Morgawr

  “Maybe not.”

  “He knows. He would have moved on by now if he didn’t. He searched the entire island and didn’t find us, but he knows we’re here. He senses it somehow. Tomorrow, he’ll search these ruins.”

  They had been in hiding all day, ever since Redden Alt Mer had taken the Jerle Shannara inside the castle walls. It was a bold gamble, but one that the Rover Captain thought would work. If the creature that lived in the ruins had not bothered with them when they had searched for the key, it might not bother with them now, even if they set the Jerle Shannara down inside one of its numerous courtyards. So long as they did not try to take anything out, it might tolerate their presence long enough for them to deceive the Morgawr.

  There was time to try his plan out before the warlock reached them, and so they did. They had been able to fly the Jerle Shannara into the ruins and set her down in a deeply shadowed cluster of walls and towers. Once anchored, they had stripped her of sails and masts and rigging, leaving her decks bare. When that was done, they had covered her over with rocks and dirt and grasses until from the air, astride a Roc, they could not see her at all and would not have known she was there.

  Alt Mer knew they were taking a big chance. If they were discovered, they would have no chance of getting aloft with the masts and rigging and sails dismantled. They would be trapped and most probably killed or captured. But the Rover Captain was counting on something else, as well. When they had tried to penetrate the ruins on their way to Parkasia, the castle’s spirit dweller had used its magic to turn them aside. Each new foray took them down blind alleys and dead ends and eventually back outside. If that magic was still in place, it ought to work in the same way against the Morgawr and his rets. When they tried to come inside, they would be led astray and never get past the perimeter walls.

  With luck, it should not come to that. With luck, the Morgawr should determine after a careful sweep of the island that his quarry had eluded him. There should be no reason to search the ruins from the ground if nothing was visible from the air.

  But Bek knew it wasn’t going to work out that way. Their concealment had been perfect, but the Morgawr’s instincts were telling him that they were still on the island. They were whispering to him that he was missing something, and it wouldn’t take him long to determine what it was. He would decide that they must be hiding in the ruins. Tomorrow, he would search them. It might not yield him anything, but if it did, the company of the Jerle Shannara was finished.

  With Rue still pressing close, he leaned back against the cool stone of the old wall. Black Moclips had not returned, and the sky was left bright and open in its wake, a trail of glittering stars shining down through a wash of moonlight. The others of the company were inside the Jerle Shannara, kept there by Redden Alt Mer’s strict order not to venture out for any reason. Bek was the sole exception, because an outside perspective was needed in case of an attempted ground approach and Bek was best able to conceal himself from the spirit dweller, should the need arise. Rue was with him because it was understood that wherever Bek went, she went, as well. They had been out there, hiding in the shadows, since early morning. It was time to go inside and get some sleep.

  But Bek’s mind was running too fast and too hard to permit him to sleep, his thoughts skipping from consideration of one obstacle to the next, from one concern to another, everything tied up with the dangerous situation facing them and what they might try to do to avoid it.

  One concern, in particular, outstripped the rest.

  He bent close to Rue. “I don’t know what to do about Grianne.” His lips pressed against her ear, his words a hushed whisper. Voices carried in the empty silence of ruins such as these, beyond even walls of mortar and stone. “If the Morgawr comes for her, she will have no way to protect herself. She will be helpless.”

  Rue leaned her head against him, her hair as soft as spiderwebbing. “Do you want to try to hide her somewhere besides here?” she whispered back.

  “No. He’ll find her wherever we put her. I have to wake her up.”

  “You’ve been trying that for weeks, Bek, and it hasn’t worked. What can you do that you haven’t already done?”

  He kissed her hair and put his arms around her. “Find out what it is that keeps her in hiding. Find out what it will take to bring her out.”

  He could sense her smile even in the darkness. “That isn’t a new plan. That’s an old one.”

  He nodded, touching her knee in soft reproach. “I know. But suppose we could figure out what it would take to wake her. We’ve tried everything we could think of, both of us. But we keep trying in a general way, a kind of blanket approach to bringing her out of her sleep. Walker said she wouldn’t come back to us until she found a way to forgive herself for the worst of her wrongs. I think that’s the key. We have to figure out what that wrong is.”

  She lifted her head, her red hair falling back from her face. “How can you possibly do that? She has hundreds of things to forgive herself for. How can you pick out one?”

  “Walker said it was the one she believed to be the worst.” He paused, thinking. “What would that be? What would she see as her worst wrong? Killing someone? She’s killed lots of people. Which one would matter more than the others?”

  Rue furrowed her smooth brow. “Maybe this was something she did when she first became the witch, when she was still young, something that goes to the heart of everything she’s done since.”

  He stared at her for a long time, remembering his dream of the other night. It had been nagging at him ever since, reduced to a vague image, the details faded. It hovered now, just beyond his grasp. He could practically reach out and touch it.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I think there’s something in what you just said that might help, something about her childhood.” He stared at her some more. “I have to go down and sit with her. Maybe looking at her, being in the same room for a while, will help.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  When he hesitated, she reached out and cupped his face in her hands. “Go by yourself, Bek. Maybe you need to be alone. I’ll come later, if you need me to.”

