High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [35]
“Don’t be too sure.” Iridia’s strange eyes had a hard look to them, as if her thoughts were of darker things still. “The Trolls have withdrawn from the Keep and massed at the gates, taking up watch. It looks like they are expecting trouble, but intend to hold their place for as long as they can.”
Shadea a’Ru nodded slowly, staring back at Iridia, thinking that nothing was easy, not even now. “We’ll let them be for the moment. After I’ve been named Ard Rhys, I’ll deal with them myself.”
“Kermadec isn’t with them. I don’t know where he’s gone. Tagwen has disappeared, as well. We might want to think about finding them.” Iridia stepped close, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “We might want to think about another possible hindrance to our plans. Her brother, the one who lives below the Rainbow Lake — if he finds out what has happened, he might decide to do something about it. He has her magic and strong ties with the Rovers. He could cause a lot of trouble for us.”
Sen Dunsidan had said the same thing. For a moment Shadea wondered at the coincidence, then dismissed it as nothing more. It was a logical consideration for all of them, one she might have been too quick to dismiss before.
“Do we know where her brother can be found?” Iridia nodded. “A way station called Patch Run.” Shadea took her arm and smiled. “Let’s send someone to tell him ourselves.”
Chapter SEVEN
Penderrin Ohmsford came out of his crouch in the forward compartment of the cat-28’s starboard pontoon, rocked back on his heels, and surveyed his handiwork. He had just finished resplicing both sets of radian draws off the single mast to stacked sets of parse tubes mounted fore and aft on both pontoons, giving the small sailing vessel almost double the power of anything flying in her class. The stacked tubes were his own design, conceived late one night as he lay thinking about what he might do to make her faster. He was always thinking about ways to improve her, his passion for airships and flying easily a match for that of the other members of his family, and when your uncle was Redden Alt Mer, that was saying something.
“He had built the cat two years earlier at the beginning of his apprenticeship with his father. It was the first major project he had undertaken on his own. It was a rite-of-passage experience that demonstrated he should no longer be considered a boy, although he was still only in his teens. The vessel he chose to construct was a twenty-eight-foot catamaran — thus the cat-28 designation.
It was a racing vessel, not a fighting ship, its decking mostly sloped and its gunwales low, its pontoons only slightly curved and lacking rams, and its sleeping compartment set into the decking right below the pilot box and barely large enough to lie down in. Its single mast was rigged with a mainsail and a jib, and all of its spares and gear were stored in holds in the pontoons.
It was a fast ship to begin with, but Penderrin was not the sort to take something as it was and leave it alone. Even with his parents’ larger airships, the ones outfitted for long-term expeditions and rough weather, he was always experimenting with ways to make them better. He had been living around airships all his life, and working on them had become second nature. He wished his parents would let him fly more, would give him a chance at the larger ships, especially Swift Sure, their favorite, the one they were on now, somewhere out in the Wolfsktaag Mountains. But like all parents, they seemed convinced that it was better to bring him along slowly and to make certain he was old enough before he was allowed to do the things he had learned to do years earlier.
His full name was Penderrin, but everyone called him Pen except for his mother, who insisted on calling him Penderrin because it was the name she had chosen and she liked the