimated Bonnie Blues, Abernathy and Willow watched silently. They, too, could see how this fight was going and could tell how it was going to end.

Then something strange happened.

The creature suddenly lurched upward and began to shrink.

It shuddered as if stricken with a poison. The Darkling saw it first. The demon shrieked with anger and disbelief, raced down Nightshade’s black robes, and thrust its spider arms out to feed its pet more magic. But the creature failed to respond. It continued to shrink, flinching back now from the blows of the broadsword struck by the Paladin, stumbling and tottering away as it felt its life drain from it.

Nightshade saw it now, too, screamed in fury, then made her own determination of the cause and wheeled suddenly on Questor Thews. Fire as dark as pitch flew from her outstretched hands and enveloped the wizard. Questor Thews erupted in a pillar of smoke and ash. Willow and Abernathy gasped in horror. The wizard had disappeared completely.

But the creature was still shrinking. And now something was happening to the Darkling as well. It was doubled over, writhing on the ground at Nightshade’s feet, twisting as if the same poison that had infected its creature had infected it as well. It was shrieking something at Nightshade, who bent quickly to listen.

“The bottle, mistress!” it was saying. “The bottle has been sealed! I cannot find the magic! I cannot live!”

Nightshade still had the bottle in one hand. She stared at it uncomprehendingly, finding it unchanged, undamaged, the stopper pulled, the neck open. What was the demon screaming about? She was mystified.

A short distance away, the creature of the witch and demon’s magic had breathed its last, crumbling completely into dust. The Paladin ground it beneath his charger’s hooves and wheeled about once more. Nightshade looked up from the bottle in confusion. The Paladin was coming now at her.

Only then did she think to reach down to test the bottle’s opening. Blue wizard fire sparked and bit at her, and she jerked her fingers back. “Questor Thews!” Willow heard her shriek in fury. The Darkling was barely moving, clinging to one sleeve. The witch snarled, clasped the bottle by its throat, and prepared to send her own magic surging into its blocked opening.

She was too late.

The Paladin was almost on top of her.

Then Questor Thews seemed to explode out of nowhere right in front of the witch, seizing the bottle before she could think to react, snatching it quickly away. Nightshade shrieked once and lunged for the wizard just as the Paladin reached her.

Fire seemed to erupt from everywhere at the point of impact.

No longer within the concealment of the Bonnie Blues, but running to reach Questor Thews and Ben, Willow and Abernathy drew up short, wincing from the sound and the heat. Fire flared, seemingly of all colors and shapes, exploding into the mist and gray like a geyser out of the earth.

Then the debris settled, and Nightshade and the Paladin were gone. Questor Thews was on his knees, both hands clutched tightly over the top of the bottle, watching stonefaced as the Darkling writhed on the scorched earth and turned to lifeless dust.

Ben Holiday returned to himself, lightheaded and dazed, with the medallion still warm against his chest. He started to sway and topple over, but then Willow was there, holding him upright, and Abernathy was beside her, and he managed to smile and say, “It’s okay now. It’s over.”



The four friends sat quietly at the site of battle and talked about what had happened.

Nightshade was gone. Whether she had been destroyed by the Paladin or escaped to trouble them another day, none of them knew. They could recall the moment of impact—a flare of light and a glimpse of the witch’s face. That was all. They were not willing to bet that they had seen the last of her.

Strabo was gone, too. He had lifted into the sky almost immediately at the battle’s conclusion, winging his way east without a backward glance. They could only imagine his thoughts. They were certain they had not seen the last of the dragon.

The Darkling, they hoped, was gone for good.

So, with any immediate danger dispelled, Ben was able—with occasional interjections from Questor—to explain to Willow and Abernathy how the puzzle of the Darkling had been solved.

“The secret was the bottle,” Ben said. “The Darkling lived in the bottle and never left it completely for long, even when freed from it, so there had to be some logical tie between them. Otherwise, the demon, who was always so anxious to be let out, would have simply abandoned its prison and gone its way. I thought, what if it can’t leave the bottle? What if that’s where it gets its power? What if the magic comes from the bottle, not the demon, and the demon stays with the bottle because it has to, if it wants to continue to use the magic? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.”

