Flint walked slowly back into his shop, closed the door, and put the empty sack in the hutch. Somehow he wasn't in the mood for supper anymore.

Chapter 4

A.C.288, Early Fall

Tanis strode along the road from Flint's shop, his moccasins scuffing against the blue and white tile. He cursed himself for his stupidity. Why had he been so curt with the dwarf? Flint Fireforge seemed to have the best of intentions; why hadn't the half-elf responded in kind?

Without paying much attention to where he was going, Tanis found himself pacing across the Hall of the Sky in central Qualinost. Patterned into the tile of the open area, now shrouded in twilight, lay a mosaic showing the region of Ansalon centering on the elven city; the map detailed lands from Solace and Crystalmir Lake at the northwest to Que-Shu at the northeast and Pax Tharkas at the south.

The half-elf stared at only one point on the map, however: Solace, the dwarf's adopted home. What kind of place was it?

"Imagine, to live in a house in a tree," he said, his whisper swallowed by the silence hanging over the deserted square. He thought of the elves' stone buildings, which never quite lost their chill. Would a wooden house in a tree be so warm?

He kicked at a loose tile that marked the position of the village of Gateway, between Qualinost and Solace; the movement sent the shard spinning. Contrite, and hoping no one had seen him deface the sacred map, he bounded after the chip and returned to replace it, kneeling. Then he sank back on his haunches and surveyed the open area.

The chilly twilight air carried delicious scents of supper and warm echoes of dinnertime chatter. Tanis stood slowly and stared around the Hall of the Sky; around him, the purplish quartz spires of elven homes, rectangles of lamplight along their curved sides, poked like the beaks of baby birds above the rounded tops of trees. Girdered all around by the arched bridges, with the gold of the tall Tower of the Sun still reflecting the sun's rays in the evening sky, the city was a remarkable sight; understandably, the Qualinesti elves believed it was the most beautiful city in the world. But how could elves bear it, living and dying in the same place?

Did his dissatisfaction, Tanis wondered, come from his father? From his human side?

Tanis raised his gaze to the deepening sky; almost as he watched, the evening darkened and stars began to appear directly overhead. He wondered about the myth that the Hall of the Sky once had been a real structure, guarding some rare and precious object, and that Kith-Kanan had magically raised building and object into the sky to hide them, leaving only the map that had formed the building's floor. As a toddler, he'd been told by the other young elves that the exact center of the map was a 'lucky spot"; stand there and wish very hard and you would get what you desired, they claimed.

"I'd like to go up there, to see that hidden place in the sky," he whispered fervently now. "I'd like to see all of Ansalon. I'd like to travel, like Flint… to have adventures… and friends…"

Looking around embarrassedly, hoping no one had seen or heard him, Tanis nonetheless continued to wait-not really hoping, of course, that a magical being would appear to grant his wish. Naturally not, he told himself. That was a child's dream, not a young man's. Still, he waited a few minutes more, until a breeze through the pear trees raised goose flesh on his arms and reminded him that it was time to go home.

Wherever that was, he thought.

"History," Master Miral told Tanis the next morning, "is like a great river."

The half-elf looked up. He knew better than to ask the tutor what he meant. Miral would either explain his point or make Tanis figure it out himself. Either way, questions would gain the half-elf nothing but an irritated wave of the hand.

Today, however, in the dim light of Miral's rooms in the Speaker's palace, the mage was inclined to be garrulous.

"A great river," he repeated. "It begins with small, clear streams, single voices, rushing quickly past their banks until they join their waters with other streams, growing larger and larger as they mingle again and again, until the small voices of a thousand tiny streams have been collected into the roaring song of a great river." He gestured widely, caught up in his metaphor.

"Yes?" Tanis prompted. The half-elf widened his eyes in the shadowy room; for as long as he could remember, the mage had kept the windows in his quarters blocked off. Bright light, Miral explained, affected the potency of the herbs and spices that formed the basis of the little magic he did. Besides, strong light hurt the nearly colorless eyes that Miral kept shaded in the hooded recesses of his deep burgundy robe. Tanis had long wondered why the Speaker had hired a mage to tutor his children; at one time, Miral had taught Laurana, Gilthanas, and Tanis-Porthios had been too old for a tutor when Miral arrived at court-but Laurana now received lessons from an elf lady. Gilthanas and Miral, on the other hand, had clashed from the start; the speaker's youngest son now took lessons in weaponry only-from Ulthen, one of Porthios's friends, who was well-born but chronically without money.

Tanis, fond of the eccentric mage, had remained with Miral, who was one of the few people at court who did not treat the half-elf with polite iciness. Perhaps the difference in Miral's attitude toward him had to do with the mage's years outside Qualinesti, Tanis reasoned; although Miral was an elf, he had not grown up with elves. All the more reason to leave Qualinost someday, the half-elf thought.

Miral now pointed a bony finger at Tanis, and the hood fell partially back from his face. His eyelashes and brows, like the shoulder-length hair that puffed from the hood of his robe, were ash-blond, lighter even than Laurana's tresses. Miral, with his shelves upon shelves of books, his magical potions, his habit of taking exercise indoors by pacing the corridors of the Tower late at night-a habit that raised giggles and conjecture from the young elves-had the colorless look of one who spent too much time in the dark.

"The great river," Miral continued, and Tanis shook his head, trying to regain his train of thought, "in turn flows into the deep and endless sea. History is like that sea."

The mage smiled at Tanis's befuddlement, and the expression gave Miral's sharp features the look of a falcon. "And although it might be simplest to study the great oceans and rivers-the wars and mighty events of ages gone by- sometimes the past is best understood by listening to the music of a few of those tiny brooks instead, the stories of the single lives that, one by one and drop by drop, made the world what it was."

Awash in the mage's rhetoric, Tanis inhaled the potpourri of spicy scents that managed to escape from corked containers around the room, knowing Miral would get to the point eventually. While another young noble might have dreaded these lessons, Tanis looked forward to his hours with Miral.

There were other subjects to study, as well as history: the written word, the movements of the heavens, the workings and habits of living things. But all of it was interesting to the half-elf. "For example," Miral said, settling back onto a huge pillow covered with cured hides of woodland stags, and waving Tanis into a similar, smaller, but no less comfortable, chair off to one side, "have I told you about Joheric?"

When Tanis shook his head, the mage told this story:

"As you know, Tanis, elves are the embodiment of good; theirs was the first race on Krynn." Tanis opened his mouth to ask if the other races believed they too were the first, but the mage silenced him with a look.