HE LOOKED AT her perplexed, an expression of confusion that caught the young woman off her guard, and, with an ambush set so close at hand, surely unnerved her.

“What do ye know?” Rhiannon asked, brushing her raven black hair from her face, her crystal blue eyes shining, flashing, to match the diamond that was set in her forehead-the mark of magic that identified her as a witch.

“The day,” young Bryan of Corning replied absently, a wistful smile brightening his face. “This day.”

“Ayuh,” Rhiannon prompted, glancing about nervously. “Are we not to fight them then?”

“My birthday,” Bryan explained with a wry smile.

Rhiannon’s face lit up, as much with relief that the lad had not seen any dangerous flaw with their ambush plan as with her sincere joy at the news of Bryan’s birthday.

“Sixteen,” Bryan announced proudly. “Today I am sixteen years.”

Rhiannon’s smile only widened, but behind it came an honest surprise. Sixteen? she echoed in her mind, over and over, incredulously. With his delicate features and shining hair and eyes, the same brilliant gray orbs of his elven father, Meriwindle, Bryan did indeed have the appearance of youth. But his heritage was half elven, and even Arien Silverleaf, who was eldar of the elves and had lived through centuries, appeared youthful. Rhiannon had spent three months beside Bryan, fighting talons along the southwestern fields of Calva and in the Baerendil Mountains, and never would she have guessed that this cunning warrior, this hero to so many of the folk who had been trapped on this side of the great River Ne’er Ending after the war, this strong young man who had slain so very many evil talons, could possibly be so young! Rhiannon herself had just passed her twenty-first birthday, and she had thought Bryan-so wise, so composed-to be at least her own age.