Elgar smiled in spite of himself.
‘Their mistrust is precisely why you are here, practically within their midst. They do not trust you, but they would trust you even less, were you not so near at hand as to be just out of their reckoning.’
‘Yet we came here to put an end to such sentiment,’ Birin protested.
‘That may be,’ Elgar replied, ‘yet it is a sentiment which your own people have created.’ He sighed, at once angry with life, and remorseful for the foulness of its irremediable course, of which his people, too, now unwittingly played a part.
‘Let me put it to you in other terms,’ Elgar told him. ‘When I was but a babe in arms, she who bore me was forced to flee from my Elven Sire, lest he slay her and myself out of hand, rather than himself risk the possible consequences, were the fruit of their consummation to be discovered.
‘Her own folk (she being Pixie), shunned her, and often we very nearly starved to death, as she had been stripped of her Power through giving birth to me, leaving us both at the mercy of chance and the elements. She and I spent many solitary years in the wilderness, until we came here and discovered others like ourselves.’