Chapter TWENTY-THREE

It was dark when Bek finally emerged from belowdecks on the Jerle Shannara, walked to the bow, and looked up at the night sky. The moon was a tiny crescent directly over the mountain they were backed against, newly formed and barely a presence in the immensity of the sky’s vast sweep. Stars sprinkled the indigo firmament like grains of brilliant white sand scattered on black velvet. He had been told once that men had traveled to those stars in the Old World, that they had built and ridden in ships that could navigate the sky as he had the waters of the Blue Divide. It seemed impossible. But then most wonderful things did until someone accomplished them.

He hadn’t been on deck for more than a few moments when Rue Meridian appeared beside him, coming up so silently that he didn’t hear her approach and realized she was there only when she placed a hand over his own.

“Have you slept?” she asked.

He shook his head. Sleep was out of the question.

“How is he?”

He thought about it a moment, staring skyward. “Holding on by his fingernails and slipping.”

They had managed to get Quentin Leah out of the Crake alive, but only barely. With Bek’s help, he had stumbled to within a hundred yards of the trail before collapsing. By then he had lost so much blood that when they had carried him out they could barely get a grip on his clothing. Rue Meridian knew something of treating wounds from her time on the Prekkendorran, so after tying off the severed arteries with tourniquets, she had stitched and bandaged him as best she could. The patching of the surface wounds was not difficult, nor the setting of the broken bones. But there were internal injuries with which she did not have the skill to deal, so that much of the care Quentin needed could not be provided. Healing would have to come from within, and everyone knew that any chance of that happening here was small.

Their best bet was to either get him to a healing center in the Four Lands or to find a local Healer. The former was out of the question. There simply wasn’t time. As for the latter, the Rindge offered the only possibility of help. Panax had gone to see what they could do, but had returned empty-handed. When a Rindge was in Quentin’s condition, his people could do no more for him than the company of the Jerle Shannara could for Quentin.

“Is he alone?” Rue asked Bek.

He shook his head. “Panax is watching him.”

“Why don’t you try to sleep for a few hours? There isn’t anything more you can do.”

“I can be with him. I can be there for him. I’ll go back down in just a moment.”

“Panax will look after him.”

“Panax isn’t the one he counts on.”

She didn’t reply to that. She just stood there beside him, keeping him company, staring up at the stars. The Crake was a sea of impenetrable black within the cup of the mountains, silent and stripped of definition. Bek took a moment to look down at it, chilled by doing so, the memories of the afternoon still raw and terrible, endlessly repeating in his mind. He couldn’t get past them, not even now when he was safely away from their cause.

“You’re exhausted,” she said finally.

He nodded in agreement.

“You have to sleep, Bek.”

“I left his sword down there.” He pointed toward the valley.

“What?”

“His sword. I was so busy trying to get him out that I forgot about it entirely. I just left it behind.”

She nodded. “It won’t go anywhere. We can get it back tomorrow, when it’s light.”

“I’ll get it back,” he insisted. “I’m the one who left it. It’s my responsibility.”

He pictured it lying in the earth by the dead Graak, its smooth surface covered with blood and dirt. Had it been broken by the weight of the monster rolling over it, broken as Quentin was? He hadn’t noticed, hadn’t even glanced at it. A talisman of such power, and he hadn’t even thought about it. He’d just thought about Quentin, and he’d done that too late for it to matter.

“Why don’t you stop being so hard on yourself?” she asked quietly. “Why don’t you ease up a bit?”

“Because he’s dying,” he said fiercely, angrily. “Quentin’s dying, and it’s my fault.”

She looked at him. “Your fault?”

“If I hadn’t insisted on going down there with him, if I hadn’t been so stubborn about this whole business, then maybe —

“Bek, stop it!” she snapped at him. He looked over at her, surprised by the rebuke. Her hand tightened on his. “It doesn’t help anything for you to talk like that. It happened, and no one’s to blame for it. Everyone did the best they could in a dangerous situation. That’s all anyone can ask. That’s all anyone can expect. Let it alone.”

The words stung, but no more so than the look he saw in her eyes. She held his gaze, refusing to let him turn away. “Losing people we love, friends and even family, is a consequence of going on journeys like this one. Don’t you understand that? Didn’t you understand it when you agreed to come? Is this suddenly a surprise? Did you think that nothing could happen to Quentin? Or to you?”

He shook his head in confusion, cowed. “I don’t know. I guess maybe not.”

She exhaled sharply and her tone of voice softened. “It wasn’t your fault. Not any more so than it was my brother’s or Panax’s or Walker’s or whoever’s. It was just something that happened, a price exacted in consequence of a risk taken.”

