Annon learns Tyrus’s true plan in a private reckoning that recasts their family history and the failed Scourgelands expedition as parts of one unfinished struggle against the Plague. Tyrus explains why he chose distance and concealment: he believed the Arch-Rike had betrayed his expedition, and he returned to Kenatos to gather knowledge while remaining inside what he calls a gilded prison. He now entrusts Annon with the secret, the evidence behind his suspicions, and the work he believes may prevent another outbreak.

The family history behind the deception

The conversation begins with Annon recalling that his mother was Merinda, not Tyrus’s sister as Tyrus had led him to believe. Tyrus confirms the deception and urges Annon to reason through it rather than accept answers passively. Annon recognizes that Tyrus took him from a mother whose uncontrolled magic endangered him, but asks why he has no memory of a sister. Tyrus explains that Hettie was taken at birth by a Romani midwife who did not know the twins were twins. Tyrus himself had not known in time to save both: he chose to save Annon’s life and lost Hettie to the Romani. The false account of Merinda’s relationship to Tyrus helped conceal the family’s circumstances; it also contributed to the Romani kidnapping Hettie to blackmail him.

What Tyrus lacked, he insists, was not money but freedom. He had spent years inside Kenatos, where attempts to test the limits of his liberty tightened the constraints around him. He could not simply claim Annon or explain himself: he needed access to knowledge held in the city, and he feared that the Arch-Rike would kill him for what he knew. His return to Kenatos after Annon’s birth was therefore both an act of concealment and a deliberate return to danger. He left Annon to be raised by the Druidecht in Wayland, told the Arch-Rike only that the expedition had failed and that he had been recovering, and hid the fact that Merinda had borne a child.

The failed expedition and the suspected betrayal

Tyrus describes his life’s work as an effort to banish the Plague, which he has seen devastate the world twice. Guided by the example of Band-Imas, he believes lasting change depends on gathering people around a cause larger than any one individual. He assembled scholars, fighters, and the gifted Bhikhu who was Annon’s father, secured the Arch-Rike’s blessing, and led them into the Scourgelands. The party was destroyed. Tyrus survived because Merinda, gravely wounded, used the magic in her blood to save the others; the exertion cost her control of her mind. He promised to get her home and give her unborn child a chance at life.

Merinda also disclosed the Druidecht secret that Dryads guarded the Scourgelands. Tyrus came to understand that the expedition had not simply encountered formidable defenses: it had been violently repelled almost as soon as it entered the woods. He reasoned that the attackers had known the party was coming and assembled too quickly for that response to be chance. When Annon identifies the Arch-Rike, Tyrus confirms the suspicion: the ruler had approved the expedition while, in Tyrus’s view, knowingly sending it to its deaths. The Rikes of Kenatos, he concludes, have reasons to preserve the secret of a past injustice in the Scourgelands.

Tyrus does not present that conclusion as established history. The wrong done to the Dryads remains unknown, and even he calls for facts rather than speculation. Annon has learned from a Dryad that the Scourgelands’ Dryads are vengeful and that a taint, injustice, or betrayal lies behind their hostility. Tyrus believes the record survives in the trees themselves, where another Dryad might read what human memory has lost. The distinction between suspicion and proof shapes his plan: his mission is not merely to enter the forbidden woods, but to find a way to learn what happened there.

Knowledge gathered in Kenatos

Tyrus stayed in Kenatos because its archives offered clues unavailable through Druidecht oral teaching, though they contained no detailed records of Dryads. He studied what he could, even bringing a tree into the Paracelsus Towers courtyard after learning that it was the last of its kind on the road to Kenatos and otherwise faced the woodcutter’s axe. He waited beside it without looking at the visitor who came, learned her name, and received a Dryad’s kiss. The insight that followed helped him understand what he needed to do: a Dryad not bound to a particular tree might enter the Scourgelands and bind herself to its trees to discover their history.

Tyrus says he explained this purpose to the Dryad and that she agreed willingly. He denies Annon’s assumption that he forced her, arguing that Annon’s knowledge of Dryad lore should make him recognize the difference between abuse of trust and a freely accepted undertaking. Tyrus also reveals that the Dryad became his wife under her people’s customs. When a Dryad chooses a mortal as a mate, she wears a bracelet around her ankle until his death; the bond to the tree in the tower binds Tyrus to her in turn. The disclosure transforms the tree that Tyrus had seemed to keep for private study into part of a reciprocal relationship and the larger investigation.

The daughter and the next stage of the plan

Tyrus reveals that he has a daughter, born of that union, and that she lives in Stonehollow, the homeland of his family and of those with the fireblood. He arranged for her to be raised as an orphan among people who would protect and teach her at the right time, rather than seek her out himself. At sixteen, she must decide whether to bond with a tree. The stones Tyrus sent Hettie to find are meant to locate her: she should wear a necklace set with a blue stone, and the other stones will be drawn to it. The stones are thus not simply objects to bargain over; they are the means by which Tyrus hopes to find the daughter whose choice and knowledge may matter to the Scourgelands mission.

Tyrus’s confession turns Annon from a neglected relation into the person chosen to carry the hidden account forward. He tells Annon that if the Kishion had killed him, the secret might have remained lost for another generation, while the Plague could return. Though he admits he has not been a good father or uncle, he says Annon helped inspire the solution. Annon’s response is not presented as an instant erasure of the past: he is startled by Tyrus’s disclosure and must judge whether to trust a man who deliberately deceived him. But when Tyrus says the expedition needs a Druidecht and needs him in particular, Annon nods firmly. Later, Tyrus identifies the need for a Shaliah as well, explaining that the previous party had been wounded and many killed; Khiara’s healing ability and strength in the keramat make her essential to a renewed journey.

An inheritance of knowledge and obligation

The revelations join several forms of hidden knowledge: the family truth Tyrus concealed, the Dryads’ memory preserved in trees, and the political secret behind the Arch-Rike’s authorization of a doomed expedition. Tyrus does not offer Annon a clean reconciliation or a complete solution. He gives him a chain of reasons, admissions, and still-unanswered questions, then asks him to act on what he can discern. The event’s decisive change is that Tyrus’s private investigation becomes a shared undertaking. Annon’s Druidecht knowledge, his newly gained insight, and his family connection to Tyrus now place him inside a mission intended to repair an unknown wrong and stop the Plague before it returns.