wipe away everything that had happened in his life like chalk
from a board and start over. There was a bitterness within him
that he could not resolve, which gnawed and scratched at him
with the persistence of a hungry animal and refused to be
chased. The bitterness had many sources—he did not care to
list them. Mostly, of course, he was bitter with himself. He was
always bitter with himself these days, it seemed, a stranger
227
228 The Talismans of Shannara
come out of nowhere, a man whose identity he barely recog-
nized, an all-too-willing pawn for the wants and needs of old
men a thousand years gone.
He sat in the glade by the stream, staring back across the
clearing and the patch of fresh-turned earth where Cogline lay,
and forced himself to remember the old man. His bitterness
needed a balm; perhaps memories of the old man would pro-
vide it. He took a moment to splash handfuls of the stream’s
cold water on his face, cleansing it of the dirt and ash and
blood, then positioned himself in a patch of sun and let his
thoughts drift.
Walker remembered Cogline as a teacher mostly, as the man
who had come to him when his life had been jumbled and con-
fused, when he had abandoned the Races to live in isolation at
Hearthstone where he would not be stared at and whispered
about, where he would not be known as the Dark Uncle. The
magic had been a mystery to Walker then, the legacy of the
wishsong come down through the years from Brin Ohmsford
in a tangle of threads he could not unravel. Cogline had shown
him ways in which he could control the magic so that he no
longer would feel helpless before it. Cogline had taught him
how to focus his life so that he was master of the white heat
that roiled within. He removed the fear and the confusion, and
he gave back to Walker a sense of purpose and self-respect.
The old man had been his friend. He had cared about him,
had looked after him in ways that on reflection Walker knew
were the ways that a father looked after a son. He had in-
structed and guided and been present when he was needed.
Even when Walker was grown, and there was that distance be-
tween them that comes when fathers and sons must regard
themselves as equals without ever quite believing it, Cogline
stayed close in whatever ways Walker would allow. They had
fought and argued, mistrusted and accused, and challenged
each other to do what was right and not what was easy. But
they had never given up on or forsaken each other; they had
never despaired of their friendship. It helped Walker now to
know that was so.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that the old man had lived
other lives before this one, some of which Walker still barely
knew about. Cogline had been young once. What had that been
The Talismans of Shannara 229
like? The old man had never said. He had studied with the
Druids—with Allanon, with Bremen, with those who had gone
before, perhaps, though he had never really said. How old was
Cogline? How long had he been alive? Walker realized sud-
denly that he didn’t know. Cogline had been an old man when
Kimber Boh was a child and Brin Ohmsford came into Darklin
Reach in search of the Ildatch. That was three hundred years
ago. Walker knew about Cogline then; the old man had talked
about that period of time, about the child he had raised, about
the madness he had feigned and then embraced, about how he
had led Brin and her companions to the Maelmord to put an
end to the Mord Wraiths. Walker had heard those stories; yet
it was such a small piece of the old man’s life to know—one
day of a year’s time. What of all the rest? What parts of his
life had Cogline failed to reveal—what parts that were now
lost forever?
Walker shook his head and stared out across the trees at
Paranor. Parts that the old man had not minded losing, he de-