“Close the door,” she said quietly, not bothering to look over.
He did so, then moved to where she could see him, and knelt at Quentin Leah’s bedside for a moment, placing his fingers on the Highlander’s wrist to read his pulse.
“Strong and steady,” Little Red said. “Bek was right. She saved Quentin’s life, whether she intended to or not.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” he asked, standing up again, giving the Highlander a final glance. “Trying to decide if it was an accident or not?”
“No,” she said.
“What, then?”
“I’m trying to find out where she is. I’m trying to figure out how to reach her.”
He stared at her, not quite believing what he was hearing. She was leaning forward as she sat in front of the witch, her face only inches away. There was no fear in her green eyes, no suggestion that she felt at risk. She held Grianne’s hands loosely in her own, and she was moving her fingers over their smooth, pale backs in small circles.
“Bek said she was hiding from the truth about herself, that when the magic of the Sword of Shannara showed her that truth, it was too much for her, so she fled from it. Walker told him that she would come back when she found a way to forgive herself for the worst of her sins. A tall order, even to sort them all out, I’d think.” She paused. “I’m trying to see if a woman can reach her when a man can’t.”
He nodded. “I guess it’s possible it might happen that way.”
“But you don’t know why I have to be the one to find out.”
“I guess I don’t.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time, sitting silent and unmoving before Grianne Ohmsford, staring into her strange blue eyes. The Ilse Witch was little more than a child, Alt Mer realized. She was so young that any attempt to define her in terms of the acts she was said to have committed was impossible. In her comatose state, blank-faced and unseeing, she bore a look of complete innocence, as if incapable of evil or wrongdoing or any form of madness. Somehow, they had got it all wrong, and it needed only for her to come awake again to put it right.
It was a dangerous way to feel, he thought.
She looked over at him. “I’m doing it for Bek,” she said, as if to explain, then quickly turned her attention back to Grianne. “Maybe because of Bek.”
Alt Mer moved to where she could no longer see him, doubt clouding his sunburned features. “Bek doesn’t expect this of you. His sister isn’t your responsibility. Why are you making her so?”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
He waited for her to say something more, but she didn’t. He cleared his throat. “What don’t I understand, Rue?”
She let him wait a long time before she answered, and he realized afterwards that she was trying to decide whether to tell him the truth, that the choice was more difficult for her than she had anticipated. “I’m in love with him,” she said finally.
He wasn’t expecting that, hadn’t considered the possibility for a moment, although on hearing it, it made perfect sense. He remembered her reaction to his decision to take Bek with him into the Crake while leaving her behind. He remembered how she had cared for the boy when Hunter Predd had flown him in from the mountain wilderness, as if she alone could make him well.
Except that Bek wasn’t a boy, as he had already noted days earlier. He was a man, grown up on this journey, changed so completely that he might be someone else altogether.
Even so, he could not quite believe what he was hearing. “When did this happen?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But you’re sure?”
She didn’t bother to answer, but he saw her shoulders lift slightly as if to shrug the question away.
“You don’t seem suited to each other,” he continued, and knew at once that he had made a mistake. Her gaze shifted instantly, her eyes boring into him with unmistakable antagonism. “Don’t get mad at me,” he said quickly. “I’m just telling you what I see.”
“You don’t know who’s suited to me, big brother,” she said quietly, her gaze shifting back to the witch. “You never have.”
He nodded, accepting the rebuke. He sat down now, needing to talk about this, thinking it might take a while, and having no idea what he was going to say. Or should. “I thought what Hawk thought—that you were never going to settle on anyone, that you couldn’t stand it.”
“Well, you were wrong.”
“It just seems that your lives are so different. If you hadn’t been thrown together on this voyage, your paths would never have crossed. Have you thought about what’s going to happen when you get home?”
“If I get home.”
“You will. Then Bek will go back to the Highlands and you’ll go back to being a Rover.”
She exhaled sharply, let go of Grianne Ohmsford’s hands, and turned to face him. “We’d better get past this right now. I told you how I feel about Bek. This is new to me, so I’m still finding out what it means. I’m trying not to think too far ahead. But here is what I do know. I’m sick of my life. I’ve been sick of it for a long time. I didn’t like it on the Prekkendorran, and I haven’t cared much for it since. I thought that coming on this voyage, getting far away from everything I knew, would change things. It hasn’t. I feel like I’ve been wandering around all these years and not getting anywhere. I want something different. I’m willing to take a look at Bek to see if he can give it to me.”
Redden Alt Mer held her gaze. “You’re putting a lot on him, aren’t you?”
“I’m not putting anything on him. I’m carrying this burden all by myself. He loves me, too, Redden. He loves me in a way no one ever has. Not for how I look or what I can do or what he imagines me to be. It goes deeper than that. It touches on connections that words can’t express and don’t have to. It makes a difference when someone loves you like that. I like it enough that I don’t want to throw it away without taking time to see where it leads.”
She eased herself into a different position, her physical discomfort apparent, still sore from her wounds, still nursing her injuries. “I wanted to kill the Ilse Witch,” she said. “I had every intention of doing so the moment I got the chance. I thought I owed that much to Hawk. But I can’t do it now. Not while Bek believes she might wake up and be his sister again. Not after all he has done to protect her and care for her and give her a chance at being well. I don’t have that right, not even to make myself feel good again about losing Hawk.
“So I’ve decided to try to do what Bek can’t. I’ve decided to try to reach her, to see where she is and what she hides from, to try to understand what she’s feeling. I’ve decided to let her know someone else cares what happens to her. Maybe I can. But even if I can’t, I have to try. Because that’s what loving someone requires of you—giving yourself to something they believe in, even when you don’t. That’s what I want to do for Bek. That’s how I feel about him.”
She turned back to Grianne Ohmsford, lifted the girl’s hands in her own, and held them anew. “I keep thinking that if I can help her, maybe I can help myself. I’m as lost as she is. If I can find her, maybe I can find myself. Through Bek. Through feeling something for him.” She leaned forward again, her face so close to Grianne’s that she might have been thinking of kissing her. “I keep thinking that it’s possible.”
He stared at her in silence, thinking that he wasn’t all that secure himself, that he felt lost, too. All this wandering about the larger world had a way of making you feel disconnected from everything, as if your life was something so elusive that you spent all the time allotted to you chasing after it and never quite catching up.
“Go away and leave me alone,” she said to him. “Fly this airship back to where we came from. Get us safely home. Then we can talk about this some more. Maybe by then we will understand each other better than we do now.”