by Terry Brooks
Then small flashes began to appear here and there across the face of the map. The most intense concentration was in the city of Arishaig, and it caught Seersha’s attention immediately. The flashes were all blue, a sign of Elven magic, and she wondered right away if they were residue from use of the Elfstones. She could tell from the strength of the flashes that the magic was very recent and spread out all through certain sections of the sprawling city.
But what in the world would Aphen and Arling Elessedil be doing in Arishaig?
She scanned the remainder of the map as it shimmered and flashed within the waters of the scrye. There were strong indicators of the demons hordes assaulting the city. There were extraneous bits and pieces flashing here and there.
But nothing more noticeable than that.
She spent a few more moments studying the scrye. Then she wiped the images clean with sweeping motions of her palms, returning the basin to its former condition. Once finished, she left the room, locking the door behind her.
She stood for long moments in the empty hallway, mulling over what she had seen and what it meant for her plans. There was so much she didn’t know and could only guess at. She wished she had the use of other tools with which to track her friends and their companions. She wished she had magic that would allow her to see beyond the horizons and into the hearts of those she worried for.
But she had none of this, only the skills and magic she had learned as a member of her order. Yet in her world, you worked with the tools at hand. These would have to do.
She pushed back strands of dark hair that had fallen over her rough features and stared off into space. She needed to decide what she was going to do. She had thought she already knew before she used the scrye, but now she wasn’t so sure. The logical choice was to go into the Eastland and assist in the summoning of a Dwarf army to march to the aid of the Elves and the Southlanders, but something inside was tugging her another way, whispering that there were better, more important ways in which she could use her Druid skills.
She broke off the debate and returned down the hallway, descended the stairs, and went out the broken entry to the landing field where Crace Coram was pacing about restlessly, eyes scanning the tops of the walls that hemmed him in.
He turned at once at her appearance. “Can we go now? I don’t mind telling you that all these walls make me feel like I’m locked in a cage. I don’t know how you stand it here.”
She nodded. Dwarves preferred the mountains and woodlands to fortress walls, felt more comfortable in open spaces than in confined ones. She felt the same way he did; it had taken her a long time to put aside her distaste and accept the presence of so much stone and iron shutting her in.
“You get used to it,” she answered softly. Then she moved toward the two-man. “Come, we can go.”
But once they were aboard their vessel, she found herself sitting in the pilot box undecided about what to do next.
“What’s wrong?” her companion asked. He moved up beside her and bent close. “Not sure about where to go?”
She nodded. “I want to do something to help those people in Arishaig. I know I should go with you to muster an army from the Dwarf tribes to rally them to the fight, but …” She trailed off. “I keep wanting to do something more immediately useful.”
“You’re a warrior, Seersha. A fighter.” Crace Coram shrugged. “So you want to fight. You want to join the battle.”
“That’s it,” she admitted.
He emitted an abrupt laugh, a hearty burst that made her smile. “Then do so! Fly to Arishaig and let’s see if we can’t help those trapped there.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “We?”
“You don’t expect me to stay behind, do you? Miss out on a fight like this one?”
“What about warning the Dwarves?”
“Oh, come now. They don’t need us to warn them. They keep watch on things just like everyone else. They’ll already know what’s taken place and have begun massing their fighters and making a decision about how best to use them. What can we add to that?”
She gave him a long hard look. “You’re sure you want to come with me? You don’t have to.”
He laughed again, his huge arms reaching out to hug her. “Girl, I didn’t have to come with you in the first place! I came because I wanted to. Nothing’s changed about that. Fly the ship!”
She opened the parse tubes to the diapson crystals and powered up their vessel. She waited a moment for the levels to rise sufficiently and then engaged the thrusters.
“I’m glad you’re coming with me,” she said to him.
Moments later they were airborne over Paranor and flying south.
Seventeen
With Grianne Ohmsford now aboard, the Quickening and her passengers were riding the back of a huge storm down out of the Klu Mountains and along the north–south corridor formed by the Charnals and the Lazareen. The storm had overtaken them shortly after they had lifted off from Stridegate and begun the long, slow journey back through the Northlands toward Callahorn. No more than gusting winds and distant clouds at first, the storm had quickly formed into a black wall of driving rains with intermittent hail. The temperature had dropped sharply, and the air grew so cold that it penetrated the heavy weather cloaks of the members of the airship’s crew and began to form ice on the decks.
Mirai Leah was in the pilot box working the controls with Austrum standing at her shoulder, one spelling the other when weariness and cold threatened to affect performance. Neither had spoken a word since they had set out. They had barely glanced at each other. Farther back, the Rover crew was clustered along the aft railing with Skint, staring off into the darkness.
Railing Ohmsford was hunkered down against the front wall of the pilot box next to Challa Nand, tightly wrapped in his weather cloak and trying to find what little shelter he could by using the other’s huge frame as a shield against the heavy winds and rain. He was thoroughly miserable, but his misery had more to do with the misfortune he had brought upon his friends and companions than with the storm. No matter how you looked at things, everything was his fault. His pigheadedness, his pride, his overconfidence, and his unwillingness to listen to anyone but himself—they had all contributed to his failure to realize that he was making a mistake.
