“We’ll need help to search for them,” Bek said. “Especially if the Ilse Witch and the Mwellrets are looking, too.”
Truls Rohk rocked back slightly on his heels and gave an audible sigh. “We’ll have some difficulty finding any. There’s bad news everywhere in this business. Your sister used her magic to immobilize the Jerle Shannara’s crew. She boarded the ship and took them all prisoner. She has locked them belowdecks, and she controls both ships. Black Moclips is anchored in the bay, where you went ashore. The Jerle Shannara is downriver, closer to the ice gates. There’s no help to be had from either.”
Bek felt as if the ground had fallen away beneath his feet. Whatever else had been taken from them, at least they’d had the Jerle Shannara to retreat to. Now that haven was lost, as well. They were trapped on Ice Henge. They couldn’t even get word of where they were to the Wing Riders.
He thought suddenly of Rue Meridian and felt a sharp pang of terror, one much sharper than he would have expected. He took a steadying breath. “Are the Rovers unharmed and well?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
The shape-shifter shrugged. “No one was hurt in the boarding. I don’t know what’s happened since, but probably nothing.”
“Shades! We’ve lost everything, Truls. You and I and maybe one or two more are all that’s left, alive and free.” He heard a hint of desperation creep into his voice and tried to block it away. “We have to do something. At least we have to go back and face Grianne, find a way to convince her that she’s an Ohmsford, make her see that she’s been—”
“Slow down, boy,” Truls Rohk said. “Let’s take a deep breath and think this through. There’s no going back to face the Ilse Witch just yet. What’s already happened is still too fresh in her mind. We need a way to reach her besides what you’ve already tried. Something she can’t brush aside as easily as your words.”
He glanced meaningfully over Bek’s shoulder. The boy glanced with him and found himself staring at the pommel of the Sword of Shannara still strapped across his back. In the excitement of his encounter with his sister, he had forgotten he was carrying it.
He looked back at the shape-shifter. “You mean, I should try using this?”
“I mean, find a way to use it.” The other’s voice was ironic. “Not so easy to do, I’d think. Your sister isn’t just going to stand there and let you use the magic on her. But if you can find a way to catch her off guard, surprise her maybe, she might not have a choice. Like it or not, she might have to face up to the truth of things. It’s the best chance we have of persuading her.”
Bek shook his head doubtfully. “She’ll never give us the chance. Never.”
Truls Rohk said nothing, waiting.
“She’ll fight us!” Bek reached back to touch the handle of the Sword of Shannara, then let his hand fall away helplessly. “Besides, I don’t know if I can make it work against her.”
“Not against her,” the shape-shifter advised quietly. “For her.”
Bek nodded slowly. “For her. For both of us.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to discount our chances,” Truls Rohk continued. “We’ve lost the ship and crew, but we don’t know about Panax and that Highlander and the others. And I wouldn’t put finished to the Druid if I saw him dropped six feet underground; he has more lives than a cat. He won’t have gone into the tower without a plan for getting out. I know him, boy. I’ve known him a long time. He thinks everything through. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was already free and looking for us.”
Bek looked doubtful, but nodded anyway. “What do we do next? Where do we go from here?”
Truls Rohk climbed to his feet, cloak falling about his wide shoulders, shadowing him from the ground up, leaving him a wraith, even in the growing dawn light.
“I need to backtrack far enough to make certain we aren’t being followed by the witch or her rets. You wait here for my return. Don’t move from this spot.” He paused. “Unless you’re in danger. In that case, hide yourself the best way you can. But if that becomes necessary, don’t use your magic. You’re not ready yet, not without me.”
He gave the boy a hard stare in warning, then turned and disappeared into the trees.
Bek sat with his back against an aging shagbark hickory and watched the eastern sky brighten with the dawn’s coming. Darkness gave way to first light, then first light to morning, the sky changing colors in gaps through the trees that were invisible in the darkness and could be discerned only now. He sat thinking of where he was, of the journey that had brought him to this place and time, and of the changes he had gone through. He remembered thinking, on the evening that Walker had first appeared in the Highlands months earlier and asked him to come on this voyage, that if he went with the Druid, nothing in his life would ever be the same again. He hadn’t realized how right he would prove to be.
He closed his eyes momentarily and tried to imagine what it had been like back in Leah, in the Highlands, in his home. He couldn’t do it. It was so far away, so removed from the present, that it was little more than a memory, fading with a past that seemed lost in another lifetime.
He gave up on the Highlands and instead tried to imagine what it would be like to have Grianne as his sister. Not just in name, but in fact. To have her accept that it was so. To have her call him Bek. He failed in this effort, as well. As the Ilse Witch, Grianne had taken lives and destroyed dreams. She had done things that he might never be able to accept, no matter how mistaken she had been or how much contrition she exhibited. Her life was wrapped in deception and trickery, in a misdirected search for revenge, in isolation and bitterness. It was not as if she could simply wipe away her past and begin fresh. She could not become someone different all at once simply because he wanted it to be so. That was asking for a child’s-fable ending of a kind that had long since ceased to be possible. Whatever he expected of her, it was probably too much. The best he could hope for was that she would come to realize the truth.
