The First King of Shannara - Terry Brooks [174]
He paused, searching her dark eyes. “You understand what this means, don’t you? It means that I believe you will have to use the magic again now that we are traveling north. Any other expectation would be unrealistic. The Warlock Lord will be looking for us, and there will come a time when you will have to protect yourself and perhaps others as well. I may not be there to help you. Your magic is too essential for you not to be able to rely on it. I am hopeful that the staff will allow you to employ it without fear.”
She nodded slowly. “Even if the magic is innate?”
“Even so. It will take time for you to learn to use the staff properly. I wish I could promise you that time, but I cannot. You must remember the staff’s purpose, and if you are required to defend yourself, order your thoughts with the staff in mind.”
She cocked one eyebrow at him, then said, “Do not act recklessly. Do not call up the magic without first thinking of the staff. Do not employ the magic without setting the staff and opening a channel within to carry the excess out.”
He smiled. “You are quick, Mareth. If I were your father, I would be proud indeed.”
She smiled back. “I think of you as my father in any case. Not as I once did, but in a good way.”
“I am flattered. Now, take the staff as your own and do not forget its use. Once to the Silver River, we are back in enemy country, and the battle with the Warlock Lord begins anew.”
They slept well that night and set out again at dawn. They rode slowly, resting their horses often in the midsummer heat, working their way steadily north. To their right, the Battlemound shimmered in the sun, barren and stark, empty of movement. To their left, the Black Oaks were a dark wall, as still as the flats, tall and forbidding. Again they rode mostly in silence, Kinson carrying the sword, Mareth the staff, and Bremen the weight of their future.
By nightfall, they had skirted the quagmire of the Mist Marsh and reached the Silver River. Anxious to gain the heights that lay just beyond so that he could view the Rabb Plains and the whole of the country north before the morrow, Bremen made the choice to cross. They found a shallows, the river low from days of little rainfall and high heat, and with the sun setting wearily beyond the flat glimmer of the Rainbow Lake west, they rode up through a series of hills and onto a bluff. There, back within a thick band of trees, they dismounted, tethered the horses, and proceeded on foot.
By now the daylight had faded to a silvery gray and the shadows of nightfall had begun to lengthen. The air, still thick with heat, had taken on a smoky quality and tasted of dust and parched grass.
Night birds flew through the darkness in search of food, flashes of movement that appeared and were gone in an instant’s time. All about them, insects buzzed hungrily.
They reached the edge of the bluff, the sunlight streaking the flats with red fire, and stopped.
Below them lay the whole of the Northland army. It was camped several miles farther north, well out on the plains so that the details of its battle pennants were obscured, but too vast and dark to be mistaken for anything other than what it was. Cooking fires were already lit, small flickers of light that dotted the grasslands like fireflies. Horses and wagons circled sluggishly, wheels and traces creaking, riders and drivers shouting roughly as they wrestled provisions and weapons into place. Tents billowed in the hot breeze amid the army’s protective mass. One, an impenetrable black, its ribs all edges and spines, stood alone at the exact center of the camp, a broad stretch of open ground encircling it like a moat. The Druid, the Borderman, and the girl stared down at it in silence.
“What is the Northland army doing here?” Kinson asked finally.
Bremen