Woostra, who had long since given up trying not to be sick or going below to hide his misery and suffer in private, was sitting with them. They were all looking forward to where a gray-robed specter crouched near the bow of the aircraft as motionless as stone.
Challa Nand bent close to the boy. “Stop thinking about it. It’s over and done with. She’s here now, and we have to live with it.”
Railing shook his head. “What was I thinking? Why didn’t I listen to the King of the Silver River? He warned me that she couldn’t come back to what she had been. He warned me that things wouldn’t work out as I wanted. But I just went ahead anyway. I wouldn’t listen.”
He shifted so he could look the Troll in the eye. “Worse, the Grimpond taunted me with what it knew was going to happen. It didn’t spell it out, but very definitely hinted at it. It dared me to keep going. It mocked me. But I just ignored that, too. I thought I knew better than a shade. I knew I could do what I had set out to do, and nothing could stop me.”
“It would have helped if you had confided in us a bit earlier,” Woostra observed with more than a hint of sarcasm in his gruff voice. “Perhaps then we could have done something to help you.”
The boy had just finished telling them everything moments earlier, all the little bits and pieces he had been keeping to himself, including his plans to save his brother by using Grianne Ohmsford reborn. He’d needed to tell someone besides Mirai, sick of dissembling, of keeping secrets. What point was there in secrecy now? It wasn’t as if any of them were going to do anything she didn’t want them to do. She’d made that plain enough even before they’d taken the airship aloft and begun their search.
Railing had been afraid she
was going to kill one of them. She’d made it plain enough she wasn’t above doing so.
“Who’s to say you won’t get what you want in the end?” The Troll was still watching him. “You’ve done what you intended. You’ve brought her back, and she’s every bit as dangerous as she needs to be for what’s required of her. What use would she be in helping your brother if she were kind and sweet and loving? You need her like this. Maybe the tree knew, and that’s why it gave her back to you this way.”
Maybe, Railing agreed silently. This thing, this wraith he had brought out of the past—how else to describe what had happened?—was not Grianne Ohmsford as she was when captured by the Straken Lord and nearly destroyed. This was Grianne Ohmsford as she had been while still under the influence of the Morgawr, controlled and manipulated by a being every bit as evil as Tael Riverine. The Ilse Witch—this was what she had been and how so many still remembered her.
This was who he was bearing back aboard Quickening to try to save his brother.
“If I thought destroying the Straken Lord would save Redden, I would feel a little better about all this,” he said to Challa Nand. He exhaled sharply. “But there’s no reason to believe for a moment that, even if she succeeds in killing Tael Riverine, she will help my brother. She would just as soon kill him, too. She doesn’t care. It doesn’t care. Not a monster like that!”
Woostra seized his arm. “You need to remember something. You took her away from the life she had chosen for herself. You are responsible for her being returned to us the way she is. So what are you going to do about it? Stand around feeling sorry for yourself or find a way to get her to do what’s needed? Remember her history. She was a child deceived into believing the lies that drove her into becoming the Ilse Witch. She was feared and hated all her life by many, and nothing she did was ever enough to change that.” The narrow face pushed close. “Don’t call her a monster. If you think of her in those terms, you surrender yourself to your own worst fears. Remember her for what she was as the Ard Rhys of the Third Druid Order. Remember why you came to find her in the first place. Don’t give up on hoping she can still help us.”
Railing stared at him in surprise, impressed by both his words and his passion. It was an intense, fervent plea.
But he was not convinced. “I don’t think she can do anything to help us. I don’t think she can do anything but lead us to ruin.”
In the pilot box directly behind them, Mirai caught snippets of this last exchange. She turned to Austrum, signaling her readiness to be relieved. As soon as his hands were on the controls, she left her station and went down on the deck to where Railing was sitting with Woostra and Challa Nand. She nodded in greeting to both, then reached down for Railing’s hand and pulled him to his feet.
“Come over here.”
She pulled him across the deck through a fresh onslaught of hail and wind and plopped him down in the lee of the mainmast. Then, heedless of those watching, she put her arms around him and kissed him.
“Just so you know who loves you,” she said.
“I know who loves me,” he replied.
“Good. Now don’t say anything more. Just sit with me.”
He did as she asked, although his unhappiness with himself remained undiminished, radiating off him like heat off coals. She let that be, waiting him out. She knew him well enough to appreciate that patience was important, that with Railing you had to allow his emotions to settle before you tried to use reason. He was hotheaded and impetuous, an impulsive risk taker, but strong in ways that others weren’t, the kind of friend that would give his life for you. She had known both brothers all her life, but her feelings for them had taken markedly different directions. Even though they might be mirror images of each other, they were very different people, and what she felt for Redden was different from what she felt for Railing. For the former, the fire was sweet and comfortable. For the latter, it was hot and compelling. She could admit it to herself now, if not before. Before, such an admission would have risked disrupting the relationship the three of them shared; choosing one over the other would have caused a schism that they might not have been able to bridge.
