Levon was silent. They rode thus for a long time. Then, “The tale is truly very complex now, and it picks up many other tales from the Great Years. It was in those days that the one we call the Unraveler raised his fortress of Starkadh in the Ice and came down on all the lands with war. There are so many deeds to tell of from that time. The one the Dalrei sing is of Revor’s Ride, and it is very far from the least of the great things that were done. But Amairgen Whitebranch, as he came to be called, for the staff Lisen found for him in Pendaran, was ever at the center of the war, and Lisen was at his side, source of his power and his soul.

“There are so many tales, Davor, but at length it came to pass that Amairgen learned by his art that Maugrim had taken for his own a place of great power, hidden far out at sea, and was drawing upon it mightily for his strength.

“He determined then that this island must be found and wrested away from the Dark. So Amairgen gathered to him a company of one hundred lios alfar and men, with three mages among them, and they set sail west from Taerlindel to find Cader Sedat, and Lisen was left behind.”

“What? Why?” Dave rasped, stunned.

It was Tore who answered. “She was a deiena,” he said, his own voice sounding difficult. “A deiena dies at sea. Her immortality was subject to the nature of her kind.”

“It is so,” Levon resumed quietly. “They built in that time for her the Anor Lisen at the westernmost part of Pendaran. Even in the midst of war, men and lios alfar and the powers of the Wood came together to do this for her out of love. Then she placed upon her brow the Circlet of Lisen, Amairgen’s parting gift. The Light against the Dark, it was called, for it shone of its own self, and with that light upon her brow—so great a beauty never else having been in any world—Lisen turned her back on the war and the Wood and, climbing to the summit of the tower, she set her face westward to the sea, that the Light she bore might show Amairgen the way home.

“No man knows what happened to him or those who sailed in that ship. Only that one night Lisen saw, and those who stood guard beside the Anor saw as well, a dark ship sailing slowly along the coast in the moonlight. And it is told that the moon setting west in that hour shone through its tattered sails with a ghostly light, and it could be seen that the ship was Amairgen’s, and it was empty. Then, when the moon sank into the sea, that ship disappeared forever.