Then he stumbled and fell and lost his grip on Grianne. In an instant, she was gone. She disappeared in the whiteout, stolen away as surely as his faith in his purpose in coming on this journey. He groped for her, turning first this way and then that, everything white and empty about him, everything the same. He could not find her. Panic overwhelmed him as he grasped at snow flurries and air and empty chances, and he screamed. He screamed not just for his lost sister or his helplessness, but for all the pent-up rage and frustration he had been carrying with him for weeks. He screamed because he had reached the breaking point, and he did not care what happened to him next.
In that moment, a shape appeared before him, huge and dark, rising up like a behemoth roused from sleep to put an end to his intrusion. He stumbled backwards from it, surprised and terrified. As he did so, his hands brushed against his sister. He pushed his face close to hers to make certain he was not mistaken, calling to her. Her pale, empty features stared back at him. She was kneeling in the snow, docile and unbothered.
Tears of relief blinded him as he brought her back to her feet, holding on to her with both hands, then deciding that wasn’t enough, wrapping her with his arms. He wiped the tears away with his sleeve and looked for the phantom that had caused him to find her. It was there, just ahead of him, but smaller and moving away. Bek peered after it, sensing something familiar about it, something recognizable. It faded and then reappeared, prowling just at the limits of his vision, expectant and purposeful.
Then suddenly it turned and beckoned him.
Almost without realizing what he was doing, he obeyed. Both hands clasped tight on Grianne’s slender wrist, he started ahead once more into the haze.
“Which is how I found you,” he finished, passing the aleskin back to Quentin, the pungent liquid warming his throat and stomach as he swallowed. “I don’t know how long I was out there, but my guide stayed just ahead of me the whole way, obviously leading me toward something, keeping me on track. I didn’t know where it was taking me, but after a while it didn’t matter. I knew who it was.”
“Truls Rohk,” his cousin said.
“That’s what I thought at the time, but now I’m not so sure. Truls is gone. He’s become a part of the shape-shifter community, and no longer has a separate identity. Maybe I just want to believe it was him.” Bek shook his head. “I don’t guess it matters.”
They were huddled in a shallow cave hollowed into the side of the mountain. Bek had started a fire, and it burned with little heat, but a steady, insistent flame that illuminated their faces. Grianne sat to one side, staring off into the night, unseeing. Every so often, Quentin looked at her, not quite sure yet what to make of having someone who had tried so hard to kill them sitting so close.
Bek watched Quentin take another deep swallow from the aleskin. The color was finally returning to Quentin’s frozen body. He had been nearly gone when he had stumbled upon Bek and Grianne. Bek had wasted no time wrapping him in his cloak and finding shelter for them all. The fire and ale had brought Quentin around, and they had spent the last hour exchanging stories about what had happened since the ambush in the ruins of Castledown. They didn’t rush it, taking their time, giving themselves a chance to adjust to the idea that the impossible had happened and they had found each other again.
“I never thought you were dead,” Bek told his cousin, breaking the momentary silence. “I never believed it was so.”
Quentin grinned, a hint of that familiar, cocky smile that marked him so distinctively. “Me either, about you. I knew when Tamis told me she had left you outside the ruins, that you would be all right. But this business about you having magic, that’s another matter. I still can’t quite believe it. You’re sure you’re an Ohmsford?”
“As sure as I can be after hearing everything Walker had to say.” Bek leaned back on his elbows and sighed. “I suppose I really didn’t believe it myself in the beginning. But after that first confrontation with Grianne, feeling the magic come alive inside me and break out like it did, I didn’t have the same doubts anymore.”
“So she’s your sister.”
Bek nodded. “She is, Quentin.”
The Highlander shook his head slowly. “Well, there’s something we’d have never guessed when we started out on this journey. But what are you supposed to do with her now that you know?”
“Take her home,” Bek answered. “Keep her safe.” He looked at Grianne a moment. “She’s important, Quentin. Beyond the fact that she’s my sister. I don’t know how, but she is. Walker was insistent on it, when he was dying and afterwards when he returned as a shade. He knows something about her that he isn’t telling me.”
