pouch, running the tips of her fingers over their hard, smooth
surfaces, rolling the Stones idly beneath the fabric of her tunic.
They were her mother’s legacy to her and her grandmother’s
trust, and despite her misgivings as to their purpose in her life
she could not give them up. Not here, not now, not until she
was free of the nightmare into which she had so willingly jour-
neyed.
I chose this, she whispered to herself, the words bitter and
harsh. I came because I wanted to.
To learn the truth, to discover who and what she was, to
bring past and future together once and for all.
And what do I know of any of that? What do I understand?
Eowen came to sit next to her, and she realized how tired
she had grown. She gave her grandmother over to the red-haired
seer and crept silently away to her own bed. Wrapped in her
blankets, she lay staring out into the impenetrable night, the
swamp a maze that would swallow them all and care nothing
for what it had done, the world a blanket of indifference and
deceit, of dangers as numerous as the shadows gathered about,
and of sudden death and the taunting ghosts of what might have
been. She found herself thinking of the years she had trained
with Garth, of what he had taught her, of what she had learned.
She would need all of it if she were to survive, she knew. She
would need everything she could summon of strength, experi-
ence, training and resolve, and she would need more than a little
luck.
And one thing more.
Her fingers brushed against the Elfstones once more and fell
away as if burned. Their power was hers to summon and com-
mand whenever she chose. Twice now she had called upon them
to save her. Both times she had done so either out of ignorance
or desperation. But if she used them again, she sensed, if she
employed them a third time now that she knew the magic was
there and understood what wielding it meant, she risked giving
up everything she was and becoming something else entirely.
Nothing would ever be the same for her again, she cautioned
herself. Nothing.
Yet, as she considered the failure of strength, experience,
training, and resolve to come to her aid, as she lamented the
apparent absence of any luck, it seemed that the power of the
Stones was all that was left to her, the only resource that re-
mained.
She turned her head into the blankets and fell asleep in a
spider’s web of doubt.
CHAPTER
17
WREN DREAMED, and her dreams were of Ohmsfords come
and gone, a kaleidoscopic, fragmented rush of images
that exploded out of memory. They careened into her
like an avalanche and swept her away, tossed and
tumbled in a slide that would not end. A spectator with no
voice, she watched the history of her ancestors take shape
in bits and flashes of time, saw events unfold that she had
never seen but only heard described, the legends of the past
carried forward in the words of the stories Par and Coil Ohms-
ford told.
Then she was awake, sitting bolt upright, startled from her
sleep with a suddenness that was frightening. Faun, curled at her
throat, skittered hurriedly away. She stared into blackness, lis-
tening to the sound of her heartbeat in her throat, to the rush
of her breathing. All around her, the others of the little com-
pany slept, save whoever among them kept guard, a dim,
faceless shape at the edge of their camp.
What was it? she thought wildly. What was it that I saw?
For something in her dreams had brought her awake, some-
thing so unnerving, so unexpected, that sleep was no longer
possible.
What?
The memory, when it came, was shocking and abrupt. Her
hand flew at once to the small leather bag tucked within her
tunic.
The Elfstones!
In her dreams of Ohmsford ancestors, she had caught a sin-
gular glimpse of Shea and Flick, one brief image out of many,
one story out of all those told about the search for the Sword