“Nothing to ssay, Prince of Elvess?” Cree Bega mocked, his face bent close, the rank smell of him strong in Ahren’s nostrils. “Wassn’t sshe your friend? Issn’t sshe sstill?”
Ahren understood the nature of the questions. He hated himself for his uncertainty, but he stayed silent, bearing the weight of the Mwellret’s taunts and his own doubts. Anything he did would reveal truths that would hurt either Ryer or himself. If she responded to him, it would suggest a hidden alliance. If she did not, he would be made even more painfully aware of how things between them had changed. He was too vulnerable for anything so raw just now. It would be smarter to wait.
He turned away. “You talk to her,” he muttered.
Another opportunity arose a day later, when he was summoned to the Morgawr’s quarters and, on entering, found the seer standing beside him. She had that distant look again, her face empty of expression, as if she was somewhere else entirely in spirit and only her body was present. The Morgawr asked him again about the members of the company of the Jerle Shannara—how many had set out, whom they were, where he had last seen them, what their relationship had been to the Druid. He asked again for a head count—how many were still alive. He had asked the questions before, and Ahren gave him the same answers. It was not hard to do so. Dissembling was not necessary. For the most part, he knew less than the Morgawr. Even about Bek, the Morgawr seemed to know as much as Ahren did. He had read the traces of magic left floating on the air in the catacombs of Castledown and knew that Bek had come and gone. He knew that Ahren’s friend was still out there, running from the warlock, hiding his sister.
What little the Morgawr hadn’t divined, Ryer Ord Star had told him. She had told him everything.
At times while the Morgawr interrogated Ahren, she seemed to come back from wherever she had gone. Her eyes would shift focus, and her hands twitched at her sides. She would become aware of her surroundings, but only momentarily and then she was gone again. The Morgawr did not seem bothered by this, although it caused Ahren no small amount of discomfort. Why wasn’t the warlock irritated by her inattention to what he was saying? Why didn’t he suspect that she was deliberately isolating herself?
It took Ahren a long time to realize what was really happening. She wasn’t distancing herself at all. She was very much a part of the conversation, but in a way the Elven Prince hadn’t recognized. She was hearing his words and using them to feed her talent. She was turning those words into images of his friends, trying to project visions of them. She was using him in an attempt to track them down.
He was so stunned by the revelation that for a moment he just stopped talking in midsentence and stared at her. The silence distracted her where his words had not. For a moment, she came back from where her visions had taken her, and she stared back at him.
“Don’t do this,” he told her softly, unable to conceal his disappointment.
She did not reply, but he could read the anguish in her eyes. The Morgawr immediately ordered him taken back to his cell, an angry and impatient dismissal. He saw his real use then—not as a hostage for negotiation or as a puppet King. Those were uses that could wait. The warlock’s needs were more immediate. Ahren would serve him better as a catalyst for Ryer Ord Star’s visions, as a trigger that would allow her to help find the Ilse Witch and the others who eluded him. Unsuspecting, naive, the boy would help without even realizing he was doing so.
Except he had realized.
Ahren was locked away once more, closed off in the storeroom and left to celebrate in fierce solitude his small victory. He had foiled the Morgawr’s attempt to use him. He sat with his back against the wall of the airship and smiled into his prison.
Yet his elation faded quickly. His victory was a hollow one. Reality surfaced and crowded out wishful thinking. He was still a prisoner with no hope. His friends were still scattered or dead. He was still stranded in a dangerous, faraway land.
Worst of all, Ryer Ord Star had revealed herself to be his enemy.
In the Commander’s quarters, the Morgawr paced with the restless intensity of a caged animal. Ryer Ord Star felt the tension radiating from him in dark waves of displeasure. It was unusual for him to display such emotion openly, but his patience with the situation was growing dangerously thin.
“He knows what we are trying to do. Clever boy.”
