He hunched down closer to Shea in the dim firelight.

“Or would you have given up on yourself and the quest then and there? How much truth could you have withstood?”

“I don’t know,” Shea answered doubtfully.

“Then I will tell you something I could not tell you before. Jerle Shannara, five hundred years earlier, knew all these things-and still he failed.”

“But I thought…”

“That he was successful?” Allanon finished the thought. “Yet if he had been successful, would not the Warlock Lord have been destroyed? No, Shea, Jerle Shannara did not succeed. Bremen confided in the Elven King the secret of the Sword because he, too, thought that knowing how the talisman would be used might better prepare the bearer for a confrontation with Brona. It did not. Even though he had been forewarned that he would be exposed to the truth about himself, Jerle Shannara was not prepared for what he discovered. Indeed, there was probably no way that he could have adequately prepared himself beforehand. We build too many walls to a completely honest with ourselves. And I don’t think that he ever really believed Bremen’s warning about what would happen when he finally held the Sword. Jerle Shannara was a warrior king, and his natural instinct was to rely on the Sword as a physical weapon, even though he had been told that it would not help him in that way. When he confronted the Warlock Lord and the talisman began to work on him exactly as Bremen had warned, he panicked. His physical strength, his fighting prowess, his battle experience-all of it useless to him. It was just too much for him to accept. As a result, the Warlock Lord managed to escape him.”

Shea looked unconvinced.

“It might have been different with me.”

But the Druid did not seem to hear him.

“I would have been with you when you found the Sword of Shannara, and when the secret of the talisman revealed itself to you, I would have explained then its significance as a weapon against the Warlock Lord. But then I lost you in the Dragon’s Teeth, and it was only later that I realized you had found the Sword and gone northward without me. I came after you, but even so, I was almost too late. I could sense your panic when you discovered the secret of the Sword, and I knew the Warlock Lord could sense it as well. But I was still too far away to reach you in time. I tried to call out to you-to project my voice into your mind. There wasn’t time enough to tell you what to do; the Warlock Lord prevented that. A few words, that was all.”

He paused, almost as if he had gone into a trance, his dark gaze fixed on the air between them.

“But you discovered the answer on your own, Shea-and you survived.”

The Valeman looked away, reminded suddenly that, although he was alive; it seemed that everyone who had gone with him into the kingdom of the Skull was dead.