Finally, Bek put up his hands. “I can’t argue this anymore, not right now. It hurts too much to argue with you.”
She snorted derisively. “It hurts you, maybe. Not me. I don’t bruise so easily. Anyway, you owe me a little consideration. You owe me a chance to tell you what I think about your sister! You owe it to me to share some of what I feel!”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
She reached down suddenly and hauled him all the way out of the blankets and shook him hard. “No, you’re not! I don’t want you to just sit there! I don’t want you to just listen! I want you to do something! Don’t you know that?”
Her red hair had shaken loose of its headband and strands of it were wrapped about her face like tiny threads of blood. “Don’t you know anything?”
Her eyes had gone wild and reckless, and she seemed on the verge of doing something desperate. She stopped shaking him, instead gripping his shoulders so tightly he could feel her nails through his clothing. She was trying to speak, to say something more, but couldn’t seem to make herself do so.
“I’m sorry about Hawk,” he whispered. “I’m sorry it was Grianne. But she didn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. She’s like a child, locked away in her mind, frightened of coming out again. Don’t you see, Rue? She had to face up to what she is all at once. That’s what the magic of the Sword of Shannara does to you. She had to accept that she was this terrible creature, this monster, and she didn’t even know it. Her whole life has been filled with lies and deceits and treacheries. I don’t know—she may never be made whole.”
Rue Meridian stared at him as if he were someone she had never seen. There were tears in her eyes and a look of such anguish on her face that he was stunned.
“I’m tired, Bek,” she whispered back. “I haven’t even thought about it until now. I haven’t had time for that. I haven’t taken time.” She wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. “Look at me.”
He did so, having never looked away, in truth, but giving her what she needed, trying to find a way to help her recover. He said, “I just want you to try to . . .”
“Put your arms around me, Bek,” she said.
He did so without hesitation, holding her against him, feeling her body press close. She began to cry, soundlessly, her shoulders shaking and her wet face pushing into the crook of his shoulder and neck. She cried for a long time, and he held her while she did, running his hand over her strong back in small circular motions, trying to give some measure of comfort and reassurance. It was so out of character for her to behave like this, so different from anything he had seen from her before, that it took him until she was finished to accept that it was really happening.
She brushed what remained of the tears from her face and composed herself with a small shrug. “I didn’t know I had that in me.” She looked at him. “Don’t tell anyone.”
He nodded. “I wouldn’t do that. You know I wouldn’t.”
“I know. But I had to say it.” She stared at him a moment, again with that sense of not knowing exactly who he was, of perhaps meeting him for the first time. “My brother and the others are down at the edge of the bluff, talking. We can join them when you’re ready.”
He climbed to his feet, reaching for his boots. “Talking about what?”
“About what it’s going to take to get us out of here.”
“What is it going to take?”
“A miracle,” she said.
Redden Alt Mer stood at the edge of the cliff face and stared down at the canopy of the Crake Rain Forest, very much the same way he had stared down at it for the previous five days. Nothing at all had changed during that time, save for the level of his frustration, which was rapidly becoming unmanageable. He had considered and reconsidered every option he could think of that would let him bypass the Graak and retrieve the diapson crystals they needed to get airborne again. But each option involved unacceptable risks and little chance of success, so he would toss it aside in despair, only to pick it up and reexamine it when he decided that every other alternative was even worse.