She did not respond. Her thoughts were of Ahren’s words and the way he had looked at her. She still heard the anguish in his voice and saw the disappointment in his eyes. Understandably confused and misguided, he had judged her wrongly, and she could do nothing to explain herself. If the situation had been bad before, it was spiraling out of control now.
The Morgawr stopped in front of the door, his back to her. “He has become useless to me.”
She stiffened, her mind racing. “I don’t need his cooperation.”
“He will lie. He will dissemble. He will throw in enough waste that it will color anything good. I can’t trust him anymore.” He turned around slowly. “Nor am I sure about you, little seer.”
She met his gaze and held it, letting him look into her eyes. If he believed she hid something, the game was over and he would kill her now.
“I’ve given you nothing but the truth,” she said.
His dark, reptilian face showed nothing of what he was thinking, but his eyes were dangerous. “Then tell me what you have learned just now.”
She knew he was testing her, offering her a chance to demonstrate that she was still useful. Ahren had been right about the game they were playing. She was feeding off his words and emotions in response to the Morgawr’s questions in an effort to trigger a vision that would reveal something about the missing members of the company of the Jerle Shannara. He had been wrong about her intentions, but there was no way she could tell him that. The Morgawr must believe she could help him find the Ilse Witch. He must not begin to doubt that she was his willing ally in his search, or all of her plans to help Walker would fall apart.
She took a small step toward the warlock, a conscious act of defiance, a gesture that nearly took her breath away with the effort it cost her. “I saw the Ilse Witch and her brother surrounded by mountains. They were not alone. There were others with them, but their faces were hidden in shadow. They were walking. I did not see it, but I sensed an airship somewhere close. There were cliffs filled with Shrike nests. One of those cliffs looked like a spear with its tip broken off, sharp edged and thrust skyward. There was the smell of the ocean and the sound of waves breaking on the shore.”
She stopped talking and waited, her eyes locked on his. She was telling him of a vision Ahren’s words had triggered, but twisting the details just enough to keep him from finding what he sought.
She held her breath. If he could read the deception in her eyes and find in its shadings the truth of things, she was dead.
He studied her for a long time without moving or speaking, a stone face wrapped in cloak and shadow.
“They are on the coast?” he asked finally, his voice empty of expression.
She nodded. “The vision suggests so. But the vision is not always what I think it is.”
His smile chilled her. “Things seldom are, little seer.”
“What matters is that Ahren Elessedil’s words generated these images,” she insisted. “Without them, I would have nothing.”
“In which case, I would have no further need of either of you, would I?” he asked. One hand lifted and gestured toward her almost languidly. “Or need of either of you if he can no longer be trusted to speak the truth, isn’t that so?”
The echo of his words hung in the air, an indictment she knew she must refute. “I do not need him to speak the truth in order to interpret my visions,” she said.
It was a lie, but it was all she had. She spoke it with conviction and held the warlock’s dark gaze even when she could feel the harm he intended her penetrating through to her soul.
After a long moment, the Morgawr shrugged. “Then we must
let him live a little longer. We must give him another chance.”
He said it convincingly, but she could tell he was lying. He had made up his mind about Ahren as surely as Ahren had made up his mind about her. The Morgawr no longer believed in either of them, she suspected, but particularly in the Elven Prince. He might try using Ahren once more, but then he would surely get rid of him. He had neither time nor patience for recalcitrant prisoners. What he demanded of this land, of its secrets and magic, lay elsewhere. His disenchantment with Ahren would grow, and eventually it would devour them both.
Dismissed from his presence without the need for words, she left him and went back on deck. She climbed the stairs at the end of the companionway and walked forward to the bow. With her hands grasping the railing to steady herself, she stared at the horizon, at the vast sweep of mountains and forests, at banks of broken clouds and bands of sunlight. The day was sliding toward nightfall, the light beginning to fade west, the dark to rise east.
