Brooks, Terry: High Druid's Blade : The Defenders of Shannara (9780345540713)

The High Druid’s Blade is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Terry Brooks

Map copyright © 2012 by Russ Charpentier

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company,

New York.

DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

The map by Russ Charpentier was originally published in Wards of Faerie by Terry Brooks, published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, in 2012.

ISBN 978-0-345-54070-6

eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54071-3

Jacket design: David G. Stevenson

Jacket illustration: © Bastien Lecouffe Deharme

www.delreybooks.com

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Dedication

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

O

NE

PAXON LEAH PAUSED IN THE MIDST OF CHOPPING WOOD TOgaze out across the misty Highlands surrounding the city of Leah. The Highlands were called Leah, too, and the confusion sometimes caused outlanders to wonder if the inhabitants were limited to a single name for everything. It was worse in his case, since his surname was Leah, as well, passed down through countless generations from the rulers of old, for whom the city and the Highlands had been named when the Leahs were their Kings and Queens.

But all that was long ago and far away, and it had little to do with him. He might be the descendant of those Kings and Queens, but that and a few coins would buy you a tankard of ale at the Two Roosters tavern. There hadn’t been a monarchy in Leah for generations; the last members of the royal family had walked away from the responsibility not long after Menion Leah had helped dispatch the Warlock Lord by finding and employing the fabled Sword of Shannara. Vague history, long forgotten by many, it was a legacy he carried lightly and with little regard.

He chopped another dozen pieces of firewood for the winter stash before pausing again. The Leahs were commoners now, no different from anyone else. They hadn’t even served on the Highlands Council, the current governing body, for many years. His parents had inherited the shipping business that had been in the family for half a dozen generations—a once-thriving but now marginal source of income and sustenance, operated by his mother and himself, but mostly by himself. He ran shipments on the average of twice a month, making just enough money to feed and clothe the family—the family consisting of himself, his mother, and his little sister, Chrysallin. His father had been gone since he was ten, killed in an airship accident while flying freight into the Eastland.

He finished cutting up the firewood, stacking it by the storage shed next to their cottage, still pausing now and then to take in the view and dream of better times to come. Not that things were bad. He had time to hunt and fish, and he didn’t work all that hard—though he would have preferred the harder work if the business would improve. At twenty, he was tall and lean and broad-shouldered, his hair red in the tradition of his ancestors. There had been hundreds of redheaded Leahs over the years; he was just the latest. And he imagined there would be hundreds more before the line was played out.

With the wood neatly stacked, he carried his tools into the shed, cleaned and oiled the saws and ax heads, and went into the house to wash up. It was a small cottage with a kitchen, a central living space, and bedrooms for his mother, his sister, and himself. There was a fireplace, with windows to the west-facing front and to the south so there was always plenty of light—important in a climate where the days were frequently gray and hazy.

He glanced at the old sword his sister had hung over the mantel above the hearth, its metal blade, leather pommel, and strap-on sheath all as black as night. Chrys had found it in the attic and proclaimed it hers. The markings on the weapon indicated that the pommel leather and sheath had been replaced more than once, but the metal blade was the original. She said it had belonged to those Leahs of old who had gone on quests with the Ohmsfords and the Druids, all the way back to Menion Leah and forward to their great-grandmother Mirai. Paxon supposed it was so; he had been told the stories often enough as a boy by both his father and his mother. Even some of their friends knew the tales, which had taken on the trappings of legend over the years.

He washed his hands and face in the kitchen sink, pumping water from their well, dried himself, and walked back into the living area to stand before the fireplace. The tales about that black sword were cautionary, whispering of dark magic and great power. It was said the blade had been tempered in the waters of the Hadeshorn once, long ago, and thereby made strong enough that it could cut through magic. A handful of Leahs were said to have carried it into battle with the Druids. A handful were said to have evoked its power.

He had tried to join their ranks more than once when he was much smaller, intent on discovering if the stories were true. Apparently, they weren’t. All of his efforts to make the magic appear—to make the sword do anything, for that matter—had failed. There might have been more to the process, but the blade didn’t come with instructions, and so after numerous attempts he had given up. What need did he have of magic, in any case? It wasn’t as if he were going on a quest with Druids and Ohmsfords.

If there even were any Ohmsfords these days.

There was some doubt about this. All of the Ohmsfords had left Patch Run—their traditional home for hundreds of years—when his great-grandmother had married Railing Ohmsford and brought him to the Highlands to live. His brother, Redden, had come with them, and for a time had shared their home. But eventually he had found a girl to fall in love with and had married her and moved out. Both Redden and Railing had stayed in the Highlands until they died, twins closer than brothers to the end. Redden’s boys had moved away and no more had been heard of them. Railing’s granddaughter, always closer to her grandmother’s side of the family, had taken back the Leah name when she married and had eventually passed it down to her children.