It did not help matters that the old man easily found him. But he could not spy out the old man on the clearest night and the broadest plain, even when he knew to look for him. He could tell you how far ahead of him they were and how fast they were traveling. He could read the movements of animals from their passage through tall grass. He saw things that others did not even know were there. How did the old man do it? The Borderman had spent almost the whole of his life in this country, kept alive by his wits and experience. It was unnerving and vaguely embarrassing, and the fact that it happened this way every time didn’t make it any more palatable. The Borderman was watching for him, sitting well back within the concealing shadows of a spreading hardwood high on a hillside overlooking the whole of the Streleheim and the trails leading out of it, everything clearly visible in the light of a full moon for at least ten miles, and he still didn’t see him. The old man just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. But, even united, they would need a weapon, something so powerful that the evil magic of Brona, the Warlock Lord, would fail before its might. And he immediately understood that if the peoples of the Four Lands were to escape eternal subjugation they would need to unite. Using the special skills he had acquired through his own study of Magic, Bremen was able to penetrate the huge camp of the Troll army and learn many of its secrets. And that at the heart of the evil tide was an archmage and former Druid named Brona! That the scouts for the army-and its principal assassins-were Skull Bearers, disfigured and transformed Druids who had fallen prey to the seductions of the magic arts. That seemingly invincible armies of trolls were fast conquering all that lay to their south. And for his persistence, Bremen found himself outcast, avoided by all but the few free-thinkers among the Druids.īut his removal from Paranor was not altogether a terrible thing, for Bremen learned that dark forces were on the move from the Northlands. Only the Bremen and a few trusted associates still studied the arcane arts. Horrified by the misuse of magic they had witnessed during the First War of the Races, the Druids at Paranor devoted themselves to the study of the old sciences, from the period before the collapse of civilization a thousand years before. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Terry Brooks's The Measure of the Magic.
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