Terry Brooks - Witch Wraith

“We’re too late,” Crace Coram rumbled, the regret and dismay evident in the tremor of his deep voice.

Seersha nodded. “The Straken Lord’s army must be huge for it to have done this. Arishaig was heavily defended, and the best Federation soldiers in the Four Lands were stationed here.”

“Do you suppose anyone got out?”

She shook her head. “Not enough, I’d guess.”

They were silent for a moment, looking down on the carnage, listening to its still-living voice rise up in a ragged plea. The destruction swept across the whole of the fallen city and well beyond. Thousands of dead lay heaped about the walls. Seersha searched for signs of airships, even small ones, but couldn’t find any. They had either made it out already or been destroyed.

“Look there!” Crace Coram said suddenly, pointing north behind them.

She looked obediently. Beyond the immediate destruction, far in the distance west of where the Prekkendorran sprawled and the grasslands below the Tirfing divided in rugged folds, a dark mass seethed. She stared, not sure what she was seeing at first.

“The Straken Lord’s army,” her companion declared. “Already on the march. Not wasting a moment more on what’s happened here. Why should they? They have a new destination.”

She took a moment to orient herself. The Borderlands lay in that general direction. The great fortress city of Tyrsis. But the drift of the enemy march to the west suggested another destination entirely.

“History suggests the demons will want to be certain the key to their prison is destroyed once and for all.” The Dwarf Chieftain shrugged. “Even a madman like Tael Riverine might be able to figure out the importance of that one.”

She nodded in dismay.

The demon army was marching on Arborlon.

Far to the north, Aphenglow and her companions angled their Sprint toward the Tirfing to begin their search for the couple who had stolen the Ellcrys seed from Arling. It was a search that the Elven Druid expected to conclude quickly with the help of the Elfstones, but one that required some caution, as well. After all, none of them knew anything about the couple. Aphen and Cymrian had met them only briefly and Arling, unconscious at the time, remembered nothing at all. All this suggested that rushing in, no matter the urgency, could be a mistake.

Recovery of the seed was too important to allow for mistakes at this point. With the Forbidding crumbling badly and the demons already breaking free in force, protecting the seed was their foremost concern until it was back in Arling’s hands.

It was a huge relief for all of them to have gotten clear of Arishaig. For hours after they fled the besieged city they found themselves glancing over their shoulders, unable to banish the images of the battle from their minds. Aphen could not stop thinking about what Edinja had said just before their departure—that perhaps the Straken Lord and his demons had found out that Arling was the bearer of the Ellcrys seed and would come after her. That would explain their decision to attack Arishaig instead of Arborlon.

She could already imagine what it would mean to the people of the Federation home city if the demons found a way to break through, and that, in turn, suggested Arborlon’s fate was grim, should the enemy then come north to the Elven home city, which she thought likely. Destroying the Ellcrys utterly would permanently secure freedom for the creatures of the Forbidding, and the Straken Lord would actively seek this end. If he could track Arling, he would do so. Hundreds of years ago, the same effort had been made and had very nearly succeeded. It was only the desperate efforts of an Ohmsford boy and an Elessedil girl and a handful of companions that had prevented it from happening.

History was repeating itself, she thought darkly, and wondered anew about the Ohmsford twins and their allies.

“Why do you think she let us go?” Arling asked as the landscape sped by beneath them.

Neither of the other two had to ask who she was talking about. “She had nothing to gain by keeping us,” Cymrian offered. He was slumped back in the rear of the cockpit, stretched out as best he could in the cramped space.

“She knows what’s at stake,” Aphen added, hands on the controls, eyes forward. “If we don’t find and quicken the seed, the whole of the Four Lands will be overrun. Edinja would suffer the same fate as the rest of us.”

Arling shook her head. “You didn’t spend time with her like I did. You didn’t see those creatures she keeps, locked away like animals. She wouldn’t help us if she didn’t have something else in mind.”

“You mean something besides saving her own skin?” Cymrian said.

“She likes controlling things. And people. Yet she just gave us this ship and let us go. It doesn’t feel right.”

Aphen had to agree. It didn’t. But she couldn’t figure out either what Edinja had to gain by letting them go, or how she thought she could manage to gain it. They had escaped Arishaig, had possession of the Elfstones, were on their way to finding the missing Ellcrys seed, and had told Edinja nothing that would help her find them if for some reason she decided to come after them.

“She’s a complicated person,” she said quietly.

“She’s a dangerous person,” Cymrian declared with a snort. “She’s probably behind the attacks you suffered in Arborlon. She’s probably responsible for us being shot down by that Federation warship in the first place.”

“She told me she had taken me and was keeping me to lure you to Arishaig,” Arling added. “She drugged me to make me tell her everything about what we were doing.”

The other two said nothing for a moment. “But she didn’t say why she was doing this?” Aphen’s hands rested lightly on the controls as she turned around to look at her sister. “She didn’t say what it was she was trying to accomplish?”

Arling looked miserable. “No.”

“Maybe everything changed once she found out about the collapse of the Forbidding and saw the demonkind knocking on the gates of her city,” Cymrian offered. “She didn’t know about any of that before, and it might have made her change her plans. Not because she wanted to, but because she had to.”

“Cymrian’s right,” Aphen agreed. “Nothing’s the way it was a week ago. Even Edinja Orle would have to take a second look at what she was thinking to see if it still had relevance.”

Arling nodded, but didn’t say anything in response, and Aphen let the matter drop. She could tell her sister was not convinced, her doubts and fears of Edinja Orle deep-seated and troubling. Letting a little time pass was probably best. Arling had been through a lot—and unless Aphen was badly mistaken, the worst was still to come. Edinja was likely to turn out to be the least of her sister’s problems.

They piloted the Sprint for several more hours through the darkening night. Close to the the southern fringes of the Duln Forests, Aphen decided they should stop; none of them had slept for more than a few hours in days, and all were exhausted. They would moor their vessel for the night, take turns standing watch, and set out again at daybreak.

Arling curled up in the aft cushions of the cockpit and was asleep within seconds. Aphen sat with Cymrian in the bow, looking out at the night. The Sprint was anchored perhaps two dozen feet off the ground, and the landscape about them was grassy and flat and open for miles. The sky was clear this night, its dark bowl bright with stars even in the absence of moonlight. The madness they had witnessed in Arishaig had begun to recede into the background.

“She’s handling all this better than I would,” Cymrian whispered, nodding toward Arling. “I don’t know how.”