“I am not questioning you …” he began.
“Yes, you are, First Minister,” she snapped.
“You must remember that I was not there when you were named Queen, my lady, and I—”
“Stop right there!” She was furious now, and she did not bother to hide it. “You are right, Eton Shart. You were not there. You were not there to see Ellenroh Elessedil die. Or Gavilan. Or the Owl. Or Eowen Cerise. You were not there to see Garth give his life for ours in our fight against the Wisteron. You did not have to help him die, First Minister, as I did, because to let him live would have condemned him to become one of the Shadowen!”
She steadied herself with an effort. “I gave up everything to save the Elves—my past, my freedom, my friends, everything. I do not begrudge that. I did it because my grandmother asked it of me, and I loved her. I did it because the Elves are my people, and while I have been gone from them a long time I am still one of them. One of you, First Minister. I am finished explaining myself. I have nothing to answer for to you or anyone. Either I am Queen or I am not. Ellenroh believed me so. That was enough for me; it ought to be enough for you. This debate ends here.”
She let her gaze rest heavily on Eton Shart. “We must be friends and allies, First Minister, if we are to have any chance against the Federation and the Shadowen. There must be trust between us, not doubt. It will not always be easy, but we must work to understand each other. We must support and encourage, not belittle and deride. There is no room in our lives for anything less. Though we might wish it otherwise, we must accept what fate has decreed for us.”
She took a deep breath, looking away to the others. “As Ellenroh once did, I ask for your support. I think we must go out to meet the Federation army and deal with it as we determine best. I think we shall discover that there are others who will help us. Hiding will gain us nothing. Isolating ourselves is exactly what the Federation hopes for. We must not give them the satisfaction of finding us frightened and alone. We are the oldest people on the earth, and we must act the part. We must provide leadership for the people of the other, younger Races. We must give them hope.”
She looked at them. “Who stands with me?”
Triss rose at once. Tiger Ty rose with him, looking decidedly awkward. Then, to her pleasant surprise, Fruaren Laurel, who had not said a word the entire time, stood up as well.
She waited. Four stood, four remained seated. Of the four who stood, only three were members of the High Council. Tiger Ty was only an emissary of his people. If nothing changed, Wren lacked the support she needed.
She turned her gaze on Eton Shart, then held out her hand to him, a gesture at once conciliatory and challenging. He stared at her in surprise, eyes questioning. He hesitated momentarily, undecided, then reached out to accept her hand and rose. “My lady,” he acknowledged, and bowed. “As you say, we must stand together.”
Barsimmon Oridio rose, too. “Better a gamecock than a plucked chicken,” he grumbled. He shook his head, then looked at Wren with something akin to admiration in his aging eyes. “Your grandmother would have advised us in the same way, my lady.”
Jalen Ruhl and Perek Arundel stood up reluctantly, casting helpless glances at each other as they did so. They were not persuaded, but they did not care to stand alone against her. Wren gave them a gracious nod. She would take what she could get.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. She squeezed Eton Shart’s hand and released it. “Thank you all. Let us remember in the days that come what we have committed to this night. Let us remember to let our belief and trust in each other sustain us.”
She looked about the table, at each face, at the way their eyes were fixed on her. For that moment, at least, she had bound them to her, and she was indeed their queen.
XIII
Walker Boh deliberated for two days before he again tried to escape the Shadowen siege of Paranor.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have gone even then, but he found himself slipping into a dangerous state of mind. The more he thought about various ways of breaking free, the more it seemed he needed to consider further. Each plan had its flaws, and each flaw became magnified as it was held up this way and that for examination. Nothing he conceived seemed exactly right, and the harder he worked at discovering a foolproof method of gaining his escape, the more he began to doubt himself. Finally it became apparent that if he allowed himself to go on, he would lose all confidence and in the end be unable to act at all.
It was all part of a game that the Shadowen were playing with him, he was afraid.
His first encounter with the Four Horsemen had left him physically battered, but those injuries were not the ones that troubled him. It was the psychological damage that refused to mend, that lingered within like a fever. Walker Boh had always been in control of his life, able to manipulate events around him and to keep intrusions at bay. He had accomplished this mostly by isolating himself within the familiar confines of Darklin Reach, where the dangers to be faced and problems to be solved were familiar and within the purview of his enormous capabilities. He had command of magic, intelligence coupled with extraordinary insight, and other assorted abilities that ranged from the intuitive to the acquired—all of which were far superior to those of anyone against whom he chose to direct them.
But that was changed. He had crossed out of Darklin Reach and come into the outside world. This was his home now, the cottage at Hearthstone reduced to ashes, the life he had known gone into another time. He had traveled a road that had altered his existence as surely as dying. He had taken up Allanon’s charge and followed it through to its conclusion. He had recovered the Black Elfstone and brought back Paranor. He had become the first of the new Druids. He was someone entirely different than the person he had been only weeks ago. That change had given him new insight, strength, knowledge, and power. But it had also exposed him to new responsibilities, expectations, challenges, and enemies. It remained to be decided if the former would be sufficient to overcome the latter. For the moment at least, the matter was unresolved. Walker Boh might fall and be lost forever—or he might find a way to climb back to safety. He was a man hanging from a precipice.