The consequence of a risk. As simple as that. You took a risk, and the person you were closest to paid the price. He began to cry, all the pent-up frustration and guilt and sadness releasing at once. He couldn’t help himself. He didn’t want to break down in front of her — didn’t want her to see that — but it happened before he could find a way to stop it.

She pulled him against her, enfolding him like an injured child. Her arms came about him and she rocked him gently, cooing soft words, stroking his back with her hand. The hard wooden rods of the splint on her left forearm were digging into his back.

“Oh, Bek. It’s all right. You can cry with me. No one will see. Let me hold you until.” She pressed him into the softness of her body. “Poor Bek. So much responsibility all at once. So much hurt. It isn’t fair, is it?”

He heard some of what she said, but comfort came not from the words themselves but from the sound of her voice and the feel of her arms wrapped about him. Everything released, and she was there to absorb it, to take it into herself and away from him.

“Just hold on to me, Bek. Just let me take care of you. Everything will be all right.”

She had said he owed it to her to share the losses she had suffered. Losses as great as his own. Furl Hawken. Her Rover companions. He was reminded of it suddenly and wanted to give back something of the comfort she was giving to him.

He recovered his composure, and his arms went around her. “Rue, I’m sorry...”

“No,” she said, putting her fingers over his mouth, stopping him from saying anything more. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want you to talk.”

She replaced her fingers with her mouth and kissed him. She didn’t kiss him softly or gently, but with urgency and passion. He couldn’t mistake what was happening or what it meant, and he didn’t want to. It took him only a moment, and then he was returning her kiss. When he did, he forgot everything but the heat she aroused in him. Kissing her was wild and impossible. It made him worry that something was wrong, but he couldn’t decide what it was because everything felt right. She ran her hands all over him, pushing him up against the ship’s railing until he was pinned there, fastening her mouth on his with such hunger that he could scarcely breathe.

When she broke away finally, he wasn’t sure who was the most surprised. From the look on her face she was, but he knew what he was feeling inside. They stared at each other in a kind of awed silence, and then she laughed — a low, sudden growl that brought such radiance to her face that he was surprised all over again.

“That was unexpected,” she said.

He couldn’t speak.

“I want to do it some more. I want to do it a lot.”

He grinned in spite of himself, in spite of everything. “Me, too.”

“Soon, Bek.”

“All right.”

“I think I love you,” she said. She laughed again. “There, I said it. What do you think of that?”

She reached out with her good arm and touched his lips with her fingers, then turned and walked away.

When he went inside the ship to the Captain’s quarters to see about Quentin, he was still in shock from his encounter with Rue.

Panax must have seen something in his face when Bek entered the room, because he immediately asked, “Are you all right?”

Bek nodded. He was not all right, but he had no intention of talking about it just yet. It was too new to share, still so strange in his own mind that he needed time to get used to it. He needed time just to accept that it was true. Rue Meridian was in love with him. That’s what she had said. I think I love you. He tried the words out in his mind, and they sounded so ridiculous that he almost laughed aloud.

On the other hand, the way she had kissed him was real enough, and he wasn’t going to forget how that felt anytime soon.

Did he love her in turn? He hadn’t stopped to ask himself that. He hadn’t even considered it before now because the idea of her reciprocating had seemed impossible. It was enough that they were friends. But he did love her. He had always loved her in some sense, from the first moment he had seen her. Now, kissed and held and told of her feelings, he loved her so desperately he could hardly stand it.

He forced himself to shift his thinking away from her.

“How is he doing?” he asked, nodding toward Quentin.

Panax shrugged. “The same. He just sleeps. I don’t like the way he looks, though.”

Neither did Bek. Quentin’s skin was an unhealthy pasty color. His pulse was faint and his breathing labored and shallow. He was dying by inches, and there was nothing any of them could do about it but wait for the inevitable. Already emotionally overwrought, Bek found himself beginning to cry anew and he turned away selfconsciously.

Panax rose and came over to him. He put one rough hand on Bek’s shoulder and gently squeezed. “First Truls Rohk and now the Highlander. This hasn’t been easy,” he said.

No.

His hand dropped away, and he walked over to where Grianne knelt on a pallet in the corner, eyes open as she stared straight ahead. The Dwarf shook his head in puzzlement. “What do you suppose she’s thinking?”

Bek wiped away the last of his tears. “Nothing we want to know about, I’d guess.”

“Probably not. What a mess. This whole journey, from start to finish. A mess.” He didn’t seem to know where else to go with his thoughts, so he went silent for a moment. “I wish I’d never come. I wouldn’t have, if I’d known what it was going to be like.”

“I don’t suppose any of us would.” Bek walked over to his sister and knelt in front of her. He touched her cheek with his fingers as he always did to let her know he was there. “Can you hear me, Grianne?” he asked softly.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore,” Panax continued. “I don’t know that there’s a reason for any of us being here. We haven’t done anything but get ourselves killed and injured. Even the Druid. I didn’t think anything would ever happen to him. But then I didn’t think anything could happen to Truls, either. Now they’re both gone.” He shook his head.