He pictured her in his mind, standing before him in her gray robes, austere and imperious. He could not imagine her being happy. Had she laughed even once since she had been stolen away? Had she ever smiled?
Yet he had to find a way to bring her back to herself, to something of the girl she had been fifteen years ago, to a little part of the world she had abandoned and disdained as meant for lesser creatures. He had to help her, even if by helping he should cause her greater pain.
How could he manage this, when their next encounter would likely result in her trying her very best to kill him?
He wished he had Quentin with him—Quentin, with his sensible, straightforward approach to things, always able to see with such clarity the right way to proceed, the best thing to do. Had Quentin survived the battle at Castledown’s ruins? Tears filled his eyes at the thought that his cousin might be dead. Even thinking such a thing seemed a betrayal. He could not imagine life without his cousin—his confidant, his best friend. Quentin had been so eager to come on this voyage, so anxious to see some other part of the world, to learn something new of life. What if it had cost him his own?
Bek knotted his hands together in frustration and stared out into the trees, into the growing sunlight, the new day, and his determination hardened into certainty. He must find Quentin. Maybe even before he found Walker, because the fact of the matter was that Quentin was the more important of the two. If they were stranded in this strange land, if their airships were lost to them and their companions dead, at least they would have each other to see the worst of it through. To face what lay ahead, however bad, in any other way was inconceivable to him.
Look after each other, Coran Leah had urged them. They had promised each other as much—long ago, in Arborlon, when there had still been a chance to turn back.
He sighed wearily. At least he had Truls Rohk to help him. As strange and frightening as the shape-shifter was, he had shown himself to be a friend. As conflicted as his life had been, he was perhaps the most dependable and capable of the ship’
s company. There was a measure of reassurance in that, and Bek embraced it eagerly.
Because he had nothing else to embrace, he admitted. Because sometimes you took comfort where you found it.
Truls Rohk was not gone long. The light had not yet chased away the last of the night when he reappeared through the trees, his cloaked form crouched low, his movements quick and furtive.
“On your feet,” he hissed roughly, pulling the boy up. “Your sister’s on our trail and coming fast.”
Bek tried to keep the fear from his eyes and throat, tried to breathe normally as he glanced in the direction from which the shape-shifter had come. Then they were running into the trees and gone.
FOUR
She was perhaps a hundred yards into the forest and well away from Cree Bega and the other Mwellrets when the Ilse Witch paused to adjust her clothing. She pulled out a length of braided cord, looped it over her shoulders, crisscrossed it down her body and through her legs, and bound up her robes where they hung loose so that she could move more easily through the heavy brush ahead. The robes she had chosen were light but strong, and would not tear easily. Anticipating a rough climb into the ruins of Castledown, she had exchanged the sandals she normally favored for ankle boots with tough, flexible soles. She had intended her clothing and footgear for something else entirely, but her foresight was paying off. She had hunted before, though for different quarry, and she understood the importance of being prepared.
Her mind drifted momentarily to those days she had buried so thoroughly until the boy had confronted her. As Grianne Ohmsford, she had spent time in the woods and hills about her home, learning to use the magic of the wishsong. One of the exercises she engaged in regularly was a form of tracking. Using the magic, she would detect the passing of an animal and then follow it to its lair. Her singing, she discovered, could color its fading body heat and movements just enough to show her its progress, if the trail wasn’t too old. She couldn’t read prints or signs in the manner of Trackers, but the ability to trace heat and movement worked just as well. She became quite good at it even before she was stolen away.
She thought again of the boy. He bothered her more than she wanted to admit. The hair and eyes were right for Bek. Even something about his movements and facial expressions was familiar. And that hint of magic that surfaced right at the end of things—that was the wishsong. No one should have all three save Bek. What were the odds? How long would the Druid have had to look to find such a combination? But she was forgetting that he could create everything but the magic, layer it on as if it had always been there, making over the one he had chosen to fool her.
Bek had never evidenced use of the wishsong before she hid him that last morning. He had been a normal baby. She had no way of knowing if he would ever have had use of the magic. Or did now.
She blinked away her discomfort and her thoughts and set about adjusting her robes a final time. She looked down at the pale skin of her wrists and ankles where it was exposed to the light, virtually untouched by the sun, so white it looked iridescent in the mix of forest shadows and golden dawn. She touched herself as if to make certain she was real, thinking as she did that sometimes it felt as if she weren’t, as if she was created out of dreams and wishes, and nothing about her was hard and true.
She gritted her teeth. It was that boy who was making her think like this. Find him, and the thoughts would disappear for good.
She set out once more, leaving the hood in place, her face in darkness, hidden away from prying eyes. With her robes bound close, she eased through the trees, humming softly to reveal the trail of the shape-shifter and the boy, finding their lingering presence at every turn, their passage as clear as if marked by paint on tree bark. She moved at a steady pace, used to walking, to journeys afoot and not just to riding her Shrikes, toughened long since because she knew that she would not otherwise survive. The Morgawr might have been content to let her remain just a girl, less a threat, more malleable, but she had determined early on that she would never allow herself to be vulnerable again. Sooner or later, she would be threatened by something or someone toughened by years of wilderness living, and she wanted to be ready for that. Nor did she ever want to be considered just a girl or even a woman, somehow reduced in stature by her sex and not regarded with caution.