“So the High Lord suggested to me,” Questor broke in eagerly, “that if the magic came from the bottle, then shutting off the bottle would cut off the Darkling’s power.”

“The trick was in doing that without letting Nightshade know what was happening—and then getting the bottle back before she could do anything about it.” Ben regained control of his explanation. “So while the Paladin was engaged in battle with the Darkling and Nightshade, Questor used the magic to shrink himself down and slip over to hide in the bottle’s neck. He became its stopper. He left an image of himself so that Nightshade wouldn’t know what he was up to. What Nightshade ended up destroying, when she guessed that Questor was behind the loss of magic, was just the image.”

“You might have alerted us to that much, at least!” Abernathy interrupted heatedly. “You scared us to death with that trick! We thought the old … Well, we thought he had been fried!”

“Questor sealed off the bottle,” Ben continued, ignoring his scribe’s outburst. “That shut off the source of the Darkling’s power and rendered Nightshade’s own magic, which was focused on the bottle’s, useless. It all worked exactly the way we had thought. By the time Nightshade figured out what had happened, it was too late. The creature was done, the demon was too weak to help, and the Paladin was bearing down. Questor surprised Nightshade by jumping out at her the way he did, full-size again, and snatching back the bottle. She couldn’t do anything.”

“What we hadn’t anticipated, of course, was the extent of the effect that sealing off the bottle would have on the Darkling,” Questor cut in again. “The demon drew not only its magic from the bottle, but its life as well. Once it was shut outside, it could not survive.”

The four glanced as one at the small pile of dust some dozen feet away. A fresh breeze had come up. Already, the flakes were beginning to scatter.

HOMECOMINGS



It was Monday morning in Seattle, nearing noon. Miles Bennett sat in one of the waiting areas of the United Airlines Annex at SeaTac Airport waiting for the arrival of Flight 159 out of Chicago O’Hare. Elizabeth’s father would be on that flight. It had taken Miles most of the weekend to track him down and arrange for his return. When he landed, they would drive out to Graum Wythe and begin making the necessary arrangements to dispose of Michel Ard Rhi’s estate.

Miles stared out the Annex windows momentarily into the gray, overcast day. It was funny how things worked out.

Elizabeth was seated beside him, reading something called Rabble Starkey. She was wearing a black and yellow knit skirt and blouse, and her jeans jacket was draped over the back of the seat next to her. She was immersed in the book and unaware that he was watching. He smiled.

Copies of the Seattle Times and the Post Intelligencer rested on his lap, and he began leafing through them idly. He had read the headlines and their various trailers a dozen times already, but each time it seemed he found something new. The events of Halloween night were far enough behind him already that he could hardly believe he had been a part of them. It was almost as if he were reading about something that had happened to someone else. It was as if it were one of those foreign affairs reports that he never quite felt had anything to do with him.

But that wasn’t true, of course—not with foreign affairs and certainly not with this.

The headlines were all very much the same. “Halloween Goblins Invade Seattle.” “Seattle Spirits Trick-Or-Treat City Hall.” “Spook Wars Over Elliott Bay.”

The subheadings referred to the mysterious collapse of a portion of the Courts Building, the sightings by policemen, firemen, various city officials, and the ubiquitous man on the street of some form of unexplained phenomenon, and the strange state in which a number of lawyers and members of the sheriff’s department had been found in a courtroom that looked as if World War III had been fought in it.

The stories beneath related the details, at least insofar as anyone was able to relate them, given what little there was to work with. The municipal police and fire departments had been summoned on Friday night, Halloween, to the Courts Building in downtown Seattle, following a report of an explosion. Upon arrival, they found a hole apparently blown out of the side of the building on the fifth floor. Attempts to reach that floor from inside were unsuccessful. There were varying accounts as to why. Several stories referred with tongue in cheek to the reports of vast jungles of growth that later disappeared entirely. Helicopters were summoned. Firefighters eventually broke through and found most of one courtroom in ruins, with an outside wall gone entirely. A number of people working in the building were found “in a dazed condition” but no one was seriously injured.