“Big surprise.”
Bek smiled. “I guess that Walker keeping secrets isn’t unusual, is it? Maybe there aren’t any surprises left for you and me. No real ones, I mean.”
Quentin exhaled a white plume that lofted into the chilly night. “I wouldn’t be so sure. I’d thought that earlier, and then I found you again. You never know.” He paused. “What do you think the chances are that anyone else is alive? Are they all dead, like Walker and Patrinell?”
Bek didn’t say anything for a moment. All of the Elves were gone, save Kian and perhaps Ahren Elessedil. Ryer Ord Star might still be alive. The Wing Riders might be out there somewhere. And, of course, there were the Rovers.
“We saw the Jerle Shannara fly into these mountains,” Bek ventured. “Maybe the Rovers are still searching for us.”
Quentin gave him a hard look. “Maybe. But if you were Redden Alt Mer in this situation, what would you do—come looking for us or fly straight back to where you came from?”
Bek thought about it a moment. “I don’t think Rue Meridian would leave us. I think she’d make her brother look.”
His cousin snorted. “For how long? Chased by those Mwellret vessels? Outnumbered twenty to one?” He shook his head. “We’d better be realistic about it. They don’t have any reason to think we’re still alive. They were prisoners themselves; they won’t want to chance being made prisoners again. They would be fools not to run for it. I wouldn’t blame them. I would do the same thing.”
“They’ll look for us,” Bek insisted.
Quentin laughed. “I know better than to try to change your mind, cousin Bek. Funny, though. I’m supposed to be the optimist.”
“Things change.”
“Hard to argue with that.” The Highlander looked off into the falling snow and gestured vaguely. “I was supposed to look out for you, remember? I didn’t do much of a job of it. I let us get separated, and then I ran the other way. I didn’t even think of looking for you until it was too late. I want you to know how sorry I am that I didn’t do a better job of keeping my word.”
“What are you talking about?” Bek snapped, an edge to his voice. “What more were you supposed to do than what you did? You stayed alive, and that was difficult enough. Besides, I was supposed to look out for you, as well. Wasn’t that the bargain?”
They stared at each other in challenge for a moment. Then the tension drained away, and in the way of friends who have shared a lifetime of experiences and come to know each other better than anyone else ever could, they began to grin.
Bek laughed. “Coward.”
“Weakling,” Quentin shot back.
Bek extended his hand. “We’ll do better next time.”
Quentin took it. “Much better.”
The wind shifted momentarily, blowing snow flurries into their faces. They ducked their heads as it whipped about them, and the fire guttered beneath its rush. Then everything went still again, and they looked out into the darkness, feeling their efforts at getting through the day catching up to them, seeping away their wakefulness, nudging them toward sleep.
“I want to go home,” Quentin said softly. He looked over at Bek with a pale, worn sadness in his eyes. “I bet you never thought you’d hear me say that, did you?”
Bek shrugged.
“I’m worn out. I’ve seen
too much. I’ve watched Tamis and Patrinell die right in front of me. Some of the other Elves, as well. I’ve fought so hard to stay alive that I can’t remember when anything else mattered. I’m sick of it. I don’t even want to feel the magic of the sword anymore. I was so hungry for it. The feel of it, like a fire rushing through me, burning everything away, feeding me.”
“I know,” Bek said.
Quentin looked at him. “I guess you do. It’s too much after a time. And not enough.” He looked around. “I thought this would be our great adventure, our rite of passage into manhood, a story we would remember all our lives, that we would tell to our friends and family. Now I don’t ever want to talk about it again. I want to forget it. I want to go back to the way things were. I want to go home and stay there.”
“Me, too,” Bek agreed.
Quentin nodded, looking off again, not saying anything. “I don’t know how to make that happen,” he continued after a moment. “I’m afraid now that maybe it can’t.”
