She raised only her dark eyes to him-the same look she gave him when she thought he was being thickheaded or purposefully evasive. But her face wasmore weary than annoyed, as if she'd already given up.

"Do not do that!" Wynn snapped. "Not unless I am expecting it. I have had enough of getting sick for one day."

Leesil pivoted to find Wynn shoving Chap away. The dog growled and then clawed at the parchments. But he wasn't tapping out symbols for Wynn to read. He just scattered them in a tantrum as the sage tried to grab the sheets away from him.

"Stop it!" Wynn shouted at the dog. "We are talking the old way, whether you like it or not."

"Keep your voice down," Leesil warned. "What's going on?"

Both of them ceased fighting over the parchments. Chap growled at the sage, barking once for "yes."

Wynn took a long breath, frowning. "I did not want to distract you from more immediate concerns."

"Spit it out," Leesil demanded, and Chap barked agreement.

Wynn rubbed her knees where she knelt, and then crawled closer to Leesil.

"I can hear Chap," she said.

"What?" Magiere asked, her voice hushed.

"And I hear when he communes with his kin," Wynn added."Although it may never happen again. They used him-as much as anyone has used either of you."

Leesil couldn't even form a question. The more Wynn whispered of all that had happened, from hearing Chap with the silver deer to the assault of the Fay, the less he wanted to know. As the sage finished, he stared at her and the dog.

Chap watched him silently in turn.

Leesil understood being an outcast in this world. He'd been alone but for Chap, without a place of his own, until he'd stumbled into Magiere-with Chap's meddling, of course. But now it seemed the dog didn't know everything concerning his own purpose.

Chap had been played by his own kind-one more unwitting tool manipulated by the Fay. Leesil wanted to sympathize with his oldest companion, but right now the last thing he needed to hear was that Chap was almost as ignorant as the rest of them.

And Wynn could hear him?

"The mantic sight," Wynn went on, "which I invoked by ritual in Droevinka to help you track the undead sorcerer… it returns at times. Whatever Chap did to take it from me, something went wrong, and it is getting worse. I was able to call it at will, but then Chap had to lick it away again."

"But you still hear him, even without the sight?" Magiere asked.

Wynn nodded, and then she flinched with a gag and uttered one word."Sorhkafare."

Magiere's leg muscles knotted under Leesil's hands.

Wynn balled up her little fist at Chap. "I told you-not until I am ready!"

Chap ignored her and focused on Magiere, and Leesil turned his eyes on the woman he loved.

That word-or name-did it mean something to her? Magiere's pallid skin made it hard to be certain, but she looked suddenly ill.

"Where did you hear that name?" she whispered.

"Not me," Wynn said. "That wasChap."

Leesil followed Magiere's rapt attention back to Chap, as Wynn slumped inresignation, speaking for the dog and turning a bit sickly herself. For every word Chap spoke through Wynn, Leesil saw his own dread echoed in Magiere's brown eyes.

Most Aged Father had been alive during the war in what the sages called the Forgotten History. How long ago wasn't clear. Even his own people didn't remember where or when he had come from.

The sages still argued over when this war took place, and even Chap couldn't guess, for his memories didn't give him any measure of time. However long ago, Sorhkafare had not been old. Now he was the decrepit leader of the Anmaglahk and impossibly ancient.

What Leesil heard still didn't explain the man's fanatical hatred of humans, strong enough to teach generations of his people to fear them. But how had Magiere known his long lost name?

"What else haven't you told me?" he asked her a little too harshly.

Magiere didn't answer.

Wynn flinched in fear, over and over, at the words Chap poured through her. As the tale swept on to the night following the battle, Leesil saw strange recognition in Magiere's face. More than once she mouthed a name before Wynn even spoke it aloud.

"I know them," Magiere whispered. "I was there… I was him that night… when I blacked out in Nein'a's clearing."

"How?" Leesil asked.

Magiere's voice carried none of its old bite as she glared at Chap. "You've been in my head again."

Leesil remembered the first time she'd had a vision. In Bela, she'd held cloth from a victim's body. She had walked the place where the corpse had been found and relived the moment that an undead had slaughtered the woman, a nobleman's daughter. Nothing like that had happened in Nein'a's clearing.

Magiere slowly shook her head. "All I wanted was to kill anything that got in the way of finding you. I touched the tree, and I was there… inside Most Aged Father… or his memory, at least."

"You saw undeads?" Wynn asked."Vampires… in the form of risen soldiers?"

Magiere looked at her. "He… they didn't know what was happening. They just ran inland toward On-nis Lo… Lon…"

Wynn sat upright. "Aonnis Lhoin'n?"

Magiere nodded. "I don't know if they made it, though obviously Sorhkafare… Most Aged Father is still alive."

"You are certain you heard it right?" Wynn demanded. "Aonnis Lhoin'n?"

Magiere lifted her head. "Why? Have you read of it somewhere?"

"No," Wynn answered. "It still exists."

The sage looked as if she'd uncovered something astonishing. Her brown eyes wandered, growing doubtful, until a scowl spread across her round face.

"Wait," Leesil said. "You've seen this place… and it still bears the same name?

Wynn shook her head. "It is what the elves of my continent call the cen-termost place in their land-First Glade-but no one in my guild knew it was that old."

She blinked rapidly, lost for an instant somewhere other than this moment.

Leesil wasn't certain what all this meant. "Perhaps the war wasn't as long ago as the sages think."

Wynn started at his voice. "No, we have long tried to determine when the war occurred. Some do not believe it everhappened, that it is all myth and legend spun out of proportion. But I have seen old scrolls and parchments, stone carvings and other things… from centuries back. Malourne, my country, goes back more than four centuries. The king's city ofCalm Seatt is even older. And what we've found was much older still."

"What does that have to do with this…First Glade?" Leesil asked.

"Because my order has been deceived!" Wynn answered sharply. "There are three branches of the Guild of Sagecraft. The first was in my Malourne, decreed by our own kings of old. Shortly thereafter, the elves established their own to match ours. And one is in the Suman Empire along the eastern coast of my continent. It was all to help preserve civilization, present and past… should the worst ever come again."

Wynn turned to Magiere.

"If you heard right, a piece of what was lost has been within reach all along. Its past and history could never have been forgotten-not by the elves. It lay right before our eyes… and they said nothing of it!"

Leesil didn't care for this one bit. It was enough they had to deal with the secrets and lies that had tangled them among the elves of this land. How long had Wynn's far-off elven neighbors kept this to themselves, an ancient place hidden in plain sight?

"They were taken unaware, unprepared," Magiere whispered. "They didn't even know what to do… with what came at them in the night."

Leesil frowned until he caught up. Magiere's thoughts had turned back to her vision in the glade.

"No name," she whispered, as if searching for one, then her dark eyes settled upon him. "They didn't have a name for what they saw."