Marissya closed her eyes and summoned the shei'dalin power that could rip truths from even the most corrupted souls and anchor mortally wounded warriors to life while she healed them. She closed her senses to everything around her, condensing her awareness. Gently, carefully, she reached out to the kitling closest to her, the one named Sharra, and on a weave of intense Spirit, blazing golden white with the power of her considerable shei'dalin magic, she sent her consciousness into the egg.

The kitling's bright light abruptly winked out, and steely shackles clapped around Marissya's wrist, yanking her hand from the shell of the egg. Her eyes flew open in confusion. She blinked away her Fey vision and found Ellysetta beside her, holding her wrist in a bruising grip. The Feyreisa's eyes were glowing green and whirling with opalescent lights, and her pupils had completely disappeared.

"Whatever you're doing, Marissya, stop." A vibrating hum deepened Ellysetta's voice to a growl.

A louder, much more menacing growl sounded behind Ellysetta. Marissya looked up and her mouth went dry.

Sybharukai's pupil-less green eyes whirled faster and brighter than Ellysetta's, fixed on Marissya with such intensity, the shei'dalin couldn't move. Venom dripped from the tairen's exposed fangs, her poisonous tail spikes were completely extended, and she was whipping that tail through the air like a weapon.

Marissya released her magic. "I-I'm sorry." Once the first word escaped, the rest began tumbling out in a rush. "I didn't mean any harm. The kitlings aren't sick or injured, but they are dying. I was just trying to find out why. Rain…tell them." She turned to him, only to find that his eyes, too, had gone more tairen than Fey.

Her first instinct was to call Dax, but she didn't dare. If she called him, he would come for her. He would come and the tairen would kill him. Frightened, but desperately trying to keep that fear from spilling over across her truemate bond with Dax, Marissya slowly rose to her feet, careful not to make any sudden moves.

"What was that you were weaving?" Ellysetta asked, and a measure of Marissya's tension drained away when she turned and saw that the Feyreisa's eyes were slowly returning to normal. "It was Spirit."

"That didn't feel like any Spirit I've ever woven."

"The pattern was a shei'dalins, weave, Ellysetta. I was trying to merge with the kitlings, to see if I could sense what is killing them."

Ellysetta released her and gave a humorless laugh. "No offense, Marissya, but I suggest you not try to merge with any more tairen. Apparently they don't like it."

Marissya glanced back up at Sybharukai, who was still eyeing her as if she were a meal on the hoof. "So I see." She backed away from the eggs. "I'm sorry, Rain. Whatever's killing the kitlings, I don't think I'll be able to stop it."

His jaw worked and he nodded. "I'll take you back to Dax, but I'd like you to stay the night, in case what hunts the kitlings returns. Perhaps when that happens, you'll be able to sense something you can't now."

She looked around the cavern at all the tairen crouched overhead.

"The choice is yours of course," Rain added. "As you just discovered, it's not a choice without risk."

"Of course I'll stay." With a smile that projected far more confidence than she was feeling, Marissya added, "After all, how many shei'dalins ever get the chance to save a tairen pride?"

Despite a night of waiting and watching, the thing that had killed Cahlah and her kit did not return, and by sunrise the next morning, four great tairen were winging across the Fading Lands. Rain carried Dax and Marissya on his back, while Steli carried Ellysetta. Sybharukai had sent the mate-pair Fahreeta and Torasul along as well to join Steli in singing pride greetings to Shei'Kess.

«Do you really think the Eye will tell us any more than it already has?» Rain asked Steli as they flew. Tairen-made or not, the Eye had been perniciously silent for centuries, adamantly refusing to offer help or guidance to the Fey until Rain had forcibly wrested from it the clues that had sent him to Celieria City—and Ellysetta.

«The Eye sent you to Ellysetta-kitling. It knew you would bring her to back to the Fey-kin and to the pride. Now that she is here, Shei'Kess may have more to say.»

«Well, I hope singing to the Eye earns a more pleasant response than the one it gave me.» The all-consuming pain that had ripped through him when he'd laid hands on the Eye was not something he would ever forget.

Steli chuffed. «You issued Challenge. We are not so…» She sang an image of a foolish tairen kit biting the tail of a grumpy elder.

Ellysetta laughed, then tried ineffectively to hide it from Rain's narrowing tairen eyes with a cough and a rapid change of subject. «I still don't understand why the tairen haven't visited Dharsa since the Mage Wars. I thought the tairen considered the Fey kin.»

He allowed the insult of her laughter to pass with a disdainful sniff. «They do, but the kinship doesn't extend to any particular affection or desire to socialize.»

«Why not?»

Rather than answer her himself, Rain directed the question to the tairen themselves. «Ellysetta wants to know why the tairen of Fey'Bahren have not visited the Fey-kin city since the Mage Wars.»

«Why would the tairen go there?» Steli sounded surprised by the question. «You were not there, and the Fey-kin are not tairen.»