and then out the windows at a sky that was clear and filled
with stars. He thought of his brother and the Sword of
Shannara, and he wondered what the King of the Silver River
had done with them. He thought of Damson and Padishar,
Walker and Wren, and all the others who had been involved in
his struggle. He wondered vaguely what the struggle had been
for.
He slept finally, drifting off before he knew what was hap-
pening, sinking into a soothing blackness. But the nightmare
surfaced instantly, and he experienced for the third time a con-
The Talismans of Shannara 303
frontadon with himself as a Shadowen wraith. He thrashed and
twisted and fought to come awake, and afterward lay sweating
and gasping in the dark.
He realized then, with chilling certainty, that something was
dreadfully wrong.
Look at what was happening to him. He could not sleep
without dreaming, and the dream was always the same. He ate,
but he lost strength. He spent his time in his room doing noth-
ing, yet he was always tired. He could not think straight. He
could not concentrate. His energy was being sapped away.
This wasn’t happening by chance, he admonished himself.
Something was causing it.
He sat upright on the bed, swung his legs to the floor, and
stared into the room’s shadows. Think! He fought back against
his exhaustion, against the chains of his lethargy and disorien-
tation. Recognition came, a slow untangling of threads that had
knotted. There were two possibilities. The first was that the
magic of the wishsong was infecting him in some new way,
and he needed to do what Rimmer Dall was urging. The sec-
ond was that the magic infecting him was Shadowen, that
Rimmer Dall was working to break down his defenses, and
that all his talk about helping him was some sort of trick.
But a trick to do what?
Par took a deep, steadying breath. He wanted to crawl back
beneath the covers but would not let himself. He felt an urge
to scream and choked it down. Was Rimmer Dall lying or tell-
ing the truth? What were his real intentions in all this? Par
clasped his hands together to keep them from shaking. He was
falling apart. He could feel himself unraveling, and he did not
know how to stop it. If Rimmer Dall was telling the truth
about the wishsong, then he needed his help. If he was lying,
it was a deception so intricate and so vast that it dwarfed any-
thing the Valeman could imagine, because it had to have been
at work from the moment the First Seeker had come looking
for him weeks ago at the Blue Whisker Ale House.
Shades’ I need to know!
Par rose, walked to the windows, and stood looking out at
the night, breathing the cool air. He was paralyzed with inde-
cision. How was he going to learn the truth? Was there some
way to see past his own uncertainty, to recognize if there was
304 The Talismans of Shannara
a deception being played? The Sword of Shannara had showed
him nothing, he reminded himself. Nothing! What else was
there to try?
He watched shadows thrown by the night clouds shift like
animals through the trees across the river. He would have to
stall, he told himself. He could listen and talk, but he could not
allow anything to happen. He. would have to find a way to dis-
pel his confusion so that he Could recognize what was truth
and what a lie, and at the same time he would have to find a
way to keep himself from disintegrating completely.
He closed his eyes, put his face in his hands, and wondered
how he was going to do that.
XXVI
M^ eat rose off the grasslands east of Drey Wood in swelter-
!• ing waves, the midday sun a fiery ball in the cloudless
JL^sky, the air thick with the smell and taste of sweat
and oust. Wren Elessedil lay flat against the crest of a rise
and watched the Federation army toil its way across the plains
like a slow-moving, many-legged insect.