But Bek’s mind was running too fast and too hard to permit him to sleep, his thoughts skipping from consideration of one obstacle to the next, from one concern to another, everything tied up with the dangerous situation facing them and what they might try to do to avoid it.
One concern, in particular, outstripped the rest.
He bent close to Rue. “I don’t know what to do about Grianne.” His lips pressed against her ear, his words a hushed whisper. Voices carried in the empty silence of ruins such as these, beyond even walls of mortar and stone. “If the Morgawr comes for her, she will have no way to protect herself. She will be helpless.”
Rue leaned her head against him, her hair as soft as spiderwebbing. “Do you want to try to hide her somewhere besides here?” she whispered back.
“No. He’ll find her wherever we put her. I have to wake her up.”
“You’ve been trying that for weeks, Bek, and it hasn’t worked. What can you do that you haven’t already done?”
He kissed her hair and put his arms around her. “Find out what it is that keeps her in hiding. Find out what it will take to bring her out.”
He could sense her smile even in the darkness. “That isn’t a new plan. That’s an old one.”
He nodded, touching her knee in soft reproach. “I know. But suppose we could figure out what it would take to wake her. We’ve tried everything we could think of, both of us. But we keep trying in a general way, a kind of blanket approach to bringing her out of her sleep. Walker said she wouldn’t come back to us until she found a way to forgive herself for the worst of her wrongs. I think that’s the key. We have to figure out what that wrong is.”
She lifted her head, her red hair falling back from her face. “How can you possibly do that? She has hundreds of things to forgive herself for. How can you pick out one?”
“Walker said it was the one she believed to be the worst.” He paused, thinking. “What would that be? What would she see as her worst wrong? Killing someone? She’s killed lots of people. Which one would matter more than the others?”
Rue furrowed her smooth brow. “Maybe this was something she did when she first became the witch, when she was still young, something that goes to the heart of everything she’s done since.”
He stared at her for a long time, remembering his dream of the other night. It had been nagging at him ever since, reduced to a vague image, the details faded. It hovered now, just beyond his grasp. He could practically reach out and touch it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I think there’s something in what you just said that might help, something about her childhood.” He stared at her some more. “I have to go down and sit with her. Maybe looking at her, being in the same room for a while, will help.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
When he hesitated, she reached out and cupped his face in her hands. “Go by yourself, Bek. Maybe you need to be alone. I’ll come later, if you need me to.”
She kissed him hard, then slipped from his side and disappeared back into the bowels of the airship. He waited only a moment more, still wrestling with his confusion, then followed her inside.
There was no reason to think that this night would be different from any other, but Bek was convinced by feelings he could not explain that it might be. Nothing he had tried—and he had tried everything—had gotten so much as a blink out of Grianne from the moment he had found her kneeling with the bloodied Sword of Shannara grasped in her hands. Only when he broke down in frustration and cried that one time, when he wasn’t even trying to make her respond, had she come out of her catatonia to speak with him. She had done so for reasons he had never been able to figure out, but tonight, he thought, he must. The secret to everything lay in connecting the reason for that singular awakening with the wrong she had committed somewhere in her past that she regarded as unforgivable.