The Shadowen knew this. They had come for him as soon as they had discovered that Paranor was returned. Walker was still a child in his role as Druid, and now was the time when he would be most vulnerable. Besiege him, frustrate him, distract his development, kill him if possible, but cripple him at all costs—that was the plan.
And the plan was working. Walker had come back into Paranor, after his first aborted attempt at escape, aware of several very unpleasant truths. First, he did not possess sufficient power to break free in a head-to-head confrontation. The Four Horsemen were his equal and more, their magic a match for his own. Second, he could not slip past them undetected. Third, and worst of all, their experience was superior to his own—and they did not fear him. They had come looking for him. They had done so openly, without subterfuge. They had challenged him, daring him to come out and fight them. They circled Paranor in open disdain of what he might do. He was a prisoner in his own castle, reduced to trying to come up with a plan that would let him be free, and the Four Horsemen were betting he couldn’t do it. It was possible, he was forced to admit, that they were right.
“You are working too hard at this,” Cogline advised him finally, finding him back on the walls, staring down at the wraiths circling below. He looked gaunt and pale, ragged and worn. “Look at you, Walker. You barely sleep. You take no notice of your appearance—you have not bathed since your return. You do not eat.”
A frail hand rubbed at the whiskers of the old man’s chin. “Think, Walker. This is what they want. They are afraid of you! If they weren’t, they would simply force the gates and finish this business. But that won’t be necessary if you can be made to doubt yourself, to panic, to forgo the caution and resolve that got you this far. If that happens, they will have won. Sooner or later, they think, you will do something foolish, and then they will ha
ve you.”
It was the most that Cogline had said to him since his return. Walker stared at him, at the ancient, weather-beaten face, at the stick-thin body, at the arms and legs jutting from his robes like poles. Cogline had welcomed him back with reassurances, but mostly he had seemed removed and distant—just as he had for those few days before Walker had first tried to go out. Something was happening with Cogline, some secret conflict, but Walker had been too preoccupied with his own problems then, as he was now, to take time to decipher what it was.
Nevertheless, he let the old man lead him down from the parapets to the inner shell of the castle and a hot meal. He ate without enthusiasm, drank a little ale, and decided that a bath was a good idea after all. He sat in the steaming water, letting it cleanse him inside and out, feeling the heat soothe and relax his body and mind. Rumor kept him company, curled up against the side of the tub as if to share its warmth. While Walker dried himself and dressed again, he pondered the enormous calm of the moor cat, the facade that all cats assumed as they regarded the world about them, considering it in their own impenetrable way. A little of that calm would be useful, he thought.
Then his thoughts shifted abruptly.
What was wrong with Cogline?
He left his own troubles behind with the bathwater and went out to find the old man. He came on him in the library, reading once more the Druid Histories. Cogline looked up as he entered, startled by his appearance or by something it suggested—Walker could not tell which.
Walker sat beside him on a carved, cushioned bench. “Old man, what is it that bothers you?” he asked quietly. He reached out to place a reassuring hand on the other’s thin shoulder. “I see the worry in your eyes. Tell me.”
Cogline shrugged in an exaggerated manner. “I worry for you, Walker. I know how strange everything seems to you since … well, since all this began. It cannot be easy. I keep thinking there must be something I can do to help.”
Walker looked away. Since the Black Elfstone, he thought. Since Allanon made himself a part of me, come in through the magic left to keep Paranor safe until the Druids’ return. Strange is hardly the word for it.
“You need not worry for me,” he replied, his smile ironic. At least not about that. The warring within of the past and the present had faded as the two assimilated, and the lives and knowledge of the Druids had become his own. He thought of the way the magic had churned through him, burning away defenses until there had been nothing left for him to do but to accept it as his own.
“Walker.” Cogline was staring at him, focused now. “I do not think Allanon would have put you through this if he did not believe that it would leave you with sufficient power to stand against the Shadowen.”
“You have more faith than I.”
Cogline nodded solemnly. “I always have, Walker. Didn’t you know that? But my faith will be yours as well one day. It simply takes time. I have been given that time and used it to learn. I have been alive a long time now, Walker. A long time. Faith is a part of what gives me the strength to go on.”
Walker took his hand away. “I had faith in myself. I had it when I knew who and what I was. But that has changed, old man. I am someone and something else entirely, and I am being asked to place my faith in a stranger. It is hard for me to do that.”
“Yes,” Cogline agreed. “But it will happen—if you give it time.”
“If I have the time to give,” Walker Boh finished.
He went out again. Rumor trailed, a black shadow slipping from lamplight to lamplight in the gloom, head swaying rhythmically, tail switching. Walker was aware of him without thinking of him, his thoughts turned again to the Shadowen without.
There must be a way …
Strength alone was not enough. The power of the Druid magic was impressive, but it had never been enough by itself even for those Druids come and gone. Knowledge was necessary as well. Cleverness. Resolve. Unpredictability. This last most of all, perhaps—an intangible that was the special province of survivors. Did he have it? he wondered suddenly. What did he have besides what the Druid magic had given him that he could call upon? He had made much out of the fact that nothing done to him by the Druids would change who he was. But was that so? If so, then what part of himself could he call upon now to enable him to believe in himself once again?
