worse could happen, a thought that was blacker still whispered
to her.
The Shadowen are Elves-and you carry the entire Elven nation back
into the Four Lands.
Why
The question hung like an accusation in the silence of her
mind.
CHAPTER
19
WREN WAS STILL STRUGGLING with the ambiguity of what
her grandmother had given her to do when the rest of
the company awoke at sunrise.
On the one hand, thousands of lives depended on
her carrying the Loden and the Ruhk Staff safely from the island
of Morrowindl back into the Westland. The whole of the Elven
nation, all save the Wing Riders who resided on the coastal
islands far away and had not migrated with the Land Elves to
Morrowindl, had been gathered up by the magic and enclosed,
there to remain until Wren-or, she supposed, another of the
company, should she die as Ellenroh had-set them free. If she
failed to do so, the Elves would perish, the oldest Race of all,
the last of the faerie people, an entire history from the time of
the world’s creation gone.
On the other hand, perhaps it was best.
She shivered every time she repeated Eowen’s words: The
Elves are the Shadowen. The Elves, with their magic, and with their
insistence on recovering their past, had turned themselves into
monsters. They had created the demons. They had devastated
Morrowindi and initiated the destruction of the Four Lands.
Practically every danger that threatened could be traced to them.
It might be better, given that truth, if they ceased to exist alto-
gether.
She did not think she was overstating her concerns. Once
the Elves were restored to the Westland, there was nothing to
prevent them from beginning anew with the magic, from trying
to recall it yet again so that it could be used in some newly
terrible and destructive way. There was nothing that said that
Ellenroh had disposed of all those who sought to play with its
power, that some one or two had not survived. It would be easy
enough for those few to begin to experiment once again, to
create new forms of monsters, new horrors that Wren did not
care to envision. Hadn’t the Elves already proved that they were
capable of anything?
Like the Druids, she thought sadly, victims of a misguided
need to know, of an injudicious self-confidence, of a foolish
belief that they could master something which by its very nature
was dependably unreliable.
How had they let it all come to this, these people with so
many years of experience in using the magic, these faerie folk
brought into the new world out of the devastation of the old by
lessons they could not have failed to learn? Surely they must
have had some small inkling of the dangers they would encoun-
ter when they began to make nature over in their own ill-
conceived image. Surely they must have realized something was
wrong. Yet time’s passage had rendered the Elves as human as
the other Races, changed them from faerie creatures to mortals,
and altered their perceptions and their knowledge. Why
shouldn’t they be as prone to make mistakes as anyone else-as
anyone else had, in fact, from Druids to Men?
The Elves. She was one of them, of cource, and worse, an
Elessedil. However she might wish it otherwise, she was con-
sumed with guilt for what their misjudgments had wrought and
with remorse for what their folly had cost. A land, a nation,
countless lives, a world’s sanity and peace-they had set in mo-
tion the events that would destroy it all. Her people. She might
argue that she was a Rover girl, that she shared nothing with
the Elves beyond her bloodline and appearance, but the argu-
ment seemed hollow and feckless. Responsibility did not begin
and end with personal needs-Garth had taught her that much.
She was a part of everything about her, and not only survival
but the measure of her life was directly related to whether she
accepted that truth. She could not back away from the unpleas-
antnesses of the world; she could not forget its pain. Once upon
a time, the Elves had been foremost among Healers, their given