For a moment, she thought it was real—that the mirror truly was a clear glass portal into that dark room and the High Mage of Eld could see her as clearly as she could see him—but then he bent his head back to his book, dipped his quill in ink, and continued to write.

"That is him? The High Mage?" Rain asked quietly.

She nodded, but didn't pull her eyes off the man in the mirror's shining veil. Though she'd never seen him clearly in her dreams, she recognized him instantly. The invisible Mage Marks that formed a four-pointed ring over her heart went cold, and her stomach tightened with dread. When a knock sounded at the door, and the Mage called, "Enter," her heart slammed in her chest and suspicion hardened to icy certainty.

The man she might never have seen, but his voice was etched eternally in her mind, never to be forgotten. This was the High Mage who had tormented her all her life. The man responsible for her mother's death and all the lives lost on the battlefields of Orest and Teleon. The man who had stolen the souls and lives of young tairen in the egg and used them for his evil experiments.

Deep within, her tairen begin to growl and rake its claws across her nerves.

Rain's hand slipped into hers, and his broad, warm fingers curled tight, offering protection and reassurance. «I am with you, shei'tani. And this is just an image from the past. He cannot hurt you.»

He thought she was afraid of the Mage.

Perhaps she should be. But her only real fear was of the hatred bubbling in her veins like fire. If she were wearing her tairen's true form, her fangs would be dripping venom, ravenous with bloodlust. The urge to kill, to rend and maim— to devour — was so fierce it shook her to her core.

Within the mirror's veil, the scene Hawksheart had summoned continued to play out. The knock on the door was a servant calling the Mage to some appointment. The white-haired High Mage exited his office to walk down a series of dark corridors tunneled out of black rock. Black metal-clad doors lined both sides of the corridor, and muscular guards gripping evil-looking barbed sel'dor pikes stood watch beside a number of them.

"Those walls look like they contain sel'dor ore," Gil muttered.

"A cave of some kind?" Bel suggested. "Perhaps burrowed into a sel'dor mine? It would explain why the Fey never sensed the Mages gathering their power."

"And why the dahl'reisen could never track them back to their lair," Gaelen agreed.

"Where are the largest sel'dor mines in Eld?" Tajik asked. "If that's where he is, then those are the first places we should start looking."

One of the doors opened, and the Mage entered. Inside was an observation room with a window that looked into an adjoining chamber where a young brunette woman lay chained to a flat table. Her eyes were half-closed, and her head lolled on her shoulders in what appeared to be a drugged stupor.

Another door opened on the far side of the room, and four burly guards, their meaty fists clenched around chains, dragged a snarling, naked man into the room by the sel'dor collar clamped around his neck and the manacles that shackled his wrists and ankles. His pale skin shone with a faint luminescence. Dark blond hair hung about his shoulders and face in matted tangles. The moment he caught sight of the woman on the table, his body went still as stone. His head came up sharply, whipping the hair back away from his face to reveal black Azrahn-filled eyes and a scar that tracked from the corner of his mouth to his left ear. His nostrils flared like those of a wolf scenting its prey.

Beside Ellysetta, Gaelen stiffened and drew in a hissing breath.

"You know him?" Rain asked.

"Korren vel Dahn. One of the Brotherhood. Six hundred years ago, I sent him into Eld to find the Mages' lair, but he never returned."

"Well, looks like he found it," Gil muttered.

In the scene unfolding in the mirror's mist, Korren lunged for the woman on the table. His body had reacted to her presence with unmistakable intent. Ellysetta gasped and turned her eyes away as the dahl'reisen fell upon the barely conscious woman. Rain's hand tightened on hers, and she felt the disgust and shame roiling through him as he forced himself to watch the creature who had once been an honorable warrior of the Fey commit his unspeakable act.

"May his soul burn in the Seventh Hell for all eternity," Bel whispered in horror.

"Do not judge him so harshly," Hawksheart said quietly. "It took two hundred years to break him, and madness can turn even the best of men into beasts. He wasn't the first and he was far from the last."

Hawksheart's soft-spoken words made Rain flinch and tighten his grip on Ellysetta. With her face pressed to his throat, she could feel his recoiling horror as clearly as her own. «You could never do such a thing, shei'tani,» she assured him.

«I could no longer, it's true,» he answered «But before your soul coiled mine? I slaughtered millions without remorse. What would one more foul crime have mattered?»

«It would have mattered, and you would not have done it.»

His lips touched her brow in a tender caress. «Korren's deed is done. You can look again.»

Ellysetta turned back in time to see the woman Korren had raped walking with blank-eyed docility behind several servants. Ellysetta scowled at Hawksheart. "Why are you showing us this? That poor creature is not the woman who gave me birth; nor is Korren vel Dahn my sire." She'd seen the two shadowy figures of her parents in a dream beside the Bay of Flames a month ago, and neither the unconscious woman nor her ra**st could have been one of the couple revealed to her.