  She kissed him hard, then slipped from his side and disappeared back into the bowels of the airship. He waited only a moment more, still wrestling with his confusion, then followed her inside.

  There was no reason to think that this night would be different from any other, but Bek was convinced by feelings he could not explain that it might be. Nothing he had tried—and he had tried everything—had gotten so much as a blink out of Grianne from the moment he had found her kneeling with the bloodied Sword of Shannara grasped in her hands. Only when he broke down in frustration and cried that one time, when he wasn’t even trying to make her respond, had she come out of her catatonia to speak with him. She had done so for reasons he had never been able to figure out, but tonight, he thought, he must. The secret to everything lay in connecting the reason for that singular awakening with the wrong she had committed somewhere in her past that she regarded as unforgivable.

  He told Redden Alt Mer what he was going to do and suggested someone else might want to take up watch from one of the taller towers. Alt Mer said he would handle it himself, wished Bek good luck, and went over the side of the airship. Bek stood alone on the empty deck, thinking that perhaps he should ask Rue to help him after all. But he knew he would be doing so only as a way of gaining reassurance that he had done everything he could, should things not work out yet again. It was not right to use her that way, and he abandoned the idea at once. If he failed this night, he wanted it to be on his head alone.

  He went down to the Captain’s quarters and slipped through the doorway. Quentin Leah lay asleep in his bed, his breathing deep and even, his face turned away from the single candle that burned nearby. The windows were shuttered and curtained so that no light or sound could escape, and the air in the room was close and stale. Bek wanted to blow out the candle and
open the shutters, but he knew that would be unwise.

  Instead, he walked over to his sister. She was lying on her pallet with her knees drawn up and her eyes open and staring. She wore her dark robe, but a light blanket had been laid over her, as well. Rue had brushed her hair earlier that day, and the dark strands glimmered in the candlelight like threads of silk. Her fingers were knotted together, and her mouth was twisted with what might have been a response to a deep-seated regret or troublesome dream.

  Bek raised her to a sitting position, placed her against the bulkhead, and seated himself across from her. He stared at her without doing anything more, trying to think through what he knew, trying to decide what to do next. He had to break down the protective shell in which she had sealed herself, but to do that he had to know what she was protecting herself from.

  He tried to envision it and failed. On the surface, she looked to be barely more than a child, but beneath she was iron hard and remorseless. That didn’t just disappear, even after a confrontation with the truth-inducing magic of the Sword of Shannara. Besides, what single act set itself apart from any other? What monstrous wrong could she not bring herself to face after perpetrating so many?

  He sat staring at her much in the same way that she was staring at him, neither of them really seeing the other, both of them off in other places. Bek shifted his thinking to Grianne’s early years, when she was first taken from her home and placed in the hands of the Morgawr. Could something have happened then, as Rue had suggested, something so awful she could not forgive herself for it? Was there something he didn’t know about and would have to guess at?

  Suddenly, it occurred to him that he might be thinking about this in the wrong way. Maybe it wasn’t something she had done, but something she had failed to do. Maybe it wasn’t an act, but an omission that haunted her. It was just as possible that what she couldn’t forgive herself for was something she believed she should have done and hadn’t.

  He repeated to himself what she said when she woke on the night she had saved Quentin’s life—about how Bek shouldn’t cry, how she was there for him, how she would look after him again, his big sister.

  But she had said something else, too. She had said she would never leave him again, that she was sorry for doing so. She had cried and repeated several times, “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

  He thought he saw it then, the failure for which she had never been able to forgive herself. A child of only six, she had hidden him in the basement, choosing to try to save his life over those of her parents. She had concealed him in the cellar, listening to her parents die as she did so. She had left him there and set out to find help, but she had never gotten beyond her own yard. She had been kidnapped and whisked away, then deceived so that she would think he was dead, too.

  She had never gone back for him, never returned to find out if what she had been told was the truth. At first, it hadn’t mattered, because she was in the thrall of the Morgawr and certain of his explanation of her rescue. But over the years, her certainty had gradually eroded, until slowly she had begun to doubt. It was why she had been so intrigued by Bek’s story about who he was when they had encountered each other for the first time in the forest that night after the attack in the ruins. It was why she hadn’t killed him when she almost certainly would have otherwise. His words and his looks and his magic disturbed her. She was troubled by the possibility that he might be who he said he was and that everything she had believed about him was wrong.

  Which would mean that she had left him to die when she should have gone back to save him.

  It was a failure for which he would never blame her, but for which she might well blame herself. She had failed her parents and then failed him, as well. She had thrown away her life for a handful of lies and a misplaced need for vengeance.

  He was so startled by the idea that it could be something as simple as this that for a moment he could not believe it was possible. Or that it could be something so impossibly wrongheaded. But she did not think as he did, or even as others did. She had come through the scouring magic of the Sword of Shannara to be reborn into the world, tempered by fire he could barely imagine, by truths so vast and inexorable that they would destroy a weaker person. She had survived because of who she was, but had become more damaged, too.

