The Dark Legacy of Shannara Trilogy 3-Book Bundle
Page 75
“We aren’t equipped to care for injuries of the sort she’s suffered,” he insisted. “Did you not see the damage to her body? You were there when I opened her clothing and took a look. You saw the puncture wounds and bruising. She was hurt badly enough in that crash that it’s a miracle she’s still breathing!”
Aquinel nodded and didn’t look at him. “That’s not the problem and you know it.”
“No, you’re the problem. That’s clear enough. You keep looking to find what’s wrong instead of focusing on what’s right! Woman, I swear you will be the death of me.”
“You’ll be the death of yourself long before I have any impact on your stubborn nature.” She stopped and turned to face him, bringing the mule and the cart they were leading to a halt. “I know what you’re about. You’re thinking of what this can mean for you, not about the girl.”
“Am I? Is that how you see it?”
“I see it clear enough. You want a reward for returning her. Or at least for giving her over and washing your hands of her. You think these people will give you coin for this. But you don’t know that. You don’t even know who they are or what they’re doing here.”
He sighed. Looking down the trail to where it bent toward their destination, he took a moment to brush the unkempt black hair from his eyes. “I know that this is fate working her hand in our favor, and when she does that you don’t stop to question the why of it. Didn’t I see the ship when she came down? Didn’t I remember it when we set out with the girl?”
He started off again, pulling on the mule’s halter, forcing Aquinel to stick with him. She was a good woman and a sturdy helpmeet, but she spent too much time questioning his decisions. It wasn’t as if she knew more than he did and was better able to reason things out. It wasn’t her place to guide the family. That was a man’s work.
“We have to think about ourselves,” he added sullenly.
They traipsed on through the damp and the murk, winding down the lane through broad-leaf trees that canopied overhead, ignoring the steady rainfall and the attendant chill, lost in their separate thoughts. Sora found himself wondering what she would say if she knew about the other—about what he had done when she wasn’t looking. He wondered how he would break it to her.
Probably, he thought, he wouldn’t. He would keep it a secret. Best that way. He would find a buyer and make some coin, and they would have a few good things for themselves that he could explain away. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done this sort of thing before. It wasn’t as if this was the first time that he found a little something knocking around that she didn’t need to know about.
“We should have waited longer,” she said for what must have been the tenth time. “We should have been more patient.”
He shook his head. “She was injured and alone. We had no way of knowing who was with her or when they were coming back. If they were coming back at all. We had no time to go searching for them. We did what we had to do. We are doing what we have to do right now. What you asked for, remember? Find a way, you said. So I did. Now stop talking about it!”
She set her jaw. “I’ll stop talking about it, but I won’t stop thinking about it. I can promise you that!”
“Fine. I’ll settle for that much.”
The trail had broadened, and the woods had opened a bit. Ahead, Sora could make out the hull of the airship through the gloom and mist. She was a big one, probably some sort of warship. He slowed automatically, Aquinel with him. For a few moments, he reconsidered what he was about to do. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe he should just take the girl to the nearest village and leave her there. Forget any reward for his trouble. It wasn’t like he hadn’t already found a way to get paid for this mess.
But greed won out over reason, and he abruptly pushed forward, clucking at the mule, pulling it and the wagon and the girl who lay in the wagon bed forward.
Already men from the airship had appeared on the decks and were watching them approach. One waved in greeting and started down the ladder to meet them.
“Remember,” he said to Aquinel, “we’re simple foragers. We gather mushrooms and sell them to the surrounding villages. We come here all the time. Today, we were on our way to our grounds and we saw this girl lying in a clearing. She was injured and alone, apparently abandoned. We don’t have the means or ability to look after her. But we are responsible people and we want to see her safe and well cared for. We saw their ship, and we thought perhaps they could help. Thought they might even be friends of hers.”
“I still think this is a mistake,” Aquinel said softly.
He glared at her. “Hush, woman!”
“Hush, yourself.”
The rains were beginning to diminish and the woods ahead to thin out and open up. The trail was muddied and the tracks they had been following virtually erased, but that no longer mattered to either of them. Aphen and Cymrian were still running as fast as the latter could manage, ignoring personal discomfort and fighting off weariness. Cymrian had assured Aphen that they were close to catching up to the cart and its mule and drivers, the last of the visible signs indicating they were just a short distance off.
But they were shocked nevertheless when all three appeared abruptly from out of the mists ahead, not fleeing but approaching them—a big man and a short woman, both stocky and plainly dressed, a mule walking with its head down, hauling a cart in trudging acceptance of its lot, no sense of hurry or concern about any of them.
