The High Druid's Blade (The Defenders of Shannara, #1)(88)
He asked her to come back for their mother, who loved her and missed her. He told her he wanted to take her home.
He talked to her until he was talked out, and then he held her to him and sang softly, stroking her hair and rocking her. A long time passed. He kept thinking the Healers would come back, but they didn’t. Maybe Sebec had told them to wait a bit, to let Paxon have time with her. Perhaps the Healers believed he might have better luck than they had in bringing her out of her withdrawal.
Then he stopped everything and just held her in the quiet of the room, trying not to cry, holding back the tears that threatened to come with every dark thought about how she might never get better. Eventually, he put her back in her bed and tucked her in, sitting next to her for another long period of time, watching over her. But she just lay there, her eyes open and staring.
He was finally getting ready to leave when a soft knock sounded at the door. Sebec, he thought. Releasing his sister, he rose and walked over. When he opened the door, the Ard Rhys was standing in the opening.
“Sebec said …” she started to whisper, and then she trailed off as she saw the expression of shock on his face as he turned quickly to look over his shoulder. Her gaze shifted past him, and she locked eyes with Chrysallin, who was suddenly sitting up in bed.
Paxon saw the shock and surprise mirrored on his sister’s face an instant before she began to scream. He reacted instinctively, throwing himself in front of the Ard Rhys to protect her, propelling her backward through the door and into the hallway beyond. But he was too slow. Chrysallin’s scream struck him like a hammer blow, slamming into him with such force that it knocked the breath from his lungs and his feet out from under him. Locked together with Aphenglow Elessedil, he was thrown into the wall beyond. They went down in a tangled heap, and Paxon lost consciousness.
When he came awake, Sebec and the Druid Healers were there, pulling him off Aphenglow. The treatment room door had been closed again, and he couldn’t see what was going on with Chrys. But the screaming had stopped, so he knew the attack was over. The Ard Rhys lay next to him, still unconscious, the Healers bent over her. They would both likely be dead now, he thought, if the impact of the attack hadn’t carried them back out the door, beyond where his sister could see them.
Or had she somehow realized who he was and instinctively held back? Or perhaps the Ard Rhys had managed to summon magic in time to protect them both. Would such magic come to her as his did to him when he held the sword—an instantaneous response that required no act or even thought to summon it?
Sebec knelt beside him. “What happened?”
He breathed in deeply and exhaled. “I’m not sure. She came to the door and knocked. I thought it was you or the Healers, so I opened the door. Chrysallin woke and saw the Ard Rhys and reacted at once, screaming …” He closed his eyes at the memory. “The force of it threw both of us out of the room and into the hallway. That was the last thing I remember. I blacked out.”
Sebec looked confused. “Why did your sister scream at the Ard Rhys? They’ve never even met.”
The scribe didn’t know about the possible resemblance between the gray-haired Elven woman of his sister’s torture experience and the Ard Rhys that Grehling had described to Leofur, so Paxon told him. “Perhaps she just attacked as a response to what she thought she was seeing; I’m sure she was terrified she was about to be hauled back for more,” he finished.
“Well, whatever she thought, she hurt my mistress; I don’t know how badly just yet. The Healers will have to spend more time with her before we know. You shouldn’t have opened the door without being sure it was me, Paxon.”
The Highlander cringed at the rebuke, thinking he hadn’t done anything wrong. Sebec had said not to open the door until he knocked, and Paxon had waited until he heard a knock. What was the Ard Rhys thinking, coming to Chrysallin’s room in the first place?
But he said nothing, letting the matter be, anxious to get back into Chrysallin’s room to see how she was. He asked Sebec if he might do this, but the young Druid told him he would have to wait, that the Healers had sedated his sister and would be working on her again as soon as she woke.
So instead, the Highlander went back down to the dining hall to look for Grehling and Leofur. He didn’t find them there, but he was told they were walking in the gardens just outside. When he left the building to have a look around he found them almost immediately, and while the three of them strolled through the flower beds and hedgerows he revealed what had happened.
“She came right to Chrysallin’s room?” Grehling asked when he had finished. “That’s strange.”
Paxon looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“This morning I told her I thought the gray-haired Elven woman looked just like her. She asked all about it, wanted to know everything. She knew exactly how Chrys felt about her.”
Paxon started to reply, but then stopped himself. He needed to think this through before he said anything more. Something about this whole business troubled him, but he couldn’t be sure yet what it was.
So he changed the subject, talking instead about his plans for Chrysallin should the Druids be unable to help her. If that happened, he told them, he would take her to the renowned Gnome Healers of Storlock in the Eastland. If anyone could help his sister, they could.
Then he asked of their plans for returning to Wayford. After a hesitant exchange of glances, Grehling said they were just waiting for someone to offer them a way back. Unless Paxon needed them to stay, of course, which they would be happy to do. The Highlander told them they had both done more than enough, and he would look into helping them find a way home.