Chapter 16

When they came to an open arched entrance, Balinor stopped. “Welcome to my humble dwelling place. There has always been room for you here, space waiting for the glad day you would come. Enter with a thousand welcomes.”

The remnants of his bitterness still twisting within his spirit, Clay hesitated. An inner sense told him once he accepted this hospitality, he would have to admit his long denied and despised kinship to this tall stranger. The elf who seemed almost a reflection of himself—or perhaps more truly, he was a reflection of his previously unknown father. Outwardly, they seemed much alike.

He sought the burning rage in his heart, the caged fury for the one who had abandoned his mother and him so long ago, the one who had left him to be abused and shunned, the misfit and evil-tainted stepchild, the fatherless fruit of unspoken sin. Shock seared him when he could find scarcely a dim spark of it.