“Show me where she is,” he said.
Hunter Predd led him along a series of trails that circumvented the center of Grimpen Ward and avoided contact with its denizens. Darkness hid their passage, and the forests were a vast, impenetrable maze into which only they appeared to have ventured. Distant and removed, the sounds of the village rose up in tiny bursts within the cloaking silence, and slivers of light appeared and faded like predators’ eyes. But both Wing Rider and Druid knew how to walk undetected, and so their passing went unnoticed.
As he slipped through the dark tangle of the trees, Walker’s thoughts crowded in on him. His opportunities, he sensed, were slipping away. Too many he had depended on were dead—first Allardon Elessedil, then the castaway, and now the Addershag. Each represented information and assistance that would be difficult, if not impossible, to replace. The loss of the Addershag troubled him most. Could he manage without a seer’s visions in this endeavor? Allanon had done so, years earlier. But Walker was not chiseled from the same rock as his predecessor and made no claims to being his equal. He did what he could with what he had, mostly because he understood the need for doing so and not because he coveted the role into which he had been cast. Druids had traditionally desired their positions in the order. The mold had been broken with him.
He did not like thinking about who he was and how he had gotten to be that way. He did not like remembering the road he had been forced to travel to become what he had never intended to be. It was a bitter memory he carried and a difficult burden he bore. He had become a Druid because of Allanon’s machinations and Cogline’s urgings and in spite of his own considerable misgivings because, in the end, the need for his doing so was overwhelming. He had never thought to have anything to do with the Druids, never thought to be part of what they represented. He had grown up with a determination to stay apart from the legacy that had claimed so many of his family—the legacy of the Shannara. He had vowed to take his life in another direction.
But this is old news, he admonished himself even as he remembered the early fire of his doomed commitment to change what was fated. He supposed what pained him most, what weighed so heavily on his conscience, was not the breaking of the vow itself, which he could justify in light of the need it served, but the distance he had strayed from his appointed path in taking up his role. He had sworn he would not be a Druid like those others, like Allanon and Bremen before him. He would not cloak himself in subterfuge and secrecy. He would not manipulate others to achieve the ends he wished. He would not deceive and misdirect and conceal. He would be open and forthright and honest in his dealings. He would reveal what he knew and be truthful always.
He marveled at how naive he had been. How foolish. How terribly, fatally unrealistic.
Because life’s dictates did not allow for quick and easy distinctions between right and wrong or good and bad. Choices were made between shades of gray, and there was healing and harm to be weighed on both sides of each. As a result, his life had irrevocably followed the path of his predecessors, and in time he had taken on the very characteristics he had despised in them. He had assumed their mantles more completely than he had ever intended. Without ever wishing it to be so, he had become like them.
Because he could see the need for doing so.
Because he was then required to conduct himself accordingly.
Because, always and forever, the greater good must be considered in determining his course of action.
Tell that to Bek Rowe when this is over, he thought darkly. Tell it to that boy.
They emerged suddenly from the forest into a clearing in which a solitary cottage sat dark and silent. Far removed from everything, the cottage was poorly tended, its windows broken, its roof sagging, its yard choked with weeds, and its gardens bare. It looked as if no one had lived in it for some time, as if it had been abandoned and let run to ruin.