Catania could not remember her mother. She had died long before the young elf could recall. In her oldest, haziest memories, she was living with her father, and her grandparents, and her widowed aunt.

Her father had hated humans. They had taken Syrelia over slowly—more and more of them coming, imposing more and more of their rules on other races. When Catania was fourteen, her father had been killed in a street fight with a dozen Men. When the governor, Haken Daniel, had come to the city and ordered the building of the wall, she had left her kin and fled. Her father had hated Men, and they had killed him—they would never be her master. Her father had always been quick to speak and act, and her admiration for him had made her leave behind her own quieter nature as best she could.

Hunting in the forest with him had prepared her a little, but not enough. Lost, pained, lonely; a little girl alone in the wilderness.  A Man, Lord Nightseer, and his household were the only creature besides Tyre (and Catania) who lived outside the city wall. The lonely elf had befriended his young slave, a she-elf named Lythia. She had been a few years older than Catania, and had herded Lord Nightseer’s swine in the forest. She had never seemed afraid, alone in the woods, with nothing but a flute and hunting knife. Lythia’s gentle smile and ocher hair danced before Catania’s mind every time she heard Jéru’s panpipes.

When the young swineherdess became pregnant, her future was uncertain until that foreign Man had asked for her hand. Master Maylock, a merchant from Irenara—the city just over the river, outside the forest’s borders. Catania (who had never been more than four miles from Syrelia) could hardly imagine any place farther off—except, of course, Hynara, the human capitol, on the seacoast. No one understood what Maylock saw in the little elf, but he was sure of himself. He had bought her from Lord Nightseer, at more than the full price for a elfin slave in the flower of age—the haughty noble would part with her for nothing less—and folk said the young merchant sold everything he had but the clothes on his back and the sword at his side.

Catania had heard none of the gossip of course, and Tyre had not bothered to tell her. She had followed her ears to Jéru’s pipe a few weeks later, and walked right into the glade where he sat with the feeding pigs, expecting Lythia. So her accidental friendship with the new swineherd began, if friendship it could be called. Lord Nightseer had taken him to replace Lythia. He obeyed every order the humans gave him, but he had promised he would not tell on her.

When the Men had taken over Syrelia, Jéru had stayed in the city and submitted to them; and Tyre hated him for it. The tireless centaur had built his tower, some of it with his own hands, and managed to keep it outside the climbing walls of the city. Infuriated by the human’s enslavement of so many of the other creatures, he had proceeded to dismiss all his servants; leaving himself alone in his tower outside the city walls. Catania guessed it was only a matter of time before Governor Daniel or Lord Nightseer found a way to have him enslaved or locked in prison—or he was killed in a skirmish, like her father.

No centaur could rival an elf when it came to deft, quiet movements; but Tyre was a good woodsman as far as centaurs went, and no creature could boast of their speed. Tyre knew about where they were headed for, though he would never know the forest like Catania; and he made good speed, even stooping under the low branches. The young she-elf knew the journey would go faster if she rode on his back, but she never dared to even consider asking him. After seeing the Men treat centaurs like beasts of burden, he would consider carrying another creature on his back a terrible outrage. That was one request Catania knew he would never forgive her for. Lugging about deer seemed hardly acceptable in his mind, but she knew he was growing used to it.

So they moved forward side by side, until they drew near the elf’s hunting-ground and she took the lead.