Farther down the page and often farther into the paper, there were stories about the sightings. A dragon, some indicated quite positively. A flying saucer, others said. A return of Satan’s hordes, some swore. Yes, there was something, agreed the helicopter pilots who had chased and been chased by whatever it was. They didn’t know what. Could have been some form of sophisticated aircraft playing games, one city official theorized. Sure, and maybe it was one of those close encounters that have their origins in Friday night taverns, another quipped. Come Christmas, we’ll be getting sightings on Santa Claus.

Ho, ho, ho, Miles thought.

There were stories in which scientists, theologians, lay ministers, government officials, and one or two channelers were interviewed and asked for their opinions, which all were only too happy to give.

No one was even close, of course.

Miles finished with those stories and turned to the single column report on the front page of the Northwest section of Sunday’s Times. There was a picture of Graum Wythe and a headline that read: “Millionaire Gives Castle To State.”

Underneath, the accompanying story began:

Millionaire businessman Michel Ard Rhi announced at a news conference today that he was donating his castle home and surrounding lands to the state of Washington as a park and recreation area. A fund will be set aside to maintain and improve the facilities, and the balance of Ard Rhi’s estate, conservatively estimated at three hundred million dollars, will be donated to various organizations throughout the world for humanitarian and charitable causes. Ard Rhi announced that the castle, Graum Wythe, will become a museum for pieces of art he has collected over the years and will be open to the public. Arrangements for readying the facilities will be handled by his private steward, whose name was not released.

Ard Rhi, a reclusive businessman who is thought to have made the bulk of his fortune in real estate and foreign trade, advised newsmen that he plans to retire to the Oregon coast to write or work on other projects. A small trust will be set aside for his support.

The story went on for several more paragraphs, relating Michel Ard Rhi’s personal history and the reaction of a number of local and national notables. Miles read the story twice and shook his head. What had Questor Thews done to the man?

He put the papers aside, stretched, and sighed. Too bad Doc wasn’t still around. There were just too many unanswered questions.

Beside him, Elizabeth looked up suddenly from her book, blue eyes intense. She seemed to read his mind. “Do you think they’re all right?” she asked.

He looked down at her and nodded. “Yep, Elizabeth,” he said. “Matter of fact, I’m sure of it.”

She smiled. “Me, too, I guess.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t worry about them, though.”

“Or miss them. I miss them a lot.”

Miles looked out the windows again, across the broad expanse of the runways and taxi lanes, into the distant gray mix of clouds and mountains and sky. “Well, they’ll be back,” he said finally. “Someday.”

Elizabeth nodded, but didn’t reply.

A moment later, the arrival of Flight 159 was announced. Miles and Elizabeth got up from their seats and walked over to the windows to watch it come in.



Several weeks later, Ben Holiday and Willow were married. They would have been married sooner, but there was protocol to be observed in a wedding such as theirs, and it took awhile even to figure out what the protocol was, let alone to implement it. After all, hardly anyone alive could even remember a marriage of a High Lord of Landover. So Abernathy dug out his histories, and Questor Thews consulted a few of the valley’s elders, and between them they finally figured out what had to be done.

Ben frankly wasn’t interested in the formalities. All he knew was that it had taken him an impossibly long time to realize what Willow had known from the very first—that they should be together, joined as one, husband and wife, High Lord and Queen, and that whatever it took to get the job done, they should do it. Once, not so very long ago, he would never have allowed himself to feel that way; he would have considered such feelings a betrayal of his love for Annie. But Annie had been dead almost five years, and he had managed finally to lay her ghost to rest. Willow was his life now. He loved Willow, had known he loved her almost from the first, had heard her speak countless times of the foretelling of her destiny at the moment of her conception, and had learned from her the Earth Mother’s prediction that one day she would bear him children.

Still he had hesitated to believe and to commit himself. He had been afraid, mostly. He had been afraid of a lot of things—that he still didn’t belong, that he was somehow inadequate to be Landover’s King, and that one day he would simply be gone, back again in the world he had wanted so badly to escape. The realization of the dream was greater than his expectations, and he had feared that he hadn’t enough to give.

