He told Redden Alt Mer what he was going to do and suggested someone else might want to take up watch from one of the taller towers. Alt Mer said he would handle it himself, wished Bek good luck, and went over the side of the airship. Bek stood alone on the empty deck, thinking that perhaps he should ask Rue to help him after all. But he knew he would be doing so only as a way of gaining reassurance that he had done everything he could, should things not work out yet again. It was not right to use her that way, and he abandoned the idea at once. If he failed this night, he wanted it to be on his head alone.
He went down to the Captain’s quarters and slipped through the doorway. Quentin Leah lay asleep in his bed, his breathing deep and even, his face turned away from the single candle that burned nearby. The windows were shuttered and curtained so that no light or sound could escape, and the air in the room was close and stale. Bek wanted to blow out the candle and open the shutters, but he knew that would be unwise.
Instead, he walked over to his sister. She was lying on her pallet with her knees drawn up and her eyes open and staring. She wore her dark robe, but a light blanket had been laid over her, as well. Rue had brushed her hair earlier that day, and the dark strands glimmered in the candlelight like threads of silk. Her fingers were knotted together, and her mouth was twisted with what might have been a response to a deep-seated regret or troublesome dream.
Bek raised her to a sitting position, placed her against the bulkhead, and seated himself across from her. He stared at her without doing anything more, trying to think through what he knew, trying to decide what to do next. He had to break down the protective shell in which she had sealed herself, but to do that he had to know what she was protecting herself from.
He tried to envision it and failed. On the surface, she looked to be barely more than a child, but beneath she was iron hard and remorseless. That didn’t just disappear, even after a confrontation with the truth-inducing magic of the Sword of Shannara. Besides, what single act set itself apart from any other? What monstrous wrong could she not bring herself to face after perpetrating so many?
He sat staring at her much in the same way that she was staring at him, neither of them really seeing the other, both of them off in other places. Bek shifted his thinking to Grianne’s early years, when she was first taken from her home and placed in the hands of the Morgawr. Could something have happened then, as Rue had suggested, something so awful she could not forgive herself for it? Was there something he didn’t know about and would have to guess at?
Suddenly, it occurred to him that he might be thinking about this in the wrong way. Maybe it wasn’t something she had done, but something she had failed to do. Maybe it wasn’t an act, but an omission that haunted her. It was just as possible that what she couldn’t forgive herself for was something she believed she should have done and hadn’t.
He repeated to himself what she said when she woke on the night she had saved Quentin’s life—about how Bek shouldn’t cry, how she was there for him, how she would look after him again, his big sister.
But she had said something else, too. She had said she would never leave him again, that she was sorry for doing so. She had cried and repeated several times, “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”
He thought he saw it then, the failure for which she had never been able to forgive herself. A child of only six, she had hidden him in the basement, choosing to try to save his life over those of her parents. She had concealed him in the cellar, listening to her parents die as she did so. She had left him there and set out to find help, but she had never gotten beyond her own yard. She had been kidnapped and whisked away, then deceived so that she would think he was dead, too.