them shudder. Nonetheless, Dalamar went, and he continued his habit of learning magic. In secret nights and stolen days, he learned such things as he had never dreamed-how the Kagonesti did not whisper their spells or even declaim them, but sang them. And the spells of the Wilder Elves were not made up of words. Rather, they were made up of weavings of notes so complex that the mortal voice must struggle for months to learn them. He had the months, he had the will, and within the first year of the exile, he'd advanced so far in his studies that he began to think again that he might find a way to travel to the Tower of High Sorcery at Wayreth and be tested in his skill and knowledge. How? He did not know, and he didn't even know whether that tower would survive the war that raged in the world outside of Silvamori.
For war did rage. He knew this. He had friends among the sailors who went out to the port cities, and they brought back news. As the first year of exile passed and the new years progressed, he learned that the world beyond Silvamori was being taught to hate the coming of spring. It was, ever, the return of spring that brought the renewal of war.
After the disaster in Silvanesti, the armies of Takhisis took stock and found their strength again. They left behind the Nightmare Kingdom and turned west. Phair Caron's had been a force of red dragons. This new one was a force of blues, and so all knew and feared it as the Blue Army. It swept through the Plains of Solamnia like wildfire, merciless and hungry for conquest. It rolled over Kalaman and rampaged down the Vingaard River valleys, burning and looting and killing. Everywhere it went, the dragonarmy conquered. People wailed to the gods of Good, cried out to E'li-Paladine, as outlanders named him-but no god answered. The sky over the land grew dark with dragons. The land itself ran red with blood, and corpses clogged the great Vingaard River. The army surged through Vingaard Keep and left behind the dead and the broken in Solanthus.
Armies of white dragons took Icewall in the south. Highlords on black dragons held Goodlund and Kendermore while the Red Army regrouped, kicking off the dust of Phair Caron's failure, and ripped into Abanasinia, slaughtering Plainsmen and running right up to the borders of Qualinesti. And out came the elves of that land, and the sundered kindred-Silvanesti and Qualinesti-met again in Southern Ergoth. A new city was built under the auspices of the Qualinesti king, he who styled himself Speaker of the Sun. The two factions of the best beloved of the gods glared at each other across Thunder Bay, and for a time the story amused Silvamori that the son of the Qualinesti king, Porthios, decided that he must take part in the fighting and do battle against the forces of Takhisis. Madman! What are the affairs of outlanders to elves? They must have lost their minds, those Qualinesti. No sooner had the folk of Silvamori tired of that story than did a delicious bit of gossip whisper that if the son of the Qualinesti king was mad, his daughter was worse. Laurana, it was said, had fallen so far below herself as to run off with her half-elven lover, disgracing her family to the point where her poor old father took to his bed, and decided she too must become a soldier in the fight against the forces of Takhisis.
It was at this time that word came to Silvamori about the fate of their own wandering princess and the state of their nightmare-ridden homeland. People argued about it for months, some saying, 'Well, it must be true,' others declaring the news an outright lie. 'After all,' muttered the nay-sayers, 'who in the world would believe that Alhana Starbreeze had found help in Tarsis-of all benighted places! — and that help at the hands of a scruffy band made up of a half-elf, some humans, an elf-maid, a kender, and a dwarf? Insanity!'
'Aye, but it's so,' said the fisherman who sat talking with Dalamar late one night while the red moon and the silver shone down on the beach and the sea ran in to the shore and out. 'It's so, I know it, because I had word with one who saw the princess's guard escorting her through the city. It was the very night the dragonarmy attacked Tarsis, burning everything they could. Must've been awful. And you know who that elf-maid was? Laurana of Qualinesti, pity her poor father. All those strange folk did meet-a princess, her Wildrunners, and that ragged band of questers. Gone 'round the place looking for a dragon orb.' The fisherman laughed, for it was a fine joke to him that the questers should meet with the very woman who sought help in freeing her homeland and her father from the magic of one of those very things. 'Wanted one for the same reason your king did, I suppose-wanted to control the dragons, and so some of 'em went with her back to the Sylvan Land.'
'And freed the king?'
'And freed the king. But, sorry to say, he found his freedom in death, and things aren't so good in the Nightmare Kingdom these days.'
