stopped. She stood there in the shadows, lost in thought. Par
waited where he was, feeling the cool night air brush his skin
in a sudden breath of wind, listening to me silence that spread
across the city like the waters of an ocean across its floor. He
could almost swim through that silence, drifting away to better
times and places. There was fear in him that he could not sup-
press-fear at the thought of returning for his friends, fear at the
thought of failing in the attempt. But to attempt nothing at all
was unthinkable.
Still, what could they do-just this slip of a giri and him-
self?
As if reading his mind she came back to him then, green eyes
intense, seized his arms tightly, and whispered, “I think I know
away, Par.”
He smiled in spite of himself.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
Walker Boh journeyed directly back to Hearthstone
after taking leave of the company at the Hades-
hom. He rode his horse east across the Rabb,
bypassed Storlock and its Healers, climbed the Wolfsktaag
through the Pass of Jade, and worked his way upriver along the
Chard Rush until he entered Darldin Reach. Three days later he
was home again. He talked with no one on the way, keeping
entirely to himself as he traveled, pausing only long enough to
eat and sleep. He was not fit company for other men and he
knew it He was obsessed with thoughts of his encounter with
the shade of Allanon. He was haunted by them.
The Anar was enveloped by a particularly violent midsummer
storm within twenty-four hours of his return, and Walker se-
cluded himself truculently in his cottage home while winds
lashed its shaved-board walls and rains beat down upon its shin-
gled roof. The forested valley was deluged, wracked by the
crack and flash of lightning, shaken by me long, ominous peals
of thunder, pelted and washed. The cadence of the rains oblit-
erated every other sound, and Walker sat amid their constant
thrum in brooding silence, wrapped in blankets and a blackness
of spirit he would not have thought possible.
He found himself despairing.
It was the inevitability of things that he feared. Walker Boh,
whatever name he chose to bear, was nevertheless an Ohmsford
by blood, and he knew that Ohmsfords, despite their misgivings,
had always been made to take up the Druid cause. It had been
so with Shea and Flick, with Wil, and with Brin and Jair before
him. Now it was to be his turn. His and Wren’s and Par’s. Par
embraced the cause willingly, of course. Par was an incurable
romantic, a self-appointed champion of the downtrodden and
the abused. Par was a fool.
Or a realist, depending on how you viewed the matter. Be-
cause, if history proved an accurate indicator. Par was merely
accepting without argument what Walker, too, would be forced
to embrace-Allanon’s will, the cause of a dead man. The shade
had come to them like some scolding patriarch out of death’s
embrace-chiding them for their lack of diligence, scolding them
for their misgivings, charging them with missions of madness
and self-destruction. Bring back the Druids! Bring back Para-
nor! Do these things because I say they must be done, because
I say they are necessary, because I-a thing of no flesh and dead
mind-demand it!
Walker’s mood darkened further as the weight of the matter
continued to settle steadily over him, a pall mirroring the op-
pressiveness of the storms without. Change the whole of the face
of the world-that was what the shade was asking of them, of
Par, Wren, and himself. Take three hundred years of evolution
in the Four Lands and dispense with it in an instant’s time. What
else was the shade asking, if not that? A return of the magic, a
return of the wielders of that magic, of its shapers, of all the
things ended by this same shade those three hundred years past.
Madness! They would be playing with lives in the manner of
creators-and they were not entitled!
Through the gray haze of his anger and his fear, he could
conjure in his mind the features of the shade. Allanon. The last