Терри Брукс - The Talismans of Shannara

His fever broke at the end of the first week. When at last he was able to open his eyes and focus on the young couple who had cared for him, he saw in their faces an obvious relief and realized how close he had come to not waking at all. His sickness had left him drained of strength, and for several days after he had to be fed by hand. He managed to stay awake for short periods and to speak a little when he did. The young wife with the straw-blond hair and the pale blue eyes looked after him while her husband worked in the fields, and she smiled with concern when she told him that his dreams must have been bad ones. She gave him soup and bread with water and a small ration of ale. He accepted it gratefully and thanked her repeatedly for looking after him. Sometimes her husband would appear, standing next to her and looking down at him, bluff and red-faced from the sun, with kind eyes and a broad smile. He mentioned once that Morgan’s sword was safely put aside, that it had not been lost. Apparently that had been part of the nightmares as well.

At the end of the two weeks Morgan was taking his meals with them at their dinner table, growing stronger daily, close to returning to normal. His memories lingered, however—the feeling of pain and nausea, the sense of helplessness, the fear that the sickness was the door to the darkness that would come at the end of his life. The memories stayed, for Morgan had come close to dying too often in the past few weeks to be able to put them aside easily. He was marked by what he had experienced and endured as surely as if scarred in battle, and even the farmer and his wife could see in his eyes and face what had been done to him. They never asked for an explanation, but they could see.

He offered to pay them for their care and predictably they refused. When he said good-bye to them seventeen days later, he slipped half of what money remained to him into the pocket of the wife’s worn apron when she wasn’t looking. They watched after him as parents might a child until he was out of sight.

And so not only was his arrival at Varfleet and his search for Padishar and Par and Coll considerably delayed, but he was left as well with a renewed sense of his own mortality. Morgan Leah had come down out of Eldwist and the Charnals still grappling with Quickening’s death, devastated by the loss he felt with her passing, in awe of her strength in carrying out her father’s wish that she give up her own life in order that the land should be restored. An elemental that had become more human than her father had anticipated, she remained for Morgan an enigma for which he did not believe he would ever find a resolution. Coupled with this realization was the undeniable pride and strength he had found in helping to defeat Uhl Belk and in regaining anew the magic of the Sword of Leah. When the Sword had been made whole again, somehow so had he. Quickening had given him that. In the loss of Quickening, Morgan realized, he had somehow found himself. The contradictions between what had been lost and gained had warred within him as he traveled south with Walker and Horner Dees, a conflict that would never be entirely settled, and it was not until the sickness had overtaken him that their raging was forced to give way to the more basic need of finding a way to stay alive.

Now, staring down at the city, come back out of several nightmare worlds, out of the lives he had expended in those worlds, so distant that they might have been lived by someone else, Morgan reflected that he stood at the beginning of yet another life. He found himself wondering if those who had known him in the old life would ever recognize now who he was.

He entered Varfleet as just another traveler come down out of the north, a Southlander weathered and seasoned from troubles that were his own business, and he was pretty much ignored by the people of the city, who, after all, had troubles of their own to worry about. He passed through the poorer sections where families lived in makeshift shelters and children begged in the streets, conscious again of how little the ill-named Federation Protectorate had done to help anyone in Callahorn. He passed into the city proper, where the smells of cooking and sewage mingled unpleasantly, the merchants hawked their wares in strident voices from carts and shopfronts, and the tradesmen serviced the needs of those who could afford the price. Federation soldiers patrolled the streets, a threatening presence wherever they went, looking as uncomfortable as the people they were charged with policing. If you stripped away the weapons and uniforms, the Highlander thought darkly, it would be hard to tell who was who.

He found a clothing shop and used most of his remaining money to buy pants, a tunic, a well-made forest cloak, and some new boots. His own clothing was frayed and soiled and worn beyond help, and he left it all behind in the shop when he departed, taking only his weapons. He asked for directions to the Whistledown, not certain even now what it was, and was told by the shopkeeper that it was a tavern that could be found at the center of the city on Wyvern Split.

Making his way through the crowds and the midday heat, Morgan recalled anew the instructions that Padishar Creel had given him weeks ago. He was to go to the Whistledown and show the hawk ring to a woman named Matty Roh. She would know how to find Padishar. Morgan fingered the hawk ring where it was buried in his pocket, safely tucked away for the time he would need it. He mused on how often he had doubted that such a time would come. The rough outline of the hawk emblem pressed against his skin as he twisted it about, bringing back memories of the outlaw chief. He wondered if Padishar Creel had been forced to come back from the dead as often as he had these past few weeks. The possibility brought a bitter smile to his lips.

He found Wyvern Split and turned down its length toward a square ringed by taverns, inns, and pleasure houses. Not a very attractive part of the city, but a busy one. He shifted the Sword of Leah from where it was draped across his back, adjusting the straps, feeling sad and weary and at the same time buoyed—an odd mix, but somehow a proper one. Sickness and loss had worn him down, but surviving both had strengthened his resolve. There was not much out there, he believed, that he could not get through. He needed that conviction. For weeks he had watched his friends and companions slip away, some lost to fortune, some to the machinations of others. He had seen his own plans repeatedly altered, his course turned aside time and again to serve a higher—or at least a different—purpose. He had done what he had believed right in each case, and he had no reason to second-guess himself. But he was tired of having his life rearranged like furniture in a room where each time he turned to look everything was in a different place. He had honored Steff’s dying wish and gone back to Culhaven to rescue Granny Elise and Auntie Jilt. He had given himself then to Quickening and her journey to Eldwist. Now it was time to do what he had been promising himself he would do since escaping Tyrsis and the Pit. It was time to find Par and Coll, to give them what protection he could, to see to it that he stayed with them until...

He gave a mental shrug. Well, until they no longer needed him, he guessed—whenever that might be.

And where were they now? he wondered for what must have been the hundredth time. What had become of them since their own escape?

Thinking of them made him uneasy. It always did. Too much time had passed since he had left them. The danger of the Shadowen was too great for the Valemen to have been left out there alone. He hoped Padishar had found them by now. He hoped that they’d had an easier time of things than he had.

But he wouldn’t have cared to place a bet on it.