Teri McLaren
Javin had ever told him was that Cheyne had been the only survivor of a vicious attack on a trading caravan. Cheyne had turned the story over and over in his mind, searching each detail Javin had supplied for historical consistency, for truth. There were things that just didn't seem right. For one, the ores had done a strange thing in killing off the drivers and the families traveling with the traders. Usually, ore bandits, well known for their laziness and lack of organization, just took what they could carry in a lightning strike of a raid and let the caravans go on, knowing they would return via the same, the only path, laden with more goods. It had taken some thousand years for the ores to understand that principle, and they practiced it with consuming faith. Why, then, had they destroyed their own livelihood for one haul of goods in that raid? It didn't make sense. It never had.
Apart from his first name, Cheyne had never recovered any memory of events before that day. AH his life, the questions of why he had been part of the lost caravan or who his family was gnawed at him like rats, growing bigger and more insistent with every new summer's end, the anniversary of the attack. Now it was his twenty-first year in Argive, and also here in Sumifa- that was the year a person took a name and left their father's house-and still he had no more than the amulet and Javin's shaky story to claim as his heritage.
For Cheyne, it seemed life had begun the moment Javin had shaken him awake, pulling him from an enchanted sleep, with only the strange amulet around his neck as proof of the first ten years of his life. For months afterward, he could not even talk. That's when Muni had come. Muni was the best linguist there was, and it had taken him nearly a year to get the boy to speak coherently. All the while, Cheyne awoke every night bathed hi a salty drench of sweat, shaking and terrified by indecipherable, recurring dreams-bizarre images of color and light, of a tall, sear-faced elf, of a man with no face.