“Me, too,” Bek agreed.
Quentin nodded, looking off again, not saying anything. “I don’t know how to make that happen,” he continued after a moment. “I’m afraid now that maybe it can’t.”
“It can,” Bek said. “I don’t know how, but it can. I’ve been thinking about getting back home, about how to take Grianne there, like Walker said I should. It seems impossible, crazy. Walker’s gone, so he can’t help. Truls Rohk won’t be going any farther. Half of everyone I came here with is dead and the other half is scattered. Until I found you, I was all alone. What chance do I have? But you know what? I just tell myself I’ll find a way. I don’t know what that way is, but I’ll find it. I’ll walk all the way home if I have to. Right over the Blue Divide. Or fly. Or swim. It doesn’t matter. I’ll find a way.
He looked at Quentin and smiled. “We got this far. We’ll get the rest of the way, too.”
They were brave words, but they sounded right, necessary, talismans against fear and doubt. Bek and Quentin were still fighting for small assurances, for bits of hope, for tiny threads of courage. The words gave them some of each. Neither wanted to challenge them just now. Look too closely at the battlements, and the cracks showed. That wasn’t what they needed. They left the words where they were, undisturbed, an echo in their thoughts, a promise of what they believed might still be.
Taking comfort in the shelter of each other, because in the end it was the best sort of comfort they could hope to find, they went off to sleep.
The dawn was cloudy and gray,—a promise of new snow reflected in the colorless canvas of the slowly brightening sky. The temperature had dropped to freezing, and the air was brittle with cold. They ate breakfast with few words exchanged, mustering their resolve. The confidence that had bolstered them the night before had dissipated like fog in sunlight. All about them, the mountains stretched away in an endless alternation of peaks and valleys. Save for the intensity of the light from the sunrise east, the horizons all looked the same.
“Might as well get going,” Quentin muttered, standing up and slinging his sword over his shoulder.
Bek rose, as well, and did the same with the Sword of Shannara. He barely gave thought to the talisman anymore, it seemed to have served its purpose on this journey and had become something of a burden. He glanced self-consciously at Grianne, realizing he could say the same about her and most certainly had thought as much more than once.
Thinking to cover as much ground as possible before the next storm and not wanting to be caught out in the open again, they set a brisk pace. The frozen ground crunched like old bones beneath their boots, grasses and earth cratering with indentations of their prints. If their pursuers were still tracking them, they would have no trouble doing so. Bek considered the possibility and brushed it aside. The shape-shifters had promised him that his pursuers would not be allowed to follow. There was no reason to think that their protection extended this far, but he was weary and heartsick and needed to believe this one thing if he was to have any peace of mind. So he let himself.
They trudged on toward midday, following trails that wound through the valleys ahead. The horizons never changed. In the vast mountain coldness, the land seemed empty of life. Once, they saw a bird flying far away. Once, further down in the shadowed woods, they heard some creature cry. Otherwise, there was only silence, deep and pervasive and unbroken.
Time dragged, a dying candle, and Bek’s spirits lagged. He found himself wondering if there was any sense to what they were doing, if there was a purpose for going on. He understood that it gave them a goal and that movement kept them alive. But the vastness of the range and the terrible solitude it visited on them gave rise to a growing certainty that they were simply prolonging the inevitable. They were never going to walk out of the mountains. They were never going to be able to find anyone else from the doomed company of the Jerle Shannara. They were trapped in a nightmare world that would deceive them, break them down, and in the end destroy them.