But this time would be different. Flint thrust a hand in his pocket, making sure the one last toy he'd been saving-a wooden pea-shooter-was still there.

The rest of the children had dissipated, gone home to suppers of venison with fruit sauce, basted fish, or quith-pa with roasted fowl. The only figure in sight was Tanis. The Speaker's ward sat by the pool, arms clasped about his knees, resting his chin on them, watching Flint with his hazel eyes. He wore a loose white shirt and tan deerskin breeches, clothing reminiscent of that of the Que-Shu plainsmen, quite unlike the flowing tunics and robes that full elves preferred. He stood, unfolding his husky frame without the sense of grace that the other elves carried. Tanis brushed back a wing of reddish brown hair.

"Tanthalas," Flint said, nodding.

The half-elf echoed Flint's nod. "Master Fireforge."

They stood, both seemingly waiting for the other to make the first move.

Finally, Flint gestured at the pond. "Watching the fish?" he asked. Brilliant start, he thought.

Tanis nodded.

"Why?"

The half-elf looked surprised, then thoughtful. His answer, when it finally came, was delivered in a nearly inaudible tone. "They remind me of someone." The half-elf didn't meet his gaze. Flint nodded. "Who?"

Tanis looked up sullenly. "Everybody here."

"The elves?"

The half-elf signaled assent.

"Why?" Flint pressed again.

Tanis kicked a clod of moss. "They're satisfied with what they've got. They never change. They never leave here except to die."

"And you're different?" Flint asked.

Tanis drew his lips into a straight line. "Someday I'm leaving here."

Flint waited for the half-elf to say something else, but Tanis seemed to consider his part of the conversation over. All right, Flint thought; I'll give it a try. At least he's not slipping away into the shadows, for once. "How was today's archery lesson?" the dwarf asked.

"All right." The boy's voice was a monotone, and his eyes were focused on the pool again. Children chattered and screamed delightedly in the distance. "Tyresian and Porthios and their friends were all there," he added.

It sounded appalling, given the way Porthios's friends felt about the half-elf. Flint wondered what he could say to cheer up the Speaker's ward. "It's suppertime," he said, thinking, Sparkling conversation, Master Fireforge. What was there about this lad that rendered him conversationally inept?

Tanis smiled thinly and nodded his agreement. Yes, indeed, it was suppertime. The half-elf moved three paces to lean against another pear tree.

Flint tried again. "Care to join me for"-What did one offer elven children? Although Tanis's thirty years would make him a young man in human years, a thirty-year-old elf was years away from being considered grown up-"some supper?"

"With elvenblossom wine, perhaps?" the half-elf asked.

Flint wondered if the Speaker's ward were laughing at him. The dwarf had become able to sip the perfumey drink without gagging-for state occasions, for example, when sharing the elven wine was part of court decorum. "Ah, Reorx's beard," Flint muttered, and he shuddered.

Tanis examined Flint, a half-smile still playing on his lips. "You dislike that wine," the half-elf finally said.

"No. I loathe it."

"Why do you drink it, then?" Tanis asked.

Flint surveyed the half-elf; he seemed sincerely curious. "As a stranger, I'm trying to fit in here."

Off in the distance, a child's shrill laugh accompanied the shriek of a wooden whistle. At least one parent was going to be less than thrilled with Flint this evening. Tanis sneered. "Are you trying to be 'one of the elves'?" he asked, almost contemptuously.

Flint debated. "Well…" he said, "when in Qualinost, do as the Qualinesti do. My mother used to say that, or something very similar." He caught a whiff of baking venison, and his stomach growled, but he maintained his stance. Oh, how he wanted his supper. Oh, how he wished he'd never started this conversation. The half-elf kept sneering, but his eyes seemed to beg for reassurance, and the dwarf suddenly thought that maybe the sneer was directed, not at him, but at Porthios and Tyresian and the others. "Don't try. Master Fireforge," Tanis said.

"What?" Flint asked.

Tanis pulled a half-ripe pear from the tree, dropped it to the moss, and ground it under the heel of his oiled leather moccasin. "Don't try. They'll never accept you. They don't accept anyone who's not just like them." He kicked the fruit off to one side and stalked off without another word. Soon his figure was lost in the trees.

Flint walked slowly back into his shop, closed the door, and put the empty sack in the hutch. Somehow he wasn't in the mood for supper anymore.

A.C.288, Early Fall

Tanis strode along the road from Flint's shop, his moccasins scuffing against the blue and white tile. He cursed himself for his stupidity. Why had he been so curt with the dwarf? Flint Fireforge seemed to have the best of intentions; why hadn't the half-elf responded in kind?

Without paying much attention to where he was going, Tanis found himself pacing across the Hall of the Sky in central Qualinost. Patterned into the tile of the open area, now shrouded in twilight, lay a mosaic showing the region of Ansalon centering on the elven city; the map detailed lands from Solace and Crystalmir Lake at the northwest to Que-Shu at the northeast and Pax Tharkas at the south.

The half-elf stared at only one point on the map, however: Solace, the dwarf's adopted home. What kind of place was it?

"Imagine, to live in a house in a tree," he said, his whisper swallowed by the silence hanging over the deserted square. He thought of the elves' stone buildings, which never quite lost their chill. Would a wooden house in a tree be so warm?

He kicked at a loose tile that marked the position of the village of Gateway, between Qualinost and Solace; the movement sent the shard spinning. Contrite, and hoping no one had seen him deface the sacred map, he bounded after the chip and returned to replace it, kneeling. Then he sank back on his haunches and surveyed the open area.

The chilly twilight air carried delicious scents of supper and warm echoes of dinnertime chatter. Tanis stood slowly and stared around the Hall of the Sky; around him, the purplish quartz spires of elven homes, rectangles of lamplight along their curved sides, poked like the beaks of baby birds above the rounded tops of trees. Girdered all around by the arched bridges, with the gold of the tall Tower of the Sun still reflecting the sun's rays in the evening sky, the city was a remarkable sight; understandably, the Qualinesti elves believed it was the most beautiful city in the world. But how could elves bear it, living and dying in the same place?

Did his dissatisfaction, Tanis wondered, come from his father? From his human side?

Tanis raised his gaze to the deepening sky; almost as he watched, the evening darkened and stars began to appear directly overhead. He wondered about the myth that the Hall of the Sky once had been a real structure, guarding some rare and precious object, and that Kith-Kanan had magically raised building and object into the sky to hide them, leaving only the map that had formed the building's floor. As a toddler, he'd been told by the other young elves that the exact center of the map was a 'lucky spot"; stand there and wish very hard and you would get what you desired, they claimed.

"I'd like to go up there, to see that hidden place in the sky," he whispered fervently now. "I'd like to see all of Ansalon. I'd like to travel, like Flint… to have adventures… and friends…"

Looking around embarrassedly, hoping no one had seen or heard him, Tanis nonetheless continued to wait-not really hoping, of course, that a magical being would appear to grant his wish. Naturally not, he told himself. That was a child's dream, not a young man's. Still, he waited a few minutes more, until a breeze through the pear trees raised goose flesh on his arms and reminded him that it was time to go home.

Wherever that was, he thought.