But she had known from the first that it must happen one day. She had always thought she would choose Railing when the time came. It was not until Redden was lost to them both and Railing was in danger of becoming lost, as well—albeit in a different way—that she decided to act. Revealing how she felt in such a dramatic, explosive way was impulsive and perhaps even foolish; she had not thought it through beforehand, and could not at all be certain of the consequences. But it didn’t matter. She needed him to be the way he had always been, not the way he had become since losing his brother. All of them did. He was the one—possibly the only one—who could save them.
So she had mocked him. She had lied to him about his brother and herself. She had spurred him to do something she had hoped he wanted to do even without realizing it. She had brought him back to himself by bringing him first to her.
But she could tell the worst wasn’t over. He had stopped at the edge of the cliff and stepped back, but now he was in danger of stepping forward again, of giving way to the despair he felt because of what Grianne Ohmsford had become.
She couldn’t permit that, couldn’t accept it, and refused to stand for it.
“Listen to me,” she said when sufficient time had passed. “You can’t blame yourself for what’s happened. There’s no reason for it. We all agreed that seeking Grianne Ohmsford so she could come back and stand against the Straken Lord was the right thing to do. All of us agreed, Railing. You didn’t force us. Yes, you kept things from us you shouldn’t have, but we all suspected this. You realize that, don’t you? We knew. We even talked about it. But that didn’t prevent us from sticking by you. Because you were the one who could make a difference. Even without knowing how, we sensed it.”
He nodded slowly, his eyes locked on hers. “But it might be a difference that will get us all killed. She’s capable of that, you know. She’s so deeply caught up in what’s been done to her—what I’ve done to her—that she could turn on us in a second.”
“I know that. The others know it, too. But we accepted that risk from the first. No one knew what she would be like if she came back. Not after a hundred years of being wedded to that tree—as an aeriad, as whatever she was or is. We took the risk that she could do what was needed. And she can, Railing. She can! She can destroy the Straken Lord.”
“We think she can, but we don’t know. We don’t even know if she will try. It doesn’t matter what she tells us. Look at her. She’s not even human anymore.”
She grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him so close that his face was almost touching hers. She could see the rain running down his forehead and cheeks. She could see the blush from the cold reddening his skin.
“Whatever she is, you have to find a way to make her do what is needed. No one else can do it but you. No one else can even get close to her. She may hate you, but she talks to you and she watches you. Have you seen how she looks at you? There’s something there, Railing.”
He stared at her, voiceless, lost.
She released him and stood up. “I have to steer the ship so it won’t crash and burn. Maybe you should do what you have to do, too.”
Then she turned and walked away and did not look back.
Railing sat where he was for a while, thinking through what Mirai had said to him, his mood alternating between acceptance and rejection. He could see what she was attempting to do, how she was reminding him none too subtly that he was the one who had to find a way to make sure Grianne Ohmsford did what they all knew was needed. It didn’t matter how he felt about her now that he had brought her back. It didn’t even matter if he felt guilty about it. The Ilse Witch was here and she wasn’t going away. What he couldn’t do—what she was telling him she wouldn’t let him do—was to throw up his hands and retreat into the mire of his despair over what he had wrought.
If nothing els
e, her words impressed on him anew that a large part of what he was struggling so hard to accomplish was not only to get Redden back from the Straken Lord but also to find a way to keep them all safe. He was the one who wielded the wishsong’s magic. He was the one who carried the ring bestowed by the King of the Silver River. He was the one on whose shoulders rested the responsibility for keeping them alive.
And as Mirai had pointed out, he was the only one the Ilse Witch might heed.
The Witch had come with him, after all. Though she hated and despised what he had done to her, she had come nevertheless. She was a creature of pure malice, and she was eager to seek out and destroy any enemy, but particularly the Straken Lord if for no better reason than to eradicate the last traces of what he had done to her. Find the Straken Lord. Engage him in battle. Destroy him and reap both relief and satisfaction.
There was no consideration for Redden’s fate, no interest in it at all. Saving him would be nothing more than a by-product of her efforts to get at Tael Riverine. Railing had tried several times to explain why she should feel otherwise, but the Ilse Witch cared nothing for the brothers and their suffering. The Ilse Witch spared not a single thought for the lives of mortal creatures, no matter their claims of family history shared with her. All of that was dead and gone to her. All of that belonged to someone else.
He climbed to his feet and, without pausing to think further on it, walked forward toward the bow where the Witch sat huddled in her gray robes in the pouring rain. She did not look up as he approached or glance back when he slowed, hesitant to come any closer without acknowledgment.
But then her hand lifted, and she beckoned to him, sensing his presence.