They slowed as the man and woman saw them and drew to an uncertain halt. If anything, the pair seemed frightened of them, and Aphen, sensing this, gave a friendly wave of reassurance. The woman returned it. The man stood motionless, watching.
“Easy, now,” Cymrian told her.
Aphen nodded, at the same time sizing up the couple in front of them. Foragers or farmers, not Rovers or townspeople, she decided. They’d lived hard lives and had little to show for it, but their bluff faces did not suggest they were either bad-intentioned or dangerous.
“Have you seen a girl?” she asked at once. “Small, young. We left her lying on the ground in the woods more than a mile back. She was injured, and we—”
Before she could finish, the woman wheeled on the man and struck him as hard as she could. “I told you we should have waited! Look what you’ve done!”
The man seized her by the arms to keep her from hitting him again. “Aquinel, stop it! We don’t know anything yet.”
“You have the girl?” Aphen asked at once, unable to contain herself any longer. “She’s my sister. Her name is Arling. Is she in your cart? Is she all right?”
The man and woman exchanged a quick look. She could tell immediately by the looks on their faces that something was wrong. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
The woman shook her head. “We didn’t know you were coming for her. We thought she had been abandoned. Her clothes and all the blood, you see. So we took her with us to keep her safe. But then we saw the airship, and we thought …”
“They said they were friends, that they could take her with them, make sure she got the help she needed,” the man said, cutting her off.
“We didn’t know!” Aquinel wailed, and began to cry.
Aphen stared. “Are you saying you gave my sister to some men flying an airship? What did the airship look like? What flag did she fly?”
“She was a warship, I guess,” the man answered, not looking at her, trying to find a way to comfort the woman, who was having none of it. “She was a Federation ship, I think.”
Aphen went pale. Shades. The ones who were hunting us.
She didn’t need to speak the words. Cymrian would be thinking the same thing. Arling had been given over to their enemies, to the ones who had brought the assassin and the mutants.
“Have they lifted off yet?” Cymrian asked, moving a step closer. “Have they left?”
The man shrugged. “They were still on the ground when we started back. That was maybe ten, fifteen minutes ago.”
They charged past the man and the woman and went down the trail in a rush. They did not look back.
Sora and Aquinel started walking again, neither looking at the other. The rains had diminished to a few scattered drops, and the windblown mists had begun to re-form and thicken once more.
“Elves,” Sora said after a time. “Dangerous look to them, too. Did you see their clothes? All torn up and bloodied. The man was hurt. You could tell by the way he was holding himself.”
He waited for Aquinel to say something, but she wouldn’t even look at him.
“I did what I thought was right,” he said again.
But he knew that wasn’t entirely so. He’d done what he hoped was right and what he knew would net him a profit. He’d been right about the men on the airship. They’d been quick to reward him for his efforts in retrieving the girl, and they hadn’t looked anywhere near as questionable as the Elves. Of course, the injured girl was an Elf, too, and she looked the same as these two. But who was to say what the real relationship was between them? Maybe the two women were sisters, but maybe not. How could anyone tell? Those Elves all looked the same to him, anyway.
He tightened his jaw. Come right down to it, this wasn’t his business. His or Aquinel’s. None of it. They were well out of it. Let the others sort it out. He glanced at his wife, marching along at his side, stone-faced. She was angry now, but she would get over it.
Even after she did though, he didn’t think he would say anything about the silvery white stone he had found in the girl’s clothing. A beautiful thing, it was. He had never seen anything like it.
Now it was his. He would keep it, sell it later on the sly, and pocket the money.
After all, he deserved something for his trouble.
HERE ENDS BOOK TWO OF
THE DARK LEGACY OF SHANNARA
For Jim, Carol, and Mark, and Katie and Karla
inspirations all
Witch Wraith is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Terry Brooks
Insert map copyright © 2012 by Russ Charpentier
Insert illustration copyright © 2013 by Todd Lockwood
Jacket design: David Stevenson
Jacket illustration: © Stephen Youll
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America by Del Rey, an imprint of the Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY and the Del Rey colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The insert map by Russ Charpentier was originally published in Wards of Faerie by Terry Brooks, published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2012.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brooks, Terry.
Witch wraith : Shannara’s Dark Legacy / Terry Brooks.
pages cm
eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-52355-6
1. Shannara (Imaginary place)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.R6596W58 2013
813′.54—dc23
2013001752
www.delreybooks.com
Cover design: David G. Stevenson
Cover illustration: © Steven Youll
v3.1_r3
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Witch Wraith
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Dedication
1
Railing Ohmsford stood alone at the bow of the Quickening and looked out at the starlit darkness. They were anchored for the night, the airship nestled in a copse of fir and hemlock, the sway of the ship in the soft breezes barely noticeable. It was well after midnight, and he should have been sleeping with the others. But sleep did not come easily these days, and when it did come it was haunted and left him wracked with a deep sense of unease. Better to stay awake where he could try to do something to control his thoughts, as dark as they were. Better to face his demons standing up, prepared to fight them off and hold them at bay.
