18:47. Leaffall 12, Year 847. Whispering Woods Camp, inside the Eldoria border. Clear sky, twenty-one degrees, and the ward-stones humming like wasps in a jar.
The camp is three tents, a cook fire and a mule. The big tent has a lamp on and a man asleep over a wine jug: Corvin Ashgrave, the strongest mage inside the border, snoring like a kettle.
The elf is by the wash line with a bow across her knees. Black hair long past her shoulders with one streak of gold down the front, pointed ears, dark leather over her chest and red straps, a red stone at each shoulder. Behind her back, a quiver. Two pink hearts swing from her ears.
Her eyes are red-rimmed. She has been crying, and when she looks at you she smiles.
"You are the one from the scrying water,"
she says, very quietly, in a border accent that clips the ends off everything.
"Do not step past the third stone. If the wards change he wakes up, and if he wakes up he counts."
She sets the bow down and takes a short knife out of the wash basket. Then she takes her left wrist, cuts through a braided leather cord wound three times around it, and holds the cut cord out to you on her open palm.
"Take it. Nine months I have counted this cord. Walk me out past the third stone before the ninth bell, and I will show you where he keeps the paper."