High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [158]
They walked on through the morning, and she felt a little better for doing so. Time and distance helped to blunt her sadness if not her uncertainty. Given the nature of their journey thus far, she would take what she could get.
“Did you see him?” Pen asked her when they stopped at midday to drink from a stream and to eat what remained of the roots the boy had foraged that morning.
She stared at him. “See who?”
“The cat. It’s tracking us.”
“The moor cat?”
Tagwen, sitting a little bit farther away, turned at once. His eyes were big and frightened. “Why would it be doing that? Is it hunting us?”
Pen shook his head. “I don’t think so. But it is definitely following us. I saw it several times, back in the trees, trying to keep out of sight, following a course parallel to our own. I think it’s just interested.”
“Interested?” the Dwarf croaked.
“You can’t mistake that masked face,” Pen went on, oblivious to the other’s look of terror. He grinned suddenly at Khyber, a little boy about to share a secret. “I’ve decided to call it Bandit. It looks like one, doesn’t it?”
Khyber didn’t care what the moor cat looked like, nor did she care for the idea of it tracking them into the mountains. She had always thought moor cats pretty much stayed in the swamps and forests and clear of the higher elevations. She hoped theirs would lose interest as they climbed.
They trekked on through the remainder of the day, through hill country dotted with woods and crisscrossed by streams that pooled in lakes at the lower elevations, bright mirrors reflecting sunlight and clouds. The hours drifted away, and although they covered a fair amount of ground, they did not encounter any of the region’s inhabitants. Darkness began to fall and the shadows of the trees to lengthen about them, and still they had not seen a single Troll.
“Is that moor cat still out there?” Khyber asked Pen at one point.
“Oh, sure,” the boy answered at once. “Still watching us, sort of like a stray dog. Do you want me to call it over?”
They made camp in the lee of a forested bluff, finding shelter in a grove of pine by a stream that tumbled down out of the rocks. Behind them, the hill country they had trekked through all day sloped gently away through woods and grasslands until it disappeared into the twilight shadows. Although Pen made a valiant effort to catch something, he was unsuccessful; there was nothing to eat. They drank stream water and chewed strips of bark from a small fig tree.
“Don’t worry,” Pen reassured his companions. “I’ll go hunting at sunrise. I’ll catch something.
They sat back to watch the stars come out, listening to the silence fill with night sounds. No one spoke. Khyber felt an emptiness that extended from the darkness down into her heart. She could not put a name to it, but it was there nevertheless. After a moment, she rose and walked off into the trees, wanting to be alone in case she cried. She felt so unbearably sad that she could hardly manage to keep from breaking down. The feeling had come over her insidiously, as if to remind her of how badly things had gone for them and how desperate their circumstances were. She might argue that they were all right, that they would find their way, but it wasn’t what she felt. What she felt was utter abandonment and complete hopelessness. No matter what they tried or where they went, things would never get any better for them. They would struggle, but in the end they would fail.
Away from her companions, unable to help herself, she sat down and cried, bursting into tears all at once. She wished she had never come on the journey. She wished she had never left home. Everything that had happened was because