Indomitable: The Epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara by Terry Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t pass through the walls like she could. It’s true. I swear it. There was others, too. Things I don’t want to talk about. They were there at Dun Fee Aran. The rets didn’t seem to see them. Or maybe they didn’t care.”
    He shook his head. “You don’t want to go inside those walls again once you’ve gotten out of them.”
    His voice trailed off and he stared out into the darkness as if searching for more substantial manifestations of the memories he couldn’t quite escape. Fear reflected in his eyes with a bright glitter that warned of the damage such memories could do. He did not seem a cowardly man, or a superstitious one, but in the night’s liquid shadows he had clearly found demons other men would never even notice.
    â€œDo you believe me?” he asked quietly.
    Jair’s mouth was dry and his throat tight in the momentary silence that followed. “I don’t know,” he said.
    The man nodded. “It would be wise if you did.”
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    At dawn, the peddler took his leave. They watched him lead his mule through the trees and turn north along the Silver River. Like one of the shades he claimed to have seen in the dungeons at Dun Fee Aran, he walked into the wall of early-morning mist and faded away.
    They traveled all that day through country grown thick with scrub and old growth and layered in gray blankets of brume. The world was empty and still, a place in which dampness and gloom smothered all life and left the landscape a tangled wilderness. If not for the Silver River’s slender thread, they might easily have lost their way. Even Cogline paused more than once to consider their path. The sky had disappeared into the horizon and the horizon into the earth, so that the land took on the look and feel of a cocoon. Or a coffin. It closed about them and refused to release its death grip. It embraced them with the chilly promise of a constancy that came only with an end to life. Its desolation was both depressing and scary and did nothing to help Jair’s already eroded confidence. Bad enough that the peddler had chilled what little fire remained in his determination to continue on; now the land would suffocate the coals as well.
    Cogline and Kimber said little to him as they walked, locked away with their own thoughts in the shadowy coverings of their cloaks and hoods, wraiths in the mist. They led their horses like weary warriors come home from war, bent over by exhaustion and memories, lost in dark places. It was a long, slow journey that day, and at times Jair was so certain of the futility of its purpose that he wanted to stop his companions and tell them that they should turn back. It was only the shame he felt at his own weakness that kept him from doing so. He could not expose that weakness, could not admit to it. Should he do so, he knew, he might as well die.
    They slept by the river that night, finding a copse of fir that sheltered and concealed them, tethering the horses close by and setting a watch. There was no fire. They were too close to Dun Fee Aran for that. Dinner was eaten cold, ale was consumed to help ward against the chill, and they went to sleep sullen and conflicted.
    They woke cold and stiff from the night and the steady drizzle. Within a mile of their camp they found clearer passage along the riverbank, remounted and rode on into the afternoon until, with night descending and an icy wind beginning to blow down out of the mountains, they came in sight of their goal.
    It was not a welcome moment. Dun Fee Aran rose before them in a mass of walls and towers, wreathed in mist and shrouded by rain. Torchlight flickered off the rough surfaces of ironbound gates and through the narrow slits of barred windows as if trapped souls were struggling to breathe. Smoke rose in tendrils from the sputtering flames, giving the keep the look of a smoldering ruin. There was no sign of life, not even shadows cast by moving