He tried to speak to her instead. He managed a few ragged words, but she showed no understanding. She just stared at him, and then shrugged, pointing at her ears and shaking her head.
She couldn’t hear him at all. Suddenly he understood: They could see each other, but not communicate verbally.
She pointed to him and shrugged, then slowly mouthed something. He could not quite decipher the words, but her gestures made it clearer: Where?
How to tell her? He pointed at his surroundings, and she gave him a questioning look.
In response, he mouthed a single word. Forbidding.
Forbidding! She pointed at him with a horrified look and repeated the word, mouthing it slowly. Forbidding?
He nodded.
The look on her face turned desperate. She pointed to him and then made a beckoning gesture. He understood. She was asking if he could escape. Could he manage to get back to her?
He shook his head. No, he mouthed.
Pointing at herself, then gesturing to her surroundings, she mouthed two words. He understood the first word—Druids—but was unsure of the second.
Tavo? He mouthed the name carefully.
Tavo, she repeated. She made a slicing movement across her throat and began to cry. Then, all at once, she became very excited. Flinc! She made an exaggerated expression and some wild motions. Alive!
He smiled in spite of himself. The little forest imp was nothing if not resourceful. Dead one minute, alive the next. Drisker was happy for the news. But he was frustrated by the lack of any verbal communication at all with Tarsha. That he could reach out to her and see her and know she was well was a great relief. But not being able to discover her circumstances or plans for Clizia or any of the rest of what was hidden from him was maddening. Mouthing words could accomplish only so much.
She was trying to tell him something, mouthing and gesturing frantically, but the words were unclear and she never finished. Blackness enfolded her, and she was gone.
And at the moment she disappeared, Drisker’s dreaming ended abruptly.
* * *
—
Tarsha had been dreaming, too. She was camped on the Streleheim, two days into her journey to Paranor, with the night deep and still about her. She had rolled into her blankets inside her two-man airship and gone to sleep several hours earlier. She had made no conscious effort to reach out to Drisker, not knowing how he had managed to do so while still trapped inside Paranor. She simply fell asleep, and suddenly he was there in her dreams.
When he first appeared, sitting across a campfire from her, she had been stunned and then elated. She immediately launched into a recitation of everything that had befallen her, but eventually noticed that he didn’t seem to be listening. Desperate for him to hear her and respond, she began shouting her words, pleading with him to answer.
Until finally it became apparent he couldn’t hear her. Nor, apparently, could she hear him. She mouthed a few words and gestured to clarify what was happening. They exchanged a few gestures and mouthings of words, but for the most part neither could understand the other. And then—just like that—he was gone again, as if he had never been there in the first place. As if he were nothing more than a figment of her imagination. He disappeared just as she was trying to figure out how to ask him about entering Paranor and gaining access to the Druid Histories. She had the drawing from his private books that showed her how to get past the door at the end of the underground tunnel that opened into the Keep, but she had no way of knowing what to do if the Guardian of the Keep surfaced.
And now he was trapped in the Forbidding—the Forbidding! Was she right in her understanding of what he was trying to tell her? Was there any way Clizia Porse could send him into the Forbidding when he wasn’t a demon? Or was this all just a dream, one conjured by weariness and exhaustion and desperation…
She came awake then, jarred out of her sleep by something she had forgotten and was finally remembering.
At the Hadeshorn, where she had gone with Drisker to meet with the Shade of Allanon, something had transpired that she had not understood and her companion had not explained. At Allanon’s urging, Drisker had dipped his fingers into the waters of the Hadeshorn and placed them against her forehead. He had held them there while murmuring words of Ancient Elfish. Then later, when they were departing the Valley of Shale and she had pressed him to tell her what that was all about, he had demurred. He had said she must be patient and he would tell her later.
But he never had explained. He had instead been snatched away and trapped inside the Forbidding before he could do so.
Yet as she sat up within her aircraft, the darkened sky pinpricked with stars and the chill of the night air sharp against her skin, she thought she might know anyway. She stared into the distance without seeing, thinking it through—remembering how the touching and the speaking of the words had come about, and remembering his reticence both to complete the act and then to talk about it afterward.
One of the last exchanges between Drisker and Allanon before he had done the shade’s urging was about her destiny. One or the other had clearly related what she had been told by the seer Parlindru. That she would make three choices, and that one of those choices would change the world. Then the shade had said to Drisker, “Ordain her.”
For what reason? To ordain her as what?
As a Druid, she realized. Nothing else made sense. He was marking her as a Druid—or at least as a student of the lore and a Druid-in-training. He was giving her that designation, and he was reluctant to do so.
She folded in on herself, drawing the blankets closer. Why would he do that? In case something happened to him, so she could carry on? As a precaution? Or as an anointment? But was this what Druids did for one another? She couldn’t know, of course, but it seemed unlikely that every Druid would be hauled off to the Hadeshorn to make their Druid tenure official.
So why her?
Because he sensed she might be the last? Because the Shade of Allanon sensed it, too?
Drisker had said she was not a Druid, and he did not intend that she should be. The training he had given her was merely meant to enable her to master the wishsong, not to turn her into a Druid. But in some way, for some purpose—and at Allanon’s insistence—he had done something of that very sort in the little ceremony at the edge of the Hadeshorn.
What she wondered now was if that act had in some way given her access to Paranor and its secrets. If so, she should be able to enter without fear of retaliation from the Guardian of the Keep. She should be able to gain access to the Druid Histories and to the archives and the talismans of magic they contained.
And there was only one way to find out if she was right.
It was still late at night—too early to rise and set out if she wanted to sleep, which she did—so she rolled back up in her blankets and lay down once more. She was awake enough she did not expect to fall asleep again easily, so of course she did exactly that. This time she did not dream.