by Terry Brooks
When the mewling sound began, soft and low, she had almost reached the center of the arena. She knew it for what it was immediately. A chill washed through her, causing her skin to shiver and the tiny hairs on the back of her neck to raise. She stopped at once, mouthing a single word voicelessly.
Furies.
She experienced an odd sense of calm. The uncertainty was gone, the waiting over. At least she could derive some small sense of satisfaction from knowing her opponent’s identity. What better way to test her than with creatures like this? She breathed slowly, deeply, trying to steady herself. The mewling was rising steadily, building in intensity. She had only moments.
What shall I do?
Hers was the stronger weapon, her magic against their teeth and claws. Hers was the superior skill and cunning, her craft honed in a thousand battles. But the Furies were driven by instincts that did not value safety or self-preservation. A pack mentality ruled them when they found prey, and they would attack and keep attacking until either the enemy or they were destroyed. No quarter would be given and none asked. Furies knew only one way, and that way eschewed any identifiably rational behavior. She had been put into a den of madness, and the source of that madness was a legion of relentless, inexorable killers.
She tested the magic of the wishsong to see if the Straken Lord had told the truth about using it, thinking that if the demon had lied, she would be rendered unconscious fast enough that she wouldn’t feel it when the Furies tore her to bits. But the magic blossomed at the end of her fingertips on command, gathering force, taking shape, waiting to be used, and the conjure collar gave no warning. Hope welled up within her at the realization that it would be an even battle. She would have her chance to survive.
A small chance.
She would have to kill all of them, if she was to walk away. Nothing short of that would save her. They would come at her in a rush, and they would keep coming until the life was bled out of them. Once, the task would have been a challenge she would have embraced, a struggle of dark magic against dark intent, the wellspring of the Ilse Witch’s indomitable self-confidence. But she was no longer the Ilse Witch, and her desire for combat had fallen away with the identity she had shed.
Her strength must come from her life as the Ard Rhys.
What shall I do?
They began to appear, small shadows in the failing light, feline faces and slanted eyes, sinuous forms sliding from holes in the earth and from behind bits of scrub. Like ghosts, they materialized in the gloom, their mewling rising and falling in waves of expectation. They were all around her, perhaps a hundred of them. Too many for her to overcome, no matter how much magic she used, no matter how strong her determination. Like the ogre she had seen on her way to her confrontation with the shade of the Warlock Lord, she would fight with passion and fury, but in the end she would be pulled down.
Instantly, she began to rethink her strategy for surviving the confrontation. Strength alone would not be enough. Cunning was what would save her. Innovation and surprise. The unexpected might turn aside these little terrors. They were inching closer, some of them within twenty yards. She saw the madness glinting in their eyes. She felt the heat of their bloodlust. The longer she took to respond, the bolder they would grow. They were stalking her with a certain amount of caution now, but the testing would be finished all too soon, and then . . .
The testing.
Of who and what I am.
As swiftly as the thought was completed, she knew what she had to do. She didn’t pause to consider the consequences or weigh the risks; she just did it. She reabsorbed the magic gathered at her fingertips, pulled it back inside, changed its form, and redistributed it throughout her body. The effect was instantaneous and irreversible. She lost control almost immediately, swept away by the magic’s implacable response. Gasping in shock, she dropped into a crouch, her appearance changing as she did so, her form altering. The magic burned within her, turning her feverish as it stripped away her look and smell, her thinking, her reasoning, her conscience. She began to mewl like those that stalked her. Like those she confronted. Like a Fury. She made the change in a heartbeat, the magic sweeping across her until Grianne Ohmsford, Ard Rhys of the Third Druid Council, simply vanished from the valley floor.
What appeared in her place was another Fury, this one larger and more dangerous than its brethren, but clearly a twin.
The transformation was so unexpected that the other Furies drew back in shock. One moment, their prey was standing helpless before them. The next, it was gone, replaced by another thing, a recognizable presence that somehow wasn’t exactly what they were, but close enough that it gave them pause.
She moved forward swiftly, cat-smooth and challenging, all spiky fur and menacing sounds, her eyes sweeping across those smaller replicas of herself, her teeth and claws bared and threatening. She hissed and spit as she swung about in uncontrollable rage. Where was her prey? Where was the human? She went so deep into her assumed form that she could anticipate the taste of blood in her mouth. She was so removed from her human side that she wanted to rip and tear at something—anything—that came within reach. She mewled her need to her cat kind, mirrors of herself, and they hissed and spit in reply.
Down through their midst she stalked, lost to herself, turned killer demon, no visible, recognizable part of her human side in evidence. She was all Fury now, a part of the pack, at one with the madness. If there had been something to attack, she would have done so, shredding it with relish, satisfying her newly minted primal need. The other Furies rubbed against her as she passed, accepting her presence, her place among them. They circled and sniffed, taking in her smell, marking her as cats would. She responded in kind, moving through the landscape as if in a dream, afloat and not quite grounded by anything. She had a vague sense of things not being right, of seeming out of joint in place and time; she had a dim memory of having had another life that didn’t square with this one. But her Fury self wouldn’t give way to that other life, wouldn’t let it intrude, and so she felt it slipping farther and farther away.