“It can,” Bek said. “I don’t know how, but it can. I’ve been thinking about getting back home, about how to take Grianne there, like Walker said I should. It seems impossible, crazy. Walker’s gone, so he can’t help. Truls Rohk won’t be going any farther. Half of everyone I came here with is dead and the other half is scattered. Until I found you, I was all alone. What chance do I have? But you know what? I just tell myself I’ll find a way. I don’t know what that way is, but I’ll find it. I’ll walk all the way home if I have to. Right over the Blue Divide. Or fly. Or swim. It doesn’t matter. I’ll find a way.”
He looked at Quentin and smiled. “We got this far. We’ll get the rest of the way, too.”
They were brave words, but they sounded right, necessary, talismans against fear and doubt. Bek and Quentin were still fighting for small assurances, for bits of hope, for tiny threads of courage. The words gave them some of each. Neither wanted to challenge them just now. Look too closely at the battlements, and the cracks showed. That wasn’t what they needed. They left the words where they were, undisturbed, an echo in their thoughts, a promise of what they believed might still be.
Taking comfort in the shelter of each other, because in the end it was the best sort of comfort they could hope to find, they went off to sleep.
The dawn was cloudy and gray; a promise of new snow reflected in the colorless canvas of the slowly brightening sky. The temperature had dropped to freezing, and the air was brittle with cold. They ate breakfast with few words exchanged, mustering their resolve. The confidence that had bolstered them the night before had dissipated like fog in sunlight. All about them, the mountains stretched away in an endless alternation of peaks and valleys. Save for the intensity of the light from the sunrise east, the horizons all looked the same.
“Might as well get going,” Quentin muttered, standing up and slinging his sword over his shoulder.
Bek rose, as well, and did the same with the Sword of Shannara. He barely gave thought to the talisman anymore; it seemed to have served its purpose on this journey and had become something of a burden. He glanced self-consciously at Grianne, realizing he could say the same about her and most certainly had thought as much more than once.
Thinking to cover as much ground as possible before the next storm and not wanting to be caught out in the open again, they set a brisk pace. The frozen ground crunched like old bones beneath their boots, grasses and earth cratering with indentations of their prints. If their pursuers were still tracking them, they would have no trouble doing so. Bek considered the possibility and brushed it aside. The shape-shifters had promised him that his pursuers would not be allowed to follow. There was no reason to think that their protection extended this far, but he was weary and heartsick and needed to believe this one thing if he was to have any peace of mind. So he let himself.
They trudged on toward midday, following trails that wound through the valleys ahead. The horizons never changed. In the vast mountain coldness, the land seemed empty of life. Once, they saw a bird flying far away. Once, further down in the shadowed woods, they heard some creature cry. Otherwise, there was only silence, deep and pervasive and unbroken.
Time dragged, a dying candle, and Bek’s spirits lagged. He found himself wondering if there was any sense to what they were doing, if there was a purpose for going on. He understood that it gave them a goal and that movement kept them alive. But the vastness of the range and the terrible solitude it visited on them gave rise to a growing certainty that they were simply prolonging the inevitable. They were never going to walk out of the mountains. They were never going to be able to find anyone else from the doomed company of the Jerle Shannara. They were trapped in a nightmare world that would deceive them, break them down, and in the end destroy them.
He was marking out the time that remained to him when a dark speck appeared in the sky to the north, faint and distant. It grew quickly larger, moving swiftly toward them, taking on a familiar look. Recognition flooded through Bek, and the sense of hopelessness that had possessed him only moments earlier fell away like old ashes in a new fire.
By the time Hunter Predd swung Obsidian down to a flat just ahead of them, one whipcord thin arm raised in greeting, Bek was ready to believe that in spite of what he had told Quentin earlier, there might still be a few surprises left.
