still that such a thing could be so, be certain that it is. I have
seen it in my visions. You are the hope of all of the Elves, now
and in the future. You have come to save them, if they are fated
to be saved. Seeing that you accept the trust of the Ruhk Staff
and the Loden, knowing that the Elfstones will protect you, I
find that all that remains left undone is the telling of that which
has been hidden from you-the secret of the rebirth of the Elven
magic and of the poisoning of Morrowindi.”
Wren shook her head quickly. “Eowen, I have not yet de-
cided about the trust . . .” she began.
“Decisions are made for us for the most part, Wren Elesse-
dil.” Eowen cut her short. “I understand that better than you. I
understood it better than the queen, I think. She was a good
person, Wren. She did the best she could, and you must not
blame her in any way for what I will tell you. You must reflect
on what I say; if you do so, you will see that Ellenroh was
trapped from the beginning and all of the decisions it might seem
she made of her own will were in fact made for her. If she kept
the truth secret from you, it was because she loved you too
well. She could not bear to think of losing you. You were all
she had left.”
The pale face reflected like a ghost’s in the haze, the voice
gone back again to a whisper.
“Yes, Eowen,” Wren replied softly. “And she was all I had.”
The seer’s slender hands reached out to take her own, the
skin as cold as ice. Wren shivered in spite of herself. “Then
heed what I say, daughter of Alleyne, Elf-kind found. Heed care-
fully.”
Emerald eyes glittered like frosted leaves at sunrise. “When
the Elves first came to Morrowindi, the island was innocent and
unspoiled. It was a paradise beyond anything they could have
imagined, all clean and new and safe. The Elves remembered
what they had left behind-a world already beginning to spoil,
sickening where the Shadowen had crawled to birth and feed,
buckling under the weight of Federation oppression and the ad-
vance of armies that knew only to obey and never to question.
it was an old story, Wren, and the Elves had endured it for
countless generations. They wanted no more of it; they wanted
it to be gone.
“So they began to scheme of how they might keep their
newfound world and themselves protected. The Federation
might one day choose to extend itself even beyond the bound-
aries of the Four Lands. The Shadowen surely would. Only
magic could protect them, they felt, and the magic they relied
upon now came not out of Druid lore or new world teachings
but out of the rediscovered power of their beginnings. Such
magic was vast and wild, still in its infancy for this generation,
and they forgot the lessons of the Druids, of the Warlock Lord
and his Skull Bearers, and of all those who had fallen victim
before. They would not succumb, they must have told them-
selves. They would be smarter, more careful, and more deft in
their use.”
She took another deep breath, and her hands released Wren’s
to brush back the tangle of her hair. “Some among them had
experience in making things with the magic. Living crea-
tures, Wren-new species that could serve their needs. They
had found a way to extract the essence of nature’s creatures and
with use of the magic could nurture it so that as it grew it
became a variation of the thing on which it had been modeled.
They could make dogs from dogs and cats from cats, only big-
ger, stronger, quicker, smarter. But that was only the beginning.
They quickly progressed to combining life forms, creating ani-
mals that evidenced the most desirable traits of both. That was
how the Splinterscats came to be-and dozens of other species.
They were the first experiments of the magic’s new use, beasts
that could think and speak as well as humans, beasts that could