They rode through the western fringe of the central Anar up into the high ground that formed the doorstep to the rugged, forested humps of the Wolfsktaag. As they traveled, they searched past sunlight and warmth and the brilliant autumn colors for the dark things that lay hidden there. By midday, they had reached the Pass of jade and begun a long, circuitous climb along its southern slope, where trees and scrub hid them from view as they walked their horses in the deep shadow. Midafternoon found them well east of the pass, wending their way upward toward the high peaks. Timber and rock stretched dark and silent about them as the daylight began to wane. By nightfall, they were deep within the mountains. In the trees through which they passed, the shadows slipped now like living things. All the while they searched, yet found no sign of other life and felt themselves to be alone.
It was curious and somehow frightening that they could be so alone, Brin thought as the dusk settled into the mountains and the day came to an end. She should sense at least a touch of life other than their own, yet it was as if these peaks and forests had been stripped. There were no birds within these trees, no insects, no living creatures of any kind. There was only the silence, deep and pervasive—the silence, itself become a living thing in the absence of all other life.
Allanon brought them to a halt in the shelter of a grove of rough and splintering hickory to set their camp. When provisions were sorted, the horses tended, and the camp at ready, the Druid called them to him, ordered that no fire be lighted, and stalked off into the trees with a quick word of farewell. Valegirl and highlander stared after him wordlessly until he was out of sight, then sat down to consume a cold meal of bread, cheese, and dried fruit. They ate in darkness, not speaking, watching the shadows about them for the life that never seemed to come. Overhead, the night sky brightened with a great scattering of stars.
“Where do you think he has gone this night?” Rone Leah wondered after a time. He spoke almost as if he were asking himself the question. Brin shook her head and said nothing, and the highlander glanced away again. “Just like a shadow, isn’t he? Shifts with every change of sun and moon, appears, and then he’s gone again—always for reasons all his own. He wouldn’t share those reasons with us, of course. Not with mere humans like us.” He sighed and set aside his plate. “Except that I guess we’re not mere humans anymore, are we?”
Brin toyed with the bit of bread and cheese that remained on her own plate. “No,” she answered softly.
“Well, no matter. We are who we always were, nevertheless.” He paused, as if wondering how sure of that he really was. Then he leaned forward. “It’s odd, but I don’t feel the same way about him now that I did before. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I still don’t trust him entirely. I can’t. He knows too much that I don’t. But I don’t mistrust him either. He is trying to help, I think, in the best way that he can.”
He stopped, waiting for Brin to agree with him, but the Valegirl stayed silent, eyes turned away.
“Brin what’s troubling you?” he asked finally.
She looked at him and shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“Is it what he told us last night—that we wouldn’t see him again after this?”
“That, yes. But it’s more than that.”
He hesitated. “Maybe you’re just…”
“Something is wrong,” she cut him short, and her eyes locked on his.
“What?”
“Something is wrong.” She said it slowly, carefully. “With him, with you, with this whole journey—but most especially with me.”
Rone stared at her. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand either. I just feel it.” She pulled her cloak tightly about her, hunching down within its folds. “I’ve felt it for days—ever since the shade of Bremen appeared in the Hadeshorn, and we destroyed that Wraith. I feel something bad coming… something terrible. And I don’t know what it is. I feel, too, that I’m being watched; all the time I’m being watched, but there is never anything there. I feel, worst of all, that I’m being… pulled away from myself, from you and Allanon. Everything is changing from what it was when we started out at Shady Vale. It’s all different, somehow.”
The highlander didn’t say anything for a moment. “I suppose it’s because of what’s happened to us, Brin. The Hadeshorn, Paranor—Allanon telling us what the shade of Bremen told to him. It had to change us. And we’ve been away from the Vale and the highlands for many days now, from everything familiar and comfortable. That has to be a part of it, too.”
“Away from Jair,” she said quietly.
“And your parents.”
“But Jair most of all,” she insisted, as if searching for a reason for this. Then she shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s something else, something besides what’s happened with Allanon and missing home and family and… That’s too easy, Rone. I can feel it, deep down within me. Something that…”
She trailed off, her dark eyes uncertain. She looked away. “I wish I had Jair here with me now—just for a few moments. I think he would know what was wrong. We’re so close that way…” She caught herself, then laughed softly. “Isn’t that silly? Wishing for something like that when it would probably mean nothing?”
“I miss him, too.” The highlander tried a quick smile. “At least he might take our minds off our own problems. He’d be out tracking Mord Wraiths or something.”
He stopped, realizing what he had said, then shrugged away his discomfort. “Anyway, there’s probably nothing wrong—not really. If there was, Allanon would sense it, wouldn’t he? After all, he seems to sense everything else.”
Brin was a long time responding. “I wonder if that is still so,” she said finally. “I wonder if he still can.”
They were silent then, neither looking back at the other as they stared fixedly into the dark and pondered their separate thoughts. As the minutes slipped away, the stillness of the mountain night seemed to press in about them, anxious to wrap them in the blanket of its stark, empty solitude. It seemed more certain with the passing of each moment that some sound must break the spell, the distant cry of a living creature, the small shifting of forest wood or mountain rock, or the rustle of leaf or insect’s buzz. But nothing did. There was only the quiet.
“I feel as if we are drifting,” Brin said suddenly.
Rone Leah shook his head. “We travel a fixed course, Brin. There is no drifting in that.”
She looked over at him. “I wish I had listened to you and had never come.”
The highlander stared at her in shock. The beautiful, dusky face stayed turned toward his own. In the girl’s black eyes there was a mix of weariness and doubt that bordered too closely on fear. For just an instant he had the unpleasant sensation that the girl who sat across from him was not Brin Ohmsford.