She cast frequent glances toward the embankment, where creatures she could eat if she could reach them buzzed and whispered among themselves, their voices raw sounding and enticing. She stalked toward them, drawn to them for a reason she couldn’t identify. The other Furies ignored her, returning now to their dens, disappearing back into the earth like shadows in sunlight. The excitement was over, the chance for a kill gone. One by one they vanished, the happenings of earlier moments already forgotten.
She walked on, drawn by a craving she could neither understand nor resist. At first, it involved the creatures on the embankment, then only one of them, a singularly tall, dark, spiky being that was descending from its perch into the valley. Her ears pricked in expectation. Fresh prey. A meal. She eased forward, but the creature didn’t turn aside or back away like her, it came on. She bared her teeth and flexed her claws. In a moment she would have it and then summon her brethren to the feast.
But all at once the spiky creature gestured at her, and pain ripped through her body, dropping her squirming and spitting on the earth. She tried to rise, and the pain returned, harsher and longer, flooding her with its razors and knives, stealing the last of her strength. She lay gasping as the black thing came over to her and stared down at her expressionlessly.
“Do you know me?” it demanded, blue eyes cold and brittle.
She did. It came back to her instantly, came back as the identity she had assumed fell away and her knowledge of who she was returned.
“Yes, Master,” she whispered.
The Straken Lord nodded. “You have excelled in your testing. You have proved your worth. I am pleased.”
The demon picked her up as if she were weightless and bore her from the arena to the thunderous roar of the assembled, to cheers and grunts and stamping of feet, to unmistakable acclaim. Yet she felt no euphoria; she felt only disgust and an appalling rage at what she had been forced to do. She
had survived, as was her intention, but the cost could not be measured. It had taken more than she wanted to acknowledge, her emotional sanity compromised, her carefully constructed integrity destroyed. She had walked into the arena as the Ard Rhys, but she had emerged as something else. She had reverted to the monster she had once been. In the arena she had become the Ilse Witch again in everything but her heart, and that becoming could not be easily undone, if at all. She was blackened through and through by the change she had wrought in herself, by the adopting of the Fury persona.
She had made herself sick, and although it made her weep inside to acknowledge it, she did not think she would ever be well again.
EIGHTEEN
“Captain, he’s calling for you.”
Pied Sanderling, Captain of the Elven Home Guard, looked up from the maps he had been studying since rising early that morning and stared at the tent flap wordlessly. He had been expecting it, but he had hoped that somehow it might be avoided. He couldn’t understand how the King could be so mistaken about something so obvious. But the King saw things differently, and perhaps that was why he was King, although Pied was inclined to think that being King was mostly an accident of birth.
Not that he had any room to talk. He was the King’s first cousin, and that had played a significant part in his ascension through the ranks of the Home Guard and eventual selection as Captain. There had been Sanderlings standing with the Elessedil Kings for as long as anyone could remember. A Sanderling had stood beside Wren Elessedil when she had fought at the Valley of Rhenn and driven the Federation and its allies back into the deep Southland more than 150 years ago.
“Pied, are you there?” Drumundoon pressed anxiously.
Sanderling could picture his aide’s young, anxious face with its fringe of black beard, high forehead, swept-back hair, and deeply slanted Elven features. Drum was already anticipating the worst, imagining how it would be if it were left to him to face the King alone, unable to explain what had become of his trusted cousin. But that was Drumundoon, always seeing the goblet as being half empty, always missing the silver lining behind any dark cloud. If he wasn’t so good at organizing and managing, wasn’t so dependable, and wasn’t so impossibly loyal . . .
But he was, of course.
“One minute,” he called to his aide, alleviating the other’s fears.
He rose, stretched to relieve cramped muscles, and stared down at the maps one final time. The whole of the Prekkendorran lay revealed in cartographic rendering, the positions of each army, Free-born and Federation, painstakingly delineated. It had taken someone a long time to do this, he thought. But it was a onetime job, since neither army had moved more than a few feet in over two years.
Until now, perhaps.
He reached for his weapons and began buckling them on. A brace of long knives went about his waist, and a short sword was strapped over one shoulder. He picked up his longbow as well, an unusual weapon for a member of the Home Guard. Their primary duty was to defend the King, which more often than not entailed hand-to-hand combat. But Pied favored the longbow, a weapon both versatile and reliable. Like most members of the Elven army, he had done a tour of duty on the Prekkendorran, serving as an archer in the ranks for six months, then as the leader of a long-range scouting unit that spent the bulk of its time deep in enemy territory. Both assignments required extensive reliance on the longbow, and he had never felt comfortable without it since. It was his work on the Prekkendorran that had gotten him noticed and appointed to the Home Guard on his return. The longbow was his good-luck charm.
Besides, he was short and slight of build, and hand-to-hand combat with broadswords was never going to favor him. Skill and quickness were what he relied on, and the longbow was a weapon that utilized both.
He glanced around his quarters to see if anything else needed doing, decided it didn’t, that he had stalled as long as he was able—though not nearly long enough to suit him—threw on his cloak, and went out through the tent flap.
