The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

by Terry Brooks

  “There will be no confrontation,” she said quickly, putting a reassuring hand on his armored wrist. She glanced over to where Penderrin stood at the bridgehead, looking over at the island. “This isn’t to be an encounter of that sort.”

  She took her hand away. “You were the best of them all,” she told him. “No one was more faithful or gave more to me when it was needed. I will never forget that.”

  He looked away. “You should go now, so that you can be back before dark.” There was resignation in his eyes. He knew. “Go, Mistress.”

  She nodded and turned away, walking over to join the boy. He glanced at her as she came up beside him, but said nothing. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. What if the tanequil won’t let us cross?”

  “Why don’t we see?”

  She walked out onto the bridge, the boy following, and called up the magic of the wishsong, humming softly to let it build, working on the message she wanted it to convey. She stopped perhaps a quarter of the way across until she had it just right, then released the magic into the afternoon silence and let it drift downward into the ravine. She gave it the whole of what she thought was needed, taking her time, content to be patient if patience was what was required.

  It was not. A response came almost immediately, a shifting of heavy roots within the earth, a rustle of leaves and grasses, a whisper of wind. Voices, soft and lilting, that only she could hear. She understood what it meant.

  “Come, Pen,” she said.

  They crossed untroubled to the other side of the bridge and walked to the trail that had led the boy into the ravine weeks earlier in his search for Cinnaminson. The island forest was deep and still, the air cooler, the light diffuse, and the earth dappled with layered shadows. She watched Pen cast about, eyes shifting left and right, searching. He was looking for the aeriads, but she already knew they would not come. Nothing would come to them now. Everything was waiting.

  They found the trailhead and stopped. The path wound downward in a steep descent that gradually faded into a mix of mist and shadows. It was so dark within the ravine that they could not see the bottom. It was the sort of place she had entered many times. It was a mirror of her heart.

  She turned to him. “You are to wait here for me, Pen. I will do this best if I am alone. I know what is needed. I will bring Cinnaminson back to you.”

  He studied her face carefully, unable to keep the hope from his eyes. “I know you will try, Aunt Grianne.”

  She reached out impulsively and hugged the boy. It was something she had seldom done, and it felt awkward, but the boy was quick to hug her back, and that made her feel better about it.

  “Be careful,” he whispered.

  She broke away, moving slowly down the trail toward the shadows.

  “Thank you,” he called after her. “For doing this.”

  She gave him a small wave in response, but did not look back.

  The afternoon eased toward evening, and the light shifted and began to fade. Pen stood until he grew tired, then sat with his back against an ancient trunk, staring down into the ravine, keeping watch. He listened for sounds he did not care to think of too carefully, but no sounds came. Silence cloaked the ravine and the forest and, for all he knew, the entire world. He watched patterns of light and shadows form and re-form, slow-moving kaleidoscopic images against the earth. He smelled the scents released into air by the forest and the things that lived there. He rubbed the blunted tips of his damaged fingers and remembered how they had gotten that way. He remembered what it had felt like to become joined to the tanequil through the carving of the runes. He remembered night in the island forest and his terrifying encounter with Aphasia Wye.

  Mostly, he remembered Cinnaminson. He could picture her face and the way she smiled. He could remember the way she moved. He could hear her voice. She was there, alive and well within his mind, and it made him want to cry for his loss.

  But he smiled instead. He knew she was coming back to him. He believed in his aunt Grianne. He had faith in her magic and her skills, in her promise that she would find a way. He loved Cinnaminson, although he had never loved a girl before and had no frame of reference from which to draw a comparison. But love seemed to him to be a state of mind peculiar to each, and there was no set standard by which you could measure its strength. He knew what he felt for Cinnaminson, and if the difference between what he felt when he had her with him and when he did not was an accurate measure, then he could not imagine how love could be any stronger.

  Time slipped away, and at last, when no one had appeared and darkness had begun to close about, he found himself wondering what he would do if his aunt failed and Cinnaminson didn’t come back to him.

  He dozed then, made sleepy-eyed by the warmth and brightness of the late afternoon sun slanting down through breaks in the branches of the trees. He did not fall deeply asleep, but hovered at the edge of wakefulness, arms about his drawn-up knees, head sunk on his chest.

  Eyes closed, he drifted.

  Then something stirred him awake—a whisper of sound, a hint of movement, a sense of presence—and he looked up to find Cinnaminson standing before him. She was more ghost than flesh and blood, pale and thin and disheveled in her tattered clothes. He got to his feet slowly and stood looking at her, afraid that he was mistaken, that he might be hallucinating.

