“I can,” she said at once. “I promise I will not tell anyone.” She gave him a wry smile. “Especially not Bombax.”

“That’s good enough for me.” Woostra rubbed his bony chin. “So it turns out I was looking in the wrong place. What I wanted wasn’t to be found in the records of the Elven Kings and Queens. It was right here.”

He took the ancient tome he had been studying when she entered and handed it to her, pointing at an entry.

The lettering at the top of the page spelled out a single word.

Aphenglow bent close and began to read.

Khyber Elessedil slept most of the day, curled up close by the shoreline of the Hadeshorn while the sun crept out of the eastern horizon and slowly worked its way across the sky toward twilight. She fell asleep not long after the departure of the shade of Allanon, exhausted from the previous day. Facing Allanon’s ghost had been stressful, and she still wasn’t certain when she woke at sunset if he intended to help her.

She could assume that his promise to return indicated he would at least consider answering some of her questions, but the extent of his willingness remained in doubt. He’d told her almost nothing of value when they talked before, and his recalcitrant attitude toward and outright disdain of her commitment to the tenets of the Fourth Druid Order suggested he was less than enthusiastic about what she was attempting. Dismissive, in point of fact. She knew he was a hard, secretive man; she had read the chronicles of his time and knew he had been the only Druid alive when the Sword of Shannara was recovered and brought to bear against the Warlock Lord. She had read how he led the Elven struggle to withstand the collapse of the Forbidding and repel the invasion of the escaping demons. Finally, she had read how he’d died in his quest to destroy the Ildatch, killed by a terrible creature called a Jachyra. His death had marked the end of any Druid presence for three hundred years.

She had read it all, and she could tell from those readings that Allanon had been a powerful influence on the Races during his life. He had fought for their survival and died doing so. Nothing of what she had discovered suggested that he would be any different in death than he had been in life.

But she had hoped he might be more sympathetic to her struggle and consider trying to do something to help her.