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The Healer said he could, although he informed the Druid that the cold house was some distance away from the healing center. “It’s not much of a night to be out in the weather,” he said.

“I’ll go alone,” Walker advised. “Just show me the way.”

The Druid wrapped himself in his damp cloak and went out the front door. Following the Healer’s instructions, he worked his way around the house, first along the porch and under the veranda, then under the eaves along one side, and slipped through the shadows in the rain. The forest began twenty yards from the back of the center, and the cold house was a hundred more beyond. Cowled head dipped against the rainfall and low-hanging branches, Walker made his way down a footpath widened from usage by the Healer and his attendants. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and whistling fiercely, a wind off the ocean blew steadily through the sodden limbs.

At the end of the footpath, the cold-house door opened into an embankment buttressed by huge boulders and covered thickly with sod and plants. Runoff cascaded down a sluice to one side and disappeared into a stream. The handle on the door was slippery and cold beneath the Druid’s fingers, and it took him a moment to release the catch.

Inside, the sounds of the storm faded into silence. There were torches set in brackets on the wall, and tinder with which to light them. Walker lit one in its bracket, then lit a second to carry. He looked around. The room was large and square and laid floor to ceiling with slabs of rock. Niches in the wall contained wooden sleds for the bodies, and runnels chiseled in the stone floor carried away excess moisture and body fluids. A metal-sheathed wood table sat in the center of the room, empty now, but used by the Healer for his examination of the dead. In the deep shadows, glinting like predators’ eyes, sharp instruments hung from pegs on the wall.

The room smelled of blood and death, and the Druid moved quickly to do what was needed and get out of there. The castaway was in the lower niche to the far left of the entry, and Walker slid the body free of its casing and turned down the covering sheet. The man’s face was bloodless and white in the torchlight, his body rigid and his skin waxy. Walker looked upon him without recognition. If he had been Kael Elessedil, he no longer looked so.

“Who were you?” Walker whispered to the dead man.

He jammed the torch he was carrying into the nearest wall bracket. Carefully, he placed his fingertips on the man’s chest, moving them slowly down his torso and then up again to his shoulders. He felt along the man’s throat and skull, probing gently, carefully. All around the man’s face he worked his fingers, searching.

“Tell me something,” he whispered.

Outside, a burst of thunder shook the earth, but the Druid did not look up from his work. He placed his fingers against the dead man’s ruined eyes, the unsupported lids giving beneath his touch, then probed slowly down to his nose and cheeks.

When he reached the man’s bloodless lips, he jerked away as if stung. Here, he mused silently, this was where the man’s life had been taken from him! The magic lingered still, and even two days later it was potent enough to burn. He brushed the lips quickly, testing. No force had been used. Death had come gently, but with a swift and certain rendering.

Walker stepped away. He knew the man’s identity now, knew it with certainty. What fragments remained of the magic used against him confirmed that he was Kael Elessedil.

Questions flooded Walker’s mind. Had the dead man’s killer probed his memory before giving him over to his death? He had to believe so. The killer would have looked there for what Walker had found in the map. A dark certainty began to grow in the turmoil of the Druid’s thinking. Only one person had the ability to do that. His enemy was one to whom he felt no hostility himself, but for whom he was anathema. He had feared for a long time that one day there must be a resolution of their antagonism, but he would have preferred that it wait awhile longer.

She, of course, would be most pleased and eager to have it happen now.

His eyes lifted to the darkness of the room, and for the first time he felt the cold. He must change his plans. Any other enemy but this one would not require the adjustments he was now forced to make. But a confrontation with her—a confrontation that must surely come—would be resolved only if he could blunt her rage by revealing a truth that had been hidden for many years. It pained him anew to think that he had not been present to prevent that truth from being concealed when it might have had a more immediate impact. But there was no help for it now; the events of the past were irreversible. What was given to him to do was to alter the future, and even that might be possible only at great cost.

He placed Kael Elessedil’s body back in its niche, extinguished the torches, and went out into the night once more. Darkness and rain closed about him as he threaded his way through the forest trees towards the center. He must act quickly. He had thought to go next in search of a ship and crew, but that would have to wait. There was a more pressing need, and he must see to it at once.

By midnight tomorrow, he must speak with the dead.

8

By sunrise of the following day, Walker had left Bracken Clell behind. Back aboard Obsidian and seated just behind Hunter Predd, he watched through a curtain of rain as the eastern sky slowly brightened to the color of hammered tin. The rains had lessened from the night before, but not abated altogether. The skies remained clouded and dark, pressing down upon a sodden earth with a mix of shadows and mist. Hunched within his travel cloak, cold and damp already, he retreated deep inside himself to help pass the time. There, he worked his way carefully through the details of the tasks he faced. He knew what was needed, but he found himself wishing again and again that there could be others with whom to share his responsibilities. That he felt so alone was disheartening. It lessened to almost nothing the margin of error he was permitted. He thought of how he had disdained the work of the Druids in his youth, of Allanon in particular, and he chided himself anew for his foolishness.

They flew through the morning with only a single stop to rest Obsidian and to give themselves a chance to eat and drink. By midday, they had crossed the Tirfing and left the Westland behind. The Duln Forests passed beneath, then the slender ribbon of the Rappahalladran. The rains began to lessen, the storm clouds to move south, and snatches of blue sky to appear on the horizon. They were flying east and slightly north now, the Wing Rider taking them along the southern edge of the Borderlands below Tyrsis and across the Rainbow Lake. Lunch was consumed on the lake’s western shores, the day clear and bright by then, their clothing beginning to warm in the sun, their interest in their mission beginning to sharpen once more.

“The castaway, Walker—was he Kael Elessedil?” Hunter Predd asked as they finished the last of the cold grouse Dorne had provided them on leaving that morning.

Walker nodded. “He was. I couldn’t tell at first. I haven’t seen him since he was not much more than a boy and don’t remember him all that well in any case. Even if I had remembered how he looked then, it would have been difficult to recognize him after what he had been through. But there were other signs, scattered traces, that revealed his identity.”

“He didn’t die in his sleep, did he? Not of natural causes. Someone helped end his life.”

The Druid paused. “Someone did. How did you know that?”

The Wing Rider shrugged, his whipcord-tough body lengthening as he stretched. “Dorne is a talented Healer and a careful man. The castaway had survived days at sea before I found him. He should have survived a couple more in a Healer’s bed.” He glanced at Walker questioningly. “Our assassins’ employer?”

The Druid nodded. “I would guess so. Magic was used to kill the man, to steal his life. Not so different from what was done to those men sent to kill Allardon Elessedil.”