Cover

Title Page

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Dedication

Dedicated to
James Oliver Rigney, Sr.
(1920–1988)

He taught me always to follow the dream,
and when I caught it, to live it.

And his paths shall be many, and who shall know his name, for he shall be born among us many times, in many guises, as he has been and ever will be, time without end. His coming shall be like the sharp edge of the plow, turning our lives in furrows from out of the places where we lie in our silence. The breaker of bonds; the forger of chains. The maker of futures; the unshaper of destiny.

—from Commentaries on the Prophecies of the Dragon,

by Jurith Dorine, Right Hand to the

Queen of Almoren, 742 AB, the Third Age

Map

PROLOGUE

Fortress of the Light

Pedron Niall’s aged gaze wandered about his private audience chamber, but dark eyes hazed with thought saw nothing. Tattered wall hangings, once battle banners of the enemies of his youth, faded into dark wood paneling laid over stone walls, thick even here in the heart of the Fortress of the Light. The single chair in the room—heavy, high-backed, and almost a throne—was as invisible to him as the few scattered tables that completed the furnishings. Even the white-cloaked man kneeling with barely restrained eagerness on the great sunburst set in the wide planks of the floor had vanished from Niall’s mind for the moment, though few would have dismissed him so lightly.

Jaret Byar had been given time to wash before being brought to Niall, but both his helmet and his breastplate were dulled from travel and battered from use. Dark, deep-set eyes shone with a feverish, urgent light in a face that seemed to have had every spare scrap of flesh boiled away. He wore no sword—none was allowed in Niall’s presence—but he seemed poised on the edge of violence, like a hound awaiting the loosing of the leash.