Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [85]
“Never before, maybe,” Kirisin said. “But she spoke today. You can pretend anything you want, but it doesn’t change things. Stop talking about hallucinations and dreams. What are we going to do?”
“Erisha,” Biat said suddenly. “What do you think we should do?”
Erisha didn’t seem to hear him. But when everyone grew silent, waiting on her, she said, “Nothing.”
“Nothing!” Kirisin repeated in disbelief. “Don’t be ridiculous! You have to go to your father and tell him what has happened!”
Erisha shook her head. “My father won’t believe any of this. I don’t even know if I do!” She was suddenly angry. “I am leader of the Chosen, Kirisin. I say what we do and don’t do. We need to wait on this, to make certain about it.
We need to see if she speaks to any of the rest of us. Then we can decide.”
“That sounds sensible to me,” Biat agreed, giving Kirisin a look that said, Be reasonable.
Kirisin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait another day? See if she speaks to the rest of you? What sort of advice is that? She told me she depends on us for help! What sort of help are we giving her by waiting?”
“You don’t really know what you heard!” Erisha snapped. “You just think you know! You daydream all the time! You probably hear voices all the time. You would be the first one to imagine something that never happened! So don’t lecture the rest of us about what we should do in this matter!”
Kirisin stared at her, and then looked at the others. “Does everyone else think the tree didn’t speak to me, that I imagined it?”
He waited for a response. There was none. Everyone looked somewhere else.
He couldn’t tell whether they were on his side or Erisha’s. In truth, it didn’t matter. They could sit around talking about this until the cows came home, but it wouldn’t help. What they had to do was to find out if there really were Elfstones. They had to discover if anyone had ever heard of a Stone called a Loden. Mostly, they had to do something besides bury their heads in the sand.
He refused the possibility that he might have imagined the Ellcrys talking to him. His mind was made up on that point. The humans and demons had found a way to destroy everything, and the Ellcrys was warning them that they had to do something about it. It was their job to protect and preserve her. She depended on them for that. Unless they were intending to abrogate their responsibilities toward her, they had no choice. They had to do what she asked.
Kirisin stood up. “The rest of you can do what you want. But I’m going to speak to the King!”
Chapter FIFTEEN
WITHOUT GIVING THEM another glance, Kirisin stalked out of the clearing.
The other Chosen shouted after him, telling him to come back, warning him that he was acting too quickly, not thinking things through. He was making a mistake, he heard Erisha shout. He ignored her, ignored them all, furious at their refusal to do more than find reasons to delay doing anything. Even Biat, his best friend. He had expected better of him. But then he always expected better of everyone except himself.
He was the one who always prevaricated. He was the one who should have been questioning this whole business.
But he wasn’t doing so here. Why was that?
The question almost stopped him in his tracks because he had no answer. He experienced a momentary sense of stepping over a line, of making a decision that he would look back on for a long time to come. But his anger and his forward momentum kept him going when common sense and second thoughts might have turned him around. He had stomped away with such finality that going back now would be the same as crawling back, and he wasn’t about to do that. Stopping to debate his reasons for accepting on faith what the Ellcrys had told him was pointless.
He couldn’t explain it because his commitment to the Ellcrys transcended reason or argument and went to the heart of his service as a Chosen. He couldn’t speak for the others, but that was the way it was for him. What the Ellcrys had told him this morning had only strengthened his determination to fulfill