She closed her eyes when her picture of the world was clear in her mind, and she let her thoughts drift. She must do something to save the Elven Prince. She had not believed it would be necessary to act so soon, but it now seemed unavoidable. That she was committed to Walker’s plan for the Morgawr did not require committing Ahren, as well. His destiny lay elsewhere, beyond this country and its treacheries, home in the Four Lands, where his blood heritage would serve a different purpose. She had caught a glimmer of it in the visions she had shared with Walker. She knew it from what the Druid had said as he lay dying. She could feel it in her heart.
Just as she could feel with unmistakable certainty the fate that awaited her.
She breathed slowly and deeply to calm herself, to muster acceptance of what she knew she must do. Walker needed her to mislead the Morgawr, to slow him in his hunt, to buy time for Grianne Ohmsford. It was not something the Druid had asked lightly; it was something he had asked out of desperate need and a faith in her abilities. She felt small and frail in the face of such expectations, a child in a girl’s body, her womanhood yet so far away that she could not imagine it. Her seer’s mind did not allow for growing up in the ways of other women; it was her mind that was old. Yet she was capable and determined. She was the Druid’s right hand, and he was always with her, lending his strength.
She held that knowledge to her like a talisman as she made her plans.
When nightfall descended, she acted on them.
She waited until all of the Mwellrets were sleeping, save the watch and the helmsman. Black Moclips sailed through the night skies at a slow, languorous pace, tracking the edge of the coastline north and east as Ryer Ord Star slipped from her makeshift bed in the lee of the aft decking and made her way forward. Aden Kett and his crew stood at their stations, dead eyes staring. She glanced at them as she passed, but her gaze did not linger. It was dangerous to look too closely at your own fate.
The airship rocked gently in the cradle of night winds blowing out of the west. The chill brought by the storms had not dissipated, and her breath clouded faintly. Below where they flew, where the tips of the mountain peaks brushed the clouds, snow blanketed the barren slopes. The warmth that had greeted them on their arrival into this land was gone, chased inland by some aberration linked to the demise of Antrax. That science had found a way to control the weather seemed incredible to her, but she knew that in the age before the Great Wars there had been many marvelous achievements that had since disappeared from the world. Yet magic had replaced science in the Four Lands. It made her wonder sometimes if the demise of science was for the better or worse. It made her wonder if the place of seers in the world had any real value.
She reached the open hatchway leading down into the storerooms and descended in shadowy silence, listening for the sounds of the guard who would be on watch below. Walker would not approve of what she was doing. He would have tried to stop her if he had been able. He would have counseled her to remain safe and concentrate on the task he had given her. But Walker saw things through the eyes of a man seeking to achieve in death what he had failed to achieve in life. He was a shade, and his reach beyond the veil was limited. He might know of the Ilse Witch and her role in the destiny of the Four Lands, of the reasons she must escape the Morgawr, and of the path she must take to come back from the place to which her troubled mind had sent her. But Ryer Ord Star only knew that time was slipping away.
The passageway belowdecks was shadowed, but she made her way easily through its gloom. She heard snores ahead, and she knew the Mwellret watch was sleeping. The potion she had slipped into his evening ale ration earlier had drugged him as thoroughly as anything this side of death. It had not been all that hard to accomplish. The danger lay in another of the rets discovering the guard to be asleep before she could reach Ahren.
At the door to his storeroom jail, she took possession of the keys from the sleeping ret and released the lock, all the while listening for the sounds of those who would put an end to her undertaking. She said nothing as she opened the door and slipped inside, a wraithlike presence. Ahren rose to face her, hesitating as he realized who it was, not certain what to make of her appearance. He kept silent, though—harking to the finger she put to her lips and her furtive movements as she came over to release him from his chains. Even in the dim cabin light, she could see the uncertainty and suspicion in his eyes, but there could be no mistaking her actions. Without attempting to intervene, he let her free him and followed her without argument when she was ready to leave, stepping over the sleeping guard where he was sprawled across the passageway, creeping behind her as she moved back toward the stairs leading up. Black Moclips rocked slowly, a cradle for sleeping men and a drowsy watch. The only sounds were those of the ship, the small, familiar stretchings and tightenings of seams and caulk.
