A world of Federation oppression and Shadowen fear, a world in which, like Morrowindl, use of magic had somehow gone awry.
Wren’s smile was slow, bitter, and ironic.
She was struck suddenly by the similarities between the two, the island and the mainland, Morrowindl and the Four Lands—different, yet afflicted with the same sort of madness. Both worlds were plagued with creatures that fed on destruction; both were beset with a sickness that turned the earth and the things that lived upon it foul. What was Morrowindl if not the Four Lands in an advanced state of decay? She wondered suddenly if the two were somehow connected, if the demons and the Shadowen might have some common origin. She wondered again at the secrets that the Elves were keeping from her of what had happened on Morrowindl years ago.
And again she asked herself, What am I doing here? Why did Allanon send me to bring the Elves hack into the Four Lands? What is it that they can do that will make a difference, and how will any of us ever discover what that something is?
She finished eating and sat for a time with her grandmother, studying the other’s face in the fading light, trying to find in the ravaged features some new trace of her mother, of the vision she had claimed from that now long-ago, distant dream when her mother had pleaded, Remember me Remember me Such a fragile thing, her memory, and it was all that she had of either parent, all that remained of her childhood. As she sat there with her grandmother’s head cradled in her lap, she contemplated asking Garth to tell her something more of what had been, though she no longer had any real expectation that there was anything else to be told, knowing only that she was empty and alone and in need of something to cling to. But Garth stood watch, too far away to summon without disturbing the others and too distanced from her to be of any real comfort, and she turned instead to the familiar touch of the Elfstones within their leather pouch, running the tips of her fingers over their hard, smooth surfaces, rolling the Stones idly beneath the fabric of her tunic. They were her mother’s legacy to her and her grandmother’s trust, and despite her misgivings as to their purpose in her life she could not give them up. Not here, not now, not until she was free of the nightmare into which she had so willingly journeyed.
I chose this, she whispered to herself, the words bitter and harsh. I came because I wanted to.
To learn the truth, to discover who and what she was, to bring past and future together once and for all.
And what do I know of any of that? What do I understand?
Eowen came to sit next to her, and she realized how tired she had grown. She gave her grandmother over to the red-haired seer and crept silently away to her own bed. Wrapped in her blankets, she lay staring out into the impenetrable night, the swamp a maze that would swallow them all and care nothing for what it had done, the world a blanket of indifference and deceit, of dangers as numerous as the shadows gathered about, and of sudden death and the taunting ghosts of what might have been. She found herself thinking of the years she had trained with Garth, of what he had taught her, of what she had learned. She would need all of it if she were to survive, she knew. She would need everything she could summon of strength, experience, training and resolve, and she would need more than a little luck.
And one thing more.
Her fingers brushed against the Elfstones once more and fell away as if burned. Their power was hers to summon and command whenever she chose. Twice now she had called upon them to save her. Both times she had done so either out of ignorance or desperation. But if she used them again, she sensed, if she employed them a third time now that she knew the magic was there and understood what wielding it meant, she risked giving up everything she was and becoming something else entirely. Nothing would ever be the same for her again, she cautioned herself. Nothing.
Yet, as she considered the failure of strength, experience, training, and resolve to come to her aid, as she lamented the apparent absence of any luck, it seemed that the power of the Stones was all that was left to her, the only resource that remained.
She turned her head into the blankets and fell asleep in a spider’s web of doubt.
Chapter Seventeen
Wren dreamed, and her dreams were of Ohmsfords come and gone, a kaleidoscopic, fragmented rush of images that exploded out of memory. They careened into her like an avalanche and swept her away, tossed and tumbled in a slide that would not end. A spectator with no voice, she watched the history of her ancestors take shape in bits and flashes of time, saw events unfold that she had never seen but only heard described, the legends of the past carried forward in the words of the stories Par and Coll Ohmsford told.
Then she was awake, sitting bolt upright, startled from her sleep with a suddenness that was frightening. Faun, curled at her throat, skittered hurriedly away. She stared into blackness, listening to the sound of her heartbeat in her throat, to the rush of her breathing. All around her, the others of the little company slept, save whoever among them kept guard, a dim, faceless shape at the edge of their camp.
What was it? she thought wildly. What was it that I saw?
For something in her dreams had brought her awake, something so unnerving, so unexpected, that sleep was no longer possible.
What?
The memory, when it came, was shocking and abrupt. Her hand flew at once to the small leather bag tucked within her tunic.
The Elfstones!
In her dreams of Ohmsford ancestors, she had caught a singular glimpse of Shea and Flick, one brief image out of many, one story out of all those told about the search for the Sword of Shannara. In that image, the brothers were lost with Menion Leah in the lowlands of Clete at the start of their journey toward Culhaven. No amount of skill or woodlore seemed able to help them, and they might have died there if Shea, in desperation, had not discovered that he possessed the ability to invoke the power of the Elfstones given him by the Druid Allanon—the same Elfstones she carried now. In that image, dredged up by her dreams out of a storehouse of tales only barely remembered, she uncovered a truth she had forgotten—that the magic could do more than protect, it could also seek. It could show the holder a way out of the darkest maze,—it could help the lost be found again.
She bit her lip hard against the sharp intake of breath that caught in her throat. She had known once, of course—all of them had, all of the Ohmsford children. Par had sung the story to her when she was little. But it had been so long ago.
The Elfstones.
She sat frozen within the covering of her blankets, stunned by her revelation. She had possessed the power all along to get them free of Eden’s Murk. The Elfstones, if she chose to invoke the magic, would show the way clear. Had she truly forgotten? she wondered in disbelief. Or had she simply blocked the truth away, determined that she would not be made to rely on the magic, that she would not become subverted by its power?
And what would she do now?
For a moment she did nothing, so paralyzed with the fears and doubts that using the Elfstones raised that she could only sit there, clutching her blankets to her like a shield, voicing within her mind the choices with which she had suddenly been presented in an effort to make sense of them.