"That is an easy thing to say when it is someone else's home they have besieged, " Galaeron said. "The phaerimm are enemies to the elves, I assure you. "

"And who's fault is that?" Alduvar turned to glower at him, but there was no anger in his eyes, no ire or malice- no emotion at all. "Was it not you who freed them in the first place?"

"And who cursed us with the Shadovar?" added Irreph Mulmar, the ruddy-faced Constable of the High Dale. Like Alduvar, he was one of the three envoys from the Dales, and like Alduvar's, his eyes seemed oddly empty. "Were you not the one who brought them back from the Plane of Shadow?"

Somewhere inside, Galaeron realized that the vitriol of the Dalesmen was strangely at odds with their vacant eyes, but his shadow was already rising to the bait, bristling at the accusations and urging him to answer with blade or spell. He started to stand and found Ruha's hand clamped to his arm, her nails digging in hard to remind him that he had to be strong, that to indulge his anger was to yield to the darkness devouring him from the inside.

"What is done is done, " she said, continuing to hold Galaeron down. "Is there anyone here who can say he would not have made the same mistake?"

"Mistakes have consequences, " said Mourngrym Amcatha, the third and last of the Dalelands envoys. A huge, powerfully built man with a brown mustache and neatly trimmed hair, his eyes were as vacant as those of his fellow Dalesmen. "The elf is the one who made the mistake. It's his people who should suffer for it-not ours. "

Mourngrym's comment drew a chorus of astonished murmurs, for he was as respected across much of Faer?n as he was in his own dale. For him to speak so openly against Evereska's interests was to condone the resentment harbored in secret by many of the alliance's lesser leaders, who gathered at night in quiet little groups to complain of the hardships visited upon them by the mistake of one elf.