The trader studied her a moment, then looked away. “He’s a friend, you see.” Then he pointed out toward the Chard Rush. “He’s got a camp a few miles downriver, south bank..”
Brin nodded. She started to turn away, then stopped. “I am the same person I was when you helped me that first night,” she said quietly.
Leather boots scuffed against the wooden planks of the porch. “Maybe it just don’t seem that way to me,” came the response.
Her mouth tightened. “You don’t have to be afraid of me, you know. You really don’t.”
The boots went still and the trader looked down at them. “I’m not afraid,” he said, his voice low.
She waited a moment longer, searching futilely for something more to say, then turned and walked into the dark.
The following morning, shortly after daybreak, Brin and Rone departed the Rooker Line Trading Center for the country that lay east. Carrying foodstuffs, blankets, and the bow supplied by the trader, they bade the anxious man farewell and disappeared into the trees.
It was a bright, warm day that greeted them. As they made their way downriver along the south bank of the Chard Rush, the air was filled with the sounds of forest life and the smell of drying leaves. A west wind blew gently out of the distant Wolfsktaag, and leaves drifted earthward in lazy spirals to lie thick upon the forest ground. Through the trees, the land ahead could be seen to run on in a gentle sloping of rises and vales. Squirrels and chipmunks scattered and darted away at the sound of their approach, interrupted in their preparations for a winter that seemed far distant from this day.
At midmorning, Valegirl and highlander paused to rest for a time, sitting side by side on an old log, hollowed out and worm-eaten with age. In front of them, barely a dozen yards distant, the Chard Rush flowed steadily eastward into the deep Anar; in its grasp, deadwood and debris that was washed down from out of the high country twisted and turned in intricate patterns.
“It’s still hard for me to believe that he’s really gone,” Rone said after a time, eyes gazing out across the river.
Brin didn’t have to ask whom he meant. “For me, too,” she acknowledged softly. “I sometimes think that he really isn’t gone at all—that I was mistaken in what I saw—that if I am patient, he will come back, just as he always has.”
“Would that be so strange?” Rone mused. “Would it be so surprising if Allanon were to do exactly that?”
The Valegirl looked at him. “He is dead, Rone.”
Rone kept his face turned away, but nodded. “I know.” He was quiet for a moment before continuing. “Do you think that there was anything that could have been done to save him, Brin?”
He looked at the girl then. He was asking her if there was anything that he could have done. Brin’s smile was quick and bitter. “No, Rone. He knew that he was going to die; he was told that he would not complete this quest. He had accepted the inevitability of that, I think.”
Rone shook his head. “I would not have done so.”
“Nor I, I suppose,” Brin agreed. “Perhaps that was why he chose to tell us nothing of what was to happen. And perhaps his acceptance is something we cannot hope to understand, because we could never hope to understand him.”
The highlander leaned forward, his arms braced against his outstretched legs. “So the last of the Druids disappears from the land, and there is no one left to stand against the walkers except you and me.” He shook his head hopelessly. “Poor us.”
Brin glanced down self-consciously at her hands, folded in her lap before her. She remembered Allanon touching her forehead with his blood as he lay dying and she shivered with the memory.
“Poor us,” she echoed softly.
They rested for a few minutes longer, then resumed their journey east. Barely an hour later, they crossed a shallow, gravel-bottomed stream that meandered lazily away from the swifter flow of the main channel of the Chard Rush back along a worn gully. They caught sight of a single-room cabin that sat back in among the forest trees. Built from hand—cut logs laid crosswise and caulked with mortar, the little home was settled in a clearing upon a small rise that formed a threshold to a series of low hills sloping gently away into the forest. A handful of sheep and goats and a single milk cow grazed in the timber behind the cabin. At the sound of their approach, an aged hunting dog rose from his favorite napping spot next to the cabin stoop and stretched contentedly.
The woodsman Jeft stood at the far side of the little clearing, stripped to the waist as he cut firewood. With a sure, practiced swing downward of the long-handled axe, he split the piece of timber that stood upright on the worn stump that served as a chopping block. Working the embedded blade free, he brushed aside the cloven halves before pausing in his work to watch his visitors approach. Lowering the axe-head to the stump, he rested his gnarled hands on the smooth butt of the handle and waited.
“Morning,” Brin greeted as they came up to him.
“Morning,” the woodsman replied, nodding. He seemed pot at all surprised that they were there. He glanced at Rone. “Feeling a bit better, are you?”
“Much,” Rone answered. “Thanks in part to you, I’m told.”
The woodsman shrugged, the muscles on his powerful body knotting. He gestured toward the cabin. “There’s drinking water on the stoop in that bucket. I bring it fresh from the hills in back each day.”
He led them down to the cabin porch and the promised bucket. All three took a long drink. Then they seated themselves on the stoop, and the woodsman produced pipe and tobacco. He offered the pouch to his guests, but they declined, so he packed the bowl of his own pipe and began to smoke.
“Everything fine back at the trading center?” he asked casually. There was a long silence. “I heard about what happened the other night with that bunch from Spanning Ridge country.”
His eyes shifted slowly to Brin. “Word has a way of getting around a lot quicker than you’d think out here.”
The Valegirl held his gaze, ignoring her discomfort. “The trader told us where to find you,” she informed him. “He said you might be able to help us.”
The woodsman puffed on the pipe. “In what way?”
“He told us that you know as much as anyone about this country.”
“I’ve been out here a long time,” the man agreed.
Brin leaned forward. “We are already in your debt for what you did to help us back at the trading center. But we need your help again. We need to find a way through the country that lies east of here.”
The woodsman stared at her sharply, then slowly removed the pipe from between his teeth. “East of here? You mean Darklin Reach?”
Both Valegirl and highlander nodded.
The woodsman shook his head doubtfully. “That’s dangerous country. No one goes into Darklin Reach if they can avoid it.” He glanced up. “How far in do you plan to go?”
“All the way,” Brin said quietly. “And then into Olden Moor and the Ravenshorn.”
“You’re mad as jays,” the woodsman announced matter-of-factly and knocked the ashes from the pipe, grinding them into the earth with his boot. “Gnomes and walkers and worse own that country. You’ll never come out alive.”
There was no reply. The woodsman studied their faces in turn, rubbed his bearded chin thoughtfully, and finally shrugged.
“Guess you’ve got your own reasons for doing this, and it’s none of my business what they are. But I’m telling you here and now that you’re making a big mistake—maybe the biggest mistake you’ll ever make. Even the trappers stay clear of that country. Men disappear up there like smoke—gone without a trace.”
He waited for a reply. Brin glanced briefly at Rone and then back at the woodsman once more. “We have to go. Can you help us?”
“Me?” The woodsman grinned crookedly and shook his head. “Not me, girl. Even if I was to go with you—which I won’t, ‘cause I like living—I’d be lost myself after the first day or so.”