“It’s all right,” she repeated.
He shook his head dismissively. “Enough. On to other matters. I have something important to tell you, as I said. I have been searching our own histories and papers, and in the course of doing so I found something unexpected about Aleia Omarosian.”
He leaned forward. “I had thought that what I would find would have something to do with her parents, who were King and Queen of the Elven people at different points in their lives, the one right after the other. I also thought it was odd Aleia died so young and there was no explanation as to what had become of her. It seemed to me that if anything were to be found, it would be in the chronicles of those times, in the records of the families. What we have is incomplete and rather scant, but I thought there was a chance. But do you know what, Aphen?”
She shook her head. “What?”
He paused. “Now you must promise me first. I have a duty to report my findings to the Ard Rhys, and technically I shouldn’t tell anyone else before I tell her—not even one of her Druid followers. But I like you and trust you, and you were the one who brought the diary here in the first place. So that gives you special dispensation, in my opinion. Still, I need your word. Until I speak of this to the Ard Rhys, you must keep it to yourself. Tell no one, not even Bombax. Can you do that?”
“I can,” she said at once. “I promise I will not tell anyone.” She gave him a wry smile. “Especially not Bombax.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Woostra rubbed his bony chin. “So it turns out I was looking in the wrong place. What I wanted wasn’t to be found in the records of the Elven Kings and Queens. It was right here.”
He took the ancient tome he had been studying when she entered and handed it to her, pointing at an entry.
The lettering at the top of the page spelled out a single word.
Aphenglow bent close and began to read.
Khyber Elessedil slept most of the day, curled up close by the shoreline of the Hadeshorn while the sun crept out of the eastern horizon and slowly worked its way across the sky toward twilight. She fell asleep not long after the departure of the shade of Allanon, exhausted from the previous day. Facing Allanon’s ghost had been stressful, and she still wasn’t certain when she woke at sunset if he intended to help her.
She could assume that his promise to return indicated he would at least consider answering some of her questions, but the extent of his willingness remained in doubt. He’d told her almost nothing of value when they talked before, and his recalcitrant attitude toward and outright disdain of her commitment to the tenets of the Fourth Druid Order suggested he was less than enthusiastic about what she was attempting. Dismissive, in point of fact. She knew he was a hard, secretive man; she had read the chronicles of his time and knew he had been the only Druid alive when the Sword of Shannara was recovered and brought to bear against the Warlock Lord. She had read how he led the Elven struggle to withstand the collapse of the Forbidding and repel the invasion of the escaping demons. Finally, she had read how he’d died in his quest to destroy the Ildatch, killed by a terrible creature called a Jachyra. His death had marked the end of any Druid presence for three hundred years.
She had read it all, and she could tell from those readings that Allanon had been a powerful influence on the Races during his life. He had fought for their survival and died doing so. Nothing of what she had discovered suggested that he would be any different in death than he had been in life.
But she had hoped he might be more sympathetic to her struggle and consider trying to do something to help her.
When sunset approached and she was awake again and at least marginally rested, she rose and ate and drank from her small supply of provisions. She had come prepared to spend more than a single day in her efforts to summon one among the dead who would help her. That it was Allanon who had appeared had given her hope and raised her expectations that her needs were recognized and embraced. It was only in the unsettling aftermath of their talk that she wondered if she had been mistaken.
But she resumed her place at the water’s edge and waited as he had commanded, hopeful that this time she might gain more from their meeting. If he reappeared at all, she added, her doubts nudging at her like a rock in her boot pressing into her sole. The sun slipped below the horizon and a scattering of stars came out. Khyber settled herself to wait, recounting over and over what she knew about Aleia Omarosian and the theft of the Stones.
Doubts plagued her, and for the first time a sense of inadequacy took root. She was Ard Rhys and a proven leader with years of life experience in the study and use of magic. She had survived much during those years and had guided the Druid order with a steady hand. But her followers were few and mostly untested. They were brave and they were committed, but they were also young. Pleysia, at thirty-six, was the oldest, and that was not old at all. Even if Khyber found a way to go and was given a map to follow, how dangerous would it be to make the journey, and how prepared were her Druids to undertake it? She did not feel easy in her heart at the thought of it; she did not think them much prepared at all.
But then others before her had undertaken equally dangerous challenges and completed them. Others had faced terrible risks and overcome them—many much younger even than Aphenglow. She shouldn’t assume it would be different this time. She shouldn’t be too quick to think that her followers were unequal to what might be demanded of them. They couldn’t know what they were capable of until they were actually tested. None of them.
One day soon, they would find out, and she wasn’t particularly eager for that day to come.
As the twilight deepened and night set in, she prepared herself for the long wait until the hour just before sunrise, when she assumed the Shade of Allanon would come—if it were coming at all. So she was surprised when in the first hour of true night, the waters of the Hadeshorn abruptly began to boil and steam, and the familiar sluggish swirling began its slow, clockwise motion. The voices of the dead lifted and intensified, filling the air and blanketing the valley in a harsh cacophony. The waters heaved in response, and hundreds of white forms rose through the surface and into the air, circling like birds.
She sat up quickly and clambered to her feet, shocked by the unexpectedness of it, wondering why Allanon was coming so soon.
Then his shade was there, a knife blade skimming the waters in a smooth, clean motion, a two-dimensional form that quickly broadened into something more substantial. Soon he dwarfed her once more, grown into a giant, gliding to a halt before her, hanging just above the waters, his black-cloaked form motionless. She could see his dark face and the strange glimmer of his eyes as they fixed on her, and she felt her heart go cold. The eyes held her pinned against the valley’s obsidian floor, and even if she had tried she could not have moved away.
–Ard Rhys. I have spoken with Aleia Omarosian. She hides much from me and what she tells me cannot be entirely trusted. But I will tell it to you anyway. You will judge for yourself and do what you feel you must–
She waited, breathless. The shade seemed to be considering what it would say.
–What was written in the diary is true. It happened as she wrote it. She left the diary for her parents to find, after she was gone. She would not say where she had gone or why. But her early death suggests she knew her life was almost over. She was leaving, and she did not want to leave without telling her parents what she had done–
So it was real. Khyber was strangely exhilarated. “Did she know anything of where the Elfstones were? Or what happened to them after the Darkling boy took them?”