No, she thought grimly, she would never be thought of like that. The Morgawr had trained her in the use of her magic, but she had trained herself in the art of survival. When he was gone, which was often, she tested herself in ways he did not know about, going out alone, into dangerous country, sometimes well beyond the Wilderun. She lived as an animal, tracking as they did, foraging, hunting, and always learning what they knew. Because she had the use of the wishsong, she could speak their language and gain their acceptance. She could make herself appear one with them. It took concentration and effort, and a single slip might have spelled disaster. She was powerful, but it required only a moment’s inattention to let a predator past her defenses. Moor cats and Kodens could strike you down before you thought to wonder what had happened. Werebeasts were quicker than that.
She had not gone far before she detected a second presence, one that overlapped the first. She slowed, suddenly cautious, reading the images, the traces of heat and movement, wary of a trap. But after a few moments she realized what she had discovered. The shape-shifter had backtracked to see if anyone was following, then retraced his steps to where he had left the boy. It was likely he’d seen her. She had to assume as much. She already knew he was experienced and skilled, and he had been wise enough not to assume that after rescuing the boy he was clear of her. He had returned to check, then gone back to warn his charge.
She set off in pursuit, anxious to close the gap between them. If he had been close enough to detect her, he could not be all that far ahead now. The images revealed by her magic were unmistakable and strong. He was not even bothering to hide his trail. He was running, fleeing, frightened of her perhaps, realizing how little distance separated them. That made her smile. It was what she wanted. Frightened, panicked people made mistakes. The shape-shifter was not one of these under normal circumstances, but conditions had changed.
Down through ravines and along the crests of low hills studded with hardwoods and choked with brush she made her way, breaking into a lope in the open areas, so close she felt she could smell them. Overhead, the sun had crested midmorning and was moving toward noon, bright and clear in a cloudless blue sky. She breathed in the warmth and freshness of the forest, a sheen of perspiration coating her face and hands, seeping down her limbs inside her garments. She felt a wildness infuse her, familiar and welcome. It was like this sometimes when she was on a chase, that sense of being feral and untamed, dangerous. She wanted to cast aside her human garments and hunt as the animals did. She craved a taste of fresh blood.
In a broad clearing ringed tightly with old growth, images of the boy reappeared, joining with the shape-shifter. Excitement raced through her, spurring her anew. The images told her they were running now, racing to escape her. The boy would know she was coming. He would be wondering what he could do to save himself if she caught up to him. He would lie, of course. He would tell his story again. But he had to know already that it would be useless to try to trick her a second time. He had to know what she would do to him.
Just another few hundred yards, perhaps. Not much more than that, and she would have them. They were right ahead.
But all of a sudden, as she entered a meadow filled with yellow and blue wildflowers that rolled like the surface of the sea in the wind, the trail she followed so eagerly disappeared. For a moment she could not believe it. She kept on, pushing ahead in disbelief, crossing the meadow to its far side, trying to make sense of what had happened. Then she stopped. The images were still there, still as discernible as ever, bright and clear. But they were everywhere, all across the meadow, all through the trees beyond, thousands of them, flickers of heat and light. It seemed as if the shape-shifter and the boy
were everywhere at once, gone in all directions at the same time.
It wasn’t possible, of course.
It wasn’t real.
She took a deep breath to calm herself, then exhaled slowly. She reached within her hood to brush back a lock of her thick, dark hair and looked from one end of the meadow to the other, casting into the shadows beneath the trees beyond, searching. No one was there. The boy and his protector were elsewhere, safely clear and farther away from her with every passing second.
In spite of herself, she smiled. She had believed them panicked, but the shape-shifter and the boy were smarter than she’d thought. Realizing she would track them using her magic, they had retaliated by using their own. Or, more accurately, if she was reading things right, the boy had used his. He had used it to cast their images all about, to disperse them in all directions. She could sort them out, find the right set to see which way the pair had gone, but it would take time. They would do this again, farther on, and each time she was forced to unravel one of the confusing puzzles, she would lose ground.
They were hoping, of course, that she lacked a Tracker’s skills and could not pursue them through reading prints and signs if they foiled her magic. They were right. Her magic was all she had, and it would have to be enough.
She sat down, cross-legged with her back against an oak, looking out into the meadow, thinking things through. There was no need for hurry. She would catch them, of course. Nothing they tried would be enough to throw her off their trail for long. It was more important not to act in haste. She took a moment to consider where all this was leading. The boy and his protector were running, but to what? This was a strange land, and they knew nothing of its geography or inhabitants. The shape-shifter would have told the boy by now that their airship was under her control and outside their reach. The members of the landing party led by Walker were scattered or dead, and the Druid had disappeared. At best, running offered only a temporary solution to their problem. How did they intend to make use of it? Where would they try to go and to what end? Surely, they weren’t running blindly and toward nothing. The shape-shifter was too smart for that.