seep quickly away. When they stopped finally for the night, she
was unconscious.
Wren watched Eowen bathe her crumpled face as Gavilan
and the Elven Hunters set camp. Garth was at her elbow, his
dark face impassive but his eyes clouded with doubt. When she
met his gaze squarely, he gave a barely perceptible shake of his
head. His fingers gestured. I cannot read the signs. I cannot even find
them.
The admission was a bitter one. Garth was a proud man and
he did not accept defeat easily. She looked into his eyes and
touched him briefly in response. You will find a way, she signed.
They ate again, mostly because it was necessary, huddled
together on a small patch of damp earth that was dryer than
anything about it. Ellenroh slept, wrapped in two blankets, shak-
ing with cold and fever, mumbling from time to time, and toss-
ing within her dreams. Wren marveled at her grandmother’s
strength of will. Not once while she had struggled with her
illness had she relaxed her hold on the Ruhk Staff. She clutched
it to her still, as if she might with her own body protect the
city and people the Loden’s magic enclosed. Gavilan had offered
more than once to relieve her of the task of carrying the staff,
but she had steadfastly refused to give it up. It was a burden she
had resolved to shoulder, and she would not be persuaded to
lay it down. Wren thought of what it must have cost her grand-
mother to become so strong-the loss of her parents, her hus-
band, her daughter, her friends-almost everyone close to her.
Her whole life had been turned about with the coming of the
demons and the walling away of the city of Arborlon. All that
she remembered as a child of Morrowindi was gone. Nothing
remained of the promise she must have once felt for the future
save the possibility that the Elves and their city might, through
her resolve and trust, be reborn into a better world.
A world of Federation oppression and Shadowen fear, a world in which,
like Morrowindl, use of magic had somehow gone awry.
Wren’s smile was slow, bitter, and ironic.
She was struck suddenly by the similarities between the two,
the island and the mainland, Morrowindl and the Four Lands-
different, yet afflicted with the same sort of madness. Both
worlds were plagued with creatures that fed on destruction; both
were beset with a sickness that turned the earth and the things
that lived upon it foul. What was Morrowindl if not the Four
Lands in an advanced state of decay? She wondered suddenly if
the two were somehow connected, if the demons and the Shad-
owen might have some common origin. She wondered again at
the secrets that the Elves were keeping from her of what had
happened on Morrowindl years ago.
And again she asked herself, What am I doing here? Why did
Allanon send me to bring the Elves back into the Four Lands? What is it
that they can do that will make a difference, and how will any of us ever
discover what that something is?
She finished eating and sat for a time with her grandmother,
studying the other’s face in the fading light, trying to find in the
ravaged features some new trace of her mother, of the vision
she had claimed from that now long-ago, distant dream when
her mother had pleaded, Remember me. Remember me. Such a fragile
thing, her memory, and it was all that she had of either parent,
all that remained of her childhood. As she sat there with her
grandmother’s head cradled in her lap, she contemplated asking
Garth to tell her something more of what had been, though she
no longer had any real expectation that there was anything else
to be told, knowing only that she was empty and alone and in
need of something to cling to. But Garth stood watch, too far
away to summon without disturbing the others and too dis-
tanced from her to be of any real comfort, and she turned in-
stead to the familiar touch of the Elfstones within their leather