High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [162]
He would be back, she told herself. No matter what happened, he would be back.
She wondered at her certainty about this, and decided rather reluctantly that it was fostered in part, at least, by the comfort she found in his presence. In a better world, such as the one from which she had come, she might not have tolerated him at all. Here, she had to take what friendship she could find.
She started back down the mountainside. Silence enveloped her, a hush that felt strange in the wake of the disappearance of the shades that had tormented her on the way in. They had all vanished, drawn back down into the netherworld with the Warlock Lord. Yet the memory of them haunted her, voices whispering at the back of her thoughts, damp fingers trailing lightly across her unprotected skin, an insidious presence.
The sun was rising, turning the eastern horizon the color of ashes, gray and damp against the departing night. Another day of low clouds and threatening skies. Another day of colorless gloom. She felt her already battered spirits sink at the prospect. She wanted out of this miserable place, out of this world of savagery and despair. She pondered on the words of Brona’s shade. A boy is coming. The pronouncement confounded her, no matter how often she repeated the words in her mind. What boy? Why a boy in the first place? It made no sense to her, and she kept thinking that it must be a puzzle of some sort, the secret to which she must find a way to unlock. Shades were famous for speaking in riddles, for teasing with half-truths.
Perhaps that was what had happened here.
She stopped for a moment and closed her eyes, feeling dizzy and weak. Her encounter with the Warlock Lord’s shade had left her battered of mind and body, light-headed and unsteady. She could feel an aching not only in her muscles and joints, but also in her heart. Just standing in the presence of the shade had left her sickened. Its poison had permeated the air she breathed and the ground she walked. It had infused the entire valley, though she had not been aware of it until now. Evil — in its rawest, most lethal form — had infected her. Though she had resisted the Warlock Lord’s offer to embrace it, it had claimed her anyway. She wouldn’t die from it, she thought, but she would be a long time ridding herself of its feel.
The dizziness passed, and she walked on. A boy, she kept thinking. And she must wait for him. She could do nothing from this end, nothing that would set her free. She did not believe it; there was always something you could do to help yourself in any situation. There was always more than one way in or out of any place, even this one. She need only find what it was. But even as she told herself it was so, she found reason to doubt the words. No one — until now — had ever found a way out of the Forbidding, not after thousands of years. No one had ever found a way in, once the wall of magic was set in place. It was a prison that did not allow for escape.
It was light by the time she reached the base of the mountains: the same sooty gray light that seemed to mark every day, the clouds slung low against the earth, fused with mist and darkened by the threat of rain. Weka Dart was sitting on a rock at the trailhead, chin in his hands, looking south across the flats, but he leapt to his feet on hearing her approach and was waiting eagerly as she came up to him.
“I thought you weren’t coming back, Straken,” he announced, not bothering to hide the relief in his voice. “That shade, so terrible, so threatening! It didn’t want you?”
She shook her head. “Nor you, so you needn’t have run away.”
He bristled with indignation. “I didn’t run! I chose to wait for you here!” His cunning features tightened as he prepared to lie. “I realized that you could not afford to be disturbed during your summoning and decided to come back down here to keep watch against... whatever might intrude.” He spit. “It worked, didn’t it? Were you bothered in