The Heritage of Shannara (24 page)

His face was lined with emotions Par could only begin to imagine. “I, too, would like to know something of what is intended for me,” he whispered.

He reached down, his pale, lean hand fastening briefly on one of Par's. “Rest now. We have another journey ahead and only a day or two to prepare for it. Let that preparation be my responsibility. I will tell the others and come for you all when it is time to depart.”

He started away, then hesitated and smiled. “Try to think better of me after this.”

Then he was out the door and gone, and the smile belonged now to Par.

Walker Boh proved as good as his word. Two days later he was back, appearing shortly after sunrise with horses and provisions. Par had been out of bed and walking about for the past day and a half now, and he was much recovered from his experience in Olden Moor. He was dressed and waiting on the porch of his compound with Steff and Teel when his uncle walked out of the forest shadows with his pack train in tow into a morning clouded by fog and half-light.

“There's a strange one,” Steff murmured. “Haven't seen him for more than five minutes for the entire time we've been here. Now, back he comes, just like that. More ghost than man.” His smile was rueful and his eyes sharp.

“Walker Boh is real enough,” Par replied without looking at the Dwarf. “And haunted by ghosts of his own.”

“Brave ghosts, I am inclined to think.”

Par glanced over now. “He still frightens you, doesn't he?”

“Frightens me?” Steff 's voice was gruff as he laughed. “Hear him, Teel? He probes my armor for chinks!” He turned his scarred face briefly. “No, Valeman, he doesn't frighten me anymore. He only makes me wonder.”

Coll and Morgan appeared, and the little company prepared to depart. Stors came out to see them off, ghosts of another sort, dressed in white robes and cloaked in self-imposed silence, a perpetually anxious look on their pale faces. They gathered in groups, watchful, curious, a few coming forward to help as the members of the company mounted. Walker spoke with one or two of them, his words so quiet they could be heard by no one else. Then he was aboard with the others and facing briefly back to them.

“Good fortune to us, my friends,” he said and turned his horse west toward the plains.

Good fortune, indeed, Par Ohmsford prayed silently.

S
unlight sprayed the still surface of the Myrian Lake through breaks in the distant trees, coloring the water a brilliant red-gold and causing Wren Ohmsford to squint against its glare. Farther west, the Irrybis Mountains were a jagged black tear across the horizon that separated earth and sky and cast the first of night's shadows across the vast sprawl of the Tirfing.

Another hour, maybe a bit more, and it would be dark, she thought.

She paused at the edge of the lake and, for just a moment, let the solitude of the approaching dusk settle through her. All about, the Westland stretched away into the shimmering heat of the dying summer's day with the lazy complacency of a sleeping cat, endlessly patient as it waited for the coming of night and the cool it would bring.

She was running out of time.

She cast about momentarily for the signs she had lost some hundred yards back and found nothing. He might as well have vanished into thin air. He was working hard at this cat-and-mouse game, she decided. Perhaps she was the cause.

The thought buoyed her as she pressed ahead, slipping silently through the trees along the lake front, scanning the foliage and the earth with renewed determination. She was small and slight of build, but wiry and strong. Her skin was nut-brown from weather and sun, and her ash-blond hair was almost boyish, cut short and tightly curled against her head. Her features were Elven, sharply so, the eyebrows full and deeply slanted, the ears small and pointed, the bones of her face lending it a narrow and high-cheeked look. She had hazel eyes, and they shifted restlessly as she moved, hunting.

She found his first mistake a hundred feet or so farther on, a tiny bit of broken scrub, and his second, a boot indentation against a gathering of stones, just after. She smiled in spite of herself, her confidence growing, and she hefted the smooth quarterstaff she carried in anticipation. She would have him yet, she promised.

The lake cut into the trees ahead forming a deep cove, and she was forced to swing back to her left through a thick stand of pine. She slowed, moving more cautiously. Her eyes darted. The pines gave way to a mass of thick brush that grew close against a grove of cedar. She skirted the brush, catching sight of a fresh scrape against a tree root. He's getting careless, she thought—or wants me to think so.

She found the snare at the last moment, just as she was about to put her
foot into it. Its lines ran from a carefully concealed noose back into a mass of brush and from there to a stout sapling, bent and tied. Had she not seen it, she would have been yanked from her feet and left dangling.

She found the second snare immediately after, better concealed and designed to catch her avoiding the first. She avoided that one, too, and now became even more cautious.

Even so, she almost missed seeing him in time when he swung down out of the maple not more than fifty yards farther on. Tired of trying to lose her in the woods, he had decided to finish matters in a quicker manner. He dropped silently as she slipped beneath the old shade tree, and it was only her instincts that saved her. She sprang aside as he landed, bringing the quarterstaff about and catching him alongside his great shoulders with an audible thwack. Her attacker shrugged off the blow, coming to his feet with a grunt. He was huge, a man of formidable size who appeared massive in the confines of the tiny forest clearing. He leaped at Wren, and she used the quarterstaff to vault quickly away from him. She slipped on landing, and he was on top of her with a swiftness that was astonishing. She rolled, using the staff to block him, came up underneath with the makeshift dagger and jammed the flat of its blade against his belly.

The sun-browned, bearded face shifted to find her own, and the deepset eyes glanced downward. “You're dead, Garth,” she told him, smiling. Then her fingers came up to make the signs.

The giant Rover collapsed in mock submission before rolling over and climbing to his feet. Then he smiled, too. They brushed themselves off and stood grinning at each other in the fading light. “I'm getting better, aren't I?” Wren asked, signing with her hands as she spoke the words.

