“Well, no matter. We are who we always were, nevertheless.” He paused, as if wondering how sure of that he really was. Then he leaned forward. “It’s odd, but I don’t feel the same way about him now that I did before. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I still don’t trust him entirely. I can’t. He knows too much that I don’t. But I don’t mistrust him either. He is trying to help, I think, in the best way that he can.”
He stopped, waiting for Brin to agree with him, but the Valegirl stayed silent, eyes turned away.
“Brin, what’s troubling you?” he asked finally.
She looked at him and shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“Is it what he told us last night—that we wouldn’t see him again after this?”
“That, yes. But it’s more than that.”
He hesitated. “Maybe you’re just . . .”
“Something is wrong,” she cut him short, and her eyes locked on his.
“What?”
“Something is wrong.” She said it slowly, carefully. “With him, with you, with this whole journey—but most especially with me.”
Rone stared at her. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand either. I just feel it.” She pulled her cloak tightly about her, hunching down within its folds. “I’ve felt it for days—ever since the shade of Bremen appeared in the Hadeshorn, and we destroyed that Wraith. I feel something bad coming . . . something terrible. And I don’t know what it is. I feel, too, that I’m being watched; all the time I’m being watched, but there is never anything there. I feel, worst of all, that I’m being . . . pulled away from myself, from you and Allanon. Everything is changing from what it was when we started out at Shady Vale. It’s all different, somehow.”
The highlander didn’t say anything for a moment. “I suppose it’s because of what’s happened to us, Brin. The Hadeshorn, Paranor—Allanon telling us what the shade of Bremen told to him. It had to change us. And we’ve been away from the Vale and the highlands for many days now, from everything familiar and comfortable. That has to be a part of it, too.”
“Away from Jair,” she said quietly.
“And your parents.”
“But Jair most of all,” she insisted, as if searching for a reason for this. Then she shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s something else, something besides what’s happened with Allanon and missing home and family and . . . That’s too easy, Rone. I can feel it, deep down within me. Something that . . .”
She trailed off, her dark eyes uncertain. She looked away. “I wish I had Jair here with me now—just for a few moments. I think he would know what was wrong. We’re so close that way . . .” She caught herself, then laughed softly. “Isn’t that silly? Wishing for something like that when it would probably mean nothing?”
“I miss him, too.” The highlander tried a quick smile. “At least he might take our minds off our own problems. He’d be out tracking Mord Wraiths or something.”
He stopped, realizing what he had said, then shrugged away his discomfort. “Anyway, there’s probably nothing wrong—not really. If there was, Allanon would sense it, wouldn’t he? After all, he seems to sense everything else.”
Brin was a long time responding. “I wonder if that is still so,” she said finally. “I wonder if he still can.”
They were silent then, neither looking back at the other as they stared fixedly into the dark and pondered their separate thoughts. As the minutes slipped away, the stillness of the mountain night seemed to press in about them, anxious to wrap them in the blanket of its stark, empty solitude. It seemed more certain with the passing of each moment that some sound must break the spell, the distant cry of a living creature, the small shifting of forest wood or mountain rock, or the rustle of leaf or insect’s buzz. But nothing did. There was only the quiet.
“I feel as if we are drifting,” Brin said suddenly.
Rone Leah shook his head. “We travel a fixed course, Brin. There is no drifting in that.”
She looked over at him. “I wish I had listened to you and had never come.”
The highlander stared at her in shock. The beautiful, dusky face stayed turned toward his own. In the girl’s black eyes there was a mix of weariness and doubt that bordered too closely on fear. For just an instant he had the unpleasant sensation that the girl who sat across from him was not Brin Ohmsford.
“I will protect you,” he said softly, urgently. “I promise.”
She smiled then, a faint, uneven smile that flickered and was gone. Gently her hands reached out to touch his own. “I believe that,” she whispered in reply.
But somewhere deep inside, she found herself wondering if he really could.
It was nearly midnight when Allanon returned to the campsite, stepping from the trees as silently as any shadow that moved within the Wolfsktaag. Moonlight slipped through the boughs overhead in thin streamers of silver and cast the whole of the night in eerie brightness. Wrapped within their blankets, Rone and Brin lay sleeping. Across the broad, forested sweep of the mountains, all was still. It was as if he alone kept watch.
The Druid paused several dozen feet from where his charges slept. He had walked to be alone, to think, and to ponder the certainty of what was to be. How unexpected the words of Bremen had been when the shade had spoken them—how strangely unexpected. They should not have been, of course. He had known what must be from the beginning. Yet there was always the feeling that somehow it might be changed. He was a Druid, and all things were possible.
His black eyes shifted across the mountain range. The yesterdays of his life were far away, the struggles he had weathered and the roads he had walked down to reach this moment. The tomorrows seemed distant, too, but that was an illusion, he knew. The tomorrows were right before him.
So much had been accomplished, he mused. But not enough. He turned and looked down at the sleeping Valegirl. She was the one upon whom everything would depend. She would not believe that, of course, or the truth about the power of the wishsong, for she chose to see the Elven magic in human terms, and the magic had never been human. He had shown her what it could be—just a glimpse of the limits to which it could be taken, for she could stand no more, he sensed. She was a child in her understanding of the magic and her coming of age would be difficult. More difficult, he knew, because he could not help her.
