“Is there a tile with a rune for choice?” he asked, looking back down at the dell below with its carpet of violets.

He heard the gentle clatter of the tiles as Linne turned them all. “Yes, sir king. One for choice, and one for coercion. That one can also be read ‘necessity.’ ”

“I am not surprised,” he said. He took a breath and let it out slowly, reaching for calm. “You know what happened here, but … you may not know all that grew from this seed.”

“We were robbed of our queen, your mother, and you … the heir,” Panin said. “And you suffered…”

“Yes. And as you would expect, that changed me—would have changed any child. But what I see now is a pattern. It started here, for me, though for my mother perhaps it must have started somewhere else, some other time—this was her pattern’s end. I had no choice then, or for years after, being young and unable to choose anything—my master chose for me, chose pain and humiliation. When I was freed … the only choice I had was to take the chance or not take it. And I took it. But I did not feel it as a choice … I felt it as inevitable. I long thought that the man who saved me had laid a geas on me … that it was his will that I escape, more even than my own desire to flee.”

“And was it?”

“I do not know. I do not know if it matters. But the choices I made later mattered. I am not the man my father wanted—though his bones are satisfied, they tell me now. I am not the man my mother hoped for, to whom she had given—” He stopped abruptly. He had told no one what Amrothlin had told him, that his mother had transferred her power to create an elfane taig to him. “To whom she had given her elven heritage,” he said. “I am the man my choices made me. And here is where I learned that choices could be unmade. Here, in what should have been a safe place for her and for me.”

“What of the robbers?” Jostin asked.

“Dead men were found here, weren’t they?” Kieri asked. “I remember being told that. Robbers, they said. What did those who found them do with the bodies?”

“I don’t know … Would they have buried them? Burned them?”

“And risk harm to the land? And ugliness?” He looked again at the scene … the violets, the stone now a graceful little shrine with its offering of flowers. “I think they would have taken the bodies away, somewhere beyond the bounds of the elvenhome.”

“If they didn’t find the … your body, sir king, why didn’t they search for you?”