Twenty
For nearly a week after taking control of Black Moclips, cruising the skies like birds of prey, the Morgawr and his Mwellrets scoured the coastal and mountain regions of Parkasia in search of the Jerle Shannara and the remnants of her company. Their efforts were hampered by the weather, which proved exceedingly arbitrary, changing without warning from sun to rain, either of which was as likely to see high winds and downdrafts as calm air. During the worst of the storms, they were forced to land and anchor for almost twenty-four hours, sheltered in a cove off the coast where bluffs and woods offered protection from an onslaught of sleet and hail that otherwise would have leveled them.
During most of this time, Ahren Elessedil languished belowdecks in a storeroom that had been converted to a cell. It was the same room that had housed Bek Ohmsford when he was a prisoner of the Ilse Witch, although Ahren did not know this. The Elven Prince was kept alone and apart from everyone save the rets who brought him food or took him on deck for brief periods of exercise. The Morgawr had moved his personal contingent of Mwellrets onto Black Moclips, preferring its sleeker design and greater maneuverability to that of the larger, more cumbersome warship he had occupied previously. Reduced to mindless shells, sad remnants of better times, the doomed Aden Kett and his men were left to crew her. Cree Bega was given command. The Morgawr occupied the Commander’s quarters, and while they sailed in search of the Jerle Shannara, the Elven Prince barely saw him.
He saw even less of Ryer Ord Star. Her absence fueled his already deep mistrust of her, and he found himself reexamining his feelings. He could not decide whether she had forsaken her promise to him and truly allied herself with the Morgawr or if she was playing a game he did not understand. He wanted to believe it was the latter, but try as he might he could not come to terms with her seeming betrayal of him when he was captured or her clear distancing from him since. She had told him in the catacombs of Castledown that she was no longer in thrall to the Ilse Witch, yet she seemed to have become very much the creature of the Morgawr. She had led the warlock on his search for the Jerle Shannara. She had directed him to Black Moclips. She had stood by while that Federation crew had been systematically reduced to members of the walking dead. She had watched it all as if in a trance, showing nothing of her feelings, as removed from the horror and degradation as if she were absent altogether.
Not once had she tried to make contact with Ahren after they had been brought aboard Black Moclips. Nothing had come of the words she’d whispered days earlier. Trust me. But why should he? What had she done, even once, to earn that trust? On reflection, the words now seemed to have been whispered to gain his confidence, to assure his com
pliance at a time when he still might have escaped. Now there was no chance. Aboard an airship, hundreds of feet off the ground, there was nowhere for him to go.
Not that he had any chance of getting beyond the door of his cell in the first place, he reminded himself bitterly, even if they were on the ground. Without the missing Elfstones or weapons of any sort to aid him, he had no hope of overpowering his captors.
Locked away as he was, he had not been witness to most of what had happened during the past few days. But he could tell from the slow and steady pace of the airship that they were still searching. Mostly, he could tell from the unchanging routine of his captors that they had found nothing.
He thought ceaselessly about escape. He imagined it over and over, thinking through the ways in which it could happen, the events that would precipitate it, the ways in which he would react, and the results that would follow. He pictured himself going through the motions—slipping through the door and down the passageway beyond, climbing the stairs to the decks above, crouching low against the mast, and waiting for a chance to gain the railing and go over the side. But in the end the mechanics always failed him and his chances never materialized.
One day, shortly after a storm had grounded them for almost twenty-four hours, he was on deck with Cree Bega when he caught sight of Ryer Ord Star standing at the bow. He was surprised to see her again, and for a moment he forgot himself and stared at her with undisguised longing and hope.
Cree Bega saw that look and recognized it. Touching Ahren lightly on his shoulder, he said, “Sspeakss to her, little Elvess. Tellss her of your feelingss.”
The words were an open invitation for him to do something foolish. The Mwellret was suspicious of the seer, as much so as Ahren was. Cree Bega had never been persuaded that her alliance with the Morgawr was genuine. He showed it in his attitude toward her, ignoring her for the most part, making no effort to consult her, even while the Morgawr did so. He was waiting, Ahren judged, for her to reveal her treachery.