[Carillon]

I have done something that I do not think Anna will like. I have questioned Lissa several times, each time under enchantment. The first time was almost a whim—I honestly did not plan it all out. I told Anna I needed some air and invited the girl to come down the the beach with me. Once I had her there, I wove my magic around her and asked my questions. It was easy enough—she has a child's mind yet, and though children can be stubborn they are also more malleable in many ways. I do not know for certain that the spell was necessary, but I feared there would be things she would be loathe to remember. I needed honesty from her, and also wanted to spare her as much trauma of the recollection as possible. Gods know it is hard enough to hear some of the things she remembers. I can only imagine what it is like for her to relive them. Perhaps Anna would understand that. I think Connor will.

He is due back any time now. I hope he has something to tell us, but if not at least I have something to tell him. It took a few days, to get the whole tale from her. Mostly, it is because we went slowly. Details are important, and children are more reliable than many give them credit for. They will not remember everything about a situation, but what they do remember is almost always truth. Very rarely do they display the kind of false memories adults do, and a few years ago I think I finally figured out why. The child has experience less of the world. The gaps in her memories are just that—gaps. Give her a few decades and she begins to fill those gaps in with her own details, based on expectation. The child may see the shadowdancer disappear and tell the truth: that it seemed they were gone in less than the blink of an eye. That they were looking right at them, and then they were gone. The common adult who is not accustomed to this uncanny ability will find other ways to explain it, rationalizing what they do not understand and forcing it to fit their perception of the world. They looked away for a moment, and the figure disappeared into a doorway perhaps. They blinked. The man or woman slipped away, but they must not have been paying attention. But far more rarely will they give you the honest answer, and the one that cannot be easily explained away.

Lissa's tale is truth, as best she remembers it. Of this I have little doubt. Any bias or error within it is the fault of her own limited perception. She cannot remember how she or the other three were taken from the temple, nor anything about the chartering of the ship. She remembers being kept below decks, but cannot recall direction. I do not blame her—a seven-year-old can make little sense of sun and stars glimpsed through a porthole. By probing deeper, by following the little details, though ... well, that is how we will find him. There are clues in her story that she does not recognize, things she observed that seem meaningless to her, but I can take those details and put them together like so many pieces of a puzzle, until I grasp the larger pattern.

The ship sailed east from Vehl. This I gleaned from a dozen little details. Land glimpsed briefly, and how rough the sea felt—whether they stayed close to land or left it. Things I know about the wind and the sea in that region, and what side of the ship the sun set on. And of course we have the site of the boat wreck, where Finn was separated from them, just east of the border of Co'rys and Ulgrid.

She told me how she and Rhiannon and Liam were marched for many days and nights east. Most of the time she remembers going along the beach. She did not like the way the stones crunched, and she kept getting pebbles in her boots but they wouldn't let her stop and take them out. “They” were ten to twelve half-orcs, as far as I can tell from her description. She remembers them as big. “Bigger than Connor” was how she described it, though this is not actually so helpful. Connor is only five and a half feet tall—most humans would be bigger than him. Still, tall to a child. It was something in the way she said it and the look in her eyes that makes me think it was half-orcs. I am frustrated by the lack of proof I have of this, but I will trust my intuition in this case.

She remembers the mountains to the north the entire way. She remembers their white tops. She does not have a firm grasp of how long the journey took. I expect it seemed endless to her child's sense of time. She does remember that they finally came to a cabin, not far from the beach. She remembers the sun rising over the ocean each morning, and setting in the mountains. They were on an eastern shore.

She told me how she and Rhiannon and Liam were ignored for the most part, though they were fed and given warm bedding. She said they spent most of their time huddled together in it—the cabin is bitterly cold in her memory. The half-orcs who had taken Finn rejoined the others a couple of weeks after Finn disappeared. Many of the half-orcs came and went, especially the three who seemed in charge. One she remembers everyone deferring to, and from her description this is undeniably Segemek. However, she remembers Vargen as well, and Nestor. All three triplets had a measure of power in the group, though Segemek ruled them all.

Nestor, the triplet we have never met, seems a psychopath from her description. He is volatile, as dangerous as alchemist's fire. The stories she told me made me shiver, and I am hard to unnerve. She described him as large, too—much larger than the others. She said that she had never seen a giant, but that she could not imagine one could be bigger than Nestor. This matches what we know of him. She spent some time describing him to me, before she got frightened and didn't want to continue. We stopped for the day at that point, and I held her and rocked her until she stopped shaking and was ready to head home.

There were other times we had to stop too. Their captors, from what I gathered, were not particularly cruel most of the time. However, it seems Segemek had to exert a fair bit of his power and take a firm hand to keep some of the men away from the children. She will not talk about it except to say the men had nasty eyes, but it was getting dark by the time she was calm enough to take her home. I was certain that Anna would find us and tear my throat out for making her tell me about it. I shudder to think what it would have looked like without my enchantment magic.

There were other things, of course—many details, and one in particular I must tell Connor. She told me how Segemek would often share their room at night but never seemed to sleep. Whenever she awoke during the night, no matter the estimated hour, he was reading scrolls or tomes by candlelight. She told me what he growled one night, after slamming a book shut. I am still mulling the phrase over, but I think it is a key to unlocking something about this man. She told me she feigned sleep and Segemek never knew she was awake. She believes this, but I am not certain. All I can say for sure is that if he knew she was awake, he did not acknowledge it.

A few things I will not tell Connor, nor Anna. I will not tell them of the afternoon she spoke of her sister, or how Rhiannon was taken away from them, screaming, never to be seen again. I can guess what tortures she endured after, and am glad Lissa has been spared this knowledge. I will not tell them of how she confirmed what Segemek told us, either: that he forced her to cut out her brother's eye. I nearly lost my grip on the enchantment when she told me this part in detail. I know I ground my teeth and clenched my jaw when she told me what he said to her. What unspeakable things he threatened Liam with if she did not do it. How he told her she must not blame him for this, or blame herself. That she was being forced to do it because of the deeds of others. He told her this more than once, but I can tell it was lost on her. Perhaps a minor blessing—she is still too young to make the distinction, or to have grasped his meaning. She blames no one but Segemek for what she was forced to do.

Like I noted before, there are differences between children and adults. Lissa's blame is whole and large, and placed firmly on Segemek's shoulders. Mine is more fractured. Oh, I blame the half-orc, but I have found other places to put my blame as well. Perhaps I have too much of it, and have been forced to spread it around. I know I blame Alleina's impetuous actions for Rhiannon's death. I blame the Rofireinite loudmouth for the loss of Liam's eye. I have half a dozen targets at least to blame for the children's initial deaths. I blame the Rofireinite church for losing them to the half-orc a second time. I blame the clerics who ordered me to bed, because I was not there to help Finn or to spare Rhiannon.I blame the gods for all the cruel little twists of fate that have made this worse. I have realized that I even blame Connor a little, for not being able to handle things when I was bedridden. More than anything, though, I blame myself. That is the darkest truth I have found: that I hold myself accountable for the fates of these children, and for the wounds they have endured and may yet be forced to suffer anew.