Drumundoon came to attention, a habit he couldn’t seem to break, even when only the two of them were present. Tall and lanky, he towered over the shorter Sanderling. “Good morning, Captain.”
“Good morning, Drum.” Pied led the way as they moved down through the Elven camp toward the King’s tent. He brushed back his mop of sandy hair and squinted up at the cloudless sky. “So he’s made up his mind.” He shook his head. “I wish he’dwait.”
“You don’t know what he’s decided,” Drumundoon ventured hopefully. “He might have decided not to try it.”
“No.” Pied shook his head. “He had his mind made up last night when I left him, and he’s not changed it. I know him. He goes with his first impression of a plan, and he liked this one right from the start. It doesn’t matter what the risks are. It doesn’t matter that the source is suspect. All that matters is that it’s bold and it favors his nature. Like his father, all he lives for is to break the stalemate and drive the Federation down off the heights and south again. He’s obsessed with it.” He shook his head again. “I can’t reason with him.”
“You have to try.”
“Of course, I have to try. I am being summoned to try. He likes it when he can win these arguments. He forgets that he wins them solely because he is King. But that is the way things are, and I can’t change them.”
They walked in silence, wending their way through the Home Guard units encamped about the King’s pavilion tent, where brightly colored banners flew bravely in the midday breeze, marking the territories they had occupied for months or, in some cases, for years. Elven Hunters came and went with the beginnings and endings of their tours of duty, but the camps remained, like markers in a landscape that had been trampled and pummeled and fought over for so long that nothing recognizable was left. The desolation depressed Pied, the barren earth and broken rock, the colors all brown and gray. He missed the green of his Westland home. He missed the lushness of the trees, the cool breeze off the Rill Song, and the sound of birds singing. He wanted it all back again. Wanted it now. But he would have to wait. Even though he had been there almost two months, he knew it would be another two at least before the King lost interest and went home again.
Still, he knew the situation—had known it from the moment he had accepted his appointment. A Captain of the Home Guard was the King’s right hand, and where the King went, he went, too. This King was not a stay-at-home King. This King was restless.
“You sent Acrolace and Parn to see what they could discover?” he asked finally.
Drumundoon nodded. “Last night. They haven’t returned. Can you stall until they do?”
“Probably not.” He hunched his shoulders defensively. “I wish this wasn’t being rushed so. I would feel better about things if a little more thought were being given to the probable consequences of guessing wrong. It bothers me that we are so eager to charge into things.”
“The King,” Drumundoon pointed out.
“The King, indeed. What sort of advice is he getting? If someone besides me would speak up, we might be able to bring him to his senses.”
“There is no one but you.” His aide smiled cheerfully. “His advisers, Ministers and otherwise, are all back in Arborlon, safely out of harm’s way. You know that. They want no part of this foolishness. Half of them want no part of this war at all. This was always an Elessedil war more than it was an Elven war. First, it was the King’s father, after his grandfather’s death, and now it is the King. All of them have viewed it in the same way—a chance to expand Elven influence into other territories, to reassert Elven control over the rest of the Four Lands, to place the Elven people at the forefront of development and expansion.”
Pied Sanderling grunted. “We have Druids for that. Let them be the ones to spread their influence.”
“Cheek by jowl with the Federation. They have no time for the Free-born. Not since the disappearance of the Ard Rhys. Not that it would make any difference while Kellen Elessedil is King, in any case. He hates
the Ard Rhys and her Druids. He blames them as his father blamed them for all the bad things that have happened to the Elves. There’s no reasoning with him on the subject. He sees our future as leader of the Free-born, and that’s the end of it.”
Pied glanced over at him. “You never cease to amaze me. Your political sense is as astute as . . .” He paused.
“As your own, Captain,” the other interjected quickly. “Don’t pretend otherwise.”
Well, whatever political sense we possess, it isn’t going to get us out of our current predicament, Pied thought. We could analyze the situation all we want and still be helpless to do anything about it.
Ahead, the King’s tent rose above those of his retinue. Kellen Elessedil never traveled lightly, always with baggage consisting of a great deal more than the clothes he wore. On this occasion, he had brought his sons along as well, something Sanderling regarded as particularly dangerous. The King wanted them to learn early about the realities of his office—as he saw it. That meant coming to the Prekkendorran to witness firsthand what war with the Federation was like—if you could call this impossible stalemate a war. At fifteen and thirteen, they were old enough to understand, the King had insisted, in spite of his wife’s and Pied’s pleas to the contrary. That he hadn’t insisted Arling and the little girls come as well was the only true surprise of the whole business.
Sometimes, in his darker moments, Pied thought that the Elves had the wrong Elessedil as King. One of the others might have done a better job—say, the King’s younger sister, Khyber. Headstrong and independent, she was forever sneaking around behind the King’s back to visit her exiled uncle, which was a constant source of trouble. But she was true to her beliefs, chief of which was that Ahren Elessedil was the best of the lot and should never have been blamed for any of what had happened after the Jerle Shannara had returned.
Kellen thought otherwise, of course, as had his father. There was no reasoning with either one. There was no forgiveness in their hearts for perceived treachery, however misconstrued the judgment rendered.