  What should he do?

  He was frightened that he might be wrong, and if he was, he had no idea of where else to look. But fear had no place in what was needed, and he had no patience with its weakness. He had to try using his new insight to break down her defenses. He had to find out if he was right.

  His choices were simple. He could call on the magic of the wishsong or he could speak to her in his normal voice. He chose the latter. He moved closer to her, putting his face right in front of hers, his hands clasped loosely about her slender neck, tangling in her thick, dark hair.

  “Listen to me,” he whispered to her. “Grianne, listen to what I have to say to you. You can hear me. You can hear every word. I love you, Grianne. I never stopped loving you, not once, not even after I found out who you were. It isn’t your fault, what was done to you. You can come home, now. You can come home to me. That’s where your home is—with me. Your brother, Bek.”

  He waited a moment, searching her empty eyes. “You hid me from the Morgawr and his Mwellrets, Grianne, even without knowing who they were. You saved my life. I know you wanted to come back for me, that you wanted to bring help for me and for our parents. But you couldn’t do that. There wasn’t any way for you to return. There wasn’t enough time, even if the Morgawr hadn’t tricked you. But even though you couldn’t come back, you saved me. Just by hiding me so that Truls Rohk could find me and take me to Walker, you saved me. I’m alive because of you.”

  He paused. Had he felt her shiver? “Grianne, I forgive you for leaving me, for not coming back, for not discovering that I was still alive. I forgive you for all of that, for everything you might have done and failed to do. You have to forgive yourself, as well. You have to stop hiding from what happened all those years ago. It isn’t a truth that needs hiding from. It is a truth that needs facing up to. I need you back with me, not somewhere far away. By hiding from me, you are leaving me again. Don’t do that, Grianne. Don’t go away again. Come back to me as you promised you would.”

  She was trembling suddenly, but her gaze remained fixed and staring, her eyes as blank as forest lakes at night. He kept holding her, waiting for her to do something more. Keep talking, he told himself. This is the way to reach her.

  Instead, he began to sing, calling up the magic of the wishsong almost without realizing he was doing so, singing now the words he had only spoken before. It was an impulsive act, an instinctive response to his need to connect with her. He was so close, right on the verge of breaking through. He could feel the shell in which she had encased herself beginning to crack. She was there, right inside, desperate to reach him.

  So he turned to the language they both understood best, the language peculiar to them alone. The music flowed out of him, infused with his magic, sweet and soft and filled with yearning. He gave himself over to it in the way that music requires, lost in its rhythm, in its flow, in its transcendence of the here and now. He took himself away from where he was and took her with him, back in time to a life he had barely known and she had forgotten, back to a world they had both lost. He sang of it as he would have wanted it to be, all the while telling her he forgave her for leaving that world, for abandoning him, for losing herself in a labyrinth of treacheries and lies and hatred and monstrous acts from which it might seem there could be no redemption. He sang of it as a way of healing, so that she might find in the words and music the balm she required to accept the harshness of the truth about her life and know that as bad as it was, it was nevertheless all right, that forgiveness came to everyone.

  He had no idea how long he sang, only that he did so without thinking of what he was attempting or even of what was needed. He sang because the music gave him a relea
se for his own confused, tangled emotions. Yet the effect was the same. He was aware of her small shivers turning to trembles, of her head snapping up and her eyes beginning to focus, of a sound rising from her throat that approached a primal howl. He could sense the walls she had constructed crumble and feel her world shift.

  Then she seized him in such a powerful embrace it did not seem possible that a girl so slender could manage it. She pressed him against her so hard that he could barely breathe, crying softly into his shoulder and saying, “It’s all right, Bek, I’m here for you, I’m here.”

  He stopped singing then and hugged her back, and in the ensuing silence he closed his eyes and mouthed a single word.

  Stay.

  Twenty-nine

  She had been hiding in the darkest place she could find, but in the blackness that surrounded her were the things that hunted her. She did not know what they were, but she knew she must not look at them too closely. They were dangerous, and if they caught even the smallest glimpse of her eyes, they would fall on her like wolves. So she stayed perfectly still and did not look at them, hoping they would go away.

  But they refused to leave, and she found herself trapped with no chance to escape. She was six years old, and in her mind she saw the things in the darkness as black-cloaked monsters. They had pursued her for a long time, tracking her with such persistence that she knew they would never stop. She thought that if she could manage to get past them and find her way home to her parents and brother, she would be safe again. But they would not let her go.

  She could remember her home clearly. She could see its rooms and halls in her mind. It hadn’t been very large, but it had felt warm and safe. Her parents had loved and cared for her, and her little brother had depended on her to look after him. But she had failed them all. She had run away from them, fled her home because the black things were coming for her and she knew that if she stayed, she would die. Her flight was swift and mindless, and it took her away from everything she knew—here, to this place of empty blackness where she knew nothing.