Garth replied soundlessly, his fingers moving rapidly in the language he had taught her. “Better, but not yet good enough,” she translated. Her smile broadened as she reached out to clasp his arm. “Never good enough for you, I suspect. Otherwise, you would be out of a job!”

She picked up the quarterstaff and made a mock feint that caused the other to jump back in alarm. They fenced for a moment, then broke it off and started back toward the lakeshore. There was a small clearing just beyond the cove, not more than half an hour away, that offered an ideal campsite for the night. Wren had noticed it during the hunt and made for it now.

“I'm tired and I ache and I have never felt better,” the girl said cheerfully as they walked, enjoying the last of the day's sunlight on her back, breathing in the smells of the forest, feeling alive and at peace. She sang a bit, humming some songs of the Rovers and the free life, of the ways that were and the ways that would be. Garth trailed along, a silent shadow at her back.

They found the campsite, built a fire, prepared and ate their dinner, and began trading drinks from a large leather aleskin. The night was warm and comforting, and Wren Ohmsford's thoughts wandered contentedly. They had another five days allotted to them before they were expected back. She
enjoyed her outings with Garth; they were exciting and challenging. The big Rover was the best of teachers—one who let his students learn from experience. No one knew more than he did about tracking, concealment, snares, traps, and tricks of all sorts in the fine art of staying alive. He had been her mentor from the first. She had never questioned why he chose her; she had simply felt grateful that he had.

She listened momentarily to the sounds of the forest, trying to visualize out of habit what she heard moving in the dark. It was a strenuous, demanding life she led, but she could no longer imagine leading any other. She had been born a Rover girl and lived with them for all but the very early years of her youth when she had resided in the Southland hamlet of Shady Vale with her cousins, the Ohmsfords. She had been back in the Westland for years now, traveling with Garth and the others, the ones who had claimed her after her parents died, taught her their ways, and showed her their life. All of the Westland belonged to the Rovers, from the Kershalt to the Irrybis, from the Valley of Rhenn to the Blue Divide. Once, it had belonged to the Elves as well. But the Elves were all gone now, disappeared. They had passed back into legend, the Rovers said. They had lost interest in the world of mortal beings and gone back into faerie.

Some disputed it. Some said that the Elves were still there, hidden. She didn't know about the truth of that. She only knew that what they had abandoned was a wilderness paradise.

Garth passed her the aleskin and she drank deeply, then handed it back again. She was growing sleepy. Normally, she drank little. But she was feeling especially proud of herself tonight. It wasn't often that she got the best of Garth.

She studied him momentarily, thinking of how much he had come to mean to her. Her time in Shady Vale seemed long ago and far away, although she remembered it well enough. And the Ohmsfords, especially Par and Coll—she still thought about them. They had been her only family once. But it felt as if all that might have happened in another life. Garth was her family now, her father, mother, and brother all rolled into one, the only real family she knew anymore. She was tied to him in ways she had never been tied to anyone else. She loved him fiercely.

Nevertheless, she admitted, she sometimes felt detached from everyone, even him—orphaned and homeless, a stray shunted from one family to the next without belonging to anyone, having no idea at all who she really was. It bothered her that she didn't know more about herself and that no one else seemed to know either. She had asked often enough, but the explanations were always vague. Her father had been an Ohmsford. Her mother had been a Rover. It was unclear how they had died. It was uncertain what had become of any other members of her immediate family. It was unknown who her ancestors had been.

She possessed, in fact, but one item that offered any clue at all as to who she was. It was a small leather bag she wore tied about her neck that contained three perfectly formed stones. Elfstones, one might have
thought—until one looked more closely and saw that they were just common rocks painted blue. But they had been found on her as a baby and they were all she had to suggest the heritage that might be hers.

Garth knew something about the matter, she suspected. He had told her that he didn't when she had asked once, but there was something in the way he had made his disavowal that convinced her he was hedging. Garth kept secrets better than most, but she knew him too well to be fooled completely. Sometimes, when she thought about it, she wanted to shake an answer out of him, angry and frustrated at his refusal to be as open with her in this as he was in everything else. But she kept her anger and her frustration to herself. You didn't push Garth. When he was ready to tell her, he would.

She shrugged as she always ended up doing whenever she considered the matter of her family history. What difference did it make? She was who she was, whatever her lineage. She was a Rover girl with a life that most would envy, if they bothered to be honest about it. The whole world belonged to her, because she was tied to no part of it. She could go where she wanted and do what she pleased, and that was more than most could say. Besides, many of her fellow Rovers were of dubious parentage, and you never heard them complain. They reveled in their freedom, in their ability to lay claim to anything and anyone that caught their fancy. Wasn't that good enough for her as well?

She stirred the dirt in front of her with her boot. Of course, none of them were Elven, were they? None of them had the Ohmsford-Shannara blood, with its history of Elven magic. None of them were plagued by the dreams …

Her hazel eyes shifted abruptly as she became aware of Garth looking at her. She signed some innocuous response, thinking as she did so that none of the other Rovers had been as thoroughly trained to survive as she had and wondering why.

They drank a little more of the ale, built the fire up again, and rolled into their blankets. Wren lay awake longer than she wished to, caught up in the unanswered questions and unresolved puzzles that marked her life. When she did sleep, she tossed restlessly beneath her blankets, teased by fragments of dreams that slipped from her like raindrops through her fingers in a summer storm and were forgotten as quickly.

It was dawn when she came awake, and the old man was sitting across from her, poking idly at the ashes of the fire with a long stick. “It's about time,” he snorted.