And wasn’t that the key to everything? That he believe in himself enough that he should not despair?
He went back up to the battlements, Rumor trailing. The night was clear and bright with stars, and the air smelled clean and fresh. He breathed it deeply as he walked atop the walls, not looking down at what waited there, letting his thoughts slip free as he went, unburdened. He found himself thinking about Quickening, the daughter of the King of the Silver River, the elemental who had given everything to restore life to a land of stone, to give the earth a chance to heal. He pictured her face and listened in his memory to her voice. He felt the slight weight of her that last time as he carried her to the edge of Eldwist, the sense of sureness that had emanated from her, the sense of power. Dying, she was fulfilling her promise. It was what she had wanted. But she had bequeathed some part of her life to him, a sense of purpose and need, a resolve that he would do in life what she could only do in death.
He stopped, staring out at the night. How far he had traveled, he thought in genuine amazement. How long a journey it had been. All to reach this point, to arrive at this place and time.
He paused in his meandering, faced inward to the castle spires, to the walls and towers that loomed over him, rising darkly into the night. Was this where his life was supposed to end? he wondered suddenly. Was this where the journey finally stopped?
It had been a pointless struggle if that was so.
He turned and looked down over the wall. One of the Horsemen was passing directly below, a faint luminescence against the dark. Death, he thought, but it was hard to tell. It made no difference in any case. Names notwithstanding, identities assumed aside, they were all Death in one form or another. Shadowen killers lacking use and purpose beyond their ability to destroy. Why had they allowed themselves to become so? What choice had made them thus?
He watched that rider fade and waited for the next. All night they would patrol and at dawn assemble once more before the gates to issue their challenge anew …
He caught himself. All together, before the gates.
A glimmer of hope flickered in his mind. What if he were to answer that challenge?
His face grim-set, he wheeled from the wall and went down the battlements in search of Cogline.
Dawn arrived with a silvering of the eastern skies that hinted of mist and heat. The air was still and sultry even this early, a remnant of yesterday’s swelter, a promise that this summer did not intend to give way easily to autumn. Birds sounded their calls in snappish, weary tones, as if unwilling to herald the morning’s start.
The Four Horsemen were assembled before the gates, lined up in the grayness on their nightmare mounts. The serpents clawed distractedly at the earth as their riders sat mutely before Paranor’s high walls, specters without voice, lives without balance. As the light crested the tips of the Dragon’s Teeth, War urged his monstrous carrier forward, lifted his armored hand, and struck the gate with a hollow thud. The sound lingered in the silence that followed, an echo that disappeared into the trees and the gloom. The gate shuddered and went still.
War started to turn away.
Walker Boh was waiting. He was already outside the walls, come through a hidden door in a tower barely fifty feet away. He was cloaked by his magic in a spell of invisibility, shrouded in the touch and look and smell of ancient stone so that he appeared just another part of Paranor. They had not been looking for him. Even if they had, he believed he would not have been discovered.
He brought up his good arm, the magic already summoned, gathered within until it was white-hot, and he sent it hurtling toward the Shadowen.
The magic exploded into War and cut the unsuspec
ting wraith entirely in half. The serpent mount bolted, War’s legs and lower torso still clinging to it, and disappeared.
Walker struck again. The magic hammered into the remaining three, catching them bunched tightly together and entirely unprepared. Fire exploded everywhere, engulfing them. The serpents reared and clawed in fury, wheeling about in an effort to escape. Walker sent the fire in front of their eyes so that they could not see and into their nostrils so that they could not smell, so that it clogged their senses and drove them mad. The Shadowen slammed up against one another, blinded and confused.
I’ve got them! Walker thought in elation.
His strength was draining from him fast, but he did not relent. He dropped the spell of invisibility, saving as much of himself as he could, and pressed the attack further, willing the magic into fire, willing the fire to consume. One of the Horsemen broke free, steaming and spitting like embers kicked by a boot. It was Pestilence, the strange body come apart into a buzzing swarm of darkness, all of its shape and definition lost. Famine had gone down, horse and rider writhing on the earth in a desperate effort to extinguish the flames that were consuming them. Death spun out of control, wheeling in a frenzy.
Then the impossible happened. Through smoke and flame, come back from where it had fled stricken and ruined, War reappeared atop its serpent mount.
But War had become whole again.
Walker stared in disbelief. He had severed the Horseman at the midpoint of its body, seen the top half fall away, and now War was back together, looking as if nothing had been done to it at all.
It charged Walker, closing the distance between them, armored body leaning forward eagerly, metal gleaming in the faint dawn light. Walker could hear the thunder of the clawed feet, the rasp of breathing, the shriek of armor, and the whistle of air giving way before its coming.
It wasn’t possible!
Instinctively Walker shifted the magic to meet the attack, gathering it in one final burst. It caught the Horseman and its mount in a whirlwind of fire and spun them away, sweeping them off the pathway circling the castle and down into the trees where they disappeared with a crash.