The dragonarmy did not again ravage the Kingdom of Silvanesti. Some got out, but most did not. All, those who fled and those who stayed, died raving, screaming and shrieking, in nightmare defeated.
And in the audience chamber of the Tower of the Stars, the body of the Speaker sat in perfect stillness, eyes starting wide, mouth open in a wrenching, soundless scream.
Chapter 10
Though the moons over Krynn were the usual ones, red Lunitari and his brother white Solinari, though the stars took their regular shapes and traveled their accustomed routes across the sky, though the sun was the same, the light in an exile's eye glares bitterly bright. By that light the exile fleet watched as the ship Aspengold, that lovely ship upon which traveled Alhana Starbreeze, separated from the others and sailed away from those who fled, taking a southerly route. It was her decision to leave the exiles in the hands of Lord Belthanos, her cousin, and go out among the cities of Krynn to seek help for her beleaguered land. Seeing her go was like seeing the shadow of one's own soul passing over the ocean.
"Ah, gods!" cried the elves. "She is going among outlanders! Our dear princess! What has become of us? What will she face out there where the people are but savage barbarians?" In the bitterly bright light of exile, they watched her leave. They prayed her away, wishing her well in her journey through the gutter they considered the rest of the world.
Yet soon it was seen by some among the Silvanesti that the Sylvan Land was not, after all, the center of the world. Fleeing from a dragonarmy and the disaster of a king's magic, some among the elves began to recognize that a wider world lay outside their wooded borders. The winds of winter drove the refugee fleet north around the Blood Sea of Istar, past Kothas and Mithas and the ravening minotaur pirates who had thrown in their lot with the forces of Takhisis.
Cold winds buffeted them, the winds off foreign lands around the Cape of Nordmaar. These winds took them past the shores of Solamnia, the home of the ancient knighthood, which, by all accounts, found itself reviled on all sides and torn from within. Old feuds died hard, as knights will testify. The people of Krynn had not forgiven them their part in the ancient tragedy of Istar, as though the sons must still account for the folly of their distant fathers who did not ride at once to defend that city from the arrogance of a kingpriest determined to flout the gods. And, as though the enmity of the world around were not enough, the knights fought each other; within their own ranks, they bickered for position and power.
"You can hear them fighting," said one elf to another, one night as King's Swan plied the seas off the shores of that land, "like quarrelsome children." One could not, of course, hear them, but it wasn't hard to imagine.
In their exodus, the elves tasted the salt spray of seas unimagined in the straits between the land of Solamnia and the isle of Northern Ergoth. Wherever they went, they gathered news. Some few of them, the venturesome, went into the port cities among the taverns and the shops to learn what they could. In this way, they discovered the fate of their king, Lorac, trapped in magic. Bitterly, they learned that Silvanesti was now being called the Nightmare Kingdom. They heard, too, news of their princess-none of it was the stuff of hope, for Alhana Starbreeze wandered the ports of the world, their lily princess going in and out of the cities, looking for help and finding none. She did not falter. Even as green dragons came to nest in the tormented forests, to claim the haunted land, she went to the houses of the high in every city she could, searching for a way to rescue her homeland from the grip of an evil magic.
"And to save her father," said an elf who had heard this in a port not far from the ruin of the City of Lost Names, there at the topmost part of Solamnia, "for she believes he is not dead." Shuddering, he said, "Our Alhana believes the Speaker of the Stars yet lives."
And so the venturesome ventured, and the news they brought to the fleet made wider the world. One such gatherer of news was Dalamar Argent, for while others sought always after word of Silvanesti, his ears were keen for word of the world around. Each time the fleet put into a port, he went down to the docks and walked among the people in the taverns, seeking to learn all he could. It was no easy thing, this going among outlanders-for he thought of all others than elves that way-but he did it. How wide the word of which Silvanesti was not the center! How strange the languages-lovely some and ugly others. He spoke with humans in the wild ports near Kalaman, in Palanthas, and in the bazaars of Caergoth. All around him, the sights of humans and dwarves and kender enchanted him-the smells of cooking in the stalls, of spices in the marketplaces, the weaves of foreign fabrics. The flashing eyes of strangers were intoxicating, rich and deep and wonderfully strange.
They came, at last, to Southern Ergoth, the elves who fled, and they made a home for themselves. In exile, Lord Belthanos, he of blood kinship to the Speaker of the Stars, shaped a council from the Heads of the Houses. This council-in-exile was made of much the same folk as Speaker Lorac's had been, with two exceptions. Lady Ylle Savath was gone from its ranks, dead in the Silvanesti Forest, and Lord Garan of House Protector had not survived the sea. He had died in the first month of the journey. The old warrior's heart had simply stopped beating in his breast. It broke, said some, because he believed that he could not survive being gone from the kingdom he had so long defended. And so House Mystic gave Lord Feleran to the new council, and House Protector gave Lord Konnal, who had served with Lord Garan in the war.
The council-in-exile convened and began at once the task of establishing the Silvanesti claim to this land of sea-breeze and sweet pine forests, of rich hunting grounds and coastal waters thick with fish. It didn't much matter to them that the wild Kagonesti lived there, those proud hunters whom Silvanos had tried to change into servitors in ancient days. The Silvanesti came with weapons; they came armed with the certainty that they were, among all races, the best beloved of the gods, thus deserving of the best of everything. This, no matter what events suggested, was not a belief the Children of Silvanos were ready to lay down. And so they forced servitude upon the Kagonesti and built upon their land a city they named Silvamori, their home in exile. This was, by honest account, a harder thing for the Kagonesti than for their aristocratic cousins, though most of the moaning and sighing came winding out from the houses of the Silvanesti, the lorn exiles.
Dalamar Argent didn't complain much, and for a time this surprised him. He did ache for his homeland, the aspenwood, the orderliness of the city, the scent of the gardens, and the deep tolling of bells in the harbors. Sometimes he took out the embroidered scroll case that held the Dawn Hymn to E'li, and he looked at it, smudged with dirt from the day of Lord Tellin's death. He had tried to return it to Lady Lynntha, but she would not have it. She'd looked at him long, her eyes filled with sorrow and with an unvoiced plea: Don't make me take it, don't make me think of that which could never have been. And so Dalamar kept it, an artifact of another time, another place, and gods whose names rang through the pine forest of Silvamori but not in his heart.
He found himself free of service, with so many others to take his place, and he found himself a lover among the Wilder Elves, a woman with hair the color of Solinari's moon, eyes green as the sea, and long sun-gilded limbs. K'gathala was a woman wise in the ways of Kagonesti magic, and one who believed strongly in the meaning of names. She said his was a strange name for one of the Light Elves, for if "argent" meant "silver" in the language of the Silvanesti, it meant "night's son" in the speech of the Kagonesti. "And that," she said one night as she lay in his arms, twining her long fingers in his dark hair, "that is a strange name for one of your kind, but perhaps not so strange for you."