The First King of Shannara - Terry Brooks [53]
But Tay Trefenwyd was good at that. He was an affable, easygoing man who cared about the problems of others and had always done his best to give what help he could. He was not confrontational like Risca or stubborn like Bremen. While at Paranor, he had been genuinely well liked, even given his association with the other two. Tay was governed by strong beliefs and an unmatched work ethic, but he did not hold himself up to others as an example of how to be. Tay accepted people as they were, isolating what was good and finding ways to make use of it. Even Athabasca had not quarreled with him, seeing in Tay what he hoped was hidden even in the most troublesome of his friends. Tay’s big hands were as strong as iron, but his heart was gentle. No one ever mistook his kindness for weakness, and Tay never let the first suggest the second. Tay knew when to stand his ground and when to yield.
He was a conciliator and a compromiser of the first order, and he would need those skills in the days ahead.
He ran over the list of what he must accomplish, laying out each item, one by one.
He must persuade his king, Courtann Ballindarroch, to mount a search for the Black Elfstone.
He must persuade his king to send his armies in support of the Dwarves.
He must convince him that the Four Lands were about to be altered by circumstance and events in a way that would change them all irrevocably and forever.
He strode across the open grasslands thinking of what this meant, heading north and west toward the forestlands that marked the eastern boundary of his country, smiling easily, whistling a tune. He did not yet know how he was going to accomplish any of this, but that didn’t matter. He would find a way. Bremen was counting on him. Tay did not intend to let him down.
The daylight hours slipped away, and the sun passed west into the distant mountains and disappeared. Tay left the Mermidon at the edge of the Westfand forests below the Pykon and turned north. Because it was night and he could no longer see well on the flats, he stayed within the concealment of the trees as he continued on. His skills as a Druid aided him. Tay was an elementalist, a student of the ways in which magic and science interacted to balance the principal components of his world — earth, air, fire, and water.
He had developed an understanding of their symbiosis, the ways in which they related to each other, the ways they worked together to maintain and further life, and the ways they protected each other when disturbed. Tay had mastered the rules for changing one to the other, for using one to destroy the other, for using any to give life to another. His talents had grown quite specialized. He could read movement and detect presence from the elements. He could sense thoughts. On a broad basis, he could reconfigure history and predict the future. It wasn’t the same as having a vision.
It wasn’t linked to the dead or to the spiritual. It was tied instead to earth laws, to the power lines that encircled the world and tied all things together with linkage of acts and counteracts, of cause and effect, of choice and consequence. A stone thrown into a still pond produced ripples. So, too, everything that happened to shift the world’s balance, no matter how small, resulted in change. Tay had learned to read those changes and to intuit what they meant.
So now, as he walked in the shadow of the forest night, he read in the movement of the wind and the smells still clinging to the trees and the vibrations borne on the surface of the earth that a large party of Gnomes had passed this way earlier and now waited somewhere ahead. He tasted their presence more strongly the farther