High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [37]
He knew the stories. All of them. His parents weren’t the sort to try to hide secrets about themselves or anyone else in the family, so they talked to him freely about his aunt. He knew what she had been and why. He understood the anger and antipathy her name invoked in many quarters. His uncle Redden would barely give her the time of day, although he had grudgingly admitted once to Pen that if not for her, the remnants of the crew of the Jerle Shannara, including himself and Pen’s parents, would never have returned alive. His parents were more charitable, if cautious. His father, in particular, clearly loved his sister and thought her misunderstood. But they had chosen different paths in life, and he rarely saw her.
Pen had seen her only twice, most recently when she had come on his birthday to visit the family. Cool and aloof, she had nevertheless taken time to fly with him aboard her airship and talk about his life at Patch Run. She had made a point of asking if he sensed any growth of the wishsong’s magic inside his body, but had not seemed disappointed when he told her he didn’t. Her own magic was never in evidence. Other people talked about it, but not her. She seemed to regard it as a condition that was best left undiscussed. Pen had respected her wishes, and even now he did not think it was a subject he would talk to her about, ever, unless she brought it up first.
Still, magic’s presence marked the history of the Ohmsford family, all the way back to the time of Wil Ohmsford, so it was hard to ignore, whether you had the use of it or not. Pen knew that it tended to skip whole generations of Ohmsfords, so it was not as if he was the first not to possess it. His father said it was entirely possible that it was thinning out in the bloodline with the passage of the years and the increase in the number of generations of Ohmsfords who had inherited it. It might be that it was fading away altogether. His mother said it didn’t matter, that there were more important attributes to possess than the use of magic. Pen, she insisted, was the better for not having to deal with its demands and was exactly who he was meant to be.
Lots of talk and reasoning had been given over to the subject, and all of it was meant to make Pen feel better, which mostly he did. He wasn’t the sort to worry about what he didn’t have.
Except that he didn’t have his parents’ blessing to go with them on their expeditions yet, and he was getting impatient at being left home in the manner of the family dog.
He walked down to the cove and did a quick check of Steady Right, tightening the anchor ropes and cinch lines so that if a blow did materialize, nothing would be lost. He glanced out over the Rainbow Lake when he was finished, its vast expanse stretching away until it disappeared into a haze of clouds and twilight, its colors drained away by the approach of heavy weather. On clear days, those fabled rainbows were always visible, a trick of mist and light. On clear days, he could see through those rainbows all the way to the Runne Mountains. Such days gave him the measure of his freedom. He was allowed the run of the lake, his own private backyard, vast and wonderful, but forbidden to go beyond. His invisible tether stretched to its far shores and not a single inch farther.
He wondered sometimes if he would have been given more freedom if he had been born with the wishsong, but he supposed not. His parents weren’t likely to think him any better able to look after himself because he had the use of magic. If anything, they might be even stricter. It was all in the way they saw him. He would be old enough to do the things he couldn’t do now when they decided he was old enough and not before.
But then, how old had his father been when he had sailed aboard the Jerle Shannara? How old, when he had crossed the Blue Divide to the continent of Parkasia?