  “It’s me, Pen,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

  He didn’t rush to her, didn’t grasp her and hold her close, although he wanted to do that, to make certain of her. Instead, he walked up to her as if time didn’t matter. He took her hands and held them, studying her face, the spray of freckles and the milky eyes. The musty smell of earth and damp emanated from her body, and tendrils of root ends still clung to her arms. He reached out and touched her face.

  “I’m all right,” she said. She touched his face. “I missed you. Even when I was one of them and thought I couldn’t possibly be happier, I remembered you and missed you. I don’t think that ever would have stopped.”

  She put her arms around him and held on to him as if she was afraid she would be taken away again, and he could feel her crying against his shoulder. He started to speak, then gave it up and just hugged her, closing his eyes and losing himself in the warmth of her body.

  “Who was it who came down for me?” she asked him finally, her voice muffled. She lifted her head from his shoulder put her mouth close to his ear. “I don’t understand it,” she whispered. “Why did she do it? Why did she trade herself for me?”

  Pen thought his heart would stop.

  In the air above them, the aeriads hummed and sang and danced on the breeze, invisible and soundless. Heedless of time’s passage, they played in the soft glow of the sunset’s red and gold and the evening’s deep indigo. They were spirits unfettered by the restrictions of the human body and the limitations of the human existence. They were sisters and friends, and the whole of the world was their playground.

  One strayed momentarily, the newest of them, looking down on the young couple that stood at the edge of the ravine and spoke in soft, comforting tones, their heads bent close. The girl was telling the boy about her, and the boy was trying to understand. She knew it would be hard, that he might never come to terms with what she had done for the girl. But she had done it for herself, too—to give herself a new life, to set herself on a different path, to be reborn. She had known what she would do almost from the time the boy had spoken of the girl’s transformation and of her joy at what she had experienced. She had wanted that for herself. That the boy and the girl would make a better life together than apart was incentive to take the chance. Offer herself for the girl, a woman not so young, but deeply talented and magically enhanced, a creature Mother Tanequil could not help but covet.

  The trade was simple; the change of places was done in a heartbeat and a small balance to things was set in place.

  Come, sister, the others called to her.

  Sh
e lingered a moment longer, thinking of what she had given up and finding she had no regrets. There was nothing of her old life that was so precious to her, nothing so compelling as even the first few moments of this new one. Too many years of struggle and travail, of heartbreaking loss and backbreaking responsibility, of failure, ruin, and death had marked the path of her life. She would never escape from it in human form. She knew that; she accepted it. But as a creature of the air she had left it all behind, a part of another life.

  She watched the boy and the girl turn away and start back through the woods toward the stone bridge. Maybe they would find in their lives something of what she had failed to find in hers. She had already found something precious in her new form, something she had not known since she was six years old and living still in the house of her parents with her baby brother.

  She had found freedom.

  BY TERRY BROOKS

  SHANNARA

  First King of Shannara

  The Sword of Shannara

  The Elfstones of Shannara

  The Wishsong of Shannara

  THE HERITAGE OF SHANNARA

  The Scions of Shannara

  The Druid of Shannara

  The Elf Queen of Shannara

  The Talismans of Shannara

  THE VOYAGE OF THE JERLE SHANNARA

  Ilse Witch

  Antrax

  Morgawr

  HIGH DRUID OF SHANNARA

  Jarka Ruus

  Tanequil

  Straken

  GENESIS OF SHANNARA

  Armageddon’s Children

  The Elves of Cintra

  The Gypsy Morph

  LEGENDS OF SHANNARA

  Bearers of the Black Staff

  The Measure of the Magic

  The World of Shannara

  THE MAGIC KINGDOM OF LANDOVER

  Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold!

  The Black Unicorn

  Wizard at Large

  The Tangle Box

  Witches’ Brew

  A Princess of Landover

  THE WORD AND THE VOID

  Running with the Demon

  A Knight of the Word

  Angel Fire East

  Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TERRY BROOKS is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books, including the Legends of Shannara novels Bearers of the Black Staff and The Measure of the Magic; the Genesis of Shannara novels Armageddon’s Children, The Elves of Cintra, and The Gypsy Morph; The Sword of Shannara; the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy: Ilse Witch, Antrax, and Morgawr; the High Druid of Shannara trilogy: Jarka Ruus, Tanequil, and Straken; the nonfiction book Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life; and the novel based upon the screenplay and story by George Lucas, Star Wars®: Episode I The Phantom Menace™. His novels Running with the Demon and A Knight of the Word were selected by the Rocky Mountain News as two of the best science fiction/fantasy novels of the twentieth century. The author was a practicing attorney for many years but now writes full-time. He lives with his wife, Judine, in the Pacific Northwest.