They went up the stairs and emerged behind the helmsman, flattening themselves against the decking, scooting along the shadow of the aft rise and across to the rail. Wordlessly, she slipped over the side and crossed down the narrow gangway to the starboard pontoon, sliding swiftly to the furthest aft fighting port, a six-foot-deep compartment stacked with pieces of sail and sections of cross beam.
Cloaked in deep shadows, she moved to where the pontoon curved upward to form the aft starboard battering ram. She felt along the inside of the structure and released a wooden latch hidden in the surface of the hull. Instantly, a panel dropped down on concealed hinges. She reached inside and drew out a framework of flexible poles to which sections of lightweight canvas had been attached.
She passed the framework and canvas forward to Ahren, where he crouched at the front of the fighting port, then moved up beside him.
“This is called a single wing,” she whispered, her head bent close to his, her long silvery hair brushing the side of his face. “It is a sort of kite, built to fly one man off a failing airship. Redden Alt Mer had it hidden in the hull for emergencies.” She reached up impulsively and touched his cheek.
“You never intended to help him, did you?” the Elven Prince whispered back, relief and happiness reflected in his voice.
“I had to save your life and mine, as well. That meant giving your identity away. He would have killed you otherwise.” She took a deep breath. “He intends to kill you now. He thinks you’re of no further use. I can’t protect you anymore. You have to get off the ship tonight.”
He shook his head at once, gripping her arm. “Not without you. I won’t go without you.”
He said it with such vehemence, with such desperate insistence, that it made her want to cry. He had doubted her and was trying to make up for it in the only way he knew. If it was called for, he would give up his life for hers.
“It isn’t time for me to go yet,” she said. “I made a promise to Walker to lead the Morgawr astray in his hunt. He thinks I intend to help, but I give him only just enough to keep him believing so. I’ll come later.”
She saw the uncertainty in his eyes and gestured sharply toward the single wing. “Qu
it arguing with me! Take this and go. Now! Unfold it, tie the harness in place, and lean out from the side with the wings extended. Use the bar and straps at the ends to steer. It isn’t hard. Here, I’ll help.”
He shook his head, his eyes wondering. “How did you know about this?”
“Walker told me.” She began undoing the straps that secured the framework, shaking it loose. “He learned about it from Big Red. The rets don’t know of it. There, it’s ready. Climb up on the edge of the pontoon and strap yourself in!”
He did as she instructed, still clearly dazed by what was happening, not yet able to think it through completely enough to see its flaws. She just had to get him off the ship and into the air, and then it would be too late. Things would be decided, insofar as she was able to make it so. That was as much as she could manage.
“You should come now,” he argued, still trying to find a way to take her with him.
She shook her head. “No. Later. Fly inland from the coast when you get further north. Look for a rain forest in the heart of the mountains. That’s where the others are, on a cliff overlooking it. My visions showed them to me.”
He shrugged into the shoulder harness, and she cinched it tight across his back. She opened the wing frame so that it would catch the wind and showed him the steering bar and control straps. She glanced over her shoulder every few seconds toward the deck above, but the Mwellrets were not yet looking her way.
“Ryer,” he began, turning toward her once more.
“Here,” she said, reaching into her thin robes and extracting a pouch. She shoved it into his tunic, deep down inside so that it was snugged away. “The Elfstones,” she whispered.
He stared at her in disbelief. “But how could you have—”
“Go!” she hissed, shoving him off the side of the pontoon and into space.
She watched the wind catch the canvas and draw the framework taut. She watched the single wing soar out into the darkness. She caught a quick glimpse of the Elven Prince’s wondering face, saw the man he had become eclipse the boy she had begun her journey with, and then he was gone.