He was still afraid. Fears such as these lingered in the subconscious and would not be banished.

But it was another fear altogether that decided him on Willow. It was his fear that he was going to lose her.

He had almost lost her twice now.

It was not almost losing her the first time, when he had just come into Landover, that decided him. It was all too new then, and he had not yet put Annie behind him.

It was almost losing her this second time, when she had come back with him into his old world and he was forced to face the fact that she had come, not because she had to, but because she loved him enough to die for him. She had known that such a journey would endanger her and ignored the risk to herself because she knew that he might have need of her.

That was what decided him. She loved him that much. Didn’t he love her just as much? Did he want to risk losing her before they had even tried to discover what sort of life they might have as husband and wife? At least he had shared that much with Annie. Didn’t he want to share it with Willow as well?

Any fool could have given the right answers to those questions. And Ben Holiday was no fool.

So there was nothing more to say, nothing more to be decided. The marriage took place at the Heart. Everyone came: The River Master, uneasy as always in the presence of his child, still reminded too much of her mother by what he saw in her, and still searching for a way to reconcile the mix of feelings she generated within him; the fairy folk of the lake country, some almost human, some no more than faint shadows flitting through the trees; the Lords of the Greensward, Kallendbor, Strehan, and the rest, with their retainers and followers, an unsettled group that trusted no one, each other least of all, but who arrived and encamped together for the sake of appearances; the trolls and kobolds from the mountains far north and south; the G’home Gnomes, Fillip and Sot in the vanguard, proud of their part—the story varied as to what it was—in the making of this marriage; and common folk from cottages and farms, shops and villages—farmers, merchants, hunters, trappers, traders, peddlers, artisans, and workers of all sorts.

Even Strabo put in an appearance, flying overhead during the feast that followed the marriage ceremony, breathing fire across the sky and presumably taking some small satisfaction from the fact that women and children still ran shrieking at the sight of him.

The marriage was simple and direct. Ben and Willow stood at the center of the Heart on the dais of the Kings of Landover and told each other and those gathered that they loved each other, would be kind and good to each other, and would always be there for each other when needed. Questor Thews recited a few archaic vows of joining that High Lords and Queens might possibly have repeated years ago, and the ceremony was concluded.

The guests feasted and drank all that day and night and into the next, and all behaved themselves relatively well. Quarrels were kept to a minimum and quickly settled. Those from the Greensward and those from the lake country sat side by side and talked of renewed efforts at cooperation. The reclusive trolls and kobolds exchanged gifts. Even the G’home Gnomes took only a few dogs when they left.

Ben and Willow thought it all went pretty well.



It wasn’t until several days later, when things had settled back down to normal, that Ben thought once again to ask Questor about what he had done to Michel Ard Rhi. They were seated in the chamber at Sterling Silver that housed the histories of Landover, a cavernous study that always smelled musty and close, trying to interpret some ancient rules on land ownership. Just the two of them were there, it was late at night, and the day’s work was completed. Ben was sipping at a glass of wine and thinking about all that had happened the past few weeks; then his thoughts drifted to Michel, and he suddenly remembered that Questor had never finished his explanation.

“What did you do to him, Questor?” he pressed, after asking the question once and getting only a shrug for a response. “Come on, tell me. What did you do? I mean, how did you even know what kind of magic to use? I seem to remember you telling me that use of the magic was pretty uncertain over there.”

“Well … most kinds of magic,” Questor agreed.

“But not the kind you used on Michel?”

“Oh, well, that magic was mostly for effect. Not much real magic was necessary.”

Ben was floored. “How can you say that? He was … he was …”

“Basically misguided, if you recall the story,” Questor finished. “Remember, my half-brother was primarily responsible for making him into the disagreeable kind of person he was.”

Ben frowned. “So what did you do?”

Questor shrugged once more. “He just needed his values rearranged, High Lord.”

“Questor!”

“Very well.” The wizard sighed. “I gave him back his conscience.”

“You what?”

