High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [62]
She hoped he would agree with her, thinking that he would be of little help in any case. But Weka Dart, still not looking at her, still frowning, shook his head. “You may need me to help you find your way, being a stranger. The land is unsafe for strangers. It doesn’t get any better where you want to go. Safer west, but I suppose you have your reasons for not going there right away. Maybe later.”
He looked up suddenly, eyes narrowed. “But you don’t want to go east. You want to go south through the mountains. I know you call them something else, but here they are called the Dragon Line. We should go below them before we go east. Too dangerous to try to go back the way I have come.”
He was so eager to have her do what he wanted that she was immediately suspicious.
“We can take one of the passes,” he continued quickly. “That will put us in Pashanon. There are cities and villages. Fortresses, too. Do you know someone there? Another Straken, perhaps?”
Clearly he was hiding something, but since she had already made up her mind to go the way he was suggesting...
“Listen to me, Weka Dart,” she said quietly, kneeling so that she could look him the eye. She held him frozen in place with the force of her gaze, a prisoner to her eyes. “You are not to call me a Straken again. Is that understood?”
He nodded hurriedly, mouth twisting, gimlet eyes bright and eager. “You are in disguise?” he guessed.
She nodded. “I want my identity kept secret. If you travel with me, you must agree. You must call me Grianne.”
He laughed, a rather scary sound, all rough edges and rasps. “I will do exactly as you wish, so long as you do not knock me out of any more trees!”
She straightened. Maybe this would work out, after all. Maybe she would find a way out of here. “Let’s be off,” she said.
Without waiting for his response, she started away.
They walked all day — or more accurately, she walked while he scurried, a sort of crablike motion that employed all four limbs and carried him from one side to the other in a wide-ranging and aimless pattern. She was astonished by his energy, which was boundless, and by his seeming unawareness of the fact that he was covering twice as much ground as was necessary for no reason. She decided, after watching him scramble about for several hours, that it must be genetic to Ulk Bogs. She knew very little about the species, having only touched on the subject in her reading of the Druid Histories, and so had little to go on. Nevertheless, in this case observation seemed enough.
The country they traveled through was both familiar and strange to her, its geographical features similar to those of her own world, but not the same. The differences were often small, ones she could not specifically identify but only sense. It was not surprising to her that the world of the Forbidding, impacted by an alternate history, would not reflect everything exactly. In her world, the topography had been altered by the destructive effects of the Great Wars. The basic landmarks were identifiably the same — the mountains, passes, bluffs, rivers, and lakes — but certain features were changed. The landscape gave her the impression that she was revisiting a familiar place, yet seeing everything in an entirely new light.
They did not encounter any other dragons. They saw huge birds flying overhead, ones that were neither Rocs nor Shrikes, and Weka Dart told her they were Harpies. She could not make out their women’s faces, but could picture them in her mind — narrow and severe, sharp and cunning. Harpies were mythical in her world, thought to be nothing more than the creation of ancient storytellers. But they were among the creatures banished in the time of the creation of the Forbidding, and so only the stories remained. To see one here, real and dangerously close, made her think about all the other dangerous things that were here, as well, creatures that would hunt her for food or sport or for no reason at all. It was an unpleasant prospect.
It had the effect, however, of distracting her. Since her