Branton left. The others stayed a while longer, discussing their plan to protect the citizens from further poisonings, but eventually exhaustion won out, and they called it a night. Venick was slow to leave, touching Ellina’s shoulder as he passed. The look on his face nearly had Ellina hurrying after him, but she made herself stay. Unlike the others, she was not quite finished.
Soon, she and Erol were the only two remaining.
“There is something that I do not understand,” Ellina said.
Erol waited.
“You knew Traegar before he was expelled from the Healer’s Academy.”
“I did,” Erol acknowledged.
“That was over a hundred years ago.”
Erol studied his fingers. Through the window behind him, the moon was bright. It glowed against the back of his chair. “Yes, it was.”
“Humans cannot live that long.”
“Most humans cannot.”
Ellina saw Erol’s perfectly white robes. His slim, clean hands. She remembered the times he had tended her wounds and the wounds of others, how his presence brought a sense of peace, the way fights tended to fizzle when he was around. She thought about his relationship with her mother, and what kind of man could have caught the attention of the elven queen.
Ellina thought about how she no longer believed in impossibilities.
She said, “You are a conjuror.”
Erol’s smile matched the moon: soft, yet still bright. “A human one.”
“But, the purge…”
“Did you think elves eradicated allhuman conjurors? They decimated our ranks, certainly, but many of us escaped into hiding. We have been there ever since.”
Despite having guessed this, Ellina was astounded. “If there have been human conjurors among us all along, where are they? They could be helping us fight.”
“Our numbers are few. And we do not fight. Didn’t you know? Human conjurors were masters of the earth, able to shape rock and stone. We could pull minerals from the ground, lift wells, unearth plants with medicinal properties. Historically, we were builders, or healers.” Erol leaned to the side, resting an elbow against the chair’s armrest. “My people live nomadic lives in the mountains now. They survive off the land. Herd goats.”
Ellina remembered something Venick had once said to her. “Iziri goats?”
“Yes, actually.”
Ellina shifted in her seat. The cushion was old, the leather torn in places. It creaked a little as she said, “You spent a lot of time in the elflands with Traegar.”
“Yes.”
“And my mother.”
“Her, too.”
“But if you knew Traegar for all those years, and my mother, then you must have also known my father.”
Erol blinked down at his knees. “I knew Rishiana’s bondmate, yes.”
Ellina studied Erol’s face. Deep lines, straight nose, those almond-shaped eyes. “You switched my words,” she said. “That is not what I asked.”
He appeared distracted. “What’s that?”
“I asked if you knew my father.”
Erol’s smile was different now, caught between two places. “Indeed, you did.”
