Read Wards of Faerie: The Dark Legacy of Shannara for Free Online

her voice and hands she couldn’t conjure any sort of magic anyway.
    Everyone knew she was a Druid and had the use of magic. Not everyone knew how that magic worked: that voice or hands or both were needed to evoke it. Her attackers must have, though. The first man, the one at the window, would have been the leader, the one who thought it all through. The second, her attacker, was a skilled fighter and likely a trained assassin.
    So now she had two mysteries. Who knew all this and would want to hurt her, and who knew about the diary and wanted to steal it?
    She opened the back door and walked into the kitchen again. In truth she had more than two mysteries that needed solving, if you considered all the questions surrounding the diary’s entries and the unknown history of their author. But only two that mattered regarding the attack.
    A course of action that might help resolve all this eluded her at the moment, so she returned to her plan regarding the lineage charts of the Elven Kings and Queens. Picking up her backpack with its notes and stuffing the diary into a deep pocket in the trousers she was wearing, she departed the cottage and headed off to the palace for more research.
    The walk was short and uneventful, but she found herself on edge the entire way. The attack had left her shaken, even if she wouldn’t admit it to Arlingfant, and she knew that for a while, at least, she would be looking over her shoulder everywhere she went.
    Deep in the lower levels of the palace, alone once more, she pulled out the lineage charts and went to work. The charts went much fartherback than the Elven histories, although nothing had survived that went all the way back to the beginning of things. She started at the place where the recordings of lineages began and worked her way forward, hoping that any reference to Pathke and Meresch would not be so long ago as to have escaped all mention.
    It was tedious work. The charts were old and handwritten, and all sorts of smudges and discolorations marred the information. In addition, she had to translate the ancient Elfish language that was being used at that time in order to comprehend what she was reading. But most troubling of all was a tendency of the early Elven scribes to leave things out, not believing them important enough to mention—a deficiency that over time had become apparent to later chroniclers who had discovered such absences while reading other writings. If that had happened here, she might miss what she was looking for without even realizing it.
    In any event, it was slow going, and she had been at work almost the entire morning before she found the entries for which she had been searching.
    She was still far back in the early years of Elven history, back before the advent of Men and the other Races—back when the Elves and their allies were still at war with the Darklings and theirs—when she discovered a Pathke Omarosian who had been King with a Meresch his wife and Queen. Their reign had lasted for over forty years, and they had been together for eight or nine before that. Their daughter, Aleia, had been born after Pathke had been King for seven years, and she had died when she was only eighteen.
    Aphenglow stopped reading. Only eighteen. That would have been about the time she met and lost the Darkling boy. Her voice in the diary and the impetuousness of her acts would be appropriate for that age.
    So had her death been linked to that event?
    Aphen couldn’t tell. There was nothing written anywhere on that page or any of the dozen that followed to reveal what had happened. Pathke had ruled for another seventeen years and then Meresch had succeeded him and ruled for twelve more. Aleia had been their only child.
    Aphenglow set down the records and stared off into the shadows. It was too big a coincidence to think that Aleia’s death was not in some way connected with her affair, but it didn’t look as if there were any way to determine the connection. Still, she