Carrick leaned forward. “Their loss is our gain. But tell us. Have you found something useful? Seersha suggested that maybe you had.”

Aphenglow hesitated. “I’m not yet certain. That is why I came back. I need you to listen to what I am about to read and then tell me your thoughts. I believed my discovery important enough to bring it now rather than wait. And there is reason to think I might be right. But leave that until I have finished.”

She reached into her pocket and produced the diary. “This book contains the writings of a young Elven girl named Aleia Omarosian, who lived and died centuries ago. I stumbled on it quite by accident. It isn’t a part of the official histories or even something that would be considered important, absent a thorough reading, to anyone looking to add to or embellish the information contained in those histories. That, I think, is why it has been overlooked for so long. It was kept because the writer was the child of a King and Queen of the Elves in the time of Faerie. But mostly, it was forgotten.”

She opened the diary. “I won’t read you all of this, only those parts that are pertinent to what seems important. Listen.”

For the next fifteen minutes or so, she read from the diary, taking each entry in turn, reading it through in its entirety and without comment moving on to read the next. Her three listeners did not interrupt, but sat quietly, paying close attention.

When she was done, Pleysia said. “I don’t know. Is this story even real? It sounds like something Aleia Omarosian might be making up. Young girls do that. They create an imaginary existence hoping that some of the angst and excitement might relieve the ennui of their real lives.”

“Maybe,” Carrick mused, rubbing his chin. “But it doesn’t sound made up to me.”

“I thought as Pleysia does,” Aphenglow said. “I wondered if the reason the diary had lain undiscovered so long was that somewhere along the way—maybe as far back as when she was still alive or right after her death—it was determined to be only a young girl’s musings. But on the same night I took the diary back to my cottage, I was attacked.”

She proceeded to fill them in on the details of the first night, then went on to relate how the attacker had returned on the second night and she had been forced to kill him. “Until then, I wondered. But the attacker’s persistence and knowledge of the book suggest it might have value. The attackers, at least, must have thought so.”