Khallayne, too, heard the song on the wind. It was a sound more beautiful than any Ogre voice, high and pure like crystal chimes, more beautiful than the voice in the sphere.

The bright, silvery light of Solinari sparkled on the featureless water, as far as they could see. But there was no island yet. No finger of land to mar the perfect beauty of the moonlight on the black-silk water.

Bare feet gripping the wooden deck, Jelindra ran to the other side of the boat and hung over the rail, but that way, too, was water, dappled with moonlight. Jelindra ran back to Khallayne.

Water and moonlight seemed unbroken to the horizon. Jelindra slumped against the rail where moments before she’d eagerly leaned across. “What do we do now?” she asked. “If there isn’t an island…”

“It has to be there!” Khallayne thumped the railing with her fists. Her heart wouldn’t contemplate otherwise. “I can hear it.”

Jelindra cocked her head. “Yes,” she agreed. “I can hear it. Let’s go!”

Before Khallayne could stop her, she’d slipped down the rope ladder to the little boat they’d prepared earlier in the evening and started to untie the rope mooring it to the ship.

Khallayne climbed down into the boat. “Are you sure? You know, if you’re wrong, we’ll die!”

“We’re not wrong,” said Jelindra firmly.

The little boat slowed and pivoted as the ocean took it, slipping away from the ship with the current. They had committed themselves. Noisily, Jelindra dipped an oar into the water. The boat responded, and she stroked again.

The boat shot forward. Khallayne dug into the water again and again, matching her strokes to Jelin-dra’s, aiming the craft toward where she thought, hoped, believed, the island should be.

She rowed until her arms ached, until her shoulders burned with fire, until the pain almost drowned out the song of the land, until she couldn’t move the wooden oar anymore and it hung over the edge of the boat.

Then, suddenly, as if a fog had lifted, the island was before them. A dark silhouette loomed up to block out the gorgeous sky.

Laughing, crying, Jelindra reached back to hug Khallayne, then began to row faster.

The pain forgotten, Khallayne pulled with her oar, sliding it so deeply into the water that she was dipping her fingers, until she felt the boat scrape bottom.

Then she slid into the cold water and pulled the boat by a rope. It seemed to take forever. Jelindra joined her, adding her insubstantial weight to the rope.

The boat scraped sand, and they left it, running the rest of the way, until warm, dry sand was beneath their feet.

Khallayne dropped to her knees, dug her fingers into the gritty sand. She pressed it to her face and felt the grains stick to the furrows that tears had left on her cheeks.

“Home, Jelindra! We’re home!” She threw hand-fuls of sand into the air, then covered her eyes when the ocean breeze blew it back in her face.

“Khallayne…”

The fear in Jelindra’s voice ended Khallayne’s celebration. She saw that someone was coming toward them.

Blinking against the sand that coated her lashes, she stood and took a tentative step toward the figure, partially hidden in shadows at the edge of the trees. “Who’s there? I’m Khallayne. I’ve come to find Igraine…”

Lyrralt! It had to be Lyrralt. She knew the way he moved, the way he stepped, his scent on the salt breeze.

The figure moved forward cautiously, too small, too slight, to be an Ogre. “Khallayne?” The light caught the soft hair, the canted eyes of an elf.

Khallayne froze.

Jelindra’s cry shattered the stillness of the night.

Khallayne stepped in front of the girl, reaching back to protect her, to comfort her, and the figure said her name again, no longer in question, but in joyous greeting.

It dawned on her. An elf had said her name! A male, tall and slender, with the features of an elf- only with Lyrralt’s voice.

Before their eyes, he transformed. It was a shape-shifting, like the appearance of the island, magical, miraculous. The lithe elf became Lyrralt, tall and strong and broad of shoulder, sapphire skin gleaming in the light of Solinari, silver hair as bright as the moon. And sightless now, forever.

“Forgive me,” Lyrralt said, holding out his arms to them. “Forgive me, but I had to be sure.”

Khallayne ran to him, threw her arms around him. A moment later, Jelindra threw herself bodily against them, joining their circle.

He shivered, held them closer.

“How did you do it?” she asked. “For a minute, I thought you were an elf!”

Laughing, he released them. “The gods have touched us, Khallayne, blessed us with a gift beyond believing, beyond-beyond-”

“Stop.” She touched her fingers to his mouth to stop his excited, confusing words, felt the warmth of his breath under her fingers, and something else. The scar. She turned him in the moonlight and saw the jagged mark running the length of his face. “Start slowly. Tell us everything.”

In response, he ran his fingers across her face, as if reassuring himself about the Ogres who stood beside him. He brushed sand from Jelindra’s hair. In a serene tone, he explained, “Last month, at the High Sanction of Solinari, the gods touched us. In the night, they touched us with peace, with calm. And when we woke, we could change.”

“Change?”

“Shapechange, as you saw me a moment before. I can assume the shape of another being. We all can. Do you realize what that means?” His voice rose excitedly. “It means that we never have to be afraid again. We never have to run again. We will always have the perfect disguise. Even if the island is discovered, no one will ever know who we are!”

“The island! Why couldn’t we see the island?” Jelindra demanded.

He paused, smiling shyly. “It’s my spell, a spell of hiding, but we all work to maintain it.”

Khallayne could hardly dare to believe it. There was simply too much information, too fast. Gifts from the gods. Everyone’s magical ability, powerful enough to hide an island? And Lyrralt, blind, scarred and using magic?

“Khallayne?” He caught her hand.

“It’s so much to take in,” she whispered. “So much.”

The sadness in her voice, in her face, registered. “What is it? Tell me,” Lyrralt asked.

She caught his hands in hers. “There’s so much, I hardly know where to begin…”

“Jyrbian?”

“Dead, I think,” she whispered, hoping it was true. She hoped there was no way he could have survived Kaede’s fire, for she never wanted to think of Jyrbian alive as she had last seen him. “Bakrell, too. And Kaede.”

“And Takar burned,” Jelindra piped in.

Khallayne nodded. “We looked back, just before we left the west road. It was like a smoking cinder. The whole city…”

“The others will want to hear.”

EPILOGUE

The Keeper of tbe history of tbe Irda stood on the hillside, surrounded by her people, assisted by friends and love ones, though she was as young and strong as the saplings that grew nearby. She had seen the world of her childhood pass on, had seen the sacred History of her people destroyed, but still she smiled, because of the Gift that she would give to all her people.

She held up the book, the Gift of the gods, and in a voice as pure and clear, as bright and beautiful as sunshine, spoke the beginning of the words written within, the words that wove the History of the World, of the Ogres, firstborn of the gods.

This I have salvaged out of the destruction. The music is gone forever, as is the beauty of the Ogres, but the words are preserved for all to read.

We are the Irda, firstborn of the gods.

The High God looked down upon the chaos and bid the god Reorx to forge the universe with his mighty hammer. From the forge of the gods, our world was wrought and the gods played here, as children gambol in a field.