'But how was the king freed? How was the spell undone? How did people manage to enter the land and come out alive?' All this Dalamar wanted to know.
The fisherman shrugged, said some mage or another did it, one of the questers, and he didn't remember much more about it except that the fellow wore red robes and part of his name was the name of a god. 'Majere…' he said. 'Something, somebody Majere.'
When Dalamar asked to know more of this mage, the fisherman shook his head. He'd told all he knew, and there wasn't more to say. No more news of the mysterious mage came to Silvamori that year, or any year after, though often Dalamar listened to see if more would. Magic and power, these things were as gold and silver to him. Tales of them were nearly as good.
Still, if one servitor among them was unsatisfied with the amount of news he gathered, most of Silvamori had more news than they knew what to do with. A red mage undoing evil magic in a land where no magic was honored but white, the Speaker of the Stars dead, the children of the Speaker of the Suns running around wild… By the end of the second year of the war, the people of Silvamori and Qualimori decided that all the world beyond their own homes in exile was doomed to damnation.
'Ah, but things are finally changing,' said the Kagonesti fisherman, one day in the spring of the third year of the war. The Blue Army, filled up with humans, ogres, and the foul traitors from Lemish who'd thrown in their lot with the minions of Takhisis, prepared to fling itself against the High Clerist's Tower, that bastion of the Knights of Solamnia that stands at the head of a high mountain pass to ward the way to Palanthas. A rich prize, that city of Palanthas, with access to Coastlund in the west and the Bay of Branchala in the north. That whole sector of Solamnia would be squeezed and starved and find itself pleading for mercy if this ploy worked. 'But it won't,' said the fisherman, laughing. 'Those knights have finally got themselves sorted out and are ready to fight.'
Indeed, they had, and they'd found themselves a general as well. Laurana of Qualinesti went for a soldier, and she aimed for high rank. Well she was, after all, the daughter of a king. They called her the Golden General, and under her leadership the Knights of Solamnia became a force worth counting on. For the first time in all the war, a dragonarmy fled the field of battle, bloody and beaten. 'Because they had something called dragonlances,' the fisherman said. 'Old weapons from old times. Made the difference, it did.'
Soon-gods be praised-dragons of brass and silver and gold and copper were seen in the skies, come at last to defend the people of Krynn against the evil of Takhisis and her servants. At Whitestone Glade, dwarves and humans and elves were making treaties of alliance left and right, swearing to defend each other one and all.
'And so,' said Dalamar Argent, who secretly liked the name Dalamar Nightson, 'for whatever reason, the gods of Good have roused at last.'
The fisherman, eyes wide at this near-blasphemy, made a sign against ill luck. 'They have their reasons, Dalamar Argent. It's being said near and far that they have been working in the world all along, through the hearts and hands of people of good faith. Look you, aren't the races coming together now, putting aside their differences to work for a common good? Why, I heard it said that last winter the dwarves took human refugees into Thorbardin!' He laughed, as at a good joke. 'Who'd ever have imagined that, eh? Enough to rouse any god and make him take notice. And the knights are united again, E'li's dragons come to save us at last… It's been a time of wonders. Which goes to show it was, after all, not just a war on the ground, but a war in the heavens as well.'
So it was, Dalamar thought. He didn't speak his bitterness aloud. He took it with him, though, the question no one dared ask: How many have died praying for this moment so long delayed while gods played their games with each other, moving the people of Krynn around as though they were gaming pieces on a board? He thought of Lord Tellin Windglimmer, the cleric who died with E'li's name on his lips, his prayer unanswered.
Dalamar thanked the fisherman for his news and, as though in ritual long planned, he went to his house-his own small home, not that of his lover-and took off his white mage's robe, that mark of one who has been dedicated to Solinari. Instead, he dressed in the dun garb of a servant. Earthen brown boots, trews the color of mahogany, a shirt dyed walnut, these were the darkest clothes he could find. So changed, he walked down to the sea to the place where exiles had landed years before, from where exiles would soon again sail. He took with him the embroidered scroll case, that artifact of another time.
For a long moment he stood in the sun, a tall dark figure on the shining strand, an elf whose black hair blew around his pale face in the wind off the sea. Waves foamed around his feet and gulls cried in the sky. He turned the
