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By Root 675 0

feud between elf and man. It’s difficult in the extreme for the Great Ones—the Lords of Wyrd and the Lords of Light—to communicate with their servants on earth, simply because those disincarnate beings inhabit a plane far removed from the physical, far more deeply within the heart of the universe than even the astral plane. If one of the Great Ones has to send a message, he has to work a dweomer of his own, first building a thought-form that’s roughly the equivalent of a dweomermaster’s body of light, then using that form to travel down the planes to the lowest level such a being can reach. From that plane, he can then either direct the elemental spirits to produce certain effects, such as thunder from a clear sky, or else send images, emotions, and with great difficulty, short thoughts into the mind of a person trained in dweomer. If one of the Great Ones had gone to such effort to send Aderyn a message about Rhodry’s elven heritage, then something very important indeed was at stake.

As Nevyn thought about it, he could see that the dark dweomer might have some interest in ensuring that peace never came to the elven border, simply because those who follow the dark arts are safer in troubled times, when lords can’t be bothered with tales of peculiar people who do suspect things in out-of-the-way places. And yet, the reason wasn’t quite adequate. Unlike the evil magicians in the bard songs, who love to cause misery and suffering for its own sake, the men of the dark dweomer never act directly in the world without some very good reason. If a dark master wanted Rhodry dead, it had to be because Rhodry presented some specific threat to him or to his kind. It was puzzling, all of it, and Nevyn knew that he had many hard hours of meditation ahead of him if he was going to begin to sort the puzzle out. He was sure that he had more clues than he could easily see, and that the roots probably lay deep in his own past and in the past lives of those in his care.

“I grow so old, and so weary.”

Whenever Nevyn looked over his life, the memories were crowded and tangled, as if he were looking at the wrong side of a tapestry and trying to figure out the pattern on the front. Quite simply, he’d never had the chance to sort things out in the state called death, where the experiences of a lifetime are sifted and condensed to hard, clear seeds of experience. Everything ran together and blurred until at times he could barely remember the names of people who had been important to him, much less why they had been important, simply because the information was sunk in a sea of meaningless details. At other times, when he was trying to make a decision, the memories crowded so thickly that he could barely act. Every possible course of action would immediately suggest three or four possible different results that had happened or might have happened in the past. Every fact became qualified a hundred times over, like some passage from a Bardek poet when adjective after adjective clusters round and overwhelms one poor little noun. In truth, as he considered the problem that night, Nevyn realized that he thought very much like an elf.

“So be it. It’s not my will, anyway, but the will of the light.”

Fortunately he had too much work on his hands to sit and brood. He gathered up his supplies and went for a look at Cullyn, whom he found awake, lying propped up on pillows. A servant had lit the candles in the silver sconce on the wall.

“Nevyn,” Cullyn snapped. “I just heard—ye gods, how could you lie to me that way?”

There was only one thing he could mean.

“Who told you she’s with the army?”

“The cursed chirurgeon. Ye gods, he’s cursed lucky I’m too sick to stand, or I’d have taken his head for this. How could you lie to me?”

“There wasn’t anything else I could do. She was determined to go, and I didn’t want you upsetting yourself.”

Cullyn growled under his breath. He was close to tears.

“Did our fat-mouthed chirurgeon tell you of the prophecy, too?”

Cullyn nodded a yes.

“She’s most likely going to kill Corbyn,” Nevyn went on. “The whole thing has