His long arms wrapped tightly within the black robes. Could he not help her? There it was again. He smiled darkly. That decision that he should never reveal all, only so much as he felt necessary—that decision that as it had been for Shea Ohmsford in a time long past, truth was best learned by the one who would use it. He could tell her, of course—or at least he could try to tell her. Her father would have said that he should tell her, for Wil Ohmsford had believed the same about the Elven girl Amberle. But the decision was not Wil Ohmsford’s to make. It was his own.
It was always his own.
A touch of bitterness twisted his mouth. Gone were the Councils at Paranor when many voices and many minds had joined in finding solutions to the problems of mankind. The Druids, the wise men of old, were no more. The histories and Paranor and all the hopes and dreams they had once inspired were lost, and only he remained.
All of the problems of mankind were now his, as they always had been his and would continue to be his for as long as he lived. That decision, too, had been his to make. He had made it when he had chosen to be what he was. But he was the last. Would there be another to make the same decision when he was gone?
Alone, uncertain, he stood at the edge of the forest shadows and looked down at Brin Ohmsford.
They rode east again at daybreak. It was another brilliant, sun-filled autumn day—warm, sweet, and alive with dreams of what could be. As night fled westward from the Wolfsktaag, the sun lifted out of the eastern horizon, slipping from the forestline in golden streamers that stretched and spread to the darkest corners of the land and chased the gloom before them. Even within the vast and empty solitud
e of the forbidden mountains there was a feeling of comfort and peace.
Brin thought of home. How beautiful the Vale would be on a day such as this one, she thought to herself as she walked her horse along the ridgeline and felt the sun’s warmth upon her face. Even here the colors of the season spread in riotous disarray against a backdrop of moss and groundcover still green with summer’s touch. Smells of life filled her nostrils and left her heady with their mix. In the Vale, the villagers would be awake now, about to begin their day’s work. Breakfast would be underway, the succulent aroma of the foods that were cooking escaping through windows thrown wide to catch the warmth of the day. Later, when the morning chores were done, the village families would gather for stories and games on an afternoon that too seldom came this time of year, anxious to take advantage of its ease and recapture for at least a brief time the memory of the summer gone.
I wish I were there to share it, she thought. I wish I were home.
The morning slipped quickly away, its passing lost in the warmth of the sun and the memories and the dreams. Ridgelines and mountain slopes came and went, and ahead the deep forests of the lowlands beyond the Wolfsktaag began to appear in brief glimpses through the humped peaks. By noon, the bulk of the range was behind them, and they were starting down.
It was shortly thereafter that they became aware of the Chard Rush.
It began as sound long before it could be seen—a deep, penetrating roar from beyond a wooded ridge that broke high and rugged against the sweep of the Eastland sky. Like an invisible wave, it surged toward them, a low and sullen rumble that shook the rutted earth with the force of its passing. Then the wind seemed to catch it, magnifying its intensity until the forest air was filled with thunder. The way forward leveled off, and the timber began to thicken. Atop the ridge head, freezing spray and a deep, rolling mist masked all but the faintest trace of distant blue from a noonday sky now lost far above the tangled branches of the forest trees with their damp, moss-grown bark and earth-colored leaves shimmering bright with wetness. Ahead, the trail sloped upward once more through clusters of rock and fallen timber that loomed spectrally out of the haze like frozen giants. And still there was only the sound, massive and deafening.
Yet slowly, as the trail wound on and the ridgeline grew close, the mist began to dissipate beneath the thrust of the wind as it raked down across the summit of the land, out of the Wolfsktaag to the lowlands east. The bowl of the valley opened before them, its wooded slopes dark and forbidding in the shadow of the mountain peaks beneath a line of ridges colored gold with sunlight. And here, at last, the source of the sound was discovered—a waterfall. An awesome, towering column of churning white water poured wildly through a break in the cliff rock and tumbled downward hundreds of feet through clouds of mist and spray that hung thick across the whole of the western end of the valley, downward into a great river that twisted and turned through rocks and trees until it was lost from view.
In a line, the three riders drew their mounts to a halt.
“The Chard Rush.” Allanon pointed to the falls.
Brin gazed down wordlessly. It was as if she stood at the edge of the world. She could not describe what she felt at that moment, only what she saw. Below, barely a hundred yards distant, the waters of the Chard Rush crashed and swirled down rock and through crevice in a magnificent, breathtaking spectacle that left her filled with wonder. Far beyond the valley into which the waters fell, the distant Eastland spread to the horizon, shimmering slightly through the windblown spray of the falls, colored like a painting faded and worn with age, its clarity muted. A steady mist washed over the Valegirl’s dusky face and whipped through her long black hair and forest clothing like a light rain. She blinked the water from her eyes and breathed deeply the cold, hard air. In a way she could not explain, she felt as if she had been born again.