He could not banish them, of course. He could not send them back to the empty places where they sometimes went, though increasingly less so these days.
Not that it mattered. He knew their faces. He knew their names.
Fear: that he might not be able to find Grianne Ohmsford and bring her back to face the Straken Lord because she was dead. Or because she was alive but could not be persuaded to leave the sanctuary in which she had placed herself, unwilling to risk a confrontation of the sort he was proposing. Or simply because she was Grianne and she had never been predictable.
Doubt: that he was doing the right thing in making this journey into the back of beyond because of a hope that had so little chance of succeeding. He should have been seeking his brother in the Forbidding, hunting for him there and bringing him out again in spite of the odds. Time was running out with every passing hour, and his brother was alone and had no one to help him and no way of knowing if help would ever come. Redden depended on him, and it must seem to his brother as if Railing had abandoned him.
Shame: that he was deceiving his companions on this quest, that he was keeping information from them that might dissuade them from continuing. The King of the Silver River had warned him that nothing would happen as he imagined, that there would be results he had not foreseen. The Faerie creature had told him he should turn back and travel instead into the Forbidding—the one place he knew he could never enter, so great was his terror at the prospect.
He felt himself to be a coward and a deceiver. He was consumed by his doubts and his shame, and it was growing increasingly difficult not to reveal this to the others. He tried to keep it hidden, masked by his false words and acts, but it was eating at him. Destroying him.
He left the vessel’s bow and walked back toward the stern, moving quietly, trying not to disturb the sleepers. Some were on deck, wrapped in blankets; some were below, rolled into hammocks. All slept save two of the Rover crew, who kept watch fore and aft. He saw the one at the stern and turned aside before he reached the man to take up a position near the starboard railing. Small creaks sounded as ropes and lines pulled taut and released again, and snores rose out of the shadows. He liked this quiet time, this confluence of shadows and sleep. Everything was at peace.
He wished he could be so.
It had only been two days now since they had set out from the Rainbow Lake, even though it felt more like twenty. They had debated among themselves that morning, on waking, as to the best route for their journey. The Charnals were unknown country to all but Skint. Even Farshaun and his Rovers had not come this way before. Railing and Mirai had traveled the Borderlands while conveying spare parts and salvage to custo
mers, but had not gone farther north.
Railing favored coming up from the Rainbow Lake, following the corridor that snaked between the Wolfsktaag and the Dragon’s Teeth to the Upper Anar, and then continuing on through Jannisson Pass east of the Skull Kingdom and its dangers and straight along the western edge of the Charnals to the Northland city of Anatcherae—much the same route his grandfather Penderrin had taken while searching for the tanequil all those years ago. From Anatcherae, once resupplied, they could continue on to their destination.
But Skint had thought differently.
What they needed most, he declared, was a guide, someone who was familiar with the Charnals and could help them find the ruins of Stridegate, where it was said the tanequil might be found. There were few who could do that, and he was not one. In point of fact, he knew of only one man who could help them with this, one whose loyalty and knowledge they could depend upon. And even he would need persuading.
His name was Challa Nand, and he made his home in the Eastland town of Rampling Steep. But finding him would require that the company fly Quickening east of the Charnals and through the Upper Anar. It would necessitate abandoning the western approach to Stridegate and finding one that came in from the east. Challa could show them, if they were able to persuade him to their cause.
Railing knew he could rely on the ring given to him by the King of the Silver River to show them the way, but using it would mean either telling them about his meeting with the Faerie creature or lying about where he had gotten the ring. The ring could always be a backup if the need arose; the better choice was to keep it a secret for now.
So he agreed to Skint’s proposal, and the others went along, all of them keenly aware that they were in unfamiliar territory and needed to reduce the risks they would encounter.
Now here they were, on their way to Rampling Steep, anchored at the northern edge of Darklin Reach not far from where the Rabb River branched east into the Upper Anar. If he listened closely, Railing could hear the murmur of the river’s waters as they churned their way out of the mountains on their journey west to the plains and from there to the Mermidon. It was a distance of hundreds of miles, and it made him wonder if anyone had ever followed the river all the way from end to end. He supposed Gnome or Dwarf trappers and traders might have done so at some point, but he doubted that any had ever made a record of it.