Терри Брукс - The Druid of Shannara

“What about this?” Horner Dees reached down and unstrapped the Stiehl from around Pe Ell’s thigh. “What do we do with it?”

“Throw it into the ocean,” Morgan said at once. “Or drop it into the deepest hole you can find.”

It seemed to Walker that he could hear someone else speaking, that the words were unpleasantly familiar ones. Then he realized he was thinking of himself, remembering what he had said, when Cogline had brought him the Druid History out of lost Paranor. Another time, another magic, he thought, but the dangers were always the same.

“Morgan,” he said, and the other turned. “If we throw it away, we risk the possibility that it will be found again—perhaps by someone as twisted and evil as Pe Ell. Perhaps by someone worse. The blade needs to be locked away where no one can ever reach it again.” He turned to Horner Dees. “If you give it to me, I will see that it is.”

They stood there for a moment without moving, three worn and ragged figures in a field of broken stone and new green, measuring one another. Dees glanced once at Morgan, then handed the blade to Walker. “I guess we can trust you to keep your word as well as anyone,” he offered.

Walker shoved the Stiehl and the Elfstone into the deep pockets of his cloak and hoped it was so.

They walked south the remainder of the day and spent their first night free of Eldwist on a barren, scrub-grown plain. A day earlier, the plain had been a part of Uhl Belk’s kingdom, infected by the poison of the Maw Grint, a broken carpet of stone. Even with nothing more than the scrub to brighten its expanse, it felt lush and comforting after the deadness of the city. There was little to eat yet, a few roots and wild vegetables, but there was fresh water again, the skies were star filled, and the air was clean and new. They made a fire and sat up late, talking in low voices of what they were feeling, remembering in the long silences what had been.

When morning came they awoke with the sun on their faces, grateful simply to be alive.

They traveled down again through the high forests and crossed into the Charnals. Horner Dees took them a different way this time, carefully avoiding dead Carisman’s tribe of Urdas, journeying east of the Spikes. The weather stayed mild, even in the mountains, and there were no storms or avalanches to cause them further grief. Food was plentiful again, and they began to regain their strength. A sense of well-being returned, and the harshest of their memories softened and faded.

Morgan Leah spoke often of Quickening. It seemed to help him to speak of her, and both Walker and Horner Dees encouraged him to do so. Sometimes the Highlander talked as if she were still alive, touching the Sword he carried, and gesturing back to the country they were leaving behind.

She was there, he insisted, and better that she were there than gone completely. He could sense her presence at times; he was certain of it. He smiled and joked and slowly began to return to himself.

Horner Dees became his old self almost as quickly, the haunted look fading from his eyes, the tension disappearing from his face. The gruffness in his voice lost its edge, and for the first time in weeks the love he bore for his mountains began to work its way back into his conversation.

Walker Boh recovered more slowly. He was encased in an iron shell of fatalistic resignation that had stripped his feelings nearly bare. He had lost his arm in the Hall of Kings. He had lost Cogline and Rumor at Hearthstone. He had nearly lost his life any number of times. Carisman was dead. Quickening was dead. His vow to refuse the charge that Allanon had given him was dead. Quickening had been right. There were always choices. But sometimes the choices were made for you, whether you wanted it so or not. He might have thought not to be ensnared by Druid machinations, to turn his life away from Brin Ohmsford and her legacy of magic. But circumstances and conscience made that all but impossible. His was a destiny woven by threads that stretched back in time hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, and he could not be free of them, not entirely, at least. He had thought the matter through since that night in Eldwist when he had agreed to return with Quickening to the lair of the Stone King in an effort to recover the Black Elfstone. He knew that by going he was agreeing that if they were successful he would carry the talisman back into the Four Lands and attempt to restore Paranor and the Druids—just as Allanon had charged him.

He knew without having to speak the words what that meant.

Make whatever choice you will, Quickening had advised.

But what choices were left to him? He had determined long ago to search out the Black Elfstone—perhaps from the moment he had first discovered its existence while reading the Druid history; certainly from the time of the death of Cogline. He had determined as well to discover what its magic would do—and that meant testing Allanon’s charge that Paranor and the Druids could be restored. He might argue that he had been considering the matter right up until the moment Eldwist had met its end. But he knew the truth was otherwise. He knew as well that if the magic of the Black Elfstone was everything that had been promised, if it worked as he believed, then Paranor would be restored. And if that happened, then the Druids would come back into the Four Lands.

Through him.

Beginning with him.

And that reality provided the only choice left to him, the one he believed Quickening had wanted him to make—the choice of who he would be. If it was true that Paranor could be restored and that he must become the first of the Druids who would keep it, then he must make certain he did not lose himself in the process. He must make certain that Walker Boh survived—his heart, his ideas, his convictions, his misgivings—everything he was and believed. He must not evolve into the very thing he had struggled so hard to escape. He must not, in other words, turn into Allanon. He must not become like the Druids of old—manipulators, exploiters, dark and secretive conjurers, and hiders of truths. If the Druids must return in order to preserve the Races, in order to ensure their survival against the dark things of the world, Shadowen or whatever, then he must make them as they should be—a better order of Men, of teachers, and of givers of the power of magic.

That was the choice he could still make—a choice he must make if he were to keep his sanity.

It took them almost two weeks to reach Rampling Steep, choosing the longer, safer routes, skirting any possibility of danger, sheltering when it was dark, and emerging to travel on when it was light. They came on the mountainside town toward midday, the skies washed with a gray, cloudy haze left by a summer shower that suggested spun cotton pulled apart by too-anxious hands. The day was warm and humid, and the buildings of the town glistened like damp, squat toads hunched down against the rocks. The three travelers approached as strangers, seeing the town anew, the first since Eldwist. They slowed as one as they entered the solitary street that navigated the gathering of taverns, stables, and trading stores to either side, pausing to look back into the mountains they had descended, watching momentarily as the runoff from the storm churned down out of the cliffs into gullies and streams, the sound a distant rush.

“Time to say goodbye,” Horner Dees announced without preliminaries and stuck out his hand to Morgan.

Morgan stared. There had been no talk of his leaving until now. “You’re not coming on with us?”

The old Tracker snorted. “I’m lucky to be alive, Highlander. Now you want me to come south? How far do you expect me to push things?”

Morgan stammered. “I didn’t mean...”

“Fact is, I shouldn’t have gone with you the first time.” The other cut him short with a wave of one big hand. “It was the girl who talked me into it. Couldn’t say no to her. And maybe it was the sense of having left something behind when I fled the Stone King and his monsters ten years ago. I had to go back to find it again. So here I am, the only man to have escaped Eldwist and Uhl Belk twice. Seems to me that’s enough for one old man.”