Then Allanon was motioning them ahead, and the three riders began working their way down the inside slope of the wooded valley, angling toward the break in the cliff face where the falls dropped away. Single file, they wound through brush and slanted pine that clung tenaciously to the rocky soil of these upper reaches, following what appeared to be a worn, rutted pathway that ran down past the falls. Rising clouds of mist enveloped them, damp and clinging against their skin. The wind died behind the rim of the ridgeline, the sound of its shrill whistle lost in the muffled roar of the falls. Sunlight dropped away into shadow, a false twilight settling over the forestland through which they passed in gradually deepening waves.
Finally they reached the base of the falls and continued along the dark pathway that had brought them there to emerge at last from mist and shadow into warm sunlight. They rode eastward along the banks of the river through deep grass still green and fresh beneath a scattering of pine and yellow-leaved oak. Gradually the roar of the falls subsided and the air grew less chill. In the trees about them, birds flew in sudden bursts of color.
Life had come back again to the land. Brin sighed gratefully, thinking how relieved she was to be clear of the mountains.
And then abruptly Allanon reined his horse to a stop.
Almost as if the Druid had willed that it should be so, the forest about them went still—a deep, layered silence that hung over everything like a shroud. Their horses came to a halt behind his. Valegirl and highlander stared at the big man and then at each other, surprise and wariness in their eyes. Allanon did not move. He simply sat there astride his horse, rigid against the light, staring ahead into the shadows of the forest trees and listening.
“Allanon, what . . . ?” Brin started to ask, but the Druid’s hand lifted sharply to cut her short.
At last he turned, and the lean, dark face had drawn tight and hard, a look within the narrow eyes that neither Valegirl nor highlander had ever seen. In that instant, without understanding why it was that the feeling had come over her, Brin was suddenly terrified.
The Druid did not speak. Instead, he smiled—a quick, sad smile—and turned away. His hand beckoned them after, and he started ahead into the trees.
They rode only a short distance through a scattering of trees and dying scrub to where a small glen opened before them beside the banks of the river. There Allanon again drew his mount to a halt and this time dismounted. Rone and Brin followed him down. Together they stood there before the horses, looking out over the glen into a deepening stand of trees beyond.
“What’s wrong, Allanon?” Brin finished the question this time.
The Druid did not turn. “Something comes. Listen.”
They waited, motionless beside him. So complete was the silence now that even the sound of their own breathing was harsh within their ears. Brin’s premonition whispered anew in her mind, come from the rain and the gray of the Dragon’s Teeth to find her. Fear stroked her skin with its chill touch and she shivered.
Suddenly, there was a sound, faint and cautious—a soft rustling of dried leaves as something moved among them.
“There!” Rone cried, his hand pointing.
Something came into view through the trees on the far side of the glen. Still hidden within the gloom, it stopped suddenly, catching sight of the three who watched it. For long moments, it stayed frozen within its shelter, invisible eyes staring out at them, a silent shadow within the dark.
Then, with swift and certain intent, it stepped from the trees into the light. The chill that had settled within Brin turned instantly to frost. She had never seen anything like the creature that stood before them now. It was man-shaped in appearance, raised upright in a half-crouch, its long arms dangling loosely before it. It was a big, strong creature, lean and heavily muscled. Its skin was a strange reddish color, drawn tight against its powerful body; it was hairless except for a thick ruff that grew about its loins. Great, hooked claws curled from its fingers and toes. Its face lifted toward them, and it was the face of some grotesque beast, blunt and scarred. Gleaming yellow eyes fixed upon their own, and its snout split wide in a hideous grin to reveal a mass o
f crooked teeth.
“What is it?” Rone Leah whispered in horror.
“What was promised,” Allanon replied softly, his voice strangely distracted.
The reddish thing came forward a few steps further to the edge of the glen. There it stopped and waited.
Allanon turned to the Valegirl and the highlander. “It is a Jachyra, a thing of another age, a thing of great evil. It was locked from the lands by the magic of the creatures of faerie in a time before the dawn of Man—in a time even farther back than that in which the Elves created the Forbidding. Only magic of equal power could have set it free again.”
He straightened and brought his black robes close about him. “It appears that I was wrong—the Mord Wraiths did anticipate that we might come this way. Only within a place like these mountains, a place where the magic still lives, could a thing like the Jachyra be set loose again. The Wraiths have given us an adversary far more dangerous than they to overcome.”
“Suppose we find out how dangerous,” Rone suggested bravely and drew forth the ebony blade of the Sword of Leah.
“No.” Allanon caught his arm quickly. “This battle is mine.”
The highlander glanced at Brin for support. “It seems to me that any battle to be fought on this journey must be fought by all of us.”
But Allanon shook his head. “Not this time, Prince of Leah. You have shown your courage and your devotion to this girl. I no longer question either. But the power of this creature is beyond you. I must face it alone.”
“Allanon, don’t!” Brin cried suddenly, grasping his arm. He looked down at her then, the worn face and the eyes that penetrated past all that she would hide a mask of sad determination. They stared at each other, and then without quite knowing why she did so, she released him.
“Don’t,” she repeated softly.
Allanon reached to touch her cheek. At the far side of the glen, the Jachyra gave a sudden, sharp cry that shattered the silence of the afternoon—a cry that was almost like a laugh.