Cogline shook his head, a slow and painful movement. “No. A Druid doesn’t tell what he doesn’t have to.” He coughed again. “You know that.”
Walker Boh couldn’t speak. He simply stared down at the old man.
Cogline blinked. “You told me that I always knew when to act and when not to.” He smiled. “You were right.”
He swallowed once more. Then his eyes fixed and he quit breathing. Walker kept staring down at him, kneeling in the dust and heat, listening to the silence as it stretched away unbroken, thinking in bitter consolation that Allanon had used the old man for the last time.
He closed Cogline’s sightless eyes.
It remained to be seen if the Druid had used him well.
Chapter Twenty
Walker Boh buried Cogline in the woods below Paranor, laying him to rest in a glade cooled by a stream that meandered through a series of shallow rapids, a glade sheltered by oaks and hickories whose leafy branches dappled a carpet of wildflowers and green grasses with shadowy patterns that would shift and change each day with the sun’s passage west. It was a setting that reminded Walker of the hidden glens at Hearthstone where they had both loved to walk. He chose a place near the center of the glade where the spires of Paranor could be clearly seen. Cogline, who to the end had thought of himself as a Druid gone astray, had come home for good.
When he was finished with the old man, Walker stayed in the clearing. He was battered and worn, but the wounds that were deepest were those he couldn’t see, and it gave him a measure of comfort to stand amid the ancient trees and breathe the forest air. Birds sang, a wind rustled the leaves and grasses, the stream rippled, and the sounds were soothing and peaceful. He didn’t want to go back into Paranor just yet. He didn’t want to go up past the blackened, charred remains of the Four Horsemen and their serpent mounts. What he wanted was to wipe away everything that had happened in his life like chalk from a board and start over. There was a bitterness within him that he could not resolve, which gnawed and scratched at him with the persistence of a hungry animal and refused to be chased. The bitterness had many sources—he did not care to list them.
Mostly, of course, he was bitter with himself. He was always bitter with himself these days, it seemed, a stranger come out of nowhere, a man whose identity he barely recognized, an all-too-willing pawn for the wants and needs of old men a thousand years gone.
He sat in the glade by the stream, staring back across the clearing and the patch of fresh-turned earth where Cogline lay, and forced himself to remember the old man. His bitterness needed a balm; perhaps memories of the old man would provide it. He took a moment to splash handfuls of the stream’s cold water on his face, cleansing it of the dirt and ash and blood, then positioned himself in a patch of sun and let his thoughts drift.
Walker remembered Cogline as a teacher mostly, as the man who had come to him when his life had been jumbled and confused, when he had abandoned the Races to live in isolation at Hearthstone where he would not be stared at and whispered about, where he would not be known as the Dark Uncle. The magic had been a mystery to Walker then, the legacy of the wishsong come down through the years from Brin Ohmsford in a tangle of threads he could not unravel. Cogline had shown him ways in which he could control the magic so that he no longer would feel helpless before it. Cogline had taught him how to focus his life so that he was master of the white heat that roiled within. He removed the fear and the confusion, and he gave back to Walker a sense of purpose and self-respect.
The old man had been his friend. He had cared about him, had looked after him in ways that on reflection Walker knew were the ways that a father looked after a son. He had instructed and guided and been present when he was needed. Even when Walker was grown, and there was that distance between them that comes when fathers and sons must regard themselves as equals without ever quite believing it, Cogline stayed close in whatever ways Walker would allow. They had fought and argued, mistrusted and accused, and challenged each other to do what was right and not what was easy. But they had never given up on or forsaken each other; they had never despaired of their friendship. It helped Walker now to know that was so.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that the old man had lived other lives before this one, some of which Walker still barely knew about. Cogline had been young once. What had that been like? The old man had never said. He had studied with the Druids—with Allanon, with Bremen, with those who had gone before, perhaps, though he had never really said. How old was Cogline? How long had he been alive? Walker realized suddenly that he didn’t know. Cogline had been an old man when Kimber Boh was a child and Brin Ohmsford came into Darklin Reach in search of the Ildatch. That was three hundred years ago. Walker knew about Cogline then; the old man had talked about that period of time, about the child he had raised, about the madness he had feigned and then embraced, about how he had led Brin and her companions to the Maelmord to put an end to the Mord Wraiths. Walker had heard those stories; yet it was such a small piece of the old man’s life to know—one day of a year’s time. What of all the rest? What parts of his life had Cogline failed to reveal—what parts that were now lost forever?
Walker shook his head and stared out across the trees at Paranor. Parts that the old man had not minded losing, he decided. Walker could not begrudge that Cogline had chosen to keep them secret. It was that way with everyone’s life. All people kept parts of who and what they were and how they had lived to themselves, things that belonged only to them, things that no one else was meant to share. At death, those things were dark holes in the memories of those who lived on, but that was the way it must be.
He pictured the old man’s whiskered face. He listened for the sound of his voice in the silence. Cogline had lived a long time. He had lived any number of lives. He had lived longer than he should have, spared at Hearthstone to come into Paranor and see it brought back again, and he had died in the way he chose, giving up his own life so that Walker could keep his. It would be wrong for Walker to regret that gift, because in regretting it he was necessarily diminishing its worth. Cogline had lived to see him transformed into the Druid the old man had never become. He had lived to see him through growing up to the dreams of Allanon and the fulfillment of Brin Ohmsford’s trust. Whether it was for good or bad, Walker had gotten safely through because of Cogline.
He felt some of the bitterness beginning to fade. The bitterness was wrong. Regrets were wrong. They were chains that bound you tight and dragged you down. Nothing good could come of them. What was needed was balance and perspective if the future was to have meaning. Walker could remember—and should. But memories were for shaping what would come, for taking the possibilities that lay ahead and turning them to the uses for which they were intended. He thought again of the Druids and their machinations, of the ways they had shaped the history of the Races. He had despised their efforts. Now he was one of them. Cogline had lived and died so that he could be so. The chance was his to do better what he had been so quick to criticize in those who had gone before. He must make the most of that chance. Cogline would expect him to do so.
The sun was slipping beneath the canopy of the forest west when he rose and stood a final time before the ground in which the old man lay. He was better reconciled to what had happened than before, more at peace with the hard fact of it. Cogline was gone. Walker remained. He would take strength and courage and resolve from the old man’s example. He would carry his memory in his heart.
With the light turning crimson and gold and purple in the haze of summer heat, he made his way back through the darkening forests to Paranor.
That night he dreamed of Allanon.