“I let the poor thing out from where Michel had locked it away. I used the magic to enlarge it and to give it a primary place of importance in Michel’s thoughts.” Questor smiled. “The guilt he felt must have been intolerable!” He smiled some more. “Oh. I did do one other little thing. I planted a small suggestion in his subconscious.”

He arched an eyebrow, looking like the cat who had eaten the canary.

“I suggested that in order to atone for his guilt, he should give everything away immediately. That way, you see, if the magic gives out before his conscience has a chance to take hold permanently, it will be too late for him to do anything to reverse matters.”

Ben grinned broadly. “Questor Thews. Sometimes you really amaze me.”

The wizard’s owlish face crinkled. They regarded each other with amusement for a moment, sharing the joke.

Then suddenly Questor jumped up. “Goodness! I almost forgot! I have some news that will amaze you indeed, High Lord.” He forced himself to sit down again, clearly excited. “What if I were to tell you that I have found a way to change Abernathy back again? I mean, really change him back!”

He studied Ben eagerly, waiting. “Are you serious?” Ben asked finally.

“Certainly, High Lord.”

“Change him back? Into a man?”

“Yes, High Lord.”

“Like before?”

“Oh, no, not like before.”

“But with magic?”

“Of course, with magic!”

“Have you tested it? This magic?”

“Well …”

“On anything?”

“Well …”

“So this is still just a theory?”

“A well-reasoned theory, High Lord. It should work.”

Ben leaned forward until their heads were almost touching. “It should, should it? Have you told Abernathy about this?”

The wizard shook his head. “No, High Lord. I thought … uh, perhaps you might?”

There was a long silence. Then Ben whispered, “I don’t think either of us should tell him just yet. Do you? Not until you’ve spent a little more time on it.”

Questor frowned, then squinched up his owlish face thoughtfully. “Wellll … perhaps not.”

Ben stood up and put a hand on his shoulder. “Good night, Questor,” he said. Then he turned and walked from the room.

Here is an excerpt from

A PRINCESS OF

LANDOVER



A new adventure in the

Magic Kingdom of Landover series!

Mistaya continued to climb until even the thinning winter trees hid all traces of the highway behind a screen of dark trunks and limbs and a thickening curtain of mist. The little falls had been left behind, and even the trickling sounds of its waters had faded. Ahead, the mist was growing more impenetrable, swirling and twisting like a living thing, climbing into the tree-tops and filling in the gaps that opened to the sky.

Had she not known what to expect, all this would have frightened her. But she had traveled between worlds before, and so she knew how it worked. The mists marked the entry into Landover, and once she passed through them, she would be on her way home. Others who found their way into these woods and encountered the mists would be turned around without realizing it and sent back the way they had come. Only she would be shown the way through.

Assuming she didn’t get careless and stray from the path, she reminded herself. If she did that, things could get complicated. Even for her.

She pulled the collar of her coat tighter, her breath clouding the air as she trudged ahead, still following the path that had taken her up. When at last the path ended, she kept going anyway, knowing instinctively where to go, aware of how she must travel.

A wall of ancient oak trees rose before her, huge monsters casting dark shadows in the failing light. Mist swirled through them, but at their center they parted to form a tunnel, its black interior running back into the forest until the light gave out. Trailers of mist wove their way through the trunks and branches, sinuous tendrils that moved like huge gray snakes. She moved toward them and entered the tunnel. Ahead, there was only blackness and a screen of mist. She kept walking, but for the first time she felt a ripple of uncertainty. It wasn’t altogether impossible that she could have made a mistake. There wasn’t any real way of knowing.

The consequences of a mistake, however, were enormous. One misstep here, and you were in the land of the fairies.

She pressed on, watching the mist and the darkness recede before her at a pace that matched her own. She hugged herself against the chills that ran up and down her spine. Whispers nudged her from within the trees to either side, the voices of invisible beings. She knew those voices, knew their source and their purpose. Fairies, teasing travelers who passed through their domain. They were insidious, unpredictable creatures, and even she, who was born in part of their soil and therefore a part of their world, was not immune to their magic. Partly their child, partly an earth child, and partly a child of Land over—that was her heritage and that was what had determined who and what she was.

