8-The Talismans of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Author:Terry Brooks [Brooks, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Shannara - Heritage
ISBN: 1857239016
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2009-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Walker Boh buried Cogline in the woods below Paranor, laying him to rest in a glade cooled by a stream that meandered through a series of shallow rapids, a glade sheltered by oaks and hickories whose leafy branches dappled a carpet of wildflowers and green grasses with shadowy patterns that would shift and change each day with the sun’s passage west. It was a setting that reminded Walker of the hidden glens at Hearthstone where they had both loved to walk. He chose a place near the center of the glade where the spires of Paranor could be clearly seen. Cogline, who to the end had thought of himself as a Druid gone astray, had come home for good.

When he was finished with the old man, Walker stayed in the clearing. He was battered and worn, but the wounds that were deepest were those he couldn’t see, and it gave him a measure of comfort to stand amid the ancient trees and breathe the forest air. Birds sang, a wind rustled the leaves and grasses, the stream rippled, and the sounds were soothing and peaceful. He didn’t want to go back into Paranor just yet. He didn’t want to go up past the blackened, charred remains of the Four Horsemen and their serpent mounts. What he wanted was to wipe away everything that had happened in his life like chalk from a board and start over. There was a bitterness within him that he could not resolve, which gnawed and scratched at him with the persistence of a hungry animal and refused to be chased. The bitterness had many sources — he did not care to list them.

Mostly, of course, he was bitter with himself. He was always bitter with himself these days, it seemed, a stranger come out of nowhere, a man whose identity he barely recognized, an all-too-willing pawn for the wants and needs of old men a thousand years gone.

He sat in the glade by the stream, staring back across the clearing and the patch of fresh-turned earth where Cogline lay, and forced himself to remember the old man. His bitterness needed a balm; perhaps memories of the old man would provide it. He took a moment to splash handfuls of the stream’s cold water on his face, cleansing it of the dirt and ash and blood, then positioned himself in a patch of sun and let his thoughts drift.

Walker remembered Cogline as a teacher mostly, as the man who had come to him when his life had been jumbled and confused, when he had abandoned the Races to live in isolation at Hearthstone where he would not be stared at and whispered about, where he would not be known as the Dark Uncle. The magic had been a mystery to Walker then, the legacy of the wishsong come down through the years from Brin Ohmsford in a tangle of threads he could not unravel. Cogline had shown him ways in which he could control the magic so that he no longer would feel helpless before it.

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