The sun came out from behind the clouds again. Egrin mopped sweat from his brow. He didn’t relish entering the Great Green again. This time, it wasn’t forest tribesmen who worried him. There had been peace between the Dom-shu and the empire for years. These days, worse things than wild woodsmen inhabited the world. Inhuman things.

Although born in a wooded area himself, Egrin had been forced out at an early age. The small settlement of humans and elves in which his family lived was destroyed by raiders. His human mother was killed and his father, a Silvanesti elf, had vanished. Egrin had been left with a sympathetic human family at a settlement far from the woodlands. His new family insisted-for his own safety-that he hide his mixed lineage, going so far as to have his upswept ears cropped to a more “normal” shape.

He had been concealing his parentage ever since. He had told the truth to only two people: a wife, long dead, and Tol, the farm boy who had become like a son to him.

The broad meadow at his back, known as Zivilyn’s Carpet, was alive with spring wildflowers, just as it had been that day twenty years ago when he’d entered the Great Green with Lord Odovar. This time Egrin had traveled alone, and this time he had no Tol to come boldly, foolishly, to the rescue.

No, that wasn’t strictly true. Tol was going to rescue Egrin again-Egrin and everyone else in the Ergoth Empire-if only Egrin could find him. It was for that reason the former marshal had left his small, comfortable home in Juramona to undertake a journey for which he was, he admitted frankly to himself, getting much too old.

Well, he wasn’t getting any younger, or any closer to finding Tol, just sitting here staring at the trees.

He dismounted and led his horse forward. The sway-backed beast was the only horse he’d found for sale for a dozen leagues in any direction. All decent animals had been rounded up and sold to the imperial army. As many horses as men had died in the last three battles-and men were more easily replaced.