«But Jair most of all,” she insisted, as if searching for a reason for this. Then she shook her head. «No, it’s not that. It’s something else, something besides what’s happened with Allanon and missing home and family and… That’s too easy, Rone. I can feel it, deep down within me. Something that…»
She trailed off, her dark eyes uncertain. She looked away. «I wish I had Jair here with me now — just for a few moments. I think he would know what was wrong. We’re so close that way…» She caught herself, then laughed softly. «Isn’t that silly? Wishing for something like that when it would probably mean nothing?»
«I miss him, too.» The highlander tried a quick smile. «At least he might take our minds off our own problems. He’d be out tracking Mord Wraiths or something.»
He stopped, realizing what he had said, then shrugged away his discomfort. «Anyway, there’s probably nothing wrong — not really. If there was, Allanon would sense it, wouldn’t he? After all, he seems to sense everything else.»
Brin was a long time responding. «I wonder if that is still so,” she said finally. «I wonder if he still can.»
They were silent then, neither looking back at the other as they stared fixedly into the dark and pondered their separate thoughts. As the minutes slipped away, the stillness of the mountain night seemed to press in about them, anxious to wrap them in the blanket of its stark, empty solitude. It seemed more certain with the passing of each moment that some sound must break the spell, the distant cry of a living creature, the small shifting of forest wood or mountain rock, or the rustle of leaf or insect’s buzz. But nothing did. There was only the quiet.
«I feel as if we are drifting,” Brin said suddenly.
Rone Leah shook his head. «We travel a fixed course, Brin. There is no drifting in that.»
She looked over at him. «I wish I had listened to you and had never come.»
The highlander stared at her in shock. The beautiful, dusky face stayed turned toward his own. In the girl’s black eyes there was a mix of weariness and doubt that bordered too closely on fear. For just an instant he had the unpleasant sensation that the girl who sat across from him was not Brin Ohmsford.
«I will protect you,” he said softly, urgently. «I promise.»
She smiled then, a faint, uneven smile that flickered and was gone. Gently her hands reached out to touch his own. «I believe that,” she whispered in reply.
But somewhere deep inside, she found herself wondering if he really could.
It was nearly midnight when Allanon returned to the campsite, stepping from the trees as silently as any shadow that moved within the Wolfsktaag. Moonlight slipped through the boughs overhead in thin streamers of silver and cast the whole of the night in eerie brightness. Wrapped within their blankets, Rone and Brin lay sleeping. Across the broad, forested sweep of the mountains, all was still. It was as if he alone kept watch.
The Druid paused several dozen feet from where his charges slept. He had walked to be alone, to think, and to ponder the certainty of what was to be. How unexpected the words of Bremen had been when the shade had spoken them — how strangely unexpected. They should not have been, of course. He had known what must be from the beginning. Yet there was always the feeling that somehow it might be changed. He was a Druid, and all things were possible.
His black eyes shifted across the mountain range. The yesterdays of his life were far away, the struggles he had weathered and the roads he had walked down to reach this moment. The tomorrows seemed distant, too, but that was an illusion, he knew. The tomorrows were right before him.
So much had been accomplished, he mused. But not enough. He turned and looked down at the sleeping Valegirl. She was the one upon whom everything would depend. She would not believe that, of course, or the truth about the power of the wishsong, for she chose to see the Elven magic in human terms, and the magic had never been human. He had shown her what it could be — just a glimpse of the limits to which it could be taken, for she could stand no more, he sensed. She was a child in her understanding of the magic and her coming of age would be difficult. More difficult, he knew, because he could not help her.
His long arms wrapped tightly within the black robes. Could he not help her? There it was again. He smiled darkly. That decision that he should never reveal all, only so much as he felt necessary — that decision that as it had been for Shea Ohmsford in a time long past, truth was best learned by the one who would use it. He could tell her, of course — or at least he could try to tell her. Her father would have said that he should tell her, for Wil Ohmsford had believed the same about the Elven girl Amberle. But the decision was not Wil Ohmsford’s to make. It was his own.
It was always his own.
A touch of bitterness twisted his mouth. Gone were the Councils at Paranor when many voices and many minds had joined in finding solutions to the problems of mankind. The Druids, the wise men of old, were no more. The histories and Paranor and all the hopes and dreams they had once inspired were lost, and only he remained.
All of the problems of mankind were now his, as they always had been his and would continue to be his for as long as he lived. That decision, too, had been his to make. He had made it when he had chosen to be what he was. But he was the last. Would there be another to make the same decision when he was gone?
Alone, uncertain, he stood at the edge of the forest shadows and looked down at Brin Ohmsford.
They rode east again at daybreak. It was another brilliant, sunfilled autumn day — warm, sweet, and alive with dreams of what could be. As night fled westward from the Wolfsktaag, the sun lifted out of the eastern horizon, slipping from the forestline in golden streamers that stretched and spread to the darkest corners of the land and chased the gloom before them. Even within the vast and empty solitude of the forbidden mountains there was a feeling of comfort and peace.
Brin thought of home. How beautiful the Vale would be on a day such as this one, she thought to herself as she walked her horse along the ridgeline and felt the sun’s warmth upon her face. Even here the colors of the season spread in riotous disarray against a backdrop of moss and groundcover still green with summer’s touch. Smells of life filled her nostrils and left her heady with their mix. In the Vale, the villagers would be awake now, about to begin their day’s work. Breakfast would be underway, the succulent aroma of the foods that were cooking escaping through windows thrown wide to catch the warmth of the day. Later, when the morning chores were done, the village families would gather for stories and games on an afternoon that too seldom came this time of year, anxious to take advantage of its ease and recapture for at least a brief time the memory of the summer gone.
I wish I were there to share it, she thought. I wish I were home.
The morning slipped quickly away, its passing lost in the warmth of the sun and the memories and the dreams. Ridgelines and mountain slopes came and went, and ahead the deep forests of the lowlands beyond the Wolfsktaag began to appear in brief glimpses through the humped peaks. By noon, the bulk of the range was behind them, and they were starting down.
It was shortly thereafter that they became aware of the Chard Rush.
It began as sound long before it could be seen — a deep, penetrating roar from beyond a wooded ridge that broke high and rugged against the sweep of the Eastland sky. Like an invisible wave, it surged toward them, a low and sullen rumble that shook the rutted earth with the force of its passing. Then the wind seemed to catch it, magnifying its intensity until the forest air was filled with thunder. The way forward leveled off, and the timber began to thicken. Atop the ridge head, freezing spray and a deep, rolling mist masked all but the faintest trace of distant blue from a noonday sky now lost far above the tangled branches of the forest trees with their damp, moss–grown bark and earth–colored leaves shimmering bright with wetness. Ahead, the trail sloped upward once more through clusters of rock and fallen timber that loomed spectrally out of the haze like frozen giants. And still there was only the sound, massive and deafening.
Yet slowly, as the trail wound on and the ridgeline grew close, the mist began to dissipate beneath the thrust of the wind as it raked down across the summit of the land, out of the Wolfsktaag to the lowlands east. The bowl of the valley opened before them, its wooded slopes dark and forbidding in the shadow of the mountain peaks beneath a line of ridges colored gold with sunlight. And here, at last, the source of the sound was discovered — a waterfall. An awesome, towering column of churning white water poured wildly through a break in the cliff rock and tumbled downward hundreds of feet through clouds of mist and spray that hung thick across the whole of the western end of the valley, downward into a great river that twisted and turned through rocks and trees until it was lost from view.
In a line, the three riders drew their mounts to a halt.
«The Chard Rush.» Allanon pointed to the falls.