“When I get home,” Bek said, still looking at Grianne’s pale, empty face, “I’ll stay there. I won’t leave again. Not like this.”

He thought again about Rue Meridian. What would happen to her when they got back in the Four Lands? She was a Rover, born to the Rover life, a traveler and an adventurer. She was nothing like him. She wouldn’t want to come back to the Highlands and stay home for the rest of her life. She wouldn’t want anything to do with him then.

“I’ve been thinking about home,” Panax said quietly. He knelt down beside Bek, his bearded face troubled. “I never cared all that much for my own. Depo Bent was just the village where I ended up. I have no family, just a few friends, none of them close. I’ve traveled all my life, but I don’t know if there’s anything left in the Four Lands that I want to see. Without Truls and Walker to keep me busy, I don’t know that there’s anything back there for me.” He paused. “I think maybe I’ll stay here.”

Bek looked at him. “Stay here in Parkasia?”

The Dwarf shrugged. “I like the Rindge. They’re a good people and they’re not so different from me. Their language is similar to mine. I kind of like this country, too, except for things like the Graak and Antrax. But the rest of it looks interesting. I want to explore it. There’s a lot of it none of us have seen, all of the interior beyond the mountains, where Obat and his people are going.”

“You would be trapped here, if you changed your mind. You wouldn’t have a way to get back.” Bek tried the words out on the Dwarf, then grimaced at the way they sounded.

Panax chuckled softly. “I don’t see it that way, Bek. When you make a choice, you accept the consequences going in. Like coming on this journey. Only maybe this time things will turn out a little better for me. I’m not that young. I don’t have all that much life left in me. I don’t think I would mind finishing it out in Parkasia, rather than in the Four Lands.”

How different the Dwarf was from himself, Bek thought in astonishment. Not to want to go home again, but to stay in a strange land on the chance that it might prove interesting. He couldn’t do that. But he understood the Dwarf’s reasoning. If you had spent most of your life as an explorer and a guide, living outside cities and towns, living on your own, staying here wouldn’t seem so strange. How much different were the mountains of the Aleuthra Ark, after all, from those of the Wolfsktaag?

“Do you think you can manage without me?” Panax asked, his face strangely serious.

Bek knew what Panax wanted to hear. “I think you’d just get in the way,” he answered. “Anyway, I think you’ve earned the right to do what you want. If you want to stay, you should.”

They were nothing without their freedom, nothing without their right to choose. They had given themselves to a common cause in coming with Walker in search of the Old World books of magic, but that was finished. What they needed to do now was to help each other find a way home again, whether home was to be found in the Four Lands or elsewhere.

“Why don’t you get some sleep,” he said to the Dwarf. “I’ll sit with Quentin now. I want to, really. I need to be with him.”

Panax rose and put his hand on Bek’s shoulder a second time, an act that was meant to convey both his support and his gratitude. Then he walked through the shadows and from the room. Bek stared after him a moment, wondering how Panax would find his new life, if it would bring him the peace and contentment that the old apparently had not. He wondered what it would feel like to be so disassociated from everyone and everything that the thought of leaving it all behind wasn’t disturbing. He couldn’t know that, and in truth he hoped he would never find out.

He turned back to Quentin, looking at him as he lay white-faced and dying. Shades, shades, he felt so helpless. He took a deep, steadying breath and exhaled slowly. He couldn’t stand this anymore. He couldn’t stand watching him slip away. He had to do something, even if it was the wrong thing, so that he could know that at least he had tried. All of the usual possibilities for healing were out of the question. He had to try something else.

He remembered from the stories of the Druids that the wishsong had the ability to heal. It hadn’t been used that way often because it required great skill. He didn’t have that skill or the experience that might lend it to him, but he couldn’t worry about that here. Brin Ohmsford had used the magic once upon a time to heal Rone Leah. If an Ohmsford had used the magic to save the life of a Leah once, there was no reason an Ohmsford couldn’t do so again.

It was a risky undertaking. Foolish, maybe. But Quentin was not going to live if something wasn’t done to help him, and there wasn’t anything else left to try.

Bek walked over to the bed and sat next to his cousin. He watched him for a moment, then took his hand in his own and held it. He wished he had something more to work with than experimentation. He wished he had directions of some kind, a place to begin, an idea of how the magic worked, anything. But there was nothing of the sort at hand, and no help for it.

“I’ll do my best, Quentin,” he said softly. “I’ll do everything I can. Please come back to me.”

Then he called up the magic in a slow unfurling of words and music and began to sing.