Her mother, Willow, had told her the story many times when she was small. Her mother was a sylph, an Elfish creature who transformed periodically into the tree for which she was named to take root and nourish in the earth. She had done so in order to give birth to Mistaya. In preparation, she had collected a mix of soils—from a place in Ben’s world called Greenwich and from the old pines in the lake country and from the fairy mists in her world. But she had unexpectedly gone into labor and been forced to take root in a hurried mix of the soils she carried while she was still down in the dark confines of the Deep Fell, the home of the witch Nightshade. The consequences were unimaginable, and while Mistaya had been born without incident, she had also been born the only one of her kind.

You couldn’t be more different than that.

But being different only got you so far. For one thing, you were never exactly like anyone else and so you never completely fit in. It was so here. Being part fairy was not enough to guarantee safe passage. Staying on the path and keeping your head was what would protect you.

So she did as she knew she must, even though the temptation to step away, to follow those intriguing voices, to try to find even one of the speakers, played on her curious mind. She pushed ahead very deliberately, waiting for the dark and the mist to fade, for the trees to open before her, for the passing between worlds to end.

Which, finally, it did.

Quickly, smoothly, without warning of any sort, the trees thinned and the curtains of mist lifted. She walked out of the darkened forest into a bright, sunlit day filled with sweet scents and warm breezes. She paused in spite of herself, drinking it in, letting it infuse her with good feelings.

Home.

She had entered at the west end of Landover, and the sweep of the valley spread away before her. Close by, just below, lay the broad, open grasslands of the Greensward; south, the lake country that was her mother’s home; north, the Melchor Mountains where the Trolls lived; and east, beyond the Greensward, the wastelands and the fire springs where Strabo, last of the dragons, made his home. She couldn’t see it all; the distance was too great, and when you reached the ring of mountains that encircled the valley, the mists cloaked everything.

As she scanned the familiar countryside, enjoying the good feelings that coming home generated, her eyes passed over and then returned to the dark smudge below the Melchor that marked the Deep Fell. Memories she did not care to relive surfaced anew, and she felt a twinge of regret. The Deep Fell was her real birthplace, dark and terrible, and though she would have wished it otherwise, it was a part of her. Nightshade had told her so. Nightshade, who had wanted her for her own child. For a while, she had wanted that, too. Treachery and deception had marked that period in her life, when she was only eleven years old. But that was finished now. Nightshade was gone, and she wouldn’t be coming back.

She shifted her gaze, fixing it instead on the place where she knew Sterling Silver waited, not too far away now, less than a day’s walk if she hurried.

She started ahead at once, moving deliberately down from the foothills into the valley, choosing her path almost without thinking about it. She breathed deeply of the scents of the valley as she descended into it, marking each of them in turn, identifying each one, able to separate them out and match them to their names. She had learned to do that a long time ago while studying under the able tutelage of Questor Thews, the court magician. Questor, ancient and amusing, held a special place in her heart. It wasn’t just because he was so funny, frequently mixing up his spells and causing all sorts of minor catastrophes. It wasn’t because he had always treated her like an adult and never a child, better attuned to who and what she was than her father. It wasn’t even because he was the dearest friend she had, aside from her parents.

It was because he had saved her life and almost lost his own by doing so. It was because he had done so impetuously and without a second thought for the consequences. It was because he had dared to go up against a much stronger sorcerer in Nightshade, the Witch of the Deep Fell.

Mistaya had used her own magic to save him, a combination of newfound talent acquired from studying with the witch and her natural talent. Enraged upon discovering she had been deceived into using both to attack her father, she had lashed out at Nightshade in a red-hot fury. The two had gone toe-to-toe in a battle of sorceries that might have seen both destroyed if not for the timely intervention of Haltwhistle. Her spell had turned back upon herself, and Nightshade had disappeared in an explosion of green witch fire. Afterward, Mistaya had used her talent and determination to nurse Questor back to health. When he was well again, he became her teacher and constant companion.

Until her father had sent her away to Carrington where, he insisted, she would learn new and necessary things.

To his credit, Questor hadn’t argued. He had agreed with her father who, after all, was King and had the final word on almost everything. He had told her that her father was right, that she needed to see something of another world, and her father’s world was the obvious choice. He would be waiting when she returned, and they would pick up right where they left off on their study of the flora and fauna, of the creatures and their habits, of the world that really mattered to her.

Remembering his promise, she was suddenly anxious for that to happen.

Abruptly, a huge black shadow fell across her, a dark stain that spread wide in all directions, as something massive and winged swept overhead in soundless flight. She gasped and dropped into a protective crouch, preparing to defend herself. A beating of great, leathery wings churned the sleepy air into a howling wind that threatened to flatten her, and Strabo hove into view. Body extended, the dragon banked into a glide that brought it about and down into a smooth landing directly in front of her.

She straightened tentatively and faced the dragon as it towered over her. “Good day, dragon!” she greeted bravely.

“Good day, Princess,” the dragon replied in a voice that sounded like metal being scraped with a saw’s sharp teeth.

She wasn’t sure where this was going but decided it was best to find out sooner rather than later. “You seem as if you have a purpose in coming upon me like this. Is there a reason for your being here? Are you here to welcome me home?”

“Welcome home,” he said.

She waited for more, but the dragon simply sat there, blocking her way. It was a massive beast, its weight something in the area of four or five tons, its body sheathed in leathery skin and armored with bony plating, its spine ridged with spikes, its triangular head encrusted with horns, and its legs as big as tree trunks. One yellowish eye fixed on her with determined intent while the other closed with languid disinterest. Neat trick, she thought, and wondered if she could learn how to do it.

“We have a small problem, Princess,” Strabo rumbled after a long few minutes. “You have engaged in behavior that is forbidden to you. Are you aware of what that behavior might be?”

“I am not,” she declared, wondering suddenly if it had something to do with Rhonda Masterson.

“You used your magic to create an image of me to frighten someone,” the dragon said, confirming her suspicion. “This is not allowed. This is never allowed. No one is ever, ever, ever allowed to use an image of me, in any form whatsoever, for any purpose whatsoever, without my permission. Perhaps you did not know this?”

She took a deep breath. “I did not. I thought it was a perfectly acceptable usage.”

“Think again. More to the point, don’t do it again. I don’t know what kind of manners they teach you at the castle, or what sort of behavior you have been led to believe is acceptable, but labeling all dragons as scary beasts is way out of line. Consider this fair warning. If you ever create an image of me again without my permission, you shall hear from me much more quickly than this and you will be made to answer for your foolishness. Am I clear?”

She tightened her lower lip to keep it from trembling as the dragon bent over her like a collapsing rock wall and she got a clear whiff of its incredibly rancid breath. “You are very clear,” she managed.

“Good,” he declared. When he straightened he was as tall as a three-story building and with his wings spread he was twice as wide. “I shan’t keep you longer. It is good to see you again, and I wish you well. I have always liked and admired you and your mother; your father, of course, is a different story. Please do yourself a favor and don’t take after him. Now, farewell. Take care to remember my warning.”

Huge wings flapping with enough force to knock her sprawling, Strabo rose into the sky and soared away, flying east until he was little more than a dwindling black speck against the horizon. Mistaya stared after him from where she sat sprawled on the ground, aware of how close she had come to finding out a whole lot more about dragon breath than she cared to.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR



TERRY BROOKS is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-five books, including the Genesis of Shannara trilogy: Armageddon’s Children, The Elves of Cintra, and The Gypsy Morph; The Sword of Shannara; the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy: Ilse Witch, Antrax, and Morgawr; the High Druid of Shannara trilogy: Jarka Ruus, Tanequil, and Straken; the nonfiction book Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life; and the novel based upon the screenplay and story by George Lucas, StarWars®: Episode I The Phantom Menace.™ His novels Running with the Demon and A Knight of the Word were selected by the Rocky Mountain News as two of the best science fiction/fantasy novels of the twentieth century. The author was a practicing attorney for many years but now writes full-time. He lives with his wife, Judine, in the Pacific Northwest.



www.shannara.com

Terrybrooks.net