...Now in this same forest, there was a boy. He was an elf-child, or so he had been told by the old widow who he had called his grandmother. But she was no flesh-kin of his. She had found him, a crying infant alone, tucked into the hollow of a lightning-sundered oak tree. In the tree's bows there hung a sword, and a tasseled flute, but no note or message from whatever poor souls had abandoned their wailing infant in a tree-cradle. The old woman took him home, and called him Issachar, after a boy in a song she had loved as a child, and Fado, for the sound the tree had made in the wind.

Issachar Fado grew up at the same speed as all children, and it was quick in his grandmother's eyes. He was a sturdy, serious boy, and very helpful around his grandmother's cottage. But sometimes, in the spring and the fall especially, Issachar would stop and listen to the wind for hours on end, staring at the blue sky as if there was a story in it he longed to read. As he grew older, it was harder and harder for him to turn his face from the sky, though he had no wish to trouble his grandmother and did not speak of it to her. But she knew, all the same, and on the fifteenth anniversary of the day she found him, she gave him the flute, and the sword, and told him to follow the wind to his fortune. In his belt she packed him good things to eat and the few coins she had, and after a tearful farewell, Issachar set off on his journey.