Ilse Witch - Terry Brooks [10]
The castaway was writhing beneath her, and the hold she kept on him slipped away momentarily as she lost focus. She brought her song to bear again, layering it over him, embedding herself more deeply within his mind to keep him under control.
Who are you? Speak your name!
His body lurched and the sounds he made were terrifying.
Tell me!
He answered her, and when he did, she understood at once the importance of the bracelet.
What else were you carrying? What else, that speaks to this?
He fought her, not realizing what it was he was fighting, only knowing that he must. She sensed it was not entirely his idea to fight her, that either someone had implanted within his mind the need to do so or something had happened to persuade him it was necessary. But she was strong and certain in her magic, and he lacked the defenses necessary to resist her.
A map, she saw. Drawn on an old skin, inked in his own hand. A map, she surmised at once, that was no longer his, but was on its way to Arborlon and the Elven King.
She tried to determine what was on the map, and for a moment she was able to reconstruct a vague image from his grunts and moans. She caught a glimpse of names written and symbols drawn here and there, saw a dotted line connecting islands off the coast of the Westland and out into the Blue Divide. She traced the line to the pillars of ice and to the land in which the safehold lay. But the writings and drawings were lost to her when he convulsed a final time and lay back, his voice spent, his mind emptied, and his body limp and unmoving beneath her touch.
She stilled her song and stepped away from him. She had all she was going to get, but what she had was enough to tell her what was needed. She listened to the silence for a moment, making sure her presence had not yet been detected. The castaway Elf lay motionless on his raised pallet, gone so deeply inside himself he would never come out again. He would live perhaps, but he would never recover.
She shook her head. It was pointless to leave him so.
Kael Elessedil, son of Queen Aine, once destined to be King of the Elves. It was before her time, but she knew the story. Lost for thirty years, and this was his sorry fate.
The Ilse Witch stepped close and drew back her hood to reveal the face that few ever saw. Within her concealing garments, she was nothing of what she seemed. She was very young, barely a grown woman, her hair long and dark, her eyes a startling blue, and her features smooth and lovely. As a child, when she had the name she no longer spoke, she would look at herself in the mirror of the waters of a little cove that pooled off the stream that ran not far from her home and try to imagine how she would look when grown. She had not thought herself pretty then, when it mattered to her. She did not think herself pretty now, when it did not.
There was warmth and tenderness in her face and eyes as she bent to kiss the ruined man on his lips. She held the kiss long enough to draw the breath from his lungs, and then he died.
“Be at peace, Kael Elessedil,” she whispered in his ear.
She went from the Healer’s home as she had come, hooded once more, a shadowy presence that drew no notice by its passing. The attendants would come awake after she was gone, unaware that anything had transpired, not sensing they had slept or that time had passed.
The Ilse Witch was already sifting through the images she had culled, weighing her options. The magic Kael Elessedil had discovered was priceless. Even without knowing exactly what it was, she could sense that much. It must be hers, of course. She must do what he had failed to do—find it, claim it, and retrieve it. It was protected in some way, as such magic necessarily would be, but there were no defenses she could not overcome. Her course of action was already decided, and only a settling of the particulars remained.
What she coveted, even if she did not require it in order to succeed, was the map.
Sliding