He was still out, tracking .
She ambled back to the cooling ashes of the cooking fire
and nudged the remains with her boot. Garth had forbidden
any sort of real fire until he made certain they were safe. He
had been edgy and suspicious all day, troubled by something
that neither of them could see, a sense of something not being
right. Wren was inclined to attribute his uneasiness to lack of
sleep. On the other hand, Garth’s hunches were seldom wrong.
If he was disturbed, she knew better than to question him.
She wished he would return.
A pool sat just within the trees behind the bluff and she
walked to it, knelt, and splashed water on her face. The pond’s
surface rippled with the touch of her hands and cleared. She
could see herself in its reflection, the distortion clearing until
her image was almost mirrorlike. She stared down at it-at a girl
barely grown, her features decidedly Elven with sharply pointed
ears and slanted brows, her face narrow and high cheeked, and
her skin nut-brown. She saw hazel eyes that seldom stayed fixed,
an off-center smile that suggested she enjoyed some private joke,
and ash-blond hair cut short and tightly curled. There was a
tautness to her, she thought-a tension that would not be dis-
pelled no matter how valiant the effort employed.
She rocked back on her heels and permitted herself a wry
smile, deciding that she liked what she saw well enough to live
with it awhile longer.
She folded her hands in her lap and lowered her head. The
Search for the Elves-how long had it been going on now? How
long Since the old man-the one who claimed he was Cogline-
had come to her and told her of the dreams? Weeks? But how
many? She had lost count. The old man had known of the
dreams and challenged her to discover for herself the truth be-
hind them. She had decided to accept his challenge, to go to
the Hadeshorn in the Valley of Shale and meet with the shade
of Allanon. Why shouldn’t she? Perhaps she would learn some-
thing of where she had come from, of the parents she had never
known, or of her history.
Odd. Until the old man had appeared, she had been disin-
terested in her lineage. She had persuaded herself that it didn’t
matter. But something in the way he spoke to her, in the words
he used-something-had changed her.
She reached up to finger the leather bag about her neck self-
consciously, feeling the hard outline of the painted rocks, the
play Elfstones, her only link to the past. Where did they come
from? Why had they been given to her?
Elven features, Ohmsford blood, and Rover heart and skills-
they all belonged to her. But how had she come by them?
Who was she?
She hadn’t found out at the Hadeshorn. Allanon had come
as promised, dark and forbidding even in death. But he had told
her nothing. Instead, he had given her a charge-had given each
of them a charge, the children of Shannara, as he called them,
Par and Walker and herself. But hers? Well. She shook her head
at the memory. She was to go in search of the Elves, to find
them and bring them back into the world of men. The Elves,
who hadn’t been seen by anyone in over a hundred years, who
were believed by most never even to have existed, and who
were presumed a child’s faerie tale-she was to find them.
She had not planned to look at first, disturbed by what she
had heard and how it had made her feel, unwilling to become
involved, or to risk herself for something she did not understand
or care about. She had left the others and with Garth once again
her only companion had gone back into the Westland. She had
thought to resume her life as a Rover. The Shadowen were not
her concern. The problems of the races were not her own. But
the Druid’s admonition had stayed with her, and